A few years ago, Juanita Brown shared a very powerful image with me. She talked about how those of us that practice dialogue and facilitation in a deep way have access to various gateways that take us into a “central garden.” All of our pathways invite us into this garden where we come to discover and realize something about the role of dialogue, meaning making and collaboration. It is a set of realizations that lies beneath the practice of methods.
On a call today with my friend Mark McKergow, we were discussing this image There are a bunch of us – although not a large bunch of us – from different practitioner communities who are always interested in transcending our methods and entering into this conversation. Alongside Juanita, Mark has also been wondering “where is everybody else, and how come we’re not connecting?”
Today we were discussing the failure of dialogue to have enough presence to provide workable and practical alternatives to everything from public policy decisions (such as the EU referendum in Britain, or the polarization of US society) to the everyday challenges of managing and running large organizations, evaluating, strategizing and controlling outcomes, people and money.
We know that our field of dialogic practice is massive, well researched and well documented. We know that leadership literature is filled with the importance of relational and sense making work. We know that that mid-career professionals end up coming to our various workshops to take on skills and ideas that are fundamentally transformative to their work and lives and that they go back to places where “it’s difficult to implement” because other mid-career professionals are wedded to globalized management practices that are good enough for what they are trying to do, within the highly constrained performance frameworks within which they are forced to operate. We even know (thanks to people like Jon Husband) that global organizations like Hay Associates have spent the better part of a century ensuring that these management science constraints are widely deployed and understood. They frame everything, not without utility, but to the exclusion of almost every other way of organizing and being together in human endeavour.
So what is the problem? Are we just lousy storytellers? Are we being deliberately marginalized? Is there something fundamentally flawed about the ability of dialogic practice to actually be of value? And how do we disrupt the standard set of management tools and the narcissism of our own communities of practice in a way that creates some serious openings for change?
What do you think?
I’m in New Mexico this week where we will be back together with our colleagues from the Navajo Nation, working together to keep finding collaborative ways to address health and wellness and community resilience in the Navajo Nation. Doing this is an ongoing skill and practice. There are no answers, only different situations that require us to keep working together.
A key skill in being able to address issues you don’t know anything about is to stop and ask for help. My friend Tenneson Woolf, with whom I spent the last weekend in Salt Lake City, sometimes tells a useful story about this. He once asked his then four year old son Isaac what advice he give if someone found themselves not knowing what to do next. Isaac said: “Sit down. Think. Ask for help.” Which, if you have ever worked on a building site, you will know is perfect advice.
I value people that can do that. I think the ability to ask for help is significantly devalued in our society, where status and competence hinge on having the right answer. We all probably have stories about times we pursued the “right answer” well past the point of its usefulness, because the vulnerability of not knowing was a bigger risk that screwing something up.
And yet, we are faced with problems as leaders and decision makers to which we have no answers. And we are often faced with a public or employees or colleagues who hold us to account, unfairly I think, for not having the right answers.
Two years ago during a local election on Bowen Island I worked with a candidate in the local election to create a forum on facebook where the only questions asked would be unanswerable ones, and where the candidates had to work together to understand and address these questions. It provided a safe space for candidates to say “I don’t know” and to go out and share links and find resources. Many of the candidates that were most active in that forum ended up getting elected and I like to think that their ability to work well with others was one of the reasons why they received the trust of voters.
This sounds good, but last week there was an incident that showed how allowing this kind of public conversation is still and uphill battle. In the USA Presidential primary campaigns, Donald Trump was asked a question about what he would called the west bank of the Jordan River. Is it Israel? Palestine? Occupied Territories? Colonized Land? The question is fraught and of course if a guy like Trump can weasel out of answering it, he will probably find a way. Perhaps he did when he turned to one of his advisors and said “Jason, how would you respond to that?”
Now you might argue that he was dodging the question, but what was most illuminating was the vitriol and backlash that came to Donald Trump criticizing his inability to have an answer. There was a lot “gotcha” kinds of comments on social media, implying that Trump must be a fool if he doesn’t know the answer to the question. A New York Times blog captured a muted version of some of the general tenor of criticism this way:
The moment evoked a similar reach-for-an-aide episode, when, in an interview with reporters in September 2003, the retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate, struggled to answer questions about whether he would have supported the congressional authorization for the Iraq invasion that year.
“Mary, help!” Mr. Clark called out to his press secretary as they rode in his campaign plane. “Come back and listen to this.”
Mr. Trump did not make such an overt plea. But he struggled to answer a basic question about a tumultuous issue.
Of course it is not at all a basic question and not just a “tumultuous issue.” It is a loaded question about one of the defining international issues of our time, an issue that in fact suffers terribly from simple and reductionist perspectives. Taking time to stop, think and ask for help is a pretty good strategy.
I’m no fan of Donald Trump and this is not about the way he handled the question. It is about how quickly his critics rose to attack him for not having an answer. It is a call to citizens to hold our public officials and decision makers not to a high level of expertise, but to a higher level of collaborative instinct. I don’t want Donald Trump to be President, primarily because he is a dishonest, racist know-it-all who generally takes pride in taking his own advice. But at the same token I urge us all to be responsible for creating the conditions in which candidates can show that when they don’t know answers, asking for help is a good strategy. This is the most important decision making skill for facing the complexity of our present and immediate future.
Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle. The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with. Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.” I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing. But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:
Back in the fall I got to finally do some work with my friends Peggy Holman and Stephen Sliha (and Carol Daniel Kasbari too!) with the fabulous organization Journalism That Matters. I was able to do a little process hosting and participating in the developmental evaluation that was going on during the two day conference in Portland.
Last month Peggy published an overview of what we learned in that conference. Embedded in that report is this video made by some of the students on the evaluation team. It contains interviews with many of the participants who had epiphanies about what else journalism could be.
It seems obvious to think that journalists, being storytellers, can help communities tell their stories and represent themselves. But I’m interested in the “weak signal” of journalists actually doing the convening of conversations. Journalists don’t only have the power to tell stories, they also have the power to call together people in conversation. They do it whenever they call up a source for a comment on a story. They do it on radio or TV when they call a panel of people to discuss or debate something. They do it in print or online when they host opinions and curate comment sections (and they DON’T do it when they just leave comments sections open). Why don’t journalists call community meetings? Why don’t they host larger scale gatherings where people discuss their communities issues, even come up with solutions, find each other and work together? Sometimes journalists “moderate town halls” but that’s really not the same thing.
I think the new frontiers in journalism are not only in using their media tools in novel ways. I think journalists can now think about how to extend their hosting practice in new ways too, to help communities find the resources they need inside themselves to address the challenges they face. And that would be another way that journalism could matter.
Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech is best known for his statements of possibility and the energy with which he concluded his remarks. It is a compelling call to purpose, to a world in which the future is only currently imagined. It provided a generative image of what is possible, if not what is attainable, and it did what a good purpose does: it helped take the place of a charismatic leader. Internalized, that purpose drives the movement.