Making powerful community action systems
Appreciative Inquiry, Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, CoHo, Conversation, Emergence, Leadership, Organization
In the last couple of weeks I have been in deep and important conversations about the work of facilitating change in the world. I am just back from another Art of Hosting gathering, this time in Boulder, Colorado and, among the many many things that were on my mind there, the subject of talk and action came up.
This was especially a good time to have this conversation as this particular Art of Hosting brought together many deep practitioners of both the Art of Hosting approach to facilitating change and the U-process approach to action and systemic change. One of the conversations I had related to solving really tough problems and I had a deep insight in that discussion.
I think first of all that there is a false dichotomy between talk and action. To be more precise I should say that there is a symbiotic relationship between talk and action. We can act any way we choose, and that is just fine, but when we want to take action that is wise, we need to be in conversation with others. We may also be in conversation with context as well, which looks like a literature review, a market study, an environmental scan and so on. Regardless, wisdom follows from being with the insights of others. Wise action is what we do after we have talked well together.
The question now is, what role does wise action have in solving tough problems? It seems to me that every system that responds to something has an action system within it. The action system is what the system or community uses to move on any particular need. And so, in Canada we have a legal system that creates action to resolve disputes between parties. We have a food system that delivers food to our stores. We have a health care system to care for us when we are sick. Within these three systems, there is a discrete action system and there is a lot of conversation. In the legal system conversation and action are raised to high and almost ritualistic arts. The formal conversation of a courtroom is so far beyond regular conversation that one actually has to hire a specialist to engage in it. And judgements, court orders and sentences are the mechanisms by which change takes place. Various bodies enforce these judgements so that there is accountability in the system.
Similarly, the food system and the health care system have conversational forums, meetings and so on in which wisdom and strategy is discerned, and there are trucks and doctors to do the work.
The problem is that neither of these three systems contains an action system that can reduce crime, prevent malnutrition or lower patient wait times. In other words thare are problems that are too big for the curent action system of any given community, society, or world. These problems become known as “wicked problems” or intractable problems, and they are often met with much despair.
When we are faced with these problems, we need to ask ourselves what to do. Do we use the existing systems, even in novel recombination, to try to tackle the biggest problems? Or perhaps is the biggest problem the capacity of the action system itself?
This is an intriguing idea to me. This is what I jotted down this morning in an email to some of my mates about this:
If we take the biggest, toughest and most intractable problem of any community we see immediately that the reason it is so is clearly that the community does not have the ability to deal with it. Water quality is an issue only in places where the community action system has been unable to deal with it. That might be because the community action system is not big enough to address it from a systemic basis, or that the leadership capacity is not strong enough or the collective container is not robust enough, or any combination. Ultimately the biggest problem for any community is: what do we need to do to get our collective power and action working on our toughest problems so that they are no longer our toughest problems?
I wrote a short note on the plane coming home from Denver, and it relates to how absolutely critical harvest is, in terms of focusing our eyes on the ways in which any conversation or meeting might affect a community’s action system. This is an attempt to caputre a simple form of the pitfalls of a false action/talk dichotomy and the necessity for learning, reflection and inquiry in a system.
But what do we do when the system itself is not up to the task of taking action on a large problem? In that case, the inquiry has to find a way to get the system to act on itself to create the conditions and change necessary for it to become powerful enough to move into action on the intractable problem. This is difficult because it requires “bootstrapping” the system to see itself and then teach itself to be bigger and more powerful.”
I don’t know how to do this. But I feel deeply that THIS is the challenge. We can solve global warming IF we figure out how the world community action system can develop the capacity to address the problem. If we don’t develop that capacity, we won’t solve the problem. We can break it into more manageable bits and pieces that fit what we can already do, but global warming is an emergent phenomenon and it needs an emergent response. So what is the biggest problem? Not global warming…it is us…the biggest problem is the inability of our existing systems to address it. And to me, daunting as it is, that seems like work we can actually do togather.
So that is where I am currently, as a facilitator of deep conversation, interested in how we can connect inquiry, talk, harvest and action to find and use the power we need to make to big changes our world needs.
Your thoughts? What seems especially interesting about this take on wicked problems?
[tags]wicked problems[/tags]
I think our work is cut out for us only to the extent that we are cut out for our work, So how cut out for our works are we? What are our interiors, our intentions and stories, collective and individual that generates our responses. Maybe the wicked problem is only the projected result of the wicked edges of our collective interior, our myths and visions, our reasoning”™s telling us that we have serious interior environmental issues to address, and we are not cutting it”¦the landscape has lost Cezanne and now resides with Exxon. The re-imaging of the land, were husbandry is the political yardstick, may have more of an ally through something akin to Wu-Wei, natural forces. The area to be rescued is the relationship, natural forces of nature and natural deeds, somewhere between languages and actions.
Brilliant David…I’m thinking through the way The Work might apply to this as well. This is a great little note, perhaps cryptic to many, but pregnant with meaning for me.
It wold be good to see you again sometime my mate!
I think what we are missing in this picture is about leadership; about people who can grow into their full potential, who are self-reflective and act in service of the whole.
How I see this is that in facilitation meaningful conversations, many times we give people a first glimp of what is possible in what they can create; and a first glimp of seeing the system as a whole. To hold that perspective – seeing myself as a creator in the system and keeping an eye on the system as a whole – is not an easy thing to do for most of the people. First of all it is a stage of cognitive development – being able to see how systems interact with systems – then that can ignite next developmental stages in emotional, interpersonal, systems intelligence.
Making “powerful community action systems” requires powerful, action-oriented individuals who talk and act as and for the community and who build in – for themselves and for the community – reflection. For me that is real leadership, and that is how we get leaderful groups.
The capacity of reflection will inevitably leed to growth, to evolvement; be it for individuals or for groups. And if people include in their reflection the relationship with nature then we come to “natural deeds, somewhere between languages and actions”.
I thank you so much Chris that you put your thoughts and ideas in this blog! This is a way to get tuned with gatherings of which I was not part of. Thinking about these gatherings I’m a little bit frustrated that so little harvest is done; at least visible to me. Do we really know the value of harvesting? Isn’t this critical for our own “community action system”?
Hi Ria…
You are right, and in fact this is what is exciting to me about the conversation I have been having about between hosting and U process practitioners. There is something in the generative nature of that conversation that is pointing at this area you identify, and I think david also nails that perspective in his more cryptic way.
In terms of the harvest that is done from gatherings like this, you raise an interesting point. I actually have alomost too much to harvest from these things. I have mind maps, personal notes, and many many questions for consideration and publication here. Much of the harvest that was done in the last three weeks was real time harvest, and I’m am sitting with the interesting questions about the best way to sift and offer nuggets. As you know, some of this is happening here on this blog, some of it in email conversations between us, some of it in other places as well, including on flickr. It is interesting for me to think about how to meet the needs of those in the wider world (beyond the circles I am in at the moment) who are clamouring for this conversation while at the same time having that distillation make sense for me too. I think this is an important leadership question, because to the extent that I hold intention for certain things to happen, my harvest into inquiry serves that. If my intention to lead deeper into this conversation wanes, then my personal capacity to hold the harvest question also wanes too. This brings us back to relationship again…
Very interesting stuff. For those that are still reading this deep in the comments thread, I see this plainly as a challenge of moving from conversation to change using harvest as the carrier for the memes that activate new ways of being and doing things.
Wow, great conversation. I would love somemore insight into the way of the harvest. And yes the Work to me has some role in this. I find the work is about individual interior, which when I do the work, i find is cluttered with the borrowings of much of the universe, god business, other peoples, so from there, my work is to know what is my work, and a bread crumbs are the wicked problems I am attached to, through love, and the love of labour towards those loves. I think of a saying, “strenght through joy”. that feels like leadership, “seeing the system as a whole”, my deep interior part of it…ground for harvest, roots of action.
thanks for hosting Chris!
Ditto Chris on raising articulate questions and holding the space open for discovery. So much of your thoughts and these great comments resonate with my awareness that, yes, “wicked” is more a statement about ourselves than an absolute sense of “the problem.”
When we’re in touch with our joy, the impossible is just something that takes longer. The wise commit to the Tao of that path.
Chris, Dave, Ria, Jack–
This morning I was tuggling with the correspondences between story and particularly the Hero’s Journey and conversation. This started with Chris’s Tao insight about having the capacity for emergence. Conversation is emergence. So what happens in a conversation?
We have a likable person (group, people with good heads, good hearts) who have a reason to set out on a journey (a good inviting question, preferably a live question) who meet with a challenge (an opposer, a good problem, an issue, an opportunity) with which they wrestle (note: they do not always “win:” sometimes the angel leaves them with a bum hip and a limp) and then they return to the community to do their work.
What does this have to do with creating powerful community action (as well as systems)? What I am focusing on for now is the good that is done by conflict, and more precisely, crisis. Life and death choice points. When we have them, with good people, most often we choose well.
But in some of the cases mentioned in this conversation, we have not yet reached (or at least framed) a life and death choice point. Take global warming: the news today is that the Bush administration still questions whether it is real–if that is where some people are, whatever you think of their position, we will not soon reach crisis.
Crisis might explain why it takes X number of deaths before the city puts up a stop sign and why it takes a cold war and an enemy to put a man on the moon.
So what I am suggesting is that we need to work more and more on coming up with good inviting questions. The way to do that is to find where are the life and death choice points–the crises. There is one in the global warming issue and every other issue you can name–we just need to find it and ask it.
Then it seems to me action flows from talk, and the system that is and has been part of the scene for about 14 billion years will get the action in gear.
:- Doug.
It seems to me the reason action does not emerge when the system is unable is that it requires radical unlearning at both a personal and community (local, global) level to let in something more “natural.” Each person, faced with both themselves and a “wicked problem,” touches down into primary earth — mud, really — in order to join the two threads. It happens “beneath the surface” in a place that may be out of sight, archetypal, organic, and for all its intentionality, a little unconscious. That’s one lens for me in understanding U-Theory. At workshops where I’ve observed such work occur, the dialogue between “outer” and “inner” takes on symbolic structures ON ITS OWN, things happen synchronistically — someone finds a stone or an antler and this is personally symbolic of the joining, or maybe the person takes on a totem, a heron or coyote. Or maybe a picture is drawn or a dance blossoms of itself. And this happens TOGETHER. The work becomes “sanctified” by the community through these symbolic, ritual and artistic means. Then maybe right away, or years later, the action emerges naturally from the need to follow a compelling thread…or a rope!…sometimes through collective leadership as part of that community, sometimes as steps taken by an individual who others want to join.
Global warming as a sustainability issue, is also about well-being and capacity to adapt at deeper levels, and is one of many issues driving us to figure this stuff out — and pretty fast. Grief at what is happening both to the world and to us can immobilize us or shake loose other ways of being. The value of the conversation is often the move from immobilized isolation to the sacred mud from which individual and group action emerges. Call it “mud,” call is “larger field,” call it “emptiness” or “mystery.” I don’t care what the name is as long as together we can get there. But if we resist looking and seeing, resist our own grief out of a need to control, and fail to see transformative possibilities for both inner and outer, then surely we are blocked. And that’s pretty much where I think we might be globally, right there, at the edge of the mud, wondering what its going to be like to really push a finger beneath the surface.
Thank you Dan for this deep reflection. Much appreciated to all as well.
And keep it coming. The richness of this conversation is inspiring me to look for some patterns in some upcoming work I am undertaking.
Doug
I really appreciate your sense of the sense of urgency, “the emergancy emerges” was a phrase from pop psycho-spiritual literature of the 80’s and it certainly reflects the issue, not unlike what Dan is saying, ie that there is something in our collective mud and its no going away, though we may not necessarily know it until we are up to our eye balls and we come face to face with emerge as a emergancy. And to me and seems to us in this conversation, there is a emotional/spiritual core to a conversation like this, something definately muddy, maybe by nature, pardon the pun, of moving where we dont “know”, where our learning is a hinderance, it calls for a unlearning, (chris had mentioned “The Work” and that is certainly a powerful reductive vs additive process to our stores of “knowledge”). But that is maybe the source of a strength, a collective unknowing embraced, and a grief in the sense of loss of what we may have believed was a comfort. I think it is hard to face these wicked problems, part us, part blind systems prepetuating themselves. there is a sense in which the push is worth it. I recently say Stephen Lewis and he answered a question about how he keeps going in face of the realities he faces. His answer was that he believe that to keep pushing forward was the greatest reward and keep coupled with a faith that things will eventually change, how could he turn it down. Found a positive core to a addressing a wicked problem…
Thank you for this thread. It is really helping me. Let me try a bit from a recent experience at a very local level.
On Saturday I was in a telephone conversation with a colleague about creating a conference together. We don’t know each other that well, but well enough to see shared interest and format in our work. If I think of he and I as an action system, we have capacity. We both know enough about convening people, setting up locations, shaping and designing conferences, sending invitations, etc. As an action system, we could have chosen to simply move forward with many good tasks. There will come a time for such.
However, the wise action for us was to first create a deeper space together, of course. So, we checkin with a bit of breathing, sharing a bit of who we are and where we are lately, and an invitation to share what each are observing about need for a conference. I have been very aware lately of the much richer possibility when we first create deeper and beautiful space together. It is what I’m noticing is shifting the action system.
We had an hour that we agreed to for this call. We ended up spending the first 35 minutes on this checkin (not good use of time — not getting to the work…). It was very juicy and energizing. From there, we were able to create several action steps that felt very different (very loaded with insight, shared passion, etc.) than the action steps we would have chosen without that deeper checkin. And it didn’t feel like we were short on time. We were both really jazzed.
From action system that is mechanically capable to wise action system that is really cooking, self-organizing, free, and I think far more impactful for those that will eventually convene. Far more innovative.
There is something here I think about the idea of capacity. I found a note in my journal from Boulder that simply said: “Capacity to BE and not just DO.” When we think about the capacity for action, it’s wise to consider it as a volume rather than a simple two dimension (time and money) matrix. How much tolerance do I have for emergence? How much chaos can we collectiviely hold and how much space do we have to bring good form to that chaos to precipitate that action?
Suddenly, thinking like this, out of a capacity to practice, questions like “Is this a good use of time?” change radically. Thanks, Tenn. I know how much I appreciate the check ins we do with one another when we are working.
Sustainability lives deeply in that relationship part of working together. Community action systesm are built on that I think.
This is an attempt to caputre a simple form of the pitfalls of a false action/talk dichotomy and the necessity for learning, reflection and inquiry in a system.
“If we are wanting stuff to get done by any system, the first question is an appreciative inquiry into how things usually get done in the system so that we know what we are harvesting into and we understand what forms of harvest will best serve the actions we want to take as a result of any conversation.
But what do we do when the system itself is not up to the task of taking action on a large problem? In that case, the inquiry has to find a way to get the system to act on itself to create the conditions and change necessary for it to become powerful enough to move into action on the intractable problem. This is difficult because it requires “bootstrapping” the system to see itself and then teach itself to be bigger and more powerful.”
I don”™t know how to do this
I’m pretty sure this will come across as naive.
I think I think that more often than we realize or believe, purposeful talk and enquiry are forms of action, and action probably more often may benefit including time and space for talk, perhaps as the beat, noticing of points pf progress, and punctuation ?
Isn’t “inquiry finding a way to get the system to act on itself and so create the conditions for change” when the system itself is not up to it similar to the process of observing emergent meaning (for example in processes of dialogue or blogging or meaningful exchange) the patterns of which unfold as the conversatons happen, instantiated around the central issues and the mitigating aspect or structure of the system that is incapable.
I think I am assuming that this is why there seems always to be a focal point for beginning the process of understanding the need for change to the system or systems in which the change is sought .. call it a burning platform, call it a central question, call it an appreciative enquiry .. something is always used to focus attention, and then employed to keep the scattering prismatic aspects of conversation about and around the issue joined together enough to come to some decision about the system or systems in question.
Hmm .. I am writing long sentences. I think that eventually in process it will become clear that the system or systems are not capable of making the change, and then the stewards will face the decision to live with the inability to change enough (I think we observe a lot of this with mid-sized and large organizations) or decide that a new organizational mission or form is necessary (I also think we observe this occurrence more often than we realize, it is just not stated in terms of the incapacity or inability of the previous system to change enough).
I realize a lot is bound up in a common understanding of “large” and “intractable”.
Here are some interesting suggestions about addressing really large issues (you may have seen these essays already) .. it boils down to the basics of dialogue, trust, responsibility … all the stuff you know better than me.
Part 1
Part 2