Who should be in the room?
(Who should be in the room?
Last week I went to a training organised by Reos Partners on convening. The training was about the question of how to get the right people into the room in any process of change or transformation. One thing I realised during the training is that, while I have asked myself the question of who should be in the room, I have in general not given enough attention to this step in the processes I have been involved in.
There are a couple of reasons why it is important to get the right people into the room. The one that most stood out for me is the one you might think of as the most obvious: any process has the deepest impact on the people who are in the room. I would even take this a step further by saying that any type of systems change starts by a small group of committed people who agree to listen to each other even if they do not necessarily agree.
In the course they shared of course criteria of how to choose the right people for the group: their legitimacy, diversity, representativity, commitment, etc. But the two questions I’m really interested in (the first as a result of the training, the second one based on my personal situation) are: should we work with a coalition of the willing or strive for radical diversity, and, can change processes be instigated by an outside actor or do they necessarily need to be started from the inside of a community to have the necessary legitimacy?
Neither of these questions has, I believe, a clear answer. As always: “it depends!”
The first question about willingness and diversity was asked as part of the training. First of all I’m not sure if it is a polarity, I think you can focus on working with the willing while at the same time striving for maximal diversity. In the cases I have experienced, however, it was often the case that we had a small group of committed, yet not very diverse people. There might be various reasons for why it is difficult to get a diverse enough group to sit together in a room and listen to each other. The question we faced was then whether we should start a process with a small group of thoughtful and committed yet not diverse actors. While I used to be of the opinion that we should, I now think that we might need to give it some more time and find ways to get more diverse voices into the room.
It is important to understand why people who are different are not willing to join. It might be because they don’t feel safe. In that case, there are many ways to get diverse voices into a change process while at the same time keeping the people safe – for example by having them join via video link rather than physically. The more difficult question is what to do if there is a lack of willingness based on the current configuration of people involved. This is where we need to think about convening power and about how we can expand our convening power to achieve greater diversity. Having convening power means to be able to get a group together that is sufficiently diverse and influential. So the question shifts to: who do we need to get to join the coalition of convenors to get the necessary convening power? Which leads me to the second of my questions.
The second question was about who should instigate a change process. This is a questions that I’m currently personally confronted by. Over the last few weeks, I have worked with a few colleagues to develop an initiative we call “Reimagining Place – A dialogue series to rediscover the vitality in communities”. The core of the initiative is a series of five events that can be organised in a community that is interested in finding a new way to meet pervasive challenges like poverty, loneliness, homelessness, poor health, social inequality and injustice, or the degradation of natural resources and green spaces, etc. I would like to offer such a series of events in the place I live. The problem is I’m not really part of that community. Due to the fact that I’m an immigrant to that country and also that my work is primarily focused on other places I do not have much engagement with the community. Yet I know that there are many of the problems named above present and I would like to contribute somehow to shift some of them. So I’m asking myself what is my legitimacy to invite the people to spend time on my process. I hear my inner voice take the perspective of the people in the community, cynically saying: “There is yet another privileged outsider thinking that his process will make a difference without really understanding our community.” I think I don’t have the necessary convening power, so I need to find some people who have, and at the same time are interested in my idea. The way I decided to approach the situation is to talk to some individuals I know who have some legitimacy in the community and see if they would find the idea could indeed bring some new vitality to the community.
What are your thougths about these two questions and about convening in general? Let me know by simply replying to this email.
The Paper Museum
_“Is it important that the right things be done for the right reasons?”
[…]
“The question is not only ethical in the conventional sense, it is also an ecological question. The means by which one man influences another are a part of the ecology of ideas in their relationship, and part of the larger ecological system within which that relationship exists.
The hardest saying in the Bible is that of St. Paul, addressing the Galatians: “God is not mocked,” and this saying applies to the relationship between man and his ecology. It is of no use to pleas that a particular sin of pollution or exploitation was only a little one or that it was unintentional or that it was committed with the best intentions. Or that “If I didn’t, somebody else would have.” The processes of ecology are not mocked.
On the other hand, surely the mountain lion when he kills the deer is not acting to protect the grass from overgrazing.
In fact, the problem of how to transmit our ecological reasoning to those whom we wish to influence in what seems to us to be an ecologically “good” direction is itself an ecological problem. We are not outside the ecology for which we plan—we are always an inevitably a part of it.
Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology—that the ideas of this science are irreversibly becoming a part of our own ecosocial system.
We live then in a world different from that of the mountain lion—he is neither bothered nor blessed by having ideas about ecology. We are.
I believe that these ideas are not evil and that our greatest (ecological) need is the propagation of these ideas as they develop—and as they are developed by the (ecological) process of propagation.
If this estimate is correct, then the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans themselves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It will not in the long run pay to “sell” the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight.
(Bateson 1972, 512ff)
Why have I added this to my paper museum? It is a profound and honest reflection on how best to communicate ideas and plans of activities that are based on these ideas. It is important that other people understand the reasons why we suggest things to be done in a certain way and not just that they should be done in that way. It is a bit like the proverb of teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish. If other people understand the (ecological) ideas that underpin the way we do things they are able to think further and not just execute our plans.
Reference: Bateson, Gregory. 1972. “Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
More for you to enjoy
- Open-ended tools for infinite games by Gordon Brander. Gordon is building Subconscious, a tool that help to generate ideas through self-organising thoughts.