第4章 PART ONE

The Fabric of Community

The social fabric of community is shaped by the idea that only when we are connected and care for the well-being of the whole is a civil and democratic society created. It is like the Bodhisattva belief that not one of us can enter Nirvana until all others have gone before us.

What is extraordinary appears to us as a habit, the dawn a daily routine of nature.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought were incidental. An afterthought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before. If the artist is one who captures the nuance of experience, then this is who each of us must become. Seeing through the eyes of the artist reflects the intimate nature of community, even if it is occurring among large groups of people.

The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, the structure of belonging gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?

CHAPTER 1

Insights into Transformation

Social fabric is created one room at a time. It is formed from small steps that ask “Who do we want in the room?” and “What is the new conversation that we want to occur?” In community building, we choose the people and the conversation that will produce the accountability to build relatedness, structure belonging, and move the action forward. It is in this process that accountability is chosen and care for the well-being of the whole is embodied. Individual transformation is not the point; weaving and strengthening the fabric of community is a collective effort and starts from a shift in our mind-set about our connectedness.

A series of core insights informs us how to answer these questions. These insights include ideas about focusing on gifts, on associational life, and on the way all transformation occurs through language. Also critical are insights about the context that governs the conversations and the willingness to speak into the future.

Two additional strands in the fabric of community explored here are the need for each small step to capture a quality of aliveness and be an example of the larger world we want to inhabit. There is an established method for accomplishing this aliveness that values all voices in the room, uses the small group even in large gatherings, and recognizes that accountability grows out of the act of cocreation. The essence of creating an alternative future comes from citizen-to-citizen engagement that focuses at each step on the well-being of the whole.

Major influences on the belief system underlying this methodology of communal transformation come from several disciplines and people whose work has been radical in many ways; their insights are foundational for our purposes. There are many others who inform us and are mentioned in this book, but these five touch the core: John McKnight, Werner Erhard, Robert Putnam, Christopher Alexander, and Peter Koestenbaum. The sixth collection of insights is from a group of wizards who have given life to large group methodologies—some of whom are Marvin Weisbord, Kathie Dannemiller, Dick and Emily Axelrod, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Barbara Bunker, Billie Alban, and David Isaacs and Juanita Brown.

There are two more people whose insights are important to understanding how the world changes. One is David Bornstein. His book How to Change the World analyzes nine social entrepreneurs who created large social movements around the globe. David's summary of why they were successful is worth our attention. Finally, I too briefly include the thinking of Allan Cohen. He translates the world of emergence and complex adaptive systems into language that once in a while I begin to think I understand.

I chose all of these people because I personally know most of them, and they are the ones who have shaken my own thinking; their ideas have, for me, endured the test of time and experience.

What follows is a summary of the aspects of these people's work that are useful to this enterprise. I'll summarize their insights briefly here and then weave them throughout the rest of the book.

The McKnight Insights: Gifts, Associational Life, and Power

John McKnight is a leading light in the world of understanding the nature of community and what builds it. Three of his insights have permanently changed my thinking.

Focus on gifts. First and foremost, he asserts that community is built by focusing on people's gifts rather than their deficiencies. In the world of community and volunteerism, deficiencies have no market value; gifts are the point. Citizens in community want to know what you can do, not what you can't do.

In the professional world of service providers, whole industries have been built on people's deficiencies. Social services and most of medicine, therapy, and psychology are organized around what is missing or broken in people.

McKnight points out that if you go to a professional service provider and say you have no deficiencies or problems, that you just want to talk about your gifts and talents, you will be shown the door and treated as though you are wasting their time. Go to an association or a group of neighbors and tell them what your capabilities are, and they get quite interested.

This insight is profound if taken seriously, for it eliminates most of the conversations we now have about problem diagnosis, gap analysis (if you do not know what this is, be grateful), weaknesses, and what's wrong with me, you, and the rest of the world. It also underscores the limitation of labeling people. McKnight knows that the act of labeling, itself, is what diminishes the capacity of people to fulfill their potential. If we care about transformation, then we will stay focused on gifts, to such an extent that our work becomes simply to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center.

John's focus on gifts has led to his founding a worldwide movement called Asset-Based Community Development. Simply put, this movement declares that if we want to make communities stronger, we should study their assets, resources, and talents. It is in the attention to these things that something new can occur.

Associational life. The second insight that is relevant here has to do with the limitations of systems. John sees a system as an organized group of funded and well-resourced professionals who operate in the domain of cases, clients, and services. As soon as you professionalize care, you have produced an oxymoron. He says that systems are capable of service but not care. Talk to any poor person or vulnerable person and they can give you a long list of the services they have received. They are well serviced, but you often have to ask what in their life has fundamentally changed.

The alternative to a system is what John calls “associational life”: groups of people voluntarily coming together to do some good. In the disabilities world, John's work has been enthusiastically received. This has led to a widespread effort to take people with visible disabilities out of institutions and systems and bring them back into neighborhoods. Support groups are created, slowly, voluntarily, with a lot of phone calls and requests, so that ordinary citizens come together to support their new neighbors. This strategy brings generosity back into a neighborhood, and in the doing, citizens whose disabilities are hidden (all of us) experience a transformation in their own lives.

Power in our hands. The third insight for community building is John's faith in citizens to identify and solve problems for themselves. He finds that most sustainable improvements in community occur when citizens discover their own power to act. Whatever the symptom—drugs, deteriorating houses, poor economy, displacement, violence—it is when citizens stop waiting for professionals or elected leadership to do something, and decide they can reclaim what they have delegated to others, that things really happen. This act of power is present in most stories of lasting community improvement and change.

To summarize these insights from the work of John McKnight and his partner, Jody Kretzmann: Communities are built from the assets and gifts of their citizens, not from the citizens' needs or deficiencies. Organized, professionalized systems are capable of delivering services, but only associational life is capable of delivering care. Sustainable transformation is constructed in those places where citizens, not institutions or experts, choose to come together to produce a desired future.

The Erhard Insights: The Power of Language, Context, and Possibility

For over thirty years, Werner Erhard has created thinking and learning experiences that have affected millions of people's lives. Many of the ideas he has worked with derive from the work of others, but Werner has named and integrated them into something more powerful than where the thinking began. His work lives through the Landmark Corporation and other licensees. What I select from his work here is a small part of his legacy, but these are the ideas that have changed my life and practice.

The power of language. Werner understands the primal creative nature of language. Many of us have focused for years on improving conversations. We have known that dialogue and communication are important tools for improvement. Werner takes it to a whole new realm by asserting that all transformation is linguistic.

He believes that a shift in speaking and listening is the essence of transformation. If we have any desire to create an alternative future, it is only going to happen through a shift in our language. If we want a change in culture, for example, the work is to change the conversation—or, more precisely, to have a conversation that we have not had before, one that has the power to create something new in the world. This insight forces us to question the value of our stories, the positions we take, our love of the past, and our way of being in the world.

The power of context. Another insight is in the statement, “The context is decisive.” This means that the way we function is powerfully impacted by our worldview, or the way, in his language, that “the world shows up for us.” Nothing in our doing or the way we go through life will shift until we can question, and then choose once again, the basic set of beliefs—some call it mental models; we're calling it context here—that lie behind our actions. Quoting Werner, “Contexts are constituted in language, so we do have something to say about the contexts that limit and shape our actions.”

Implied in this insight is that we have a choice over the context within which we live. Plus, as an added bargain, we can choose a context that better suits who we are now without the usual requirements of years of inner work, a life-threatening crisis, finding a new relationship, or going back to school (the most common transformational technologies of choice).

The way this happens (made too simple here) is by changing our relationship with our past. We do this by realizing, through a process of reflection and rethinking, how we have not completed our past and unintentionally keep bringing it into the future. The shift happens when we pay close attention to the constraints of our listening and accept that our stories are our limitation. This ultimately creates an opening for a new future to occur.

The power of possibility. Changing our relationship with our past leads to another aspect of language that Werner has carefully developed. This is an understanding of the potential in the concept and use of possibility. Possibility as used here is distinguished from other words like vision, goals, purpose, and destiny. Each of those has its own profound meaning, but all are different from the way Werner uses the word possibility. Possibility, here, is a declaration: a declaration of what we create in the world each time we show up. It is a condition, or value, that we want to occur in the world, such as peace, inclusion, relatedness, or reconciliation. A possibility is brought into being in the act of declaring it.

For example: if you declare that you are the possibility of peace in the world, though peace may not reign at this moment, the possibility of peace enters the room just because you have walked in the door. Peace here is a future not dependent on achievement; it is a possibility. The possibility is created by our declaration, and then, thankfully, it begins to work on us. The breakthrough is that we become that possibility, and this is what is transforming. The catch is that possibility can work on us only when we have come to terms with our story. Whatever we hold as our story, which is our version of the past, and from which we take our identity, becomes the limitation to living into a new possibility.

Werner has described this with more precision in personal correspondence:

I suggest that you consider making it clear that it is the future that one lives into that shapes one's being and action in the present. And, the reason that it appears that it is the past that shapes one's being and action in the present is that for most people the past lives in (shapes) their view of the future. . . .

[I]t's only by completing the past (being complete with the past) such that it no longer shapes one's being and action in the present that there is room to create a new future (one not shaped by the past—a future that wasn't going to happen anyhow). Futures not shaped by the past (i.e., a future that wasn't going to happen anyhow) are constituted in language.

In summary, (1) one gets complete with the past, which takes it out of the future (being complete with the past is not to forget the past); (2) in the room that is now available in the future when one's being and action are no longer shaped by the past, one creates a future (a future that moves, touches, and inspires one); (3) that future starts to shape one's being and actions in the present so that they are consistent with realizing that future.

Werner Erhard's way of thinking about language, context, and possibility are key elements in any thinking about authentic transformation. As with the other insights here, they are about a way of being in the world first, and then they can be embodied in concrete actions.

The Putnam Insights: Social Capital and the Well-Being of Community

Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone and amplified the conversation about the role that social capital plays in building community. As one part of his extensive research, he studied a fair number of Italian towns and tried to understand why some were more democratic, were more economically successful, had better health, and experienced better educational achievement.

His findings were startling, for he discovered that the one thing that distinguished the more successful from the less successful towns was the extent of social capital, or widespread relatedness that existed among its citizens. Success as a town was not dependent on the town's geography, history, economic base, cultural inheritance, or financial resources.

Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures—and how we may reconnect. He warns that our stock of social capital—the very fabric of our connections with each other—has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities.

As earlier mentioned about Putnam, geography, history, great leadership, fine programs, economic advantage, and any other factors that we traditionally use to explain success made only a marginal difference in the health of a community. Community well-being simply had to do with the quality of the relationships, the cohesion that exists among its citizens. He calls this social capital.

In the book Better Together, Putnam and coauthor Lewis M. Feldstein explain that “social capital refers to social networks, norms of reciprocity, mutual assistance, and trustworthiness. The central insight of this approach is that social networks have real value both for the people in those networks . . . as well as for bystanders. Criminologists, for instance, have shown that the crime rate in a neighborhood is lowered when neighbors know one another well, benefiting even residents who are not themselves involved in neighborhood activities.”

They go on to distinguish between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital. Bonding social capital comprises networks that are inward looking, composed of people of like mind. Other social networks “encompass different types of people and tend to be outward looking—bridging social capital.” It is primarily the bridging social capital that we are interested in here. As Putnam and Feldstein put it: “a society that has only bonding social capital will . . . [be] segregated into mutually hostile camps. So a pluralistic democracy requires lots of bridging social capital, not just the bonding variety.”

The Alexander Insights: Aliveness, Wholeness, and Unfolding

Christopher Alexander speaks from the world of architecture, but his thinking applies equally well to the creation of community. He grieves over the fragmented and mechanistic way we currently operate. In The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life, he writes,

In discussing what to do in a particular part of a town, one person thinks poverty is the most important thing. Another person thinks ecology is the most important thing. Another person takes traffic as his point of departure. Another person views the maximization of profit from development as the guiding factor. All these points of view are understood to be individual, legitimate, and inherently in conflict. It is assumed that there is not a unitary view through which these many realities can be combined. They simply get slugged out in the marketplace, or in the public forum.

But instead of lucid insight, instead of growing communal awareness of what should be done in a building, or in a park, even on a tiny bench—in short, of what is good—the situation remains one in which several dissimilar and incompatible points of view are at war in some poorly understood balancing act.

Aliveness and wholeness. The alternative to this fragmentation is to create structures that are defined by what Alexander calls “a quality of aliveness.” The absence or presence of this quality has profound impact on the experience of being in that structure. Also, for that quality of aliveness to be present in the final product, it must be present in each step in the design and creation of the structure.

This aliveness grows out of a sense of wholeness. Wholeness is made up of a collection of separate centers, where each center has “a certain life or intensity. . . . We can see that the life of any one center depends on the life of other centers. This life or intensity is not inherent in the center by itself, but is a function of the whole configuration in which the center occurs.”

To connect this to our discussion, we must ask whether every single step in our work holds this quality of life or intensity. Whether we're talking about a strategy, program, invitation, dialogue, gathering, or the building of a master plan, the human experience of aliveness in each choice or step has as much significance as any technical, economic, or purely practical consideration.

This aliveness also is most often found in surprising places. Often in irregular structures, all with aspects of imperfection. Alexander identifies fifteen properties that create the wholeness and aliveness. It would take us off track to list them all here, but some are clearly to the point. Listen to the language he uses, and you get a feel for the world he is naming: Deep Interlock and Ambiguity, Contrast, Roughness, Simplicity and Inner Calm, Not-Separateness.

It is easy to take these words, which he uses to reflect qualities in nature and in a room or building, and apply them to the world of social capital, human relatedness, and belonging that we are concerned with here. Much of what follows in the book is just this: bringing aliveness and wholeness to our notions of leadership, citizenship, social structures, and context, which are essential in creating the community of belonging and restoration that we desire.

Transformation as unfolding. One more influence from Alexander is his belief that aliveness and wholeness can occur only through a process of “unfolding.” Transformation unfolds and is given structure by a consciousness of the whole. The task of transformation is to operate so that what we create grows organically, more concerned with the “quality of aliveness” that gives us the experience of wholeness than with a predictable destination and the speed with which we can reach it.

An unfolding strategy requires giving an uncomfortable importance to each small step we take. We have to worry as much about the arrangement of a room as we do about the community issue that caused us to assemble. It leads us to value the details of each step so that each step becomes its own center. For example, each step of a master plan has to be a small example of the qualities we want in the final large thing. Throughout this book, you will see the effort to value the importance of small things; this intention is a direct outgrowth of Alexander's insights.

In summary, Christopher Alexander moves us toward aliveness, embodied in those places and moments that give us the experience of belonging. In the absence of aliveness, we unknowingly experience an inner conflict, a feeling of something unresolved.

The Koestenbaum Insights: Paradox, Freedom, and Accountability

For several decades, Peter Koestenbaum has brought the insights of philosophy to the business marketplace. His work on the Leadership Diamond paints a holistic and practical landscape of what is required of leaders to achieve greatness in the world, both personally and for their institutions.

Appreciating paradox. One insight that informs our exploration of communal transformation is Peter's understanding of how we can come to terms with the paradoxical nature of human affairs. He values ambiguity and anxiety as the natural condition of being human. The painful choices people make in their lives and for their institutions are an affirming aspect of their humanity. These choices are not the sign of a problem or weakness or the world gone wrong. It is out of the subjectivity and complexity of life that transformation emerges. As a philosopher and consultant, Peter has always given voice to how profound the right question can be.

It is the willingness to reframe, turn, and even invert a question that creates the depth and opening for authentic change. Questions take on an almost sacred dimension when they are valued for their own sake. This is in stark contrast to the common need for answers and quick formulaic action.

Choosing freedom and accountability. A second thread that courses through this book and has given coherence to all of Peter's work is the search for human freedom—freedom being the choice to be a creator of our own experience and accept the unbearable responsibility that goes with that. Out of this insight grows the idea that perhaps the real task of leadership is to confront people with their freedom. This may be the ultimate act of love that is called for from those who hold power over others.

Choosing our freedom is also the source of our willingness to choose to be accountable. The insight is that freedom is what creates accountability. Freedom is not an escape from accountability, as the popular culture so often misunderstands.

One more aspect of Peter's work that has informed my thinking about community is the idea that our willingness to care for the well-being of the whole arises when we are confronted with our freedom, and when we choose to accept and act on that freedom.

The Insights of Large Group Methodology: Designing for the Experience of Community

Over the last thirty years, a rather small group of people has become quite sophisticated in bringing large groups of people together (from fifty to five thousand at a time) to create visions, build strategy, define work processes, and set direction for institutions and communities. This body of knowledge has many names, but is generally called large group methodology. Although it is well established among expert practitioners, it has not found its way into the mainstream of how most leaders do planning and bring people together. These methods tend to be relegated to something that is pulled out on special occasions for special events. We treat these methods like sterling silver and use the stainless every day. This is a shame, for the difference between this kind of practice and the conventional way we bring people together is more like the difference between using sterling silver and eating with our hands.

These large group methods are too profound and too important to remain primarily in the hands of specialized experts. They need to be in the regular practice of community and institutional leaders. They are more than simply tools; they are the means of creating the experience of democracy and high engagement, which we say we believe in but rarely embody. As this thinking and practice grow, they have the potential to fundamentally change the nature of leadership, which would be a good thing.

Four of the innovators whose work is highlighted have been friends and teachers of mine for years. I reflect their thinking here only because I have been in many rooms with them. There are many others who have also changed the world and our thinking about bringing large groups of people together: Harrison Owen, Barbara Bunker, Billie Alban, Fred and Marilyn Emory, and Carolyn Lukensmeyer come to mind.

Future Search. Marvin Weisbord has created Future Search with Sandra Janoff. This structure begins with a scan of the environment and brings people into a conversation about the future they want to create. Marvin and Sandra have long understood the importance of the right question, the way to balance expert input with communal dialogue, and how to structure the flow of small group discussions into a collective outcome. They have also codified the distinction between solving problems and creating a future.

Conference Model. Dick and Emily Axelrod are design geniuses. They realized early on that if we can change the way we meet, we can change the way we live together. They know that learning best occurs when we structure meetings in a way that puts people in contact with each other so that they experience in a conference the same dilemmas they face in life. The Axelrods create experiences that simulate the democratic, self-governing principles that, if taken seriously, can create large communities of committed and powerful people.

Whole-Scale Change. The late Kathie Dannemiller was another innovator in this movement. “One heart—one mind” was the spirit that she lived, and her goal was to bring that into an event where people assembled to create a new future. She had a faith in the collective capacity of employees and citizens that would put Thomas Jefferson to shame.

Her guiding question was “How will the world be different tomorrow as a result of our meeting today?” Like the others, she valued the question and held deep skepticism about answers. She also knew that the questions with the most power were the ones that touched the heart and spoke to what people were experiencing. If “What did you know and when did you know it?” defined the Watergate hearings, the question “What did you hear and how did you feel about that?” was at the core of her work.

Kathie wanted the whole system in the room, and then she constantly broke it into small groups. She advocated that the small group worked best when it was maximally diverse—meaning that each small group was a microcosm of the large system. This composition plus a broad-enough question results in people momentarily putting aside their own individual interests and beginning to care for the well-being of the whole.

The World Café. Finally, I want to talk about the work of Juanita Brown and her partner, David Isaacs. Their structure is called the World Café. Its gift is in its sophisticated simplicity. They begin by defining a large question that gets at the purpose of the gathering. Each small group focuses on the question, but in the Café method, the group sits at a round cocktail-sized table.

On each table is a flip-chart sheet or butcher paper and a marker for each person. As people talk, each writes on the paper in large letters the ideas worth retaining. At certain intervals, as in musical chairs (except that there are enough seats for all), one person stays as host at the table and the others go to different tables. The host summarizes for the new group what is on the paper, and the discussion continues. Eventually, the ideas from the tables are shared with the whole group. It is an elegant model to create convergence for a large group.

Now, my intent here is not to describe the full process for any of these innovative large group methods—I know that I do each a great injustice in my minimalist descriptions and acknowledgment. The intent is to define some of the essential elements that form the design basis of the large group work that informs our thinking about community transformation.

Each element of each large group method has profound implications for how people meet, how they create an alternative future, and how community can be developed in a sustainable way. What we may once have relegated as useful but incidental little “training exercises” now have a power beyond our imagination. They form a way of thinking and operating in community that, when matched with the philosophical insights of the others, give us the structure of belonging that we seek. Here is a brief summary of the power of their thinking:

Accountability and commitment. The essential insight is that people will be accountable and committed to what they have a hand in creating. This insight extends to the belief that whatever the world demands of us, the people most involved have the collective wisdom to meet the requirements of that demand. And if we can get them together in the room, in the right context and with a few simple ground rules, the wisdom to create a future or solve a problem is almost always in the room. All you need to ensure this is to make sure the people in the room are a diverse and textured sample of the larger world you want to affect.

This insight is an argument for collective intelligence and an argument against expensive studies and specialized expertise. That is why this thinking finds a skeptical ear from the academy, most expert consultants, and the leadership that espouses democracy but really only trusts patriarchy and cosmetic empowerment.

Learning from the stranger and one another. The key to gathering citizens, leaders, and stakeholders is to create in the room a living example of how we want the future to be. This means we need as much diversity in the room as possible. The more strangers the better. One of the principles is that all voices need to be heard, but not necessarily all at one time or by everybody. What makes this succeed is that almost everything important happens in a small group. This expresses another principle, that peer-to-peer interaction is where most learning takes place; it is the fertile earth out of which something new is produced. In this small group, you place the maximum mix of people's stories, values, and viewpoints, and in this way each group of six to twelve brings the whole system into that space.

Bias toward the future. The insights from large group methods have a bias toward the future and devote little or no time to negotiating the past or emphasizing those areas where we will never agree anyway. The most organizing conversation starter is “What do we want to create together?” So much for in-depth diagnoses, more studies, argument and negotiation, and waiting for the sponsorship or transformation of top leaders.

How we engage matters. The most important contribution of those who have developed these principles and insights is the idea that the way we bring people together matters more than our usual concerns about the content of what we present to people. How we structure the gathering is as worthy of attention as grasping the nature of a problem or focusing on the solutions we seek.

The gift to us from these masters of large group work is the belief that transformation hinges on changing the structure of how we engage each other. It is the insight that authentic transformation does not occur by focusing on changing individuals or being smart about political processes, which are based on advocacy of interests, hardball negotiation, or finding where the power resides and getting them on your side. The insights of these masters represent a dramatic shift from much of our conventional thinking, which, by the way, is not working that well.

The Bornstein-Cohen Insights: Scale, Speed, and Emergent Design

David Bornstein is a journalist who has written about the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and other social innovations that have become large movements. Within the stories he tells in his books are some radical thoughts about how successful transformations came into being.

Small scale, slow growth. Not one of the examples David describes began as a government- or large-system-sponsored program. Each was begun with very little funding, no fanfare, and little concern about how to measure the outcomes. Each had a deeply committed and self-chosen leader with a commitment to make a difference in the lives of however many people they were able to reach.

Bornstein concluded that well-funded efforts, with clear outcomes, that spell out the steps to get there do not work. Changes that begin on a large scale, are initiated or imposed from the top, and are driven to produce quick wins inevitably produce few lasting results. This may be a clue to why our wars, such as those on drugs and poverty, have been consistently disappointing and sometimes have even produced more of what they sought to eliminate.

If you reflect on the stories of the successful leaders whom Bornstein documents, you realize that these entrepreneurs were committed enough and patient enough to give their projects time to evolve and find their own way of operating. There were years spent simply learning what structures, agreements, leadership, and types of people were required to be successful.

It was after the model had evolved and succeeded on its own terms that it began to grow, gain attention, and achieve a level of scale that touched large numbers of people.

This means that sustainable changes in community occur locally on a small scale, happen slowly, and are initiated at a grassroots level.

Emergent design. Allan Cohen is a brilliant strategy consultant who combines a deep understanding of the power of conversation with insights about the organic nature of design. A winning combination. Allan makes even more intentional and explicit the strategies that Bornstein has documented. Allan distinguishes between emergent strategies and destination or blueprint strategies. He says that effective change strategies obviously begin with a strong sense of purpose plus a commitment to bring something new into the world.

The key is what you do after that. Allan talks of two things: one is recognizing that organizations are always adapting and learning, even in the absence of big change initiatives. So a good place to start is by asking why the organization hasn't been moving naturally in a more desirable direction. Then take modest steps to impact the conversations and relationships that are shaping the direction of change inherent in the organization. Watch what emerges, pause, reflect, and course-correct—then watch what emerges again. This is a crude definition of emergence.

The second insight from Allan is about changing the conditions under which an intention is acted on. He claims the ability to herd cats, which many have said is impossible. He does this by tilting the floor, which changes the conditions under which the cats are operating. Emergent strategies focus on conditions more than on behaviors or predictable goals. Ironically, the act of predicting the path may be the obstacle to achieving the purpose.

Allan's work on emergent design strongly emphasizes becoming clear on the purpose, the key to which is opening wide the possibility for a different future. He also gives importance to relatedness being the foundation of all achievement.

Combining the Insights

David Bornstein's stories are an expression of all the insights summarized here and woven throughout this book. For example, the efforts he talks about demonstrate the conditions leading to Alexander's quality of aliveness. They unfolded slowly and with great consciousness; then they became small whole centers in and of themselves, which finally, organically, began to combine with other centers to achieve some scale.

These efforts also had leaders who chose to live into Werner Erhard's concept of possibility. The ends seemed unachievable, and the commitment was not contingent on results. Each project created a new conversation about the people involved. Take Grameen Bank as an example. The founder declared that poor people were creditworthy and excellent entrepreneurs. This was simply a declaration of possibility and began a new conversation about poverty that shifted the context within which loans were made.

By this shift in context, Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen, embodied McKnight's observation that development is based on gifts, not deficiencies.

Grameen Bank also counted on the power of community and relatedness. Yunus and his bank created teams of borrowers (they called them chapters), in which each person's ability to receive a loan was dependent on the repayment by others in the group. A portion of each repayment went to fund the loans to other chapters and the well-being of the community. These small groups were the basic unit of borrowing, four women to a group. Not individuals, but the small group. Each small group also was required to operate as part of a larger community, so that the small groups could not become insular and act as if the boundary of their group was the edge of the earth. This is the essence of the large group methodologies.

There was for each team of borrowers a set of requirements that went beyond the money. They were accountable for producing a successful life for themselves and others, which is a correlate of Koestenbaum's understanding of freedom—that freedom and accountability are one and the same.

And all of this resulted in the wider benefits of having created social capital, as Putnam would term it. The participation of the women in the entrepreneurial venture affected all aspects of their lives and of their village. Eventually it would impact a nation.

Another example of these principles in action is the Family Independence Initiative (FII), which tracks the self-reported strengths, gifts, and initiatives of participating families and helps them see what they can create with a little help. FII provides matching funds and support for the progress that marginalized families produce on their own. They carefully avoid giving advice or thinking that they, the professionals, know what is best for a family. They are prescription-free. And it works.

So in this brief snapshot we have the core elements of the methods of collective transformation that follow. Integrating these insights gives us some basic conceptual elements for transforming communities. The reason to keep reading is to gain more form and depth to these ideas and apply them to our world, however large or small we may define it.

CHAPTER 2

Shifting the Context for Community

The context that restores community is one of possibility, generosity, and gifts, rather than one of problem solving, fear, and retribution. A new context acknowledges that we have all the capacity, expertise, and resources that an alternative future requires. Communities are human systems given form by conversations that build relatedness. The conversations that build relatedness most often occur through associational life, where citizens show up by choice, and rarely in the context of system life, where citizens show up out of obligation. The small group is the unit of transformation and the container for the experience of belonging. Conversations that focus on stories about the past become a limitation to community; ones that are teaching parables and focus on the future restore community.

The move toward authentic community entails a shift in context. Context is an expression of the mental models we bring to our collective efforts. It is the set of beliefs—at times beliefs that we are unaware of—that dictate how we think, how we frame the world, what we pay attention to, and consequently how we behave. It is sometimes called a worldview. The existing dominant context is that we live in a world of scarcity, competition, and individualism.

Scarcity means that no matter how much we have, it is not enough. Whatever is needed, there is not enough to go around. Competition means that the world is, by its nature, rank ordered, top to bottom, a zero-sum game. Individualism means that you are on your own. Bootstrap time. It has us believe that people born on third base actually hit a triple. Individualism feeds the myth that there is such a thing as an autonomous human being.

This current context leads us to analyze deficiencies, define the gap between needs and aspiration, and believe that we need to produce more programs, more measurement, better planning, better problem solving, and stronger leadership.

The following are the shifts in context that would precede the movement into authentic community:

?We are a community of possibilities, not a community of problems.

?Community exists for the sake of belonging, and takes its identity from the gifts, generosity, and accountability of its citizens. It is not defined by its fears, its isolation, or its penchant for retribution.

?We currently have all the capacity, expertise, programs, leaders, regulations, and wealth required to end unnecessary suffering and create an alternative future.

Community is fundamentally an interdependent human experience given form by the conversation citizens hold among themselves. The history, buildings, economy, infrastructure, and culture are products of the conversations and social fabric of any community. The built and cultural environments are secondary gains of how we choose to be together.

Principles of Strategy

Shifting the context leads to certain principles of a strategy to build community:

?The essential work is to build social fabric, both for its own sake and to enable chosen accountability among citizens. When citizens care for each other, they become accountable to each other. Care and accountability create a productive community. The work is to design ways to bring citizens (including formal leaders, for they are citizens) together so that they experience the “quality of aliveness” Christopher Alexander writes about. This occurs by being highly attentive to the way that we gather.

?Strong associational life is essential and central. Associational life is how citizens choose to build connections for their own sake, sometimes for coffee, sometimes for a common purpose, like getting a stop sign put in. These sometime incidental encounters, or more regular meetings, are the core determinants for transformation. In associational life, creating connectedness becomes both an end and a means. Large established systems such as business, government, education, health care, and social services are important but are not essential to community transformation. For systems, building relatedness is mostly a means, not an end in itself.

?Citizens using their power to convene other citizens create an alternative future. A quality of aliveness occurs through change efforts that are energized by citizens and are organic or emergent in nature. A shift in the thinking and actions of citizens is more vital than a shift in the thinking and actions of institutions and formal leaders. This idea is in sharp contrast to the traditional beliefs that better leadership, more programs, new funding, new regulations, and more oversight are the path to a better future. All of these are necessary at times, but they do not have the power to create a fundamental shift.

?The small group is the unit of transformation. It is in the structure of how small groups gather that an alternative future will be created. This also means that we must set aside our concern for scale and our concern for speed. Scale, speed, and practicality are always the coded arguments for keeping the existing system in place. Belonging can occur through our membership in large groups, but this form of belonging reduces the power of citizens. Instead of surrendering our identity for the sake of belonging, we find in the small group a place that can value our uniqueness.

?All transformation is linguistic, which means that we can think of community as essentially a conversation. This means that if we want to change the community, all we have to do is change the conversation. The shift in conversation is from one of problems, fear, and retribution to one of possibility, generosity, and restoration. This is the new context that both creates strong social capital and is created by it.

The overarching intent of these principles is to create communities that operate out of a new context. Context clearly occurs as individual mind-sets, but it also exists as a form of collective worldview. Communities carry a context through the frequently repeated beliefs that citizens hold about the place where they live. The media is one carrier of this context, but does not create it.

If transformation is linguistic, then community building requires that we engage in a new conversation, one that we have not had before, one that can create an experience of aliveness and belonging. It is the act of engaging citizens in a conversation that allows us to act in concert and, equally important, to create accountability between citizens.

I am using the word conversation in a broad sense—namely, all the ways that we listen, speak, and communicate meaning to each other. So, in addition to speaking and listening, this meaning of conversation includes the architecture of our buildings and public spaces, the way we inhabit and arrange a room when we come together, and the space we give to the arts.

The Futility Context: Community as a Problem to Be Solved

To make a difference in our community, we must begin by naming the existing context and evolving to a way of thinking that leads to new conversations that produce a new context. It is the shift in conversation that increases social capital. Every time we gather has the potential to become a model of the future we want to create. If you really get this paragraph, you probably don't need to read any further.

Our current context is a long way from one of gifts, generosity, and accountability. The dominant context we now hold is one of deficiencies, interests, and entitlement. Out of this context grows the belief that the suffering of communities is a set of problems to be solved.

After we finish giving speeches about the virtues of our neighborhood and city, we love to elaborate their problems. We have studied and reported for years the problems of housing, health care, the environment, youth at risk, race, the disabled, poverty, unemployment, public education, the crisis in transportation, and drugs. These problems are studied by academics and fueled by talk radio and the AM band, which serve as places for hosts and citizens to argue, debate, and complain about who is right or wrong and who needs to change. And nowadays we have this thing called social media. Enough said.

Our love of problems runs deeper than just the joy of complaint, being right, or escape from responsibility. The core belief from which we operate is that an alternative or better future can be accomplished by more problem solving. We believe that defining, analyzing, and studying problems is the way to make a better world. It is the dominant mind-set of Western culture.

This context—that life is a set of problems to be solved—may actually limit any chance of the future being different from the past. The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems as though we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.

Community-as-problems-to-be-solved has some benefits. It values the ability to implement, is big on doing, has a certain honesty about it, and worships tangible results as the ultimate blessing. You might say that this is what has gotten us this far. It is not that this (or any other) context is wrong; it just does not have the power to bring something new into the world.

To shift to some other context, we need to detach ourselves from the discussions of problems. One way to achieve this detachment is to see that what we now call problems are simply symptoms of something deeper.

For example, what we call “urban problems” are really symptoms of the breakdown of community. Barry Lopez, well-known author on the environment, lives in a town that several years ago suffered a terrible shooting at its high school. He wrote later that after all the TV cameras, advocates for and against gun control, grief counselors, and experts on youth and public education left town, the citizens could face the reality that the shooting was symptomatic of a breakdown in that community—a breakdown in citizens' capacity to create a place where this kind of tragedy could not happen. His analysis has stayed with me. The same could be said for the other tragic shootings in the United States, from Sandy Hook to Sutherland Springs, Las Vegas to Orlando, New York to San Bernardino.

The Limitations of Symptoms

The conventional approach to community building and development is to create programs, blueprints, and funding to keep us safe, keep us working, keep us housed and healthy. Every city has thousands of institutions, programs, and agencies all committed to serving the public good. Yet the needle for each of these in too many neighborhoods and cities refuses to move. Affordable housing, poverty, drug use, and obesity are moving in the wrong direction. From the standpoint of building community and social capital, these institutions and programs are treating the symptoms. Safety, jobs, housing, and the rest are symptoms of the unreconciled and fragmented nature of the community—what Lopez calls the breakdown of community. This fragmentation or breakdown creates a context in which trying to solve the symptoms only sustains them. Otherwise, why have we been working on these symptoms for so long and so hard? And even with so many successful programs, why have we seen too little fundamental change?

When we shift from talking about the problems of community to talking about the breakdown of community, something changes. Naming the challenge as the “breakdown of community” opens the way for restoration. Holding on to the view that community is a set of problems to be solved holds us in the grip of retribution.

At every level of society, we live in the landscape of retribution. The retributive community is sustained by several aspects of the modern community conversation, which I will expand on throughout the book: the marketing of fear and fault, gravitation toward more laws and oversight, an obsession with romanticized leadership, marginalizing hope and possibility, and devaluing associational life to the point of invisibility.

Getting Our Story About Story Straight

One form of the retributive community is the story we tell ourselves and each other about who we are. Getting clear about the nature of story is important in appreciating the power of the existing context, especially in those places where history and the past seem overridingly restraining.

Storytelling plays a noble and historic role in our lives and in society. Stories can give us a narrative to guide and instruct us. They are crucial to our knowing who we are; they provide a sense of identity. Some stories, however, become the limitation to creating anything new. Werner Erhard has been so insightful about this. We need to distinguish between the stories that give meaning to our lives and help us find our voice, and those that limit our possibility.

In Russia, even the past is unpredictable.

Author unknown

The stories that are useful and fulfilling are the ones that are metaphors, signposts, parables, and inspiration for the fullest expression of our humanity. They are communal teaching stories. Creation stories, wisdom stories, sometimes personal stories that have a mythic quality, even if they come from the person sitting next to you.

Theater, movies, song, literature, and art are storytelling of the highest order. These are the mediums for building an individual sense of what it means to be human. The arts are an essential part of the story of what it means to be a human being and a community.

There are other kinds of stories that in their telling become a limitation. Limiting stories are personal versions of the past. They are stories about the conclusions we drew from events that happened to us. Other limiting stories are those that are rehearsed or make the point that the future will be a slightly modified continuation of the past out of which the story arose. Stories of this nature place us as victims of events or even fate.

Limiting stories are the ones that present themselves as if they were true. Facts. Our stories of our own past are heartfelt and yet are fiction. All we know that is true is that we were born. We may know for sure who our parents, siblings, and other key players in our drama were. But our version of all of them, the meaning and memory that we narrate to all who will listen, is our creation. Made up. Fiction. And this is good news, for it means that a new story can be concocted any time we choose.

Same with community. The stories of violence, crime, and wrongdoing that are constantly told are also fiction. The events may have happened, but the versions that let those events define who we are as a community—such as whether it is safe to go downtown, whether we need new leaders, whether people in this place are friendly, whether we are headed up or down—are all fiction. The decision to tell those stories over and over again as if they were defining truths creates the limitation against an alternative future.

This is why therapy and healing are really processes of re-remembering the past in a more forgiving way. The willingness to own up to the fictional nature of our story is where the healing begins. And where the possibility of restoration resides.

In this way, restoration can be considered the willingness to complete and extract the power out of the current story we have of our community and our place in it. This creates an opening to produce a new collective story. A new story based on restorative community. One of possibility, generosity, accountability.

CHAPTER 3

The Stuck Community

The existing community context is one that markets fear, assigns fault, and worships self-interest. This context supports the belief that the future will be improved with new laws, more oversight, and stronger leadership. Possibility thinking and associational life are marginalized, relegated to human interest and side stories in the media. The corporate model is the modern ideal, and the economy is the center story. The story in the stuck community defines the role of the media as framer of the debate. In community building, we need to realize that what the media reports is a reflection, not the cause, of the conversation that citizens currently hold.

To create a new story, we first need to come to terms with the current one. This begins by naming it. The story of the stuck community can be heard both in the dominant public debate and also in what we talk about to each other each day. It is important to understand that there is a hidden agenda in every story. This agenda is a point to be made, a political belief about what is important, that stays constant regardless of the events of the day.

Marketing Fear and Fault

The overriding characteristic of the stuck community is the decision to broadcast all the reasons we have to be afraid. This is a kind of advertising that exploits the fear we have of violence, of the urban core, of terrorism, of African Americans and other ethnic groups, of immigrants, of those who are poor or undereducated, of other religions, and of other countries. It seems as though the lead story of every local evening newscast is about crime and human suffering, and if our city had none that day, then we hear how somewhere else in the world someone was murdered, bombed, killed in an accident, or abducted from what was once thought to be a safe place. What we are hearing is the marketing of fear.

In the telling, we are willing to sacrifice the wholeness and dignity of a person for the sake of capturing the emotion or drama of the moment. The marketing of fear thrusts a microphone in the face of someone who has just suffered an irreplaceable loss and asks, “How do you feel?” It is the commercialization of suffering for the sake of profit. Not that complicated.

When I was deputy press secretary at the White House, our credibility was so bad we couldn't believe our own leaks.

Bill Moyers

The marketing of fear is not just for profit; it also holds a political agenda. Fear justifies the retributive agenda, fundamentalist in the extreme, that has been on the rise for some time. The retributive agenda believes that a just and civil society is one that gives priority to restraints, consequences, and control, and underlines the importance of rules. It gets packaged as spiritual values, family values, the American Way, love it or leave it, all under the umbrella of law and order. It helps build the incarceration industry and the protection industry, it creates a platform that enables those in power to expand their belief system, and it discounts the rehabilitation industry. Fear forms the basis of our recent foreign policy and drives much of our legislation. Fear also fuels the allure of suburban life and is a subtle but clear argument against diversity and inclusion.

In addition to marketing fear, the stuck community markets fault. When there is a human tragedy, most of the energy goes into finding who was to blame. There is a retributive search for responsibility and a corresponding defense from the players claiming their innocence. This blame marketing rests on the belief that if we can assign blame and find cause, it is useful to society and somehow reassures us that the tragedy won't happen again. To me, this is irrational thinking. What is missing here is a recognition of the complexity of human affairs, an acknowledgment of the paradoxical and accidental nature of life. There is no insurance policy against the human condition.

Out of the decision to dwell on fear and fault, the community is stuck in a context that holds the following:

?We are a community of problems to be solved. Those who can best articulate the problems and who can best articulate the solutions dominate the conversation.

?The future is defined by the interplay of self-interests, dependent on the accountability of leaders, and controlled by a small number of wealthy and powerful people, commonly lumped into the category we call “they.”

?Community action is aimed at eliminating the sources of our fear. We aim at a set of needs and deficiencies. In order to eliminate our fear and respond to the neediness of our people, we try harder at what we have been doing all along. We lock down neighborhoods, build more prisons, and reduce tolerance to zero. We call for better measurements, more expertise, more funding, better leadership, stronger consequences, and more protection. We are committed to trying harder at what is not working.

Ramping Up Laws and Oversight

When something goes wrong, we carry the illusion that after we find the guilty party, some kind of legislation or change in policy will prevent the crime or accident from happening again. We are stuck in the belief that we can legislate the future and mandate morality. In Cincinnati, we passed an ordinance that street people had to be licensed to ask passersby for money. The idea was that somehow I now would be comfortable going downtown knowing that the person asking for money had been certified and approved by the city council. Now even panhandling was professionalized. The ordinance did not bring more people into town at night.

A corollary to passing more laws is the push for more oversight. We think that more watching improves performance. All the evidence is to the contrary, for most high-performing communities and organizations are heavily self-regulating. My favorite quote on this is “Research causes cancer in rats.” It is reasonable to understand that the act of oversight may in fact increase the very thing that is being watched with the intent of reducing it.

The political agenda of the stuck community says that citizens and employees are incapable of monitoring themselves and controlling each other, and that more careful oversight, institutionally mandated and installed, will build community and provide for the common good. It is in fact an argument against building community. It ends up leaving us more dependent on security specialists and professionalized control. It provides the business case for monarchy. Someone to watch over me.

Romanticizing Leadership

Carole Schurch was taking care of the logistics of a conference on transformation. She opened the event by announcing, “The restrooms are down the hall on the left, lunch will be at 1:00 p.m., dinner is at 8:00 p.m., and the conference will be over tomorrow afternoon. Let me know if I can help you with anything and also let me know what time your mother is picking you up!”

We love our habit of dependency and accept the culture of retribution because it reinforces the case for strong leaders—“strong” being the code word for autocratic, a message our culture is increasingly willing to accede to. We are fascinated with our leaders. We speak endlessly, both in the public conversation and privately, about the rise and fall of leaders. The agenda this sustains is that leaders are cause and all others are effect. That all that counts is what leaders do. That leaders are the leverage point for building a better community. That they are foreground, while citizens, followers, players, and anyone else not in a leadership position are background. This is a deeply patriarchal agenda, and it is this love of leaders that limits our capacity to create an alternative future. It proposes that the only real accountability in the world is at the top. They are the only ones worth talking about.

The effect of buying in to this view of leadership is that it lets citizens off the hook and breeds citizen dependency and entitlement. It undermines the development of a culture where each is accountable for their community. The attention on the leader makes good copy; it gives us someone to blame and thereby declares our innocence. In its own way, it reinforces individualism, putting us in the stance of waiting for the cream to rise, wishing for a great individual to bring light where there is darkness. It is possible to admire and be inspired by great leaders, even bosses, but we need to resist the projection that they can produce a change in the conditions that concern us. Each of us is accountable for our small piece of creating better conditions. When we project that on a leader, power gets abused and disappointment is inevitable.

What is missing or dismissed here are the community-building insights about how groups work, the power of relatedness, what occurs when ordinary people get together. We write communal possibility off as just another meeting, the blind leading the blind, citizens coming together to pool ignorance or to speak “truth to power,” which is just a complaint session in evening clothes.

As an aside, some reasons for discounting the power of citizens are well founded, for most of the time when citizens come together it makes no difference. That's because they operate under the retributive principles that I am trying to describe in this section. They want to define the problem, find fault, elaborate fear, demand control-oriented action, and point to leaders. Many citizens get engaged in community only when they are angry.

If we keep engaging citizens in this traditional way, then no amount of involvement will make a difference. The way we currently gather has no transformational power. This is what needs to change, for if we do not change the way citizens come together, if we do not shift the context under which we gather and do not change the methodology of our gatherings, then we will have to keep waiting for great leaders, and we will never step up to the power and accountability that is within our grasp.

Marginalizing Possibility

Given the dominant context that values scarcity, leadership, individualism, fear, and fault, anything positive or hopeful becomes an anomaly. An exception, an accident. To choose possibility means that we have to confront cynicism. Journalism, human services, corrections, and public safety are professions which claim that their cynicism comes from constant contact and familiarity with the dark side of society. This ignores the reality that what you see comes from what you choose to look at. Decide that all the news fit to print is about problems, and that is what you get. In the retributive culture, cynicism is the norm and becomes the lead story. Cynicism justifies retribution. Retribution is fueled by cynicism.

In this context, possibility and vision become buried in the middle section of the news, or become an upbeat pat on the back as the anchor goes off the air. Possibility and faith are seen as threatening because they are an indictment of cynicism. So when citizens do find a way to use their gifts, or commit to something thought impossible, or bring faith and gratitude into the world, it is not by accident that the story is reduced to a “human interest” piece—the kiss of death when it comes to changing our context. Many reporters do not even consider these stories journalism.

When labeled “human interest,” possibility doesn't qualify as news. It is a feel-good diversion. Something to calm our nerves. Possibility and the faith that supports it may be strong declarations for the individual, but for the collective, they are neutered and treated as merely charming. Mainstream journalism treats us as passive spectators and is a profession which thinks that its role is to speak truth to power. It worships the sensational and the tragic. What bleeds is what leads. This is costing the profession its audience. Especially since every individual is now a publisher. We need to support the efforts of a journalism committed to what is working. Think of the Solutions Journalism Network, the citizen journalism movement, NewScoop in Calgary, Kolbe Times. Small signs of a shift in thinking.

Possibility also gets undermined by being confused with optimism. Even when leaders speak to the possibility of our community, in the stuck community we consider it a motivational speech, a sales pitch, a bootstrap keynote to make us feel better and lift our spirits from what we call reality. But possibility is not a prediction or a goal; it is a choice to bring a certain quality into our lives. Optimism, which is a prediction about the future, has no power. Pessimism is equally irrelevant.

The ways in which possibility is marginalized underline the importance of context. All that does not confirm the prevailing mind-set is made marginal and cute. This is why, if you want to create an alternative future, you have to shift the context, for all that disconfirms the current context will be discarded. We need to shift what is considered “reality.” For example, what if we see the media as a reflection of who we are, and choose to listen primarily to media that promote learning and possibility, document miracles, and report on a different agenda, and call it the “new reality”? Les Ihara, a longtime state senator in Hawaii, says that what is needed is “a shift in the ground of being that reports the news.”

Devaluing Associational Life

John McKnight has studied communities for thirty years and found that community is built most powerfully by what he calls “associational life,” referring to the myriad ways citizens come together to do good work and serve the public interest. Whether in clubs, associations, informal gatherings, special events, or just on the street or at breakfast, neighborly contact constitutes an uncounted and unnoticed glue and connection that makes good communities work.

The stuck community essentially discounts associational life and instead values, and even glorifies, the “system” life, especially the private sector and corporate mind-set. This context is so pervasive that we have become anaesthetized to it. Although there is a growing awareness of the cost of this mind-set (see David Korten's work, listed at the end of the book), we still act as if what is good for business is good for the country.

Here are some ways in which we discount associational life, the place where the social fabric is built:

?The only true measure of community is its economic prosperity according to traditional measures. We seek the American dream, streets paved with gold. The only good news that makes the news is when Toyota decides to build a plant in our town. Communities will justify spending infinite amounts of money to keep sports teams because they are theoretically good for the economy. Job creation is the final argument for most of our mistakes, especially when we destroy the neighborhood economy. We measure the neighborhood and the person by their average annual income.

?We name social services and institutions that serve the public good “not for profits.” “Not for profit” means that service and generosity are defined by what they are not. What kind of identity and esteem does this establish for the choice for service and care for community? Can you imagine introducing yourself as the name you are not? “Hello, my name is not Alice.” “Well, I would like you to meet my friend, not Roger.” There is no identity in that. Nothing memorable or recognizable next time we meet. There is a movement to call it the “public benefit” sector. Not such a bad thing.

?Associations are under constant pressure to be more corporate: to merge, become more efficient, submit to external oversight, measure harder, and submit to greater accountability. These are core values in the private sector. A natural outgrowth of this is the way many foundations, which exist for the sake of community service, treat corporations as their clients. In the philanthropic world, you also hear people talk about their “return on social investment.” We use the language of commerce when talking about the field of generosity.

?The public benefit sector makes front-page news only when there is scandal. The head of a large agency who spends funds on limousines and high living is on the front page for days. When the same agency softens the landing for people in a tragedy or turns people's lives around, the story is at best a footnote.

?We marginalize compassion in the public conversation. Here's an example: As an effort to build the image and well-being of the city, Go Cincinnati is about streetcars, housing development, and attracting new businesses. It sells hard the strengths of the city, including the arts, entertainment, and sports attractions. All good things to sell and essential to a city that works. What is missing in this conversation and sales pitch is the compassion of a city. Having a large number of social services in a neighborhood is seen as a weakness, not a selling point. The view is that if people need help, if they are vulnerable or in crisis, it is a communal liability. The generosity that serves these people goes unmentioned as an asset.

Reinforcing Self-Interest and Isolation

These dimensions of the way we talk about our community and the stories we repeatedly tell about our community work together to create an insular mentality. Under the siege of fear, fault, and the rest, people and institutions build a wall around themselves and are primarily concerned with their own interests and survival. This gives us a community in which each sector— business, education, government, social service, health care—is so focused on its own affairs that those who choose to commit to the well-being of the whole have a difficult time gaining a foothold.

And what exists for our institutions is reinforced by citizens. Citizens mostly get engaged when something threatens their backyard. They show up in public settings when they are angry; they become activated only by local, next-door interests.

To summarize, the context of retribution and the story that grows out of it cause our attempts to build community to be what actually keeps it unchanged. Our retributive approach to the symptoms of poverty, violence, homelessness, and cynicism does not create these symptoms, but does interfere with their changing. Retribution by its nature serves to fragment community and reduce social capital. The side effect is that each citizen's accountability for the well-being of community is reduced. When the context is retributive, reduced accountability and diminished social capital are the direct outgrowths of our very efforts to improve community. And this mostly occurs as an unintended consequence, for no one holds a fragmented community as a goal.

The Media

As a key messenger of context in the stuck community, the media takes its cue from citizens and makes its living from the call for retribution. The public conversation most visible to us is the interaction between what we citizens want to hear and the narrative put forth by the media. But it is too easy to blame the media for valuing entertainment over news and for selling fear and problems over generosity and possibility. It is more useful to see that the media is a reflection of who we, as citizens, have become.

The news is most usefully understood as the daily decisions about what is newsworthy. This is a power that goes way beyond simply informing us. The agenda in each story defines what is important, and in doing this, it promotes an identity for a community.

The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and white.

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

This means that the real importance of the media is not in the typical debate over the quality, balance, or even accuracy of what is reported. These vary with the channel, the network, the newspaper, the website. They vary depending on having the resources to get the whole story, the market segment the source is aiming at, and its editorial agenda. What is most important, and the power that is most defining, is the power of the media to decide what is worth talking about. As British newspaper pioneer Lord Northcliffe once said, “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.”

The media's power is the power to name the public debate. Or, in other words, the power to name “reality.” This is true for the mainstream as well as online media.

Plus there are new players in the media landscape. The Internet, the social networks, the blogosphere have invaded the world we once called news. While the traditional media still define what the story is about, the texture and color come from every direction, and the most powerful players on social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook take retribution, blame, and accusation to the extreme. Technology is often held up as the answer to the future, but at this point it mostly just amplifies the dominant story.

The point is this: citizens have the capacity to change the community story, to reclaim the power to name what is worth talking about, to bring a new context into being. Those of us who create the current dominant context for the community conversation drive the conditions that nurture a retributive context and a retributive community. If we do not choose to change this context and the strategies that follow from it, we will produce no new outcomes for our institutions, neighborhoods, and towns.

CHAPTER 4

The Restorative Community

Restoration comes from the choice to value possibility and relatedness over problems, needs, self-interest, and the rest of the stuck community's agenda. It hinges on the accountability chosen by citizens and their willingness to connect with each other around promises they make to each other.

Restoration is created by the kinds of conversations we initiate with each other. These conversations are the leverage point for an alternative future. The core question that underlies each conversation is “What can we create together?” Shifting the context from retribution to restoration will occur through the use of language that moves in the following directions: from problems to possibility; from fear and fault to gifts, generosity, and abundance; from law and oversight to social capital and chosen accountability; from the dominance of corporation and systems to the centrality of associational life; and from leaders to citizens.

In contrast to the isolating effects of retribution, a restorative experience, relationship, or community produces new energy rather than holding us in place. Restoration is associated with the quality of aliveness and wholeness that Christopher Alexander talks about. This quality is not only in the artifacts, buildings, and spaces that he refers to but also in the gatherings and conversations we choose to create. The energy crisis we face is not so much about fossil fuels as it is about the calcified experience that is too often created by the way we hold conversations, both publicly and when we come together in more private settings.

Restorative community is activated by language of connection and relatedness and belonging, spoken without embarrassment. It recognizes that taking responsibility for one's own part in creating the present situation is the critical act of courage and engagement, which is the axis around which the future rotates. The essence of restorative community building is not economic prosperity or the political discourse or the capacity of leadership; it is citizens' willingness to own up to their contribution or agency in the current conditions, to be humble, to choose accountability, and to have faith in their own capacity to make authentic promises to create the alternative future.

This all matters because to achieve what we seek hinges on the question of accountability. Asking who will be accountable is about asking who will stand up to be counted. In whose hands does transformation rest? It is not by chance that in the United States we have more people in jails and prisons than any other country in the world. We are dominated by the punitive mind-set of consequences, of setting examples, of assigning blame when suffering occurs. These are the practices of an imperial culture, which is nourished by fear. Retributive cultures claim to increase accountability, but they actually can't deliver it. Accountability is always a choice, what someone does when no one else is looking. Handcuffs do not get the job done.

This means that the essential aspect of the restoration of community is a context in which each citizen chooses to be accountable rather than entitled. This inverts the common use of the word accountability. It is most often used as a burden, a basis for future liability. Not necessarily so.

Accountability is the willingness to care for the whole, and it flows out of the kind of conversations we have about the new story from which we want to take our identity. It means we have conversations about what we can do to create the future. Entitlement is a conversation about what others can or need to do to create the future for us.

Restoration begins when we think of community as a possibility, a declaration of the future that we choose to live into. This idea of a communal possibility is distinct from what we commonly call an individual possibility. Community is something more than a collection of individual longings, desires, or possibilities. The communal possibility has its own landscape and its own dynamics, requirements, and points of leverage. In the individualistic world we live in, we can congregate a large collection of self-actualized people and still not hold the idea or experience of community.

The communal possibility rotates on the question “What can we create together?” This emerges from the social space we create when we are together. It is shaped by the nature of the culture within which we operate but is not controlled by it. This question of what we can create together is at the intersection of possibility and accountability. Possibility without accountability results in wishful thinking. Accountability without possibility creates more of what we have now, which ultimately turns to despair, for even if we know we are creating the world we exist in, we cannot imagine its being any different from the past that got us here.

Example: The Clermont Counseling Center

Tricia Burke was the director of the Clermont Counseling Center. She completely understood the destructive power of labeling and categorizing human beings. Rare for one in a leadership position in a labeling industry. One of her programs was for women in abusive relationships who are survivors of domestic violence. She called this program Women of Worth. What's in a name . . . everything.

The counseling center also ran a mental health facility. The center exemplified most of the elements of freedom, choice, transforming language, and small group belonging discussed in this book. In the mental health program were clients labeled as paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar, and delusional, and people who had a history of state hospital stays. For the center to bill Medicaid for their services, the services must be “medically necessary.” This means that the center was required to certify each client's illness and medicalize all of the center's services in order to be reimbursed.

In the eyes of Tricia and her staff, many of the most effective healing efforts come from actions that are not really medical interventions. What are often most healing are the ways that people in programs discover how to have fun in what they do and feel embraced and surrounded by the support of others like themselves. The sense of belonging that accrues is as healing as traditional treatment. This sort of thing is not a legitimate program activity in the eyes of Medicaid. To keep Medicaid funding, the center was required to name and place a disease on the head of each person.

Despite this, Tricia and her staff decided to change the conversation at Clermont in dramatic ways. They gave up the Medicaid funding for their “partial hospital day treatment” program and put the clients in charge of the day program. Staff were reassigned to other programs. In doing this, Tricia changed the message to clients from one focusing on their liabilities to one focusing on their possibilities. The organizing questions to members—no longer patients—were “What do you like to do?” and “How do you want to fill your day?” The traditional hospital experiences were maintained, but these questions were the organizing principles that guided the healing process.

The strategy then was to treat members as if they had the capacity to design and structure a good portion of their own time. Phoenix Place, the new name the members chose for this effort, became a member-controlled self-governing program. There was only one paid staff member—Kim Hensley, the director of the program—and many of the governance and program decisions were placed in the hands of members.

In the first year, the members came up with ingenious answers to the question “What can we create together?” For example:

?They formed and chose an executive committee for themselves.

?They organized a wellness activity.

?They volunteered their services to an animal shelter.

?They wanted to travel, so they decided to open a snack shop to earn money.

?When Phoenix Place received a grant to offer medication education for other mentally ill folk in five counties, the members provided it themselves.

?When Ohio state legislators were invited to visit the facility, the members wanted time with them to make the point that people who have mental illness are not their illness; they are much more than their illness.

?They were no longer afraid to talk about their lives; they came out of the closet.

?The group started training police on the nature of mental illness— what it is like to hear voices, for example. They taught the police how to approach people having an incident and what language to use.

?They started a journaling process, which they called WildSpirits, to give voice to what it feels like to be in the dark hole of despair and find your way out, and to express their healing by writing about hope, gratitude, and love.

At the end of the first year of Phoenix Place, its members felt pride in what they had created; they had jobs to do and had regained some of the roles they had lost in the larger society. Most of all, they had begun once again to have hopes and dreams about their future.

Eventually they outgrew the small house for Phoenix Place, so they set about raising money for a bigger one by working the concession stands at the Reds and Bengals games—and years later their dream came true. When it did, they wrote a grant proposal to make a video to tell their story.

Of course, the story of Phoenix Place, and others like it, is not all about success and victory. Along the way, Tricia says, it took patience and encouragement to help Phoenix members shift their thinking to believing that they could run their own program. In the beginning, they were angry and felt they were being abandoned. They even picketed the center. Helping them break free of their dependency was difficult.

Here is a part I especially like: As part of a program on positive psychology, one exercise was for individuals to complete a questionnaire about their strengths. The members noted that this was the first time in their lives they had ever taken a test and gotten good news from the results.

The transition from patient to citizen is always difficult—for all of us, not just labeled people. And the trajectory is not always smooth. For example, the departure of the original director of Phoenix Place caused anxiety and worry. The member-led executive committee began to act superior, controlling, and judgmental, and some of the spirit of community waned. In other words, the committee started to function like most traditional executive committees. Eventually, this center and its radical values were absorbed into a more traditional institution of service. Which underscores the power of the dominant context.

Nothing in Phoenix Place's ending detracts from what it created or what it meant to the people it touched. What is important for each of us is what conclusions we draw from the example, which is the point of context: whatever we conclude is ours to manufacture.

Lessons from Restorative Justice

Phoenix Place gives us a powerful model of what a restorative community can look like. When I say “restorative,” I am not talking about returning to a prior time, fixing up an old building, or seeking to recapture a culture that we think once existed. Restoration is about healing our woundedness—in community terms, healing our fragmentation and incivility. It is only out of this healing that something new can emerge.

I have been attracted for some time by the way restorative is used in the criminal justice system, which I learned from Barry Stuart, Lee Rush, and others who have created the restorative justice movement. They have given a powerful structure to restoration, and they have done it in a most unlikely place. The intent of restoration in the criminal justice system is to provide a more reconciled path for both the offender and the victim of a crime. This becomes an option for the victim to choose and for the offender to agree to. It also gives a voice to the community, for the community is also wounded by a crime.

There are several steps to restoration. They all occur in a meeting. The offender admits to the crime, the offender and the victim and their families talk of the cost and damage the crime has caused to all their lives, the offender apologizes for the offense, the offender promises not to do it again, and the offender agrees to some form of restitution for the damage caused.

Finally, the victim and their family decide whether to forgive the offender and accept the restitution. If they decide to forgive, then the representatives of the community have a voice in deciding whether to allow the offender to go free and rejoin the community. If the victim and family decide not to forgive, then the offender goes through the regular criminal justice process. On a global scale, restorative justice is similar to the practices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

These steps contain many of the elements of community building. It is not so much the methodology that concerns us here, but rather the context and spirit that these movements offer us. They show that an alternative to retribution is possible and has worked in the world. This spirit of restoration promises a different future for our communities.

Community as Conversation

The idea of community restoration becomes concrete when we grasp the importance of language. When we do, we can see how our language, or conversation, is the action step that makes creating an alternative future possible. Stated simply, we can begin to think of our communities as nothing more or less than a conversation. If we can accept the idea that all real change is a shift in narrative—a new story as opposed to the received dominant story—then the function of citizenship, or leadership, is to invite a new narrative into existence. Narrative begins with a ride on the wave of conversation. For greatest effect, we need a new conversation with people we are not used to talking to.

Every community has its buildings, leaders, schools, and landscape, but for the moment let us say that these are not what make a community unique or define its identity. Instead we decide to declare that the aspect of a community that gives it a new possibility is simply the conversation that citizens choose to have with themselves. Jane Jacobs, world expert on neighborhoods, understands this. When she was asked why she thought Portland, Oregon, has been so successful in creating a habitable community, she said that the only thing unique about Portland is that “Portlanders love Portland.” In our terms here, it was the conversation Portlanders had with each other about their town that made the difference.

Thus if we speak of change or transformation in our city or town—in my case, Cincinnati—we are referring to the conversation that is occurring in that town. We highlight the conversation community members have with themselves not because it is the whole picture, but because it is the part of the picture that is most amenable to change.

This means that the alternative future we speak of takes form when we realize that the only powerful place from which to take our identity may be the story we hold about ourselves and our collective way of being together. We begin the process of restoration when we understand that our well-being is defined simply by the nature and structure and power of our conversation.

The future of a community then depends on a choice between a retributive conversation (a problem to be solved) and a restorative conversation (a possibility to be lived into). Restoration is a possibility brought into being by choosing that kind of conversation. And with that conversation, restoration becomes real and tangible, for once we have declared a possibility, and done so with a sense of belonging and in the presence of others, that possibility has been brought into the room and thus into the institution, into the community.

The key phrase here is “in the presence of others.” When declared publicly, heard and witnessed by others with whom we have a common interest, at a moment when something is at stake, a possibility is a critical element of communal transformation. This public conversation creates a larger relatedness and transcends a simply individual transformation. In the faith world, this is similar to what has been called bearing witness. We are bringing that into secular practice. Conversations of possibility gone public are not all that restores, but without them, personal and private conversations of possibility have no political currency and therefore no communal power.

The Shift

To summarize the story line to this point, our conversations and gatherings have the power to shift the context from retributive community to restorative community. This occurs through questions and dialogue that move us in the following directions:

?From conversations about problems to ones of possibility

?From conversations about fear and fault to ones of gifts, generosity, and abundance

?From a bet on law and oversight to a preference for building the social fabric and chosen accountability

?From seeing the corporation and systems as central to change to seeing associational life as central

?From a focus on leaders to a focus on citizens

What these have in common is the movement from centrism and individualism to collectivism and interdependent communalism. This shift has important consequences for our communities. It offers to return politics to public service and restore our trust in leadership. It moves us from having faith in professionals and those in positions of authority to having faith in our neighbors. It takes us into a context of hospitality, wherein we welcome strangers rather than believing we need to protect ourselves from them. It changes our mind-set from valuing what is efficient to valuing belonging. It helps us leave behind our penchant for seeing our disconnectedness as an inevitable consequence of modern life and moves us toward accountability and citizenship.

CHAPTER 5

Taking Back Our Projections

Citizens become powerful when they choose the context within which they operate. This choosing is difficult because we are seeking an alternative to the received wisdom of the culture. Choosing our own language of context, rather than aligning with the language of the dominant culture, puts the choice into our own hands. It acknowledges that our mind-set, even our worldview, is subjective and therefore amenable to change. There is a cost to this—namely, we are subject to doubt and at times loneliness. It is the path of a pioneer.

To choose a context conducive to citizenship, we first need to understand the idea of communal projection. Projection is the act of attributing qualities to others that we deny within ourselves. It is expressed in the way we label others and then build diagnostic categories and whole professions around the labeling. The shift away from projection and labeling provides the basis for defining what we mean by authentic citizenship—which is to hold ourselves accountable for the well-being of the larger community and to choose to own and exercise collective power rather than defer or delegate it to others.

Here is a way of thinking about the shift in context from retribution to restoration. We begin with going deeper into what it means to choose to be accountable, not just for ourselves but for the world. The reason the retributive context cannot improve the conditions it tries to heal is that it talks a lot about accountability but does not embody it. The context of retribution itself is actually an ongoing argument against accountability. This happens each time I want to see a change in “those people.” Those people can be supervisors, top management, the mayor, immigrants, people living in poverty—the list is endless. When I develop prescriptions for “their” transformation, I am making them the cause of our troubles. I am expressing the belief that if “those people” were different, our organization, our community would be better.

This is the attraction of the marketing of fear and fault and our love of leadership. It is a way of seeking control through the belief that something or someone else is the problem and that the someone else needs to do something different before anything can profoundly get better. And the clincher is that, as holders of the dominant narrative, we believe we know what that something different is. This is the colonial nature of most of our public conversations. On a large scale, it is what drives Great Britain out of the European Union. It is what wants to build a wall to keep the stranger out. It is why my mother was angry with her brother for forty years.

To inquire more deeply into this shift in context, we need to focus on the distinction between culture and context. The common thinking holds that transformation requires a culture change. I am talking here about context, not culture. The reason I use the word context rather than culture is to construct our stance as a matter of choice. Culture is a set of shared values that emerges from the history of experience and the story that is produced out of that. It is the past that gives us our identity and corrals our behavior in order to preserve that identity. Context is the way we see the world. See the world, not remember the world.

We conventionally think that our view of the world is based on history, events, and evidence, and this pattern is treated as fact and is decisive. It is called fact but is only a collective memory, which in the glare of the midday sun I would irreverently call fiction. If this thing we call context were fact, then it would not be amenable to transformation.

If context were inevitable and purely based on fact, then we would be condemned to live in fear. We are constantly being sold the fear curriculum so that, in time, we begin to think the context of fear is for good cause and data based. In reality, fear rises and falls for more reasons than events would dictate. If we can entertain the thought that fear is the curriculum of the patriarchal element of our culture, then we can understand that the dominant fear conversation is as much a result of marketing and product promotion as it is a response to facts. In the domain of public safety, for instance, there is little relationship between the crime rate and people's attitude about danger. There is evidence that many kinds of crime went down in many major cities in the late 1990s and have stayed down to this present moment. But while crime went down, the public's fear of crime went up. Why? Because while crime was going down, the reporting of crime went up. So the determinant of our fear is partly the retributive agenda, which leads to reporting about how dangerous the world is and, more important, our choice to buy the story.

Here is the point: in the retributive context, we act as though fear, fault, dependency on leaders, cynicism, and indifference to associational life are evidence based. If we are committed to a future distinct from the past, then we treat them as a matter of choice, and we call this way of thinking context, not culture.

Projection and Labeling

If the fear-retribution cycle is a matter of choice and not an inevitable result of culture, then we have to face the fact that the choice to inhale it must mean it offers us payoffs.

One payoff for believing that problems and the suffering in our cities are the inevitable products of modern life and culture is that it lets us off the hook. The payoff begins the moment we believe that problems reside in others and that these others are the ones who need to change. We displace or assign to others certain qualities that in fact have more to do with us than with them. This is called projection, an idea most of us are quite familiar with. I discuss it here because if we do not take back our projection, a new context and conversation are simply not possible. The essence of our projection is that it places accountability for an alternative future on others. This is the payoff of stereotyping, prejudice, and a bunch of “isms” that we are all familiar with. This is what produces the “other.” The reward is that it takes the pressure off of us. It is a welcome escape from our freedom. We project onto leaders the qualities or disappointments that we find too much to carry ourselves. We project onto the stranger, the wounded, the enemy those aspects of ourselves that are too much to own.

Projection denies the fact that my view of the “other” is my creation, and this is especially true with how we view our communities and the people in them. Most simply, how I view the other is an extension or template of how I view myself. This insight is the essence of being accountable. To be accountable is to act as an owner and creator of what exists in the world, including the light and dark corners of my own existence. It is the willingness to focus on what we can do in the face of whatever the world presents to us. Accountability does not project or deny; accountability is the willingness to see the whole picture that resides within, even what is not so pretty.

“You pushed my buttons.” “I know, but I didn't install them.”

Author unknown

We are generally familiar with these ideas from the psychology of projection for individuals, and the point here is that projection also works more broadly at the level of profession, institution, and community.

Take poverty, for example. When we see low-income people, we focus on their needs and deficiencies, and that is all we see. We think their poverty is central to who they are, and that is all they are. We believe that the poor have created that condition for themselves. We view them with charity or pity and wring our hands at their plight. At this moment we are projecting our own vulnerability onto the poor. It is a defense against not only our own vulnerability but also our complicity in creating poverty.

If we took back this projection, we would stop denying that each of us plays a role in creating poverty—by our way of living, by our indifference, by our labeling them “poor” as if that is who they are, by our choice not to have them as neighbors and get to know them. Part of the tax reduction debate is the belief that we are wasting money on “those people.” It is not that the people we project onto do not have some of the qualities we see; it is that the meaning we give to what we see—in this case, the label and categorization—is just projection. It's the same with the unemployed, with broken homes and broken-down neighborhoods, youth on the street, and all the other symptoms we live with.

In our philanthropy, this mind-set that the “other” is the problem means that we need to wait for them to change before the change we want in the world can come to pass. And until they change, we need to stay distant and contain them. This diverts us from the realization that we have the means, the tools, the thinking to create a world we want to inhabit, and to do it for all. If we saw others as another aspect of ourselves, we would welcome them into our midst. We would let them know that they belong, that they are neighbors, with all their complexity.

To continue, as a community, to focus on the needs and deficiencies of the most vulnerable is not an act of hospitality. It substitutes labeling for welcoming. It is isolating in that they become a special category of people, defined by what they cannot do. This isolates the most vulnerable. Despite our care for them, we do not welcome them into our midst; we service them. They become objects. This may be why it is easier to raise money for suffering in distant places or to celebrate the history of slavery's end than it is to raise money for our neighbors on the margin who are six blocks away. Their proximity stands in the way of our compassion. An example: In Cincinnati we have spent $110 million to construct a magnificent Freedom Center to celebrate the end of slavery. Six blocks away we have citizens living in very difficult conditions—and there is great reluctance to see the relationship between the two. We are willing to acclaim the victories of the past; yet, caught in our projection onto the poor, we sustain a colonial attitude toward the suffering of people down the street.

To be even more specific about projection, it shows up in communities through the conversations that focus on any of the needs, problems, and diagnostic categories through which we label others. For example, we limit our future when we frame conversations in the following ways:

?Young people on the corner or out of school become “youth at risk.”

?People who served their time in jail become “ex-offenders.”

?People who live on the street become “homeless” or “vagrants.”

?Those with physical or mental challenges become “handicapped” and “bipolar.”

?Immigrants become “illegals.”

And the list goes on based on the mood of the times.

This labeling, along with the services that flow out of it, is the “commercialization of needs” that John McKnight has written about. It becomes the justification for the fear-and-fault conversation that in turn justifies the context of retribution. Which in turn drives all the programs, expertise, and policy that we thought were going to make the difference.

Taking Back the Projection

When we stay isolated, there is no way to take back the communal projection. No amount of inner work or healing as individuals will be powerful. Projection sustains itself in the absence of relatedness, in a life or workplace where we have no sense of belonging. It cannot be taken back by acting alone. It does not disappear no matter how much data is presented, no matter how much moral suasion or guilt we try to produce. “Why can't we all just get along?” was a poignant plea, but it had no power to join us together.

Communal transformation, taking back our collective projections, occurs when people connect with those who were previously strangers, and when we invite people into conversations that ask them to act as creators or owners of community. It occurs when we become related in a new way to those we are intending to help. This means we stop labeling others for their deficiencies and focus on their gifts.

Example: Elementz

One example of a place where youth are valued rather than labeled is a center in Cincinnati named Elementz. A group of young people have created a hip-hop–oriented urban arts center where fourteen- to twenty-four-yearolds can spend three nights a week learning about writing, performing, disc jockeying, and producing hip-hop music. Their music. They also learn about graffiti as an art form and break dancing as a form of entertainment. Elementz takes the very things that bother many adults—the music, the dancing, the graffiti—and treats them as gifts. This is not a recreation center; it is a learning space where youth have to attend programs in order to be in the building.

Elementz was conceived by young people, and young people run it, so that when kids from the street walk into the building, they see a reflection of themselves and know they are welcome. The staff of the place are not professionally trained “youth workers”; they are young people two steps further down the road who have made a commitment and sacrifice to care for those coming behind them.

The goal of Elementz is not specifically to provide careers in these entertainment fields—that would be making a promise that is unreal. The goal is to give to young people an experience of what they can create, a sense of the value they have inside themselves. The ultimate goal is to offer them a new possibility for their lives. It also serves to overcome the isolation of urban youth. When they walk in the door for the first time, if you ask them how many adults in their life have their best interest at heart, their answer is one or two. If you ask them the same question after they have participated in Elementz for six months, the answer is four to five. This experience makes the difference. When they are less isolated, and have adults interested in their well-being, they have the will to retreat from the street culture and begin to construct a more productive life for themselves.

Nothing guarantees that a young person will see a new possibility, but we can create the conditions where that choice is more likely. The transformation we seek occurs when these two conditions are created: when we produce deeper relatedness across boundaries, and when we create new conversations that focus on the gifts and capacities of others.

These conditions allow us to focus on our connectedness rather than on our differences. We no longer need to take our identity from being right about “them” or from continuing to see “them” as individuals with needs or as people somehow less than us. It puts an end to our need to declare victory. The differences, instead of being problems to solve, become a source of vitality, a gift. In the language of community transformation, this is what it means to be accountable. At these moments, we become owners, with the free will capable of creating the world we want to inhabit. We become citizens.

CHAPTER 6

The Inversion into Citizen

Choosing to be accountable for the whole, creating a context of hospitality and collective possibility, acting to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center—these are some of the ways we begin to create a community of citizens. To reclaim our citizenship is to be accountable, and this comes from the inversion of what is cause and what is effect. When we are open to thinking along the lines that citizens create leaders, that children create parents, and that the audience creates the performance, we create the conditions for widespread accountability and the commitment that emerges from it. This inversion may not be the whole truth, but it is useful.

If what holds the possibility of an alternative future for our community is our capacity to come fully into being as citizens, then we have to talk about this word citizen. Our definition here is that a citizen is one who is willing to be accountable for and committed to the well-being of the whole. That whole can be a city block, a workplace, a community, a nation, the earth. A citizen is one who produces the future, someone who does not wait, beg, or dream for the future.

The antithesis of being a citizen is being a consumer or a client, another idea that John McKnight has been so instructive about. Consumers give power away. They believe that their own needs can be best satisfied by the actions of others—whether those others are elected officials, top management, social service providers, or the shopping mall. Consumers also allow others to define their needs. If leaders and service providers are guilty of labeling or projecting onto others the “needs” to justify their own style of leadership or service they provide, consumers collude with them by accepting others' definition of their needs. This provider–consumer transaction is the breeding ground for entitlement, and it is unfriendly to our definition of citizen and the power inherent in that definition.

The Meaning of Citizenship

The conventional definition of citizenship is concerned with the act of voting and taking a vow to uphold the constitution and laws of a country. This is narrow and limiting. Too many organizations that are committed to sustaining democracy in the world and at home have this constrained view of citizenship. Citizenship is not about voting, or even about having a vote. To construe the essence of citizenship primarily as the right to vote reduces its power—as if voting ensures a democracy. It is certainly a feature of democracy, but as Fareed Zakaria points out in his book The Future of Freedom, the right to vote does not guarantee a civil society, or in our terms a restorative one.

When we think of citizens as just voters, we reduce them to being consumers of elected officials and leaders. We see this most vividly at election time, when candidates become products, issues become the message, and the campaign is a marketing and distribution system for the selling of the candidate. Great campaign managers are great marketers and product managers. Voters become target markets, demographics, whose most important role is to meet in focus groups to respond to the nuances of message. This is the power of the consumer, which is no power at all.

Through this lens, we can understand why so many people do not vote. They do not believe that their action can impact the future. It is partly a self-chosen stance and partly an expression of the helplessness that grows out of a retributive world. This way of thinking is not an excuse not to vote, but it does say that our work is to build the capacity of citizens to be accountable and to become creators of community.

We can see most clearly how we marginalize the real meaning of citizen when the word becomes politicized as part of the retributive debate. We argue over undocumented workers, immigration, and the rights of exfelons—and even their children. We politicize the issue of English as the official language and building a new wall on the Rio Grande that we will have to tear down someday.

Citizenship as the willingness to build community gets displaced by isolationism in any form. It is not by accident that the loudest activists for finding and deporting undocumented workers are some of the leaders of the fear, oversight, safety, and security agenda. They are the key beneficiaries of the retributive society. If we want community, we have to be unwilling to allow citizenship to be co-opted in this way.

The idea of what it means to be a citizen is too important and needs to be taken back to its more profound value. Citizenship is a state of being. It is a choice for activism and care. As a citizen you are someone who is willing to do the following:

?Hold yourself accountable for the well-being of the larger collective of which you are a part. Don't answer the question “What's in it for me?” When asked, simply say, “I don't know.”

?Choose to own and exercise power rather than defer or delegate it to others. Set aside your wish for great leadership. You may be it. How enticing is that?

?Enter into a collective possibility that gives hospitable and restorative community its own sense of being.

?Acknowledge that community grows out of citizens' deciding to trust each other and cooperate to make this place better. Community is built not by specialized expertise or great leadership or improved services; it is built by great local people deciding to do something useful together.

?Attend to the gifts and capacities of all others, and act to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center. Find a way to do this each time you meet. To understand our gifts, we need to hear about them from each other as a practice for ending a gathering. Citizenship is the knowledge that I have contributed something of value. I have to hear to believe it.

The Inversion of Cause

To create communities where citizens reclaim their power, we need to shift our beliefs about who is in charge and where power resides. We need to invert our thinking about what is cause and what is effect. This shift is what has the capacity to confront our entitlement and dependency.

Being powerful means that my experience, my discovery, even my pleasure are mine to create. This view has us see how audiences create performances, children create parents, students create teachers, and citizens create leaders.

The chicken is the egg's way of reproducing itself.

Peter Koestenbaum

It is not that these shifts of cause are necessarily true, but they give us power. In every case, it puts choice into our own hands instead of having us wait for the transformation of others to give us the future we desire. If our intention is to create the possibility of an alternative future, then we need a future formed by our own hands. A handcrafted future.

Inverting our thinking does not change the world, but it creates a condition where the shift in the world becomes possible. The shift starts with the inversion in our thinking. The step from thinking of ourselves as effect to thinking of ourselves as cause is the act of inversion that creates a culture of citizen accountability. This is the point on which accountability revolves.

A note: the cause-and-effect, Cartesian clockwork view of the world not only overstated the mechanical nature of the world but also put cause at the wrong end of the equation. Double indemnity.

This inversion challenges conventional wisdom that believes there is one right way. And by “inversion” I mean a real inversion: 180 degrees, not 179 degrees. This is not the time for compromise or balance. Inverting our thinking about cause and effect gives support to really challenge “the way things work.” Again, I am not saying that this way of thinking is 100 percent accurate 100 percent of the time, but it can give added power to our way of being in community. The question to begin to reclaim our power as citizens is, “If you believed this to be true, in what ways would that make a difference, or change your actions?”

This means that the possibility of an alternative future centers on the question, “Have we chosen the present, or has it been handed to us?” The default culture would have us believe that the past creates the future, that a change in individuals causes a change in organizations and community, and that people in authority create people in a subordinate position. That we are determined by everything aside from free will. That culture, history, genetics, organizations, and society drive our actions and our way of being.

All this is true, but the opposite is also true: that free will trumps genetics, culture, and parental upbringing.

The Utility of This Inversion

The first inversion I ran into years ago was the thought that the inmates run the prison. I was skeptical until I worked with some corrections people, who said there is truth in this. Here are some implications of switching our thinking this way:

Inversion: The audience creates the performance.

Implications: Redesign the audience experience. Stop putting so much energy into the talent and message of those on stage. Limit PowerPoint presentations to four slides. Peter Brook immersed the stage in the center of the audience; John Cage held concerts where the rumbling, coughing sounds of the audience were the show. When we meet, make it possible for the audience to be engaged with one another. Every auditorium, almost every church, almost every conference room and classroom would be redesigned. Chairs would be mobile; the audience members would be able to see one another and know that no matter what occurred onstage, they would not be alone and would have the ability to get what they came for.

Inversion: The subordinate creates the boss.

Implications: Learning, development, and goal setting are in the hands of the subordinate. We would stop doing surveys about how people feel about their bosses, the results of which no one knows what to do with anyway. The attention would turn from the boss to peers, which is the relationship that produces the work.

Inversion: The child creates the parent.

Implications: Parents could sleep through the night. The conversation and industry of inculcating values and forcing consequences onto kids would quiet down. We would focus on the gifts, teachings, and blessings of the young instead of seeing them as problems to be managed. We would decide that the primary role of the parent is to discover who these strange little creatures we call children really are. We would listen to them instead of instructing and teaching them again and again. This would allow parents to relax their jaws and index fingers, a secondary health benefit.

Inversion: Citizens create their leaders.

Implications: Our dependency on leaders and our disappointment in them would go down. The media would have to change their thinking about lead stories. What citizens are doing to improve their community would no longer be human interest stories but actual news. The cost of elections would be reduced by 90 percent, for the question of whom we elect would be less critical. Candidates for elected office could be poor.

Above all, our leaders would be conveners, not role models and containers for our projections. More on this later.

Inversion: A room and a building are created by the way they are occupied.

Implications: We would be intentional about how we show up. We would spend time designing how we sit in the room, and not be mere consumers of the way the room was intended to be used, or dependent on what the custodians or the last group using the room had in mind.

We would redesign the physical space around us—rooms, hallways, reception areas—in a way that affirmed community, so that it had a welcoming feeling and gave the sense that you had come to the right place. Most of all, how we sit together would be a serious subject of discussion.

Inversion: The student creates the teacher and the learning.

Implications: Education would be designed more for learning than for teaching. This already occurs in many places under the heading of individualized learning. Montessori education has forever operated along these lines. The social contract in the classroom would be renegotiated toward a partnership between teacher and student. Students would set goals for themselves and be responsible for the learning of other students. Simple ideas, powerful ideas, still rare in practice. This would also find a resting place for standardized testing and the colonial drive for a core curriculum.

Inversion: Youth create adults.

Implications: Adultism would be confronted. Adults would decide to get interested in the experience of youth instead of always instructing them. When there were meetings and conferences about youth, the voices of youth would be central to the conversation. Youth would become a possibility, not a problem. If we really believed this, we would move our belief in the next generation from lip service to pervasive practice. The question we would ask of youth is “What is it that we do not understand about you?” This would be life changing, if we had the nerve.

Inversion: The listening creates the speaker.

Implications: Listening would be considered an action step. For most of us, listening is just waiting until we get a chance to speak. There might even be a period of silence between statements, and this silence would be experienced as part of the conversation, not dead space. The dark side of virtual communication is that there is little place for silence. If we were in the room together and you were quiet, we would wait. If we are in a Zoom call and you don't speak, we think it is a failure in technology.

Listening would drive our speaking. We would also learn what speaking into the listening of the room means. Fundamentally, we would treat the listening as more important than the speaking.

You get the point—the list could go on. In each case, when we invert our thinking, the focus of attention and effort gets redirected.

The power in these shifts is that they confront us with our own freedom in unexpected ways. It is out of this freedom, which all of us have ways of escaping, that community and authentic accountability are born. I will be an accountable possibility for only that which I have had a hand in creating, my life and community included.

The politics of this is that the inversion of cause refocuses my attention from that person in authority—leader, performer, parent, warden—to that person who together with others also holds the real power. Not to overdo this perspective, for leader, performer, parent, and warden are critical partners in community; it's just that they are not the primary or sole proprietors we have construed them to be. We will never eliminate our need for great leaders and people on the stage; we just cannot afford to put all our experience and future in their hands.

There is no need to argue about this idea of inversion, only to play with its utility. A given inversion may not be true, but it is useful in the way it gives us power to evoke the kind of citizen we have defined as crucial to a true community. People who work in the civic arena have a certain cynicism about citizens. For example, they talk about how hard it is to get parents involved in their child's school. About how few people show up at council and board meetings unless they are angry. About how such a small number of people are really active in their community. There is truth to this view. It is not just cynicism; it is pretty accurate observation. What restores community is to believe that we play a role in constructing this condition. It is not in the nature of people to be apathetic, entitled, complainers.

To state the issue simply, as long as we see leader as cause, we will produce passive, entitled citizens. We will put our attention, our training, and our resources wherever we think cause resides. When we see citizen as cause, then this will shift our attention and our wealth, and the energy and creativity that go with them.

This shift in thinking about cause and effect creates the belief that in each case, including our individual lives, choice and destiny replace accident and fate. No small thing.

A Word About Accountability

One cost of the retributive conversation is that it breeds entitlement. Entitlement is essentially the conversation, “What's in it for me?” It expresses a consumer mentality, and the economist tells us that only what is scarce has value. Entitlement is the outcome of a patriarchal culture, which I have discussed too often in other books. But for this discussion, I'll simply say that if we create a context of fear, fault, and retribution, then we will focus on protecting ourselves, which plants the seed of entitlement.

The cost of entitlement is that it is an escape from accountability and soft on commitment. What is interesting is that the existing public conversation claims to be tough on accountability, but the language of accountability as it is used in a retributive context is code for “control.” High-control systems are unbearably soft on accountability. They keep screaming for tighter controls, new laws, and bigger systems, but in the scream, they expose their weakness.

The weakness in the dominant view of accountability is that it thinks people can be held accountable. That we can force people to be accountable. Despite the fact that it sells easily, it is an illusion to believe that retribution, incentives, legislation, new standards, and tough consequences will cause accountability.

This illusion is what creates entitlement—and worse, it drives us apart; it does not bring us together. It turns neighbor against neighbor. It denies that we are our brother's keeper. Every colonial and autocratic regime rises to power by turning citizens against each other. To control a culture, fear has to be sold. Through the central control of the media. By the crisis-based story line of journalism. Community is built by the stories of success. Community is undermined by finding who was at fault. This is the methodology of empire.

To see our conventional thinking about accountability at work, notice the conversations that dominate our meetings and gatherings. We spend time talking about people not in the room. If not that, our gatherings are designed to sell, change, persuade, and influence others, as if their change will help us reach our goals. These conversations do not produce power; they consume it.

Chosen Accountability, Commitment, and the Use of Force

Commitment and accountability are forever paired with each other and linked with creating community. None exists without the others. Accountability is the willingness to care for the well-being of the whole; commitment is the willingness to make a promise with no expectation of return.

The economist would say this smacks of altruism, and so be it. What community requires is a promise devoid of barter and not conditional on another's action. Without that, we are constantly in the position of reacting to the choices of others. Which means that our commitment is conditional. This is barter, not commitment.

The cost of constantly reacting to the choices of others is increased cynicism and helplessness. The ultimate cost of cynicism and helplessness is that we resort to the use of force. In this way, the barter mentality that dominates our culture proliferates force. Not necessarily violence, but the belief that for anything to change, we must mandate or use coercion.

The use of force is an end product of retribution, which rejects altruism and a promise made for its own sake. It rejects the idea that virtue is its own reward.

Commitment is the antithesis of entitlement and barter. Unconditional commitment with no thought to “What's in it for me?” is the emotional and relational essence of community. It is what some call integrity, fidelity, honoring your word.

Commitment is to choose a path for its own sake. This is the essence of power. Mother Teresa got this. When asked why she worked with people one at a time rather than caring more about having impact on a larger scale, she replied, “I was called by faith, not by results.” If you want to join the chorus arguing with Mother Teresa, be my guest.

CHAPTER 7

The Transforming Community

Conventional thinking about communal transformation believes that focusing on large systems, better leaders, clearer goals, and more controls is essential, and that emphasizing speed and scale is critical. The conventional belief is that individual transformation leads to communal transformation. Our explorations to this point lead instead to the understanding that transformation occurs when we focus on the structure of how we gather and the context in which the gatherings take place; when we work hard on getting the questions right; when we choose depth over speed and relatedness over scale. We also believe that problem solving can make things better but cannot change the nature of things.

Community transformation calls for citizenship that shifts the context from a place of fear and fault, law and oversight, corporation and “systems,” and preoccupation with leadership to one of gifts, generosity, and abundance; social fabric and chosen accountability; and associational life and the engagement of citizens. These shifts occur as citizens face each other in conversations of ownership and possibility. To be more specific, leaders are held to three tasks: to shift the context within which people gather, name the debate through powerful questions, and listen rather than advocate, defend, or provide answers.

The mind-set that we can program and problem-solve our way into a vision does not take into account the complexity and relational nature of community. It undervalues the importance of context and the linguistic, conversational nature of community. If we want to see a change in our communities, we must let go of the conventional or received wisdom about how change occurs. This means we reject or at least seriously question the beliefs that communal change will occur in the following circumstances:

?We count on an aggregation of individual changes. We have seen this in attempts by large organizations trying to change their culture through large-scale trainings and change efforts. Communities initiate large-scale dialogue programs and book clubs where many are simultaneously reading the same book. No matter how well intentioned, these efforts largely fall short of their goals. Why? Because individual lives are touched, but the organizational culture and the community are unmoved.

What's missing is that these efforts do not recognize that there is such a thing as a collective body. A community benefits from shifts in individual consciousness, but needs a communal connectedness as well, a communal structure of belonging that produces the foundation for the whole system to move. This is why it is so frustrating to create high performance and consciousness in individuals and in individual institutions and then find that they have so little impact on the social capital or fabric of the community.

?We think in terms of scale and speed. As David Bornstein has so clearly pointed out, something shifts on a large scale only after a long period of small steps, organized around small groups patient enough to learn and experiment and learn again. Speed and scale are the arguments against what individual and communal transformation requires. They are a hallmark of the corporate mind-set. When we demand more speed and scale, we are making a coded argument against anything important being any different.

?We stay focused on large systems and top leaders to implement better problem solving, clearer goals and vision, and better control of the process. Large-system change is useful, but transforming action is always local, customized, unfolding, and emergent. The role of leaders is not to be better role models or to drive change; their role is to create the structures and experiences that bring citizens together to identify and solve their own issues.

Communal transformation does occur when we accept the following beliefs:

?We focus on the structure of how we gather and the context in which our gatherings take place. Collective change occurs when individuals and small diverse groups engage one another in the presence of many others doing the same. It comes from the knowledge that what is occurring in one space is similarly happening in other spaces, especially ones where I do not know what they are doing. This is the value of a network, or even a network of networks, which is today's version of a social movement. In paying attention to the structure and context of our gatherings, we declare our faith in restoration. All this needs to be followed up with the usual actions and problem solving, but it is in those moments when citizens engage one another, in communion with and in the witness of others, that something collective shifts.

Keeping this focus is especially critical when individuals and institutions meet across boundaries. The key is to structure a way of crossing boundaries so that people become connected to those they are not used to being in the room with. Every gathering, in its composition and in its structure, has to be an example of the future we want to create. If this is achieved in this gathering, then that future has occurred today and there is nothing to wait for. Pretty Zen.

?We work hard on getting the questions right. This begins by realizing that the questions themselves are important, more important than the answers. The primary questions for community transformation are “How do we choose to be together?” and “What do we want to create together?” These are different from the primary questions for individual transformation, which are “How do I choose to be in whatever setting I find myself in?” and “What am I called to do in this world?”

?We choose depth over speed and relatedness over scale. The question “What do we want to create together?” is deceptively complicated. It implies a long journey crossing social, class, and institutional boundaries. Depth takes time and the willingness to engage. Belonging requires the courage to set aside our usual notions of action and of measuring success by the numbers touched. It also means that while we keep our own point of view, we leave our self-interest at the door and show up to learn rather than to advocate. These are the conditions whereby we find new places where we belong.

Choosing Possibility over Problem Solving

Creating a future is different from defining a future. If our goal is to build social capital and to change the way that citizens are engaged with each other, then we have to shift our thinking about the roles that traditional strategy and problem solving take. We talked earlier about valuing gifts and possibility over needs and problems. Now we can be more detailed about what this looks like.

Our typical way of creating a future is by specifying the vision and the goals and then defining a blueprint to achieve them. This is called a destination strategy for solving problems. Here are the strategic elements of traditional problem solving:

?Identify a need. Find a problem, need, or deficiency that we want to fix or improve.

?Study and analyze the need. Do research, assemble facts, survey people, and organize survey results and data to make a compelling case for change.

?Search for solutions. Brainstorm alternatives. Benchmark where others have solved this deficiency. Bring in experts, consultants, academics, former leaders, and former public officials to provide good approaches.

?Establish goals. Set realistic and achievable goals, based on the vision. Define outcomes and narrow the effort toward results that can be achieved; the quicker and lower the cost the better. Search for the low-hanging fruit. Maybe initiate a pilot project to prove the viability of the strategy. Laminate the vision, mission, and goals to demonstrate the permanence of this intention.

?Bring others on board. Sell to key leaders, meet with citizens to define the effort and name the playing field. Enlist organizations and individuals to create an alliance for change. Publicize the burning platform and stress the urgency and the need for quick results. Give wide distribution to the laminate.

?Implement. Launch the program and drive it forward. Stay on message, and measure at frequent intervals. Hold people accountable for results, fulfilling promises, and showing outcomes. Declare to others how accountable we are.

?Loop back. When the world intervenes and creates a bump in the road, begin the problem solving anew, identifying what went wrong and who was responsible, and initiating a clear oversight process so that this will not happen again.

The essence of these classic problem-solving steps is the belief in a blueprint. We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now. And this all has such face validity that it seems foolish to argue in any way against it.

Also, this way of thinking does indeed work for many things, especially for the material world. It does not work well with human systems or when the desire is to create something out of nothing. We still believe that in building a community, we are in effect building and operating a clock. Once again, problem solving can make things better, but it cannot change the nature of things. This insight is at the center of all the thinking about complex adaptive systems, emergent design, and the organic and self-regulating nature of the universe.

The limitations of a clockwork strategy for the future can be seen in one of the most popular forms of community problem solving: creating a vision. Most communities have at some point described a vision for themselves—these visions are developed as a way of defining the destination. (The new millennium was a great occasion for this. Now the horizon has shifted to 2030.) These types of visions have value in that they bring many people together for the sake of development, and they give form to the optimism we hold for ourselves. But they are limited in their power to transform because they assume that a defined destination can be reached in a linear path from where we are today.

Most visions are based on the belief that we know a lot about what constitutes an ideal or healthy community, which is true. There are many wonderful books that describe what a great community looks like. Jane Jacobs crystallized our thinking about the power of street life. Robert Putnam raised our consciousness about the centrality of social capital. John McKnight's work has built wide support for asset-based community development.

The challenge for community building is this: while visions, plans, and committed top leadership are important, even essential, no clear vision, nor detailed plan, nor committed group leaders have the power to bring this image of the future into existence without the continued engagement and involvement of citizens. In most instances, citizen engagement ends when the plan is in place. The implementation is put in the hands of the professionals. In concept, the master plan provides some parameters for development and the use of space, but in real life it usually is a call to let the arguing begin. For all its utility, it rarely builds interdependence or strengthens the social fabric of a place.

What brings a fresh future into being is citizens who are willing to selforganize. An alternative future needs the investment of citizens—leaders not in top positions—who are willing to pay the economic and emotional price that creating something really new requires.

Therefore, the challenge for every community is not so much to have a vision of what it wants to become, or a plan, or specific timetables. The real challenge is to discover and create the means for engaging citizens that brings a new possibility into being. To state it more precisely, what gives power to communal possibility is the imagination and authorship of citizens led through a process of engagement. This is an organic and relational process. This is what creates a structure of belonging. This is more critical than the vision and the plan.

Example: Covington

In Covington, Kentucky, several city institutions together chose to use this kind of community building as a way of developing a strategic plan for its civil servants and citizens. City Manager Jay Fossett; the head of the Center for Great Neighborhoods, Tom DiBello; and the head of the local business association, Gina Breyfogle, asked for help with a series of citizen gatherings to create the agenda for the city following the protocol suggested in this book. Under the leadership of Jeff Stec, a very talented local community builder, we invited the citizens of Covington to four public gatherings. Not to advise the leaders, but to define the priorities of the plan and to commit to making the strategic plan work. Five hundred people in a town of forty-four thousand showed up to do just this.

Each session had people meeting in small groups, working with people they did not know but with whom they shared a common interest. They answered open-ended questions, were asked to choose among priorities, and, in the final session, were asked for their commitment to bring this planning process into reality.

At the end of the process, the city had its strategic plan—and, more important, it had the commitment of a significant group of citizens signed up to make the plan work. Perhaps most important, they strengthened the fabric of their community in the process.

What creates an alternative future is acting on the belief that context, relatedness, and language are the point, and that traditional problem solving needs to be subordinated and postponed until context, relatedness, and language have shifted. In this thinking, problem solving becomes a means, not an end in itself.

We cannot problem-solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation, or community. To state it one more way: this is not an argument against problem solving; it is an assertion that the primary work is to shift the context and language and thinking about possibility within which problem solving takes place.

This shift requires us to change our idea of what constitutes action, so that what was once seen as a means to an end now is itself valued as action. Another key insight from Jim Keene, who has spent his life in the public arena, is that “perhaps the purpose of problems is to give us an excuse to come together.”

Expanding Our Idea of Action

Of course, just coming together has to provide some movement toward the future. Every time we meet, we want to feel that we have moved the action forward. Community has a purpose beyond relationship: it has to create livelihood, raise a child, care for our health, embrace the vulnerable. To have these communal effects, we have to reconstruct our definition of action.

The question then is, what qualifies as action? Traditionally, in order to be satisfied that we have spent our time well when we are together, we want a strategy, a list of next steps and milestones, and then a combination of brick and mortar and the knowledge of who will be responsible for what. Any change in the world will, in fact, need this kind of action. To say, however, that this is all that counts as action is too narrow.

If we are to value building social fabric and belonging as much as budgets, timetables, and bricks and mortar, we need to consider action in a broader way. For example:

Would a meeting be worthwhile if we simply strengthened our relationship?

Would a meeting be worthwhile if we learned something of value?

Suppose in a meeting we simply stated our requests of each other and what we were willing to offer each other. Would that justify our time together?

Or, in a gathering, what if we only discussed the gifts we wanted to bring to bear on the concern that brought us together. Would that be an outcome of value?

Suppose we spent the time agreeing on what matters to us?

Saying yes to these questions opens and broadens the spectrum of what constitutes action, and this is the point. Relatedness, learning, requests, intentions, offers of gifts, agreements on what matters are outcomes as valuable as agreements and next steps.

It is not that we are gathering just for the sake of gathering. Or gathering to get to know each other. We come together for an exchange of value and to experience how relatedness, gifts, learning, and generosity are valuable to community. When we name these as outcomes, we're able to experience completion for the investment we made without having to leave with a list for the future.

Without these elements of connection, the traditional tasks lose their urgency and have to be constantly incentivized to be sustained. With this expanded notion of action, we can bring visioning, problem solving, and clearly defined outcomes into the room—and in fact we need them to sustain us. People will meet to learn and connect for only so long, and then they need a task. In addition to finding each other and having new conversations with people we are not used to talking to (at least in this way), it also helps to produce a physical thing. Clean something up, make a meal, start a community garden, walk some dogs, ask a neighbor if they are lonely. The practical becomes an excuse to be together, which is needed to sustain belonging over time.