by Peter Block
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 comm
unity 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.