Community

by Peter Block

  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.

  PART TWO

  The Alchemy of Belonging

  Certain properties of collective transformation create the conditions for greater belonging and stronger social fabric. Not that transformation can be reduced to a recipe or set of steps, but its properties can be seen as a combination of ingredients that give it a more concrete structure. Our attempt to convert lead into gold, as it was for the original alchemists, is part working with the right properties and part an act of faith and spirit.

  To gain the kingdom of heaven is to hear what is not said, to see what cannot be seen, and to know the unknowable.

  Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani to her daughter, after she saw the end of her monarchy

  Up to this point, we have said that transformation occurs when we shift context, value possibility, and shift language, all of which produce a sense of belonging. We can now be specific about the means for making this happen. The following “pattern language,” to borrow Christopher Alexander’s term, when brought into a context of caring for the whole, can produce a new future:

  Leadership is convening.

  The small group is the unit of transformation.

  Questions are more transforming than answers.

  Six conversations materialize belonging.

  Hospitality, the welcoming of strangers, is central.

  Physical and social space support belonging.

  These provide the framework for the discussion of a methodology that puts the ideas from part 1 into practice.

  CHAPTER 8

  Leadership Is Convening

  This is not an argument against leaders or leadership, only a desire to change the nature of our thinking about leadership. Communal transformation requires a certain kind of leadership, one that creates conditions where context shifts in the following ways:

  • From a place of fear and fault to one of gifts, generosity, and abundance

  • From a belief in more laws and oversight to a belief in social fabric and chosen accountability

  • From institutions, corporations, and systems as central, to associational life as central

  • From a focus on leaders to a focus on citizens

  • From problems to possibility

  For this shift in context to occur, we need leadership that supports a restorative path. Restoration calls for us to deglamorize leadership and consider it a quality that exists in all human beings. We need to simplify leadership and construct it so that it is infinitely and universally available. We need to end our search for better leaders. We have enough.

  • • •

  In communal transformation, leadership is about intention, convening, valuing relatedness, and presenting choices. It is not a personality characteristic or a matter of style, and therefore it requires nothing more than what all of us already have.

  This means we can stop looking for leadership as though it were scarce or lost or had to be trained into us by experts. If our traditional form of leadership has been studied for so long, written about with such admiration, defined by so many, worshipped by so few, and the cause of so much disappointment, maybe doing more of all that is not productive. The search for great leadership is a prime example of how we too often take something that does not work and try harder at it.

  I have written elsewhere about reconstructing leader as social architect. Not leader as special person, but leader as a citizen willing to do those things that have the capacity to initiate something new in the world. In this way, leader belongs right up there with cook, carpenter, artist, hair stylist, and landscape designer. It is a capacity that can be learned by all of us, with a small amount of teaching and an agreement to practice. The ultimate do-it-yourself movement.

  Community building requires a concept of the leader as one who designs experiences for others—experiences that in themselves are examples of our desired future. Experiences here refers to the way people in the room interact with each other. The experiences we create need to be designed in such a way that relatedness, accountability, and commitment are every moment available, experienced, and demonstrated. David Isaacs of the World Café calls this “relational leadership.”

  This concept of leadership means that in addition to embracing their own humanity, which is the work of every person, the core task of leaders is to create the conditions for civic or institutional engagement. They do this through the power they have to name the debate and to design gatherings.

  We use the term gathering because the word has different associations from what we think of when we say “meeting.” Most people do not even like meetings, and for good reason. They are frequently designed to explain, defend, express opinions, persuade, set more goals, and define steps—the result of which is to produce more of what currently exists. These kinds of meetings either review the past or embody the belief that better planning, better managing, or more measurement and prediction can create an alternative future. So the word gathering is intended to distinguish what we are talking about here, something with more significance than the common sense of meeting.

  Engagement Is the Point

  Leadership begins with understanding that every gathering is an opportunity to deepen accountability and commitment through engagement. It doesn’t matter what the stated purpose of the gathering is.

  Each gathering serves two functions: to address its stated purpose, its business issues; and to be an occasion for each person to decide to become engaged as an owner. The leader’s task is to structure the place and experience of these occasions to move the culture toward shared ownership.

  This is very different from the conventional belief that the task of leadership is to set a vision, enroll others in it, and hold people accountable through measurements and reward. Consider how most current leadership trainings assert the following:

  • Leader and top are essential. They are role models who need to possess a special set of personal skills.

  • The task of the leader is to define the destination and the blueprint to get there.

  • The leader’s work is to bring others on board. Enroll, align, inspire.

  • Leaders provide for the oversight, measurement, and training needed (as defined by leaders).

  Each of these beliefs elevates leaders as an elite group, singularly worthy of special development, coaching, and incentives. A
ll of these beliefs have face validity, and they have unintended consequences. When we are dissatisfied with a leader, we simply try harder to find a new one who will perform more perfectly in the very way that led to our last disappointment. This creates a burden of isolation, entitlement, and passivity that our communities cannot afford to carry.

  The world does not need leaders to better define issues or to orchestrate better planning or project management. What it needs is for the issues and the plans to have more of an impact, and that comes from citizen accountability and commitment. Engagement is the means through which there can be a shift in caring for the well-being of the whole, and the task of leader as convener is to produce that engagement.

  The Art of Convening

  In this way of thinking, we hold leadership to three tasks:

  • Create a context that nurtures an alternative future, one based on gifts, generosity, accountability, and commitment.

  • Initiate and convene conversations that shift people’s experience, which occurs through the way people are brought together and the nature of the questions used to engage them.

  • Listen and pay attention. Be able to say “I don’t know.”

  Convening leaders create and manage the social space within which citizens become deeply engaged and discover that it is in their power to resolve something or at least move the action forward. Engagement, and the accountability that grows out of it, occurs when we ask people to be in charge of their own experience and act on the well-being of the whole. Leaders do this by naming a new context and convening people into new conversations through questions that demand personal investment. This is what triggers the choice to be accountable for those things over which we can have power, even though we may have no control.

  • • •

  In addition to convening and naming the question, we add listening to the critical role of leadership. Listening may be the single most powerful action the leader can take. Leaders will always be under pressure to speak, but if building social fabric is important, and sustained transformation is the goal, then listening becomes the greater service.

  This kind of leadership—convening, naming the question, and listening—is restorative and produces energy rather than consumes it. It is leadership that creates accountability as it confronts people with their freedom. In this way, engagement-centered leaders bring kitchen-table and street-corner democracy into being.

  Example: Findley House

  Seven Hills is a neighborhood center in the West End of Cincinnati. One of its locations is called Findley House, and a project there illustrates the power of engagement-centered listening. The story starts when four “leaders” were asked to work with a group of urban youths. The essence of the story is that they resisted the temptation to be helpful.

  Joan and Michael Hoxsey and Geralyn and Tom Sparough were four white, overeducated adults when they first met with a dozen streetwise African American youths in what began as an intervention to help the youths, including a full curriculum on what these young men “ought” to learn about relationships.

  Shortly into the effort, the Hoxseys and Sparoughs realized that to make any difference in the young men’s lives, the adults had to try to understand who these young people were. So they threw out the curriculum and decided to simply hang out with the youths. They listened two nights a week for eight months. The listening was hard, the language was hard, the stories were heartbreaking.

  At first it seemed the young men were unreachable, and any attempt to “help” would be futile. Then, at some point the adults’ listening made a difference. The adults and the young people began to trust one another. As one young man put it, “The reason I respect you so much is because you may be the only people who really listen. Everyone wanted to tell us to ‘pull up our pants’ and tell us how to live.” Something valuable was built, and in the end the “things” the adults wanted to teach about relationships were taught by simply changing the nature of the conversation.

  In this same facility, there were two other programs for the youth started at the same time: GED training and computer skills training. Both of these programs had something in mind for the young men, something the leadership knew was best for them. By the end of this part of the program, the youths simply stopped showing up. Operating under the traditional ideas of good leadership, the GED program and the computer training program were gone. The youths rejected that kind of help.

  Even when the program that brought the youths and the Hoxseys and Sparoughs together ended, these adults and youths continued to meet, and they managed to produce a movie about the crucible of choices facing young urban people. What turned out to be sustainable and durable over time was the program of listening and valuing run by the Hoxseys and Sparoughs, whom the youths decided to trust. And, eight years later, there is another movie, and those of the original group still around are still connected.

  One of the challenges facing relational approaches such as this is that they do not measure well. If we were to take a conventional approach to measuring these efforts, we would look for computer skill improvement and how many youths got their GED diplomas. The report would give low marks to the easily measured expected outcomes. We would probably conclude that the youths were not ready to learn. We would not consider the computer and GED efforts a failure in leadership—that would be too strong an indictment of our current thinking.

  The social outcomes of the Hoxseys and Sparoughs’ work would most likely not be valued by the assessment at all, nor would their leadership style show up as a positive factor. Conventional measures would miss the essence of the humanity and restraint that led to transformation that took the form of a group of young African Americans finding four white people, in positions of leadership, whom they could trust.

  The Convening Capacity of Elected Officials

  Elected officials are a special case in how we think about leadership and the art of convening. We have put elected officials in a difficult role. We distort them into service providers and suppliers. We relate to them as if we are consumers, not citizens. We want them to solve for us those issues that we should be solving for ourselves.

  The customer model, in which elected officials exist to satisfy citizen demands, is a disservice to community, even though citizens love it. Elected officials are partners with citizens, not suppliers. The most useful role that elected officials can perform is to bring citizens together. They have this convening capacity like no one else in a city, but it is seriously underutilized. If elected officials take on this role as their primary one, we may still occasionally request that they pass some legislation or ordinance that serves us, but this should be the exception. If we continue to define elected officials primarily as legislators, then we are going to have to endure the results of their productivity.

  Example: Cold Spring

  Mark Stoeber was the mayor of Cold Spring, Kentucky, a small and mostly residential town. At some point he realized that the citizen complaints he was getting did not need an elected official to resolve. For example, he was getting complaints in one neighborhood about someone’s dog. Mark decided that the complaint about the dog was a symptom of the lack of connectedness among neighbors. With the dog’s behavior as cover, he asked one citizen to host a meeting in her home with other neighbors. Neighbors showed up, including the dog owner, and an agreement was reached. The social fabric became a little stronger. The mayor moved on to other things.

  A year later, Mark decided to take another step and invited about twenty community leaders into a conversation with city council members. They met in council chambers, but not in the usual configuration. In Cold Spring, as in most cities, the council sits on a platform and citizens sit in seats on a lower level. For this meeting, everyone sat in chairs in circles at the same level in the council room. They arranged themselves in groups to sit with people they knew the least, and talked about some of the questions we are discussing here: crossroads facing the town, the major gifts of the town an
d its citizens, doubts about anything really shifting, a look at the future demands facing the town, and what commitment they had to participate in engaging more people to develop the possibility called Cold Spring.

  This was a small but symbolic beginning for an elected official deciding that the future economic development and quality of life of the town were dependent on the quality of relatedness of its citizens and its ability to bring those on the margin into the center.

  Local government has two primary responsibilities. One is to sustain and improve the infrastructure of its community: roads, traffic, transportation, public safety, code enforcement, economic development, master planning, environment, and more. City managers and civil servants are well trained to do this and mostly do an excellent job at it.

  The other role of local government is to build the social fabric of the community. Officials are in a key position to engage citizens in the well-being of the city. The challenge in doing this is intensified by the structures they most often use to do it. The typical forms of engagement are city council meetings, public hearings, neighborhood summits, town hall meetings, and any variety of speaking engagements and special events that they attend.

  There is nothing in the current structure of these gatherings that encourages citizens to connect with each other or to be engaged as producers of the future. Citizens show up as critics and consumers.

  For local government to build the social fabric and create the context for a restorative community, the form in which citizens are involved needs to change from a patriarchal, consumer model to a partnership model that takes advantage of the energizing power of the small group.

  The idea that leadership is primarily about convening is a hard sell. It assaults the heroic projections we want to place on our leaders. We want to believe that leaders create followers. Especially when we choose the leaders. This idea requires us to take the parenting out of power. Leadership has the job of caring for the common good, for the well-being of all. No question of the special demands of this task. It is in the thinking and collective awareness of the leader that community often hinges. This is what we want to nudge.