Announcements
Dear Conversation Calgary Participants:
Our facilitator, Bob Chartier has a vision of the power that a citizen-led “Think Tank” could have in transforming a community. A Citizen Think Tank would play this key role by sponsoring and leading conversations of consequence amongst citizens.
He has asked to have his proposal distributed amongst those who participated in our two “Conversation Calgary” events in 2009. I am pleased to have it attached for your consideration.
Feel free to visit Bob’s website at http://www.managers-gestionnaires.gc.ca/chartier-eng.asp There’s some great information, templates, biography, etc. for those who want to know more. If you wish to contact him directly you can do so at chartierbob@gmail.com
Bob Hawkesworth
The Citizen Think Tank…engagement and civic discourse
A firestarter paper
By Bob Chartier
It’s the most recent iteration of an old irritation…the employee retired on the job and the citizen who can’t even be bothered to vote. By whatever term we call it, we know what it looks like. We are all too familiar with the unengaged employee in a free fall entitlement zone of misery, frustration and ennui. We see every day the manager that cannot put away the Blackberry that holds him captive in the micro zone of e-mail clutter. We see the front line employees who see high priced consultants being asked for advice on how to clean up the mess but who themselves are never asked even once on what they would do to improve things around here.
Employee disengagement is a billion dollar wasteland of busy work and distractive attractions. It is bad enough in organizations where productivity, innovation, and effectiveness are at stake. It is deadly in societies and communities where health, safety, education, environment and democracy are at stake.
One could argue that the old fashioned concept of civic discourse is the canary in the mineshaft of every established and emerging democracy in the global vista. A simple web definition of civil discourse looks something like…An engagement in conversation intended to enhance understanding. Done well, it can drive to insight that is actionable in the context of furthering individual dignity and improving society.
So when was your last engagement in a conversation for understanding? The Greeks used to meet in the agora for a community conversation and the exchange of ideas. I am hard pressed to think of a contemporary version of the agora.
Note the use of the word conversation…not the exchange of information or making a connection. Blackberries can exchange information and Facebook can keep us connected but for many the conversation still holds the key to real civic discourse.
To put it in even more plain language…yes it’s true that you can be connected to hundreds, maybe thousands of “friends” in Toronto, Amsterdam and Nairobi, but have you attended a school board meeting lately where less than thirteen people show up for any kind of conversation on how our children are being educated.
Connection is global, conversation is local. Both are important but one is critical.
What happened?
Well, three things happened…meetings, committees and town halls. Imagine if you will, from out of the great corporate house of pain, a decision being reached in late fall of 1956 to eliminate the conversation from the workplace. It was much too cumbersome, inefficient and frankly just plain embarrassing to have conversations in the workplace. Much more “professional” to have meetings, cubicles, speeches, offices, phones, computers, workshops, presentations (god bless PowerPoint) and committees. The conversation was so non productive, perhaps still useful to artists and farmers but not so much for the professional class.
It worked. There has not been a real deep conversation in an office environment since that metaphorical cold November day in 1956.
Of course, these workers and executives would come home to their neighborhoods and communities and many of them took their civic duties seriously. They were more than anxious to bring their newly acquired meetings, committees and town hall consultations approach back to their terribly old fashioned civic governments and public service boards and providers,
It worked.
Much as it did inside the corporate organizational world, the conversation was soon edged out of the local world of the once natural civic discourse of the real town hall and the coffee shop. So do you wonder why you can’t get thirteen people out to a school board meeting and if you do get thirteen out only three will ever want to come back?
Have you ever attended one? A rich conversation was it?
Try sitting in straight rows on some hard arsed stacking chairs, listening to some self important official pontificate through the blinding vacuity of the ubiquitous Dum Dum bullets of PowerPoint for the first half of the meeting. The second half, we get to liner up at a microphone and call on our little “inner orators” to pontificate right back anthem because that just what you do with a microphone.
Actually, perhaps the microphone has succeeded in making us all into speechifying poseurs. You have been there…or maybe not
Perhaps it was the Health Board consultation microphone line-up…the City Zoning committee microphone line-up or the Ministry of Natural Resources workshop on sustainability PowerPoint and microphone line-up that finally got to you and you went home muttering…”Never again!”.
Those diddly darn citizens, they just don’t care. We give up our valuable time and they won’t even come out. Well right back at ya.’ Would you even come out to the last meeting you threw if you weren’t being paid or it was a compliance part of your mandate to hold it?
Ok, perhaps I have gone a bit over the edge here, but I am not at all sure that most citizens feel truly engaged in their community and when they do get engaged, it is often with desperation, hostility, position and single interest. This is a deadly combination, when combined with those “old school” 1956 engagement tools, leaving us with even more frustration around civic discourse.
We are still in love with democracy, but it is becoming like a dotty old aunt, we love her but not sure about holding hands in public. The warmer fires of true democratic passion and dialogue seem to grow dimmer each passing year.
Another favorite tool of that corporate world is delegation. Well, now in the civic world we love it too. We delegate our learning to the teachers, our safety to the police, our wellness to the doctors, our sport to the pros, our spirit to the churches, our positions to the television news channels and our thinking to think tanks…well how is this all working out for you?
Actually that last one got me thinking.
A little Backstory…
For a decade now, a few of us in public service have been experimenting with tools and practices that open conversations, link up people across artificial borders and more fully engage people in the organizations and communities. Grounded in the principles of systems thinking, these tools open up the possibilities inherent in the best of the system or even better, putting the whole system in the room instead of the more traditional having as many people as perhaps the boardroom can hold.
There is, of course, good news and bad news. The bad news is that it still feels a bit scratchy to get hundreds of people out. The good news is that we have these new tools that will guarantee their full engagement when they get there.
The new Tools of Engagement love the large groups because the people are now being brought in from the beginning – not “bought in” after some one else has done all the heavy thinking.
Tools like OpenSpace allow the room full of people the opportunity to design and set their own agenda based on their insider knowledge of the system. Other tools like the Courtyard Café create an environment where specific issues are tackled in a fully civil, open choice, non microphone dominated space.
The coffee based conversation is as old as the bean itself. Why should Tom Hortons’ get all the great conversations?
The Conversations
I have facilitated with fascination hundreds of these sessions in public service organizations but it started to get even more interesting when the BC government tried an experiment a few years ago. The government wanted to engage citizens in the ever growing critical issues around health care.
The first call went out requesting a “consultation” process…perhaps one of those town hall sorts of procedures. Have you ever attended one of these consultation events? I would love to hear that your experiences were unique but my own were pretty much old school with the audience in straight rows looking ahead to the presenters at the front. The PowerPoint was most often the tool of choice and the question period was dominated by heated questions and angry mini speeches dominating microphones one, two and three.
Well, providentially for the people of BC the person placed in a leadership role had done some work in our little community of practice. She respectfully suggested that perhaps we did not need another consultation process, but rather we might want to start a conversation with citizens on the significant questions around health care.
The subsequent BC Conversation on Health used three innovative systems based tools to engage citizens in most cities and towns in the province. There were no microphones, speeches or position or presentations. It was simply an engaging province wide conversation on health care. Follow up evaluations were very high.
The intelligence gathered was particularly useful to business, governments and the health care system. And no, they did not solve all the problems but they did gather some insights and practical knowledge and most important, the citizens felt truly engaged. One woman was quoted in a local paper as saying, “I still don’t trust the government but I have never felt so listened to.”
Recently in Calgary, long serving Alderman, Bob Hawkesworth has been concerned of late by the hardening of positions and the feeling that his city is more and more breaking into camps…bottom line vs. green vs. market vs. community vs. stop vs. go vs. who gives a ….
He became interested in the idea of a city in conversation, perhaps a re-awakening of the old idea of civic discourse…talking to Mike instead of into a mic, if you will.
In May 2009 over 200 people came out on a Saturday for a day of conversation using the OpenSpace and Courtyard Café tools. The end of day response was quite powerful. Sure a few left early when they realized that there would be no platform, but the majority stayed and to a person, they wanted more. A follow up session on another Saturday, – actually it was Halloween 2009 – and once again the same numbers of people came out and went deeper into the original conversations with new tools such as the Interview Matrix, Workout Pitch and Ritual Dissent. Again the response was very positive.
So what was different?
Well, first of all, these tools are quite unique and very engaging. A day with these tools is not like a day in a meeting. Everyone gets a voice, there is respect in the room and the results are rich and grounded.
Secondly, the process is owned by the participants. Let’s be clear, we do a lot of this sort of thing already when we do it for someone’s business or political needs. When organizations, business or cities do their planning there is a compliance piece requiring input. This is the more conventional consultation process and there are clear expectations on all sides about where the “product” at the end of the day is going. There is often frustration, disappointment and a lack of trust on sides, the participants and the organizers. Follow through is the big promise and often the big disillusionment.
This was different.
It was not for any organization or person. Bob Hawkesworth got it going but not so much as an Alderman but as a citizen. He would have done it anyway and he was clear that the results were of interest to him as a politician to take back to the City, but he wanted the results to be as important for people to take hope to their families, for others to take back to their community centers and for others to take back to their business.
The Big Idea
What happened here? We are not sure but we learned a couple of things.
People are hungry for dialogue and conversation. Hungry, heck we are anorexic.
Public consultation is an important process. We need it for input into government and we can and are doing it better and better with contemporary tools but this was not consultation. There are many great initiatives out there that are engaging citizens in a more active role. Look at Plan It and Imagine Calgary for example. This did not feel like that. It was perhaps more simple and more profound. It seemed to just want to be a conversation. It was almost like going back to kindergarten to learn how to talk to one another again. Once we get that back then perhaps we look for other more effective ways to get involved.
Food and conversation go together and have since the times of the Greek philosophers. Over seven hundred dollars was raised not spent for food. In a time where hospitality costs are crippling events we perhaps need to be more creative in our thinking.
The Vision
The think tanks out there do not have a client or recipient in mind. They are putting good minds to work, documenting their findings and responding to people who come to them for the good information. What if we were to imagine hundreds of these conversations as citizen think tanks? They were beholden to no organization, business or government but boy oh boy, every business, public service and family wanted to know what the thinking was these days in those citizen think tanks.
Logistically, all we would have to do is train a community of practice in each city of practitioners skilled in how to use the tools and design the processes. These practitioners would be available and think tanks could break out all over the cities in halls, community centers, schools, churches and whatever. A citizen think tank website would hold the trends, innovative ideas and key findings.
So…an even bigger idea.
One of the most engaging civic initiatives ever was Participaction. Thousands of people were engaged and one of the biggest drivers was competition…between towns, cities age groups and such. What if a jurisdiction was to declare a week as Civic Conversation week?
Simple, just a declaration. What could happen?
Well what if a small community in the city set a goal to have 20 civic conversations in the community that week? There would be some small conversations in homes, maybe some larger ones in community centers, some in churches, some in schools, some in business and some in coffee shops. Results would be posted on a Citizen Think Tank website.
Next year, who else would be playing? And how many hits do you think there would be on such a site that offered up the latest in citizen thinking…
Just a thought.
