Community In Conversation With Itself
When a community or group asks me to help them be in conversation with themselves to figure out a course of action, I have to discern how much of myself to insert into the process of having that conversation and how much content to offer. I always ask this question: How much me?
Finding the answer to the “how much me?” question requires exploration of five other questions:
What is the purpose of the gathering?
What relationship does the community want to be in with the hosts?
What relationship does the community need to be in with the hosts?
What pattern does the hosting team need to be in with participants?
What support do we need to have to be in the conversation we need to be in now?
The answers to these questions are shifty; they change from meeting to meeting or within a session. Keeping an eye on them at all times is time well spent.
Know the purpose
The purpose of a gathering can be simple (let’s decide what our meeting schedule will be for the next year) or complicated (let’s come up with a way for our neighbourhoods to be involved in our neighbourhood’s redevelopment).
The purpose can seem simple at first, only to see that once the conversation gets going that much more discussion is needed before the task is done (as you can imagine with both these examples). At times, the purpose of a gathering might be to discern the purpose of the next meeting!
Having a clear purpose for a gathering enables a series of subsequent decisions: who to invite, location, length of time, conversation design considerations, special accommodations for attendees, minimal information needed to be on hand, etc. Also, clear purpose sheds light on the pattern the community would like to be in, with emphasis on a host or two (or more) or the wider community, or something in between.
When I teach the City Nestworking course, for example, the purpose of our face-to-face gatherings, whether in-person or online, is to create the conditions for relationships to form between:
Self and self (self-awareness)
Self and others (community awareness)
Self and the city places we make for ourselves (a broader city-scale awareness)
Our face-to-face time is time and space to digest, integrate and consolidate the material we are learning separate from each other and facilitates our awareness of self, others and place. It is not time for me to lecture or reteach the material they have read; it is time for us to be in the brave space of learning. Finding what we know and understand differently, in ways that would or could not, happen if each simply read a book, even if they sat down together to talk about what they read.
With a clear purpose for our face-to-face time, the commitments we need to make to each other about how we will spend time together become clear. When I teach, I ask participants to make three commitments to ensure our face-to-face time meets the awareness purpose: attend 80% of our face-to-face sessions, read the course material, do the personal reflection activities.
Know the relationship pattern (for participants and hosts)
With purpose known, it is possible to see which pattern makes the most sense: me at the center as the host or expert, or me on the rim, with the community as the hosts or experts. Our default is the expert trap, where we expect someone to step into an authoritative role, leaving participants to play a passive role. We all get caught in this trap, as convenors, organizers and participants, because of the familiar power dynamics that make us feel comfortable.
Left: host at the center. Right: host-on-the-rim.
When we wish to lean into a broader community focus on expertise, it is necessary to describe the shift we are making. As I teach, or as I host a community that wants to be in conversation with itself, I describe it like this:
From lots of me as the host to less of me as host, or
From little of you as hosts to more of you as hosts
As needed, we talk about this shift and what it means for how we discern power dynamics and the new habits we need to practise to allow us to lean into a community’s expertise.
Some participants do not want to take on a shared leadership role and feel most comfortable demanding the expert be the expert. It is easier to blame someone else (the authority) when things go wrong rather than assume shared accountability. It is equally possible that a host or expert does not want to relinquish the power of being the expert or center of attention. Both of these scenarios take place consciously and unconsciously, but what is consistent is people who feel powerful and powerless. And their reactions to the experience of power, in self or other, are consistently healthy and unhealthy.
When a host or community says it wants to create the conditions for the community to be in conversation with itself, it is necessary to look at who is talking and who is listening.
To activate the expertise of many, we must practise placing ourselves, and others, in unfamiliar positions. Both formats, expert at the center or expertise everywhere, serve us well in the right circumstances. Sometimes we need instructions, and other times discernment. We might even move from one to the other, or create hybrids, depending on the community’s needs. What matters is that I tune into the community’s needs, the work it is doing and will be doing, not my own.
Support to learn new skills
When a group first comes together to learn and work as a community, hosting expertise serves as a set of training wheels; they need support to learn new skills. At first, they rely heavily on support, but as they become more skillful, the training wheels (the hosting team) have a lesser role. The hosting team must discern the minimal guidance needed for the group to host itself. The community must stretch, as ready, into shared leadership and accountability. The hosting team releases its expertise while the community grows into its shared expertise.
Learning new skills is hard work, especially relationship skills. We are inviting the shift from “here’s what I think: go figure it out” to “here’s what I see: let’s figure it out.”
While subtle, I am inviting a significant shift in how I see myself in the communities I work with. Do I see myself as separate from, or included in, the community? Either is appropriate, depending on the circumstances, but making a choice here is vital.
There’s a quality of civic practice in play here, space where we place community connection at the center of our attention. For all of us, hosts and participants alike, there are multiple tensions in play:
Do I insert a lot of me or a little?
Do I provide a lot of support or little?
Am I beside the community or in the community?
Am I attached to what we choose to do as a community, or detached?
Am I the expert, or are we the experts?
Are participants active or passive?
Is this about many individuals learning separately or learning together?
The clarity that comes from exploring these questions is crucial because it helps us see where we sabotage ourselves. Suppose our objective is to embody the host-on-the-rim pattern. In that case, if I activate and enable the host-attractor pattern, me and community, I destabilize the community’s capacity to be a community. I can do this as a host or participant by singling out someone and putting them in the center, myself or another. When I do this, the experience that counts is no longer the community’s experience.
Invisible (yet palpable) enabling
If I want to enable a community to find and listen to itself, as a host I have to be invisible, barely there, playing an essential role of holding them before they can hold themselves. In this, there are many stages of transition, where I release more and more of the holding to them, continually releasing my attachment to how things unfold. I have to prepare for this release, and I have to activate this release by handing the reins over and giving the community my trust. Over and over again.
“If I want to enable a community to find and listen to itself, as a host I have to be invisible, barely there, playing an essential role of holding them before they can hold themselves.”
As I release more of the holding to them, I see that their work gets more challenging. I watch to make sure I don’t step in, or the group or part of the group steps in, to deflect any disturbance or avoid discomfort; Because the denial of the experience of disruption is the denial of opportunities for growth and evolution.
I do not stop being me. However, my motivation for how I participate must come from a place beyond ego—a more whole me contributing to the whole as a participant. I do not need to displace myself, but I need to monitor how much my simple presence, let alone what I say and the roles I play, shifts the community’s stability. It also involves, when necessary, holding the community to their intention to be a community. And when those temptations to defer to me as an authority surface in the community, I have a responsibility to put the choices and decisions back to them and reset the pattern.
In this, we reach from hosts-on-the-rim to host-as-all-of-us.
REFLECTION
Under what conditions do we need support when in conversation with ourselves?
What skills do we need to improve to enable some of us to host us well?
What skills do we need to improve to enable us all to host ourselves well?