It’s All in the Cards
—you can listen to this article here—
I spent some time cleaning my office this week, looking for things that no longer made sense to have around. I found some index cards with notes to myself for the first gathering that I formally hosted. I was surprised to see that twenty-seven years ago when I was a year or two out of city planning school and into my first job as a planner in Brandon, Manitoba, I was paying attention to social habitat. I just didn’t have the words for it then.
At my first job, my boss, Ron, introduced me to people he thought I would enjoy. I moved to a new city for this job, and Ron was the only person I knew. He made a concerted effort to help me make social contact with people. On the surface, his effort looked like a good strategy to help a new hire settle in. Over the years, I’ve understood that Ron’s effort was about more than employee retention—Ron loves it when people and ideas find and meet each other and grow into new possibilities.
Contact and connection
Ron introduced me to Terry, a lawyer who often had business in our office. Terry introduced me to a community of women who met for lunch on Thursdays every week to talk about the United Nations Platform for Action on the Status of Women. When I first met the group, two had just returned from the United Nations gathering in Beijing and witnessed the signing of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995. There was a buzz of stories in Kady’s living room as we sat beside a crackling fire. Everyone, including me, the newcomer, received a gift from Beijing. We started the work to figure out how to activate the Platform for Action in Manitoba.
Formally, we were the Manitoba Action Committee on the Status of Women (Brandon). When we gathered people from around southwestern Manitoba to flesh out who we wanted to be, I had an opportunity to experiment with a growing interest I could not pursue at my nine-to-five job: facilitate. It was magical.
The cards
Half a lifetime later, I look at these cards and recognize how the bones of a good conversation made their way into the twenty-seven-year-old design. I had a clear sense of purpose for the meeting. I offered clear ground rules, or agreements, about how we would work together. There was a clear agenda, starting with an opportunity for people to relax into an embodied meditation about how “everything we do has to be in the spirit of ______.” The words we found formed our check-in, setting us up for the discussion to follow.
When we got to work, there was an activity to deepen our connection with each other as we got to know each other. At the same time, we noticed the skills, resources, experiences and personal qualities we were each bringing to the group. We started to see the possibilities of what we could do or who we could be together. We made decisions about how we would make decisions together. Before leaving, we asked, What priorities do we see?
At the close of the gathering, we took a moment for a check-out, asking evaluation questions:
What were the most valuable things for you about this workshop?
What was the least valuable?
Did you find it easy to participate in this meeting?
What suggestions do you have for improving a workshop like this?
We had a parting ceremony of care, too. In a circle, each participant rubbed the shoulders of the person ahead of them, then turned around and rubbed the shoulders of the person behind. After social, emotional, and intellectual connections, we closed with physical connection.
“City Makers never work alone. Let’s work well together.”
Wonder
I look at this workshop design in wonder because I did not learn how to design and host a gathering in city planning school. As I was finishing my thesis, I took an extracurricular course on mediation that planted a few seeds about effective communication. In my Brandon years, that same boss, Ron, organized a communication and leadership class. I quickly understood that to be a good city planner, I needed to be a good leader—the kind with good people skills, follows as much as leads and helps people better communicate with each other.
I run a lot of meetings. I’ve taken a lot of training about running meetings and read many books about how people operate and how to run meetings. At about twenty-seven years old, I did not know how to design an effective gathering. And yet I did.
Social habitat and city making
I have long struggled with two trajectories of interest in my professional world: city planning and leadership. I have technical skills in city planning, but without good leadership skills, I am only a technician. City planning is so much more than a technical exercise.
The making of our cities weaves together multiple perspectives: the people who write the rules (elected officials, city planners, engineers, etc.), the people who physically build our cities (builders, developers, homeowners, etc.), the people who advocate for the unmet needs in our cities (non-profit and community organizations), and the people who live in our cities. Some of us pay attention to how we build the city, while others pay attention to how we care for each other. Together, especially when we choose to work together, we engage in city making. The catch: city making, the weaving of building and caring, only happens when we have a social habitat in which we choose to weave these perspectives together.
While the technical and leadership aspects of me were separate 27 years ago, they have been on a constant journey to live happily together in the work I do in the world. In the City Makers community I host, we understand that city makers never work alone, so we practice working well together.
10 social habitat ideas to explore
I now have words to describe what I intuitively designed all those years ago: social habitat. We explore ten ideas twice a year in the City Makers community. Below are the bones that help create a good social habitat in which city making happens and what we explore.
A warning for you: There is no prescription that dictates how to use each of these ten social habitat ideas. In the City Makers community, we gather over and over to explore these ideas. The exploration is never the same twice because the context in which we live and work constantly changes. For example, I make different choices with each design, recognizing different contexts, players, purposes, and sensitivities. A high-conflict public meeting (The agony of conversation) is designed differently than a workshop for a board looking to make concrete choices to move a project forward. The choices always change.
1. Check-in + check-out
Why go to the trouble of incorporating a check-in and check-out in our gatherings? What difference does it make? Is it worth it to take up valuable time in a gathering?
We explore:
A variety of ways to lead a check-in
A variety of ways to lead a check-out
How a check-in and check-out affect the quality of a gathering
How a check-in and check-out can happen in explicit and implicit ways
How you can incorporate a check-in and check-out in your city-making practice
2. Agreements
Why go to the trouble of having and using agreements in our gatherings with people working to improve our cities, neighbourhoods, and communities? What difference does it make? Is it worth taking up valuable time in a gathering to talk about what we expect of each other?
We explore:
The agreements that support the City Makers community
Examples of agreements
When and where to make agreements explicit
How agreements can adjust to different contexts
3. Purpose
Why go to the trouble to have a clear purpose for our gatherings with people working to improve our cities, neighbourhoods and communities? What difference does it make? Is it worth it? When is it valuable not to have a purpose? Or is not having a purpose a purpose in disguise?
We explore:
The purpose of the City Makers community
Examples of kinds of purposes for gatherings
How purpose contributes to effective gatherings
When and where to make purpose explicit
How purpose shifts with scale and context
4. Simple questions
Why go to the trouble to find a simple question to support our gatherings with people working to improve our cities, neighbourhoods and communities? What difference does it make? Is it worth it? Does it always have to be hard to find a simple question? What if there is more than one question?
We explore:
The question that drives the City Makers community
Examples of simple questions
How simple questions contribute to effective gatherings
How simple questions can shift with scale and context
A simple question that guides your work
5. Invitation
Why go to the trouble to craft a clear invitation when people gather to work to improve our cities, neighbourhoods and communities? What difference does it make? Is it worth it? Should the invitation have a few details or a lot? What is the minimum information to include in an invitation?
We explore:
The purpose of an invitation
How invitations contribute to effective gatherings
How invitations can shift with scale and context
How an invitation serves as a filter
6. Harvest
Why go to the trouble to "harvest" our insights, choices and decisions when we gather to work to improve our cities, neighbourhoods and communities? What difference does it make? Is it worth it? How can we plan for a harvest? How can we plan to use the harvest? Who should harvest our work?
We explore:
The various forms a harvest can take
How a harvest can contribute to effective gatherings
Who can harvest
What to do with a harvest
7. Meeting planning
We explore how to put it all together: check-in and check-out, agreements, purpose, simple questions, invitations, and a harvest.
Are you planning a meeting? We have a template you can use to think it through, whatever stage you're at in the meeting planning process, to bring people together who are working to improve their cities, neighbourhoods and communities. What difference does it make to think things through ahead of time? How much needs to be thought through? Who needs to think things through? What if the meeting is to think things through?
We explore:
A basic template to help you with meeting planning
How to put together the Social Habitat Series materials (check-in and check-out, agreements, purpose, simple questions, invitation, and a harvest)
One small thing you can do to make your next meeting more effective
8. Helpful + unhelpful behaviour
What difference does identifying helpful and unhelpful behaviour in our work make? How can we encourage more of what we want and discourage less of what we don’t want? Who do I need to be, who do we need to be, to behave in helpful ways—and helpful to what, according to who?
We explore:
The difference between helpful and unhelpful behaviour
Strategies to encourage helpful behaviour
Strategies to discourage unhelpful behaviour
9. Conflict
How is conflict helpful? How is conflict unhelpful? How can we handle conflict in ways that help us learn and grow as a community? Who gets to say there is—or isn’t—conflict?
We explore:
Conflict is helpful and insightful
How we handle conflict can be problematic
Graduated strategies to resolve conflict
10. Burning questions
What questions do you have about how to activate quality social habitats when we gather with other city makers? What questions are on fire? What questions are simmering? Would you like to hear others' questions first, then see what arises in you?
We explore:
How people always have great questions
The great questions in you :)
Something surprising (but we don't know what it is yet)
“City Makers never work alone. Let’s work well together.”
Indirect possibilities
Ron did something important: he arranged for Terry and I to find and meet each other. He fostered social contact and connection. He had no idea what would come of that connection or how it would nourish me twenty-seven years later. The indirect possibilities that come with paying attention to social habitat are inconceivable—as they should be—because any imagined possibility is not big enough. By fostering a simple connection between me and one other person, he encouraged my professional growth for decades. I chose to participate, too—I followed my instincts when I offered to facilitate that gathering twenty-seven years ago. It seems to have been in the cards that my interests in city planning, leadership and facilitation would weave together as they have.
Wherever we go, we encourage or discourage the opportunities for people and ideas to find and meet each other. The social habitat we make for ourselves promotes or prevents the needed improvements to our cities, neighbourhoods and communities. The choice to foster improvement is ours.
Reflection
Think of a gathering you are organizing or have recently attended…
What is the purpose of the gathering you are planning (or attended)?
Which social habitat ideas will you use (or were used)?
Which social habitat ideas might you now incorporate into your design (or wish were incorporated)?