Monthly Archives: April 2016

NCDD is collecting blurbs describing your great work!

Posted on by
Reply

NCDD is made up of extraordinary organizations and individuals who, in my opinion, are doing some of the most important work on the planet.  For fundraising and outreach purposes, we want to do a better job explaining the work our members do.

IMG_8202For starters, we want to collect short, concise sentences (blurbs) describing your work.  Here are a few examples of some blurbs I wrote a few years ago to illustrate our members’ work…

  • King County’s (Seattle Area) innovative Countywide Community Forums, a project of the King County auditor’s office, engages hundreds of volunteer “citizen councilors” in regular dialogues held across the county on issues local government is tackling.
  • One of our members led the creation of the nation’s first official “Democracy Zone” in Napa, California, where hundreds of white and Latino residents have come together across class and ethnic divides to redefine their community’s concept of “citizen” by focusing on democratic processes and a commitment to common values.
  • Vets4Vets trains Iraq-era veterans to facilitate dialogue among fellow new veterans to help with the reintegration process. Working closely with the VA, Vets4Vets is building a peer support community among the growing number of vets who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Will you take a few minutes to turn one or two of your recent projects/programs into brief one- or two-sentence blurbs like the ones above?  Be as specific as possible in your blurbs, in terms of program location, number of people engaged/effected, outcomes achieved (focusing on one is best), and how your effort exemplifies a DIFFERENT kind of conversation than what we ordinarily see.

Add your blurbs to the comments on this post, and include a link so people can learn more about you.

Thank you in advance for helping equip NCDD to better describe your amazing work!!

Leading Groups to their Potential through Listening

Posted on by
Reply

A critical part of D&D work is listening, but listening is a skill that doesn’t always come naturally. That’s why we encourage you to read the piece below by NCDD Sustaining Member Beth Tener of New Directions Collaborative that features some important tips and insights about the kind of listening that help us lead and generate new possibilities. You can read Beth’s piece below or find the original here.

Listening that Enables Emerging Possibilities

I recently participated in an on-line course presented by MIT and Otto Scharmer about creating transformative change (amazingly, with about 40,000 other people around the world). The course explores frameworks for how we personally and collectively can address the challenges of our time and change systems that are “creating results nobody wants.” The heart of our leadership challenge is how to take existing situations where the dynamics are an ‘ego-system’ (e.g., each person or organization looks out for their interests) to a ‘eco-system’ where each participant focuses on the well-being of all.

His Theory U proposes that “the quality of results that we create in any kind of social system is a function of the quality of awareness, attention, or consciousness that people in the system operate from.” One of the core skills to practice to make this shift is in how we listen.

Listening is at the source of all great leadership. A key source of leadership failure is lack of listening. – Otto Scharmer

Often leadership training focuses on how we communicate our ideas and how we persuade others, essentially on talking as opposed to listening. In this season of Presidential primaries, I have been struck by how the formats of picking our country’s leader rarely emphasize how they listen. The candidates give speeches and run ads promoting themselves and their views and they participate in debates, competing to out-do each other. One thing I admired Hilary Clinton for when she decided to run for Senate in New York was she launched a listening tour and traveled across the state, listening to the stories of people.

The best leaders have an ability to listen and sense what is changing and adapt. They are also able to listen in ways that bring out the best thinking in the people around them. A related and powerful way of listening is to sense and listen for the emerging potential or possibilities that could emerge. Scharmer offers this framework as a way to think about different qualities of listening:

  • Downloading – This is listening that goes through the lens of what you already know; you pay attention to that which confirms your current opinions and point of view. For example, when I listen to political news on the radio, it is often through a lens of left/right and agree/disagree. My filters and reactivity are engaged and I am not listening with an open mind.
  • Factual listening – This is listening where we listen for what is different from what we already know or believe, like a scientist who aims to objectively study a situation. Scharmer uses the example of Charles Darwin kept a notebook where he wrote down observations that contradicted his theory. “Disconfirming data is the source of innovation.”
  • Empathic listening – This is listening where we see through another person’s eyes; feeling empathy, sensing what it is like to walk in another person’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. When I am listening like this, I try to put my opinions or point of view to the side and ask questions (and follow up questions) to learn more directly about the situation or person’s experience.
  • Generative listening – This is listening for emerging future possibilities. It comes from being fully present without preconceptions or judging. It’s rooted in human capacities for intuition, sensing, and knowing – think of the “aha” moment, the impulse or energy that moves us, the insight or new idea that “drops in.”

When I think of my personal experience, moments of transition and change were often spurred by the qualities of empathic and generative listening by a friend or partner where they gave me the space to voice something I hadn’t articulated before, or they listened as if they could sense a bigger version of me or my path that I hadn’t seen yet. When I am with people who are skilled at these forms of listening, I feel more myself, I can see things more clearly, and I am more energized about the possibilities ahead.

Helping Groups Listen More Generatively

This quality can be generated in group settings as well. Meeting formats like World Café encourage empathic and generative listening, providing the space for many people to share their ideas and stories and encouraging participants to listen for patterns and new connections. In cross-pollinating small group conversations around an open question, new connections are generated and new ideas pop up more frequently.

How do we create spaces for groups that encourage these kinds of listening that can generate new ideas and motivation to act? What can emerge when a group works from the space of empathic and generative listening? Here are a few thoughts:

  • Set the Tone in the Space. The way the facilitator invites people to show up at a meeting or retreat can encourage these more expansive ways of listening. In our work as facilitators, we set the tone early in a meeting by sharing this quote from the web site, Thinking Environments: “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. The quality of our thinking depends on the way we treat each other while we are thinking.” That web site has a list of ten components that help create this kind of space.
  • Be Curious About Difference. We invite people to be curious about differences and the perspectives of others instead of competing to win with ideas. Instead of rebutting someone’s point of view, ask what has led them to see things that way… that becomes a different conversation.
  • Listen with Our Full Attention. “Listen like there is a thief in the house” is the quality of listening that Fran Peavey, a social activist, encourages. This means that while we are listening, we are not scripting what we are going to say next, critiquing what we are hearing, or immediately relating it to our own opinion or experience to bring the conversation back to us.
  • Learn to “Hold Space.” Instead of viewing a meeting as a chance to promote our ideas, we view it as a place to ask questions, listen, explore, and exchange. Instead of taking space, we hold space for others and listen from that empathic or generative place. This blog by Heather Plett describes more fully what it means to “hold space” for people, plus eight tips on how to do it well.

You can find the original version of this post from New Directions Collaborative at www.ndcollaborative.com/listening-that-enables-emerging-possibilities.

Flying Below the Radar: Making Local Progress in Spite of National Dysfunction

Posted on by
Reply
First published in The Huffington Post on April 14, 2016.


If you haven't read James Fallows' chronicle of local progress in The Atlantic, do yourself a favor and click over to read it when you're done here.

In it, Fallows writes about his small-plane travels to four dozen small cities throughout the U.S. Through his journey, we discover an alternate narrative of America, one celebrating the power of local determination, democracy and problem solving.

Nationally, we are utterly incapable of collaboration, compromise or making any progress on solving problems. The very rare exceptions only make the dominant pattern more visible.

Yet in cities big and small, where most people live and work, the ability of residents and officials to solve problems has not abated and may actually have picked up.

I would add this observation to Fallows' encouraging chronicle: There are two distinct strategies and styles evident in many local success stories. One is a more technocratic, top-down, data-driven, often tech-enabled approach. The other is more deliberative and democratic, centered on civic engagement and community empowerment. Both have their strengths and can help address different classes of problems or different aspects of the same problem.

Top-down, technocratic problem solving can be good for technical problems. For example, it can identify where the potholes are, and how to speed up response time to a 911 call.

In New York, for instance, the former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, was a master of technocratic, top-down problem solving, and for many types of problems that worked very well-- but not for all. It created an efficient 311 system that serves citizens well, and strengthened New York's anti-terrorism capabilities. But technocratic attempts to improve schools and police-community relations through corporate approaches of measurement and accountability fell flat and, in many instances, were counterproductive.

There are no purely technocratic fixes for many problems cities face, including poverty, inequality, educational disparities or diminishing opportunity. Such "wicked problems" (as the literature sometimes calls them) prove amazingly resistant to purely top-down solutions.

Instead, such problems require ongoing attention from many disparate actors, durable public support so experiments can prove themselves and blossom into policies and practices that drive progress, and tough choices among competing priorities about how we want to live.

Solutions to such problems can be data-informed but not data-determined because they are, to a very great extent, matters of values, priorities and the trade-offs we are willing to accept as a community. Do the pros outweigh the cons of a much higher minimum wage? Are we willing to experiment to find out? Should we permit bigger buildings in historic neighborhoods if doing so will make rents more affordable? If not, what measures should we take instead? Are we willing to provide the resources to ensure that all schools have adequate and safe facilities and well-trained teachers, or not? If so, how?

This is fertile ground for deliberative democratic work, and in fact that's the only approach that will bear fruit in the long term. In his most compelling examples of renewal and progress, Fallows feature cities where many different groups of people -- experts and non-experts, officials and everyday residents, conservatives and liberals -- work together on solutions.

As technocratic approaches reach their limit, we have the opportunity to help cities make progress on their more wicked problems. We can do so by engaging and empowering communities, building the public will needed to sustain sound policy, developing strong lines of communication, and by celebrating our successes rather than wallowing in our failures.

The Work and Workers of Democracy

Posted on by
Reply
In our Education Week blog, Deborah Meier and I have been discussing the meaning of "democracy," as well as public policies that might promote democracy schools. Public policy can be a rallying point, and a take-off for discussion and debate. It can be a foundation for coalition building. Advancing policies for democracy in schools can also raise public awareness of the purpose of education.

Definitions are more than semantics. What democracy means makes a lot of difference for strategy. What policies - and other things -- will advance democracy in schools, both as an idea and as a living practice, while also advancing democracy?

If we understand democracy as collective power to shape the world around us, we highlight democracy as something we co-create. Last fall The New York Review of Books reprinted a conversation that the novelist Marilynne Robinson had with president Obama in Iowa. She argued that democracy gained its tremendous appeal in American history from the idea that it was "something people collectively made." This rattled Obama. It seemed clear that he had never thought about democracy in this way.

The idea of democracy as something we make, something that we co-create, highlights the work of making democracy schools. Democracy understood as our collective work also highlights democracy schools' role in preparing people who will make democracy through their work. We should pay attention to all the co-workers in making democracy, whatever their particular roles in formal governance structures.

Last weekend I made this point about the meaning and the work of democracy in Washington, speaking to deans of colleges of education at the American Education Research Association, making a presentation with Margaret Finders, chair of the education department at Augsburg College to the John Dewey Society, and talking to participants at the Council of Foundations meeting. All three groups were meeting in DC.
The book by Melissa Bass, The Politics and Civics of National Service, was extremely useful (Brookings Institution 2013). Bass has an excellent treatment of democracy-building policies, policies that "empower, enlighten, and engage citizens..."

She analyzes three major national service programs in American history, the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s; Volunteers in Service to America, begun by the Kennedy administration in the 1960s; and AmeriCorps, Bill Clinton's signature service program which Barack Obama expanded.

All had similarities. "Service" meant making a contribution to the nation and to communities. All had cross-partisan support. All had educational elements. But they understood service quite differently. It made a difference.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, which involved over three million young men from 1933 to 1942 in conservation effort like planting trees (sometimes it was called the "tree army"), building shelters and roads in parks, and many other activities, had a strong emphasis on public work - collective work that was visible and helped to build the nation's commonwealth, the national park system. Partly because of the work focus the CCC had enormous visibility -- even now, far more Americans know about the CCC than VISTA or AmeriCorps. It had also impacts that the other two service programs, focused on civic virtue, didn't have.

The young men of the CCC developed great pride in their work. They also learned identities of citizens through their work. They were not volunteers or people taking an idealistic break from the rest of their lives. Clinton described AmeriCorps as "taking time out to serve." That citizen identity of the CCC expressed through work, in contrast, stayed with them into everyday work, which Nan Kari and I discovered when we interviewed many veterans of the CCC for our book, Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work.

The work focus of the CCC -- and other programs like the Works Progress Administration -- contributed to the sense that democracy was something people were making in the 1930s. The historian Lisabeth Cohen wrote a book, Making a New Deal, whose title conveys the point.

We need to emphasize policies and practices that advance the work of making and sustaining democracy schools and the larger democracy. We need initiatives, like a new version of Cooperative Education, which tie liberal arts and citizenship to work experiences and also prepare students for citizenship expressed through their work in the future.

Democracy's future depends on renewing the understanding that we make it.

The Work and Workers of Democracy

Posted on by
Reply
We need to emphasize policies and practices that advance the work of making and sustaining democracy schools and the larger democracy. We need initiatives, like a new version of Cooperative Education, which tie liberal arts and citizenship to work experiences and also prepare students for citizenship expressed through their work in the future.

The Work and Workers of Democracy

Posted on by
Reply
We need to emphasize policies and practices that advance the work of making and sustaining democracy schools and the larger democracy. We need initiatives, like a new version of Cooperative Education, which tie liberal arts and citizenship to work experiences and also prepare students for citizenship expressed through their work in the future.

why Donald Trump is anti-conservative

Posted on by
Reply

Although not a conservative, I have sincere respect for conservative thought, because I think its core insight is human limitation. We human beings are too frail cognitively and morally to change societies wholesale without bad consequences.

You can come to that insight from a religious background, thinking that human beings are sinful but that we receive invaluable guidance from the divine. You can be completely secular, like Friedrich von Hayek, and argue that people lack the cognitive capacity to understand or manipulate something as complicated as a modern society, so we shouldn’t try to manage it centrally. Or you can be a cultural traditionalist, like Edmund Burke, and presume that much trial-and-error is embedded in all local traditions, whereas novel ideas are likely to go wrong, especially when imposed from without or above.

Regardless of your entry point, the conservative premise of human limitation leads to certain biases or tendencies: against central governments, against radical reforms, and in favor of durable constitutions, markets, and common law.

Of course, there is another side to each of those arguments, and I often land on the progressive rather than conservative side. (Just for instance, I don’t think that modern capitalist economies are really distributed systems that avoid top-down control; I think they are disruptive forces run by a few arrogant people.) But the conservative perspective is always worth serious consideration.

By this light, Donald Trump is not only the least conservative candidate in the current field, but the most anti-conservative candidate I can think of in modern American history. His whole argument is against human limitation. He promises that he can make everything radically better by applying his own amazing brainpower. He acknowledges none of the constraints prized by conservatives: religious revelations, cultural norms, constitutional checks, limited government in a mixed economy, or common law. I think his strong support in the primaries underlines the fact that the Republican electorate had become anti-conservative in basic ways, although a genuinely conservative GOP core is horrified by his campaign. As they should be, because he is the diametrical opposite of what is most valuable in conservatism.

See also: What defines conservatism; Edmund Burke would vote Democratic; and the left has become Burkean.

The Work and Workers of Democracy

Posted on by
Reply
We need to emphasize policies and practices that advance the work of making and sustaining democracy schools and the larger democracy. We need initiatives, like a new version of Cooperative Education, which tie liberal arts and citizenship to work experiences and also prepare students for citizenship expressed through their work in the future.