Andre's Development Blog

Changing address

2008-12-16T05:51:00.000-08:00

Dear readers, friends, co-travellers and anyone else who may chance upon this blog. It is with some sadness that I am shifting my blog to wordpress. Sadness because this is the place where I started blogging; the place where I started my process of sharing my journey of learning and change with the world. I remember the first little bubbles of excitement when I discovered that someone had actually visited my blog. I remember the even greater excitement when I received a comment on something I had written. Not that I've received a huge number of visits... But then, for whom does the songbird sing? I suppose it's for whoever is around to hear!

So, enough emotionalising this transition. Instead, simply come and visit my new blog over at http://andreling.wordpress.com. I look forward to seeing you there soon!

What I've been doing

2008-12-01T17:15:00.000-08:00

The way that can be described is not the absolute way...

-- Lao Tse

It's been a while since I last posted and so I feel the need to explain my absence from the blogosphere to the world. The basic justification is that I have been immersing myself in my MA in Participation Power and Social Change and, more specifically, the preparation of my Analytical Paper. The Analytical Paper is, essentially, supposed to be a kind of concept paper that can be used to frame the work I will be doing when I return to Seva Mandir. It will combine a contextual analysis, a conceptual framework and an overview of how I plan to go about addressing the questions that I intend to ask.

I won't go into the context just here, but the conceptual framework seems worth sharing. Essentially, I will be locating my action research project at the theoretical intersection of three main domains: complexity, power and learning.
There are plenty of theories related to each of these domains and I have been seeking out the particular ones where they converge. This has led me to a number of texts that have quite significantly contributed to the way that I think about my participation in the universe - and particularly in social life.

So far my learning journey here at IDS seems to have given me a much more solid understanding of the more philosophical dimensions of the work that I am involved in. In particular, I have come to gain a more solid understanding of the idea of 'epistemology' - a word I had often heard, sometimes used but whose definition (and importance) I had never understood so completely. I have also manged to explore the linkages between knowledge and power and understand how participatory action research serves to transform power relations by engaging people in the creation of new knowledge.

I have also had the opportunity to explore Mezirow's work on Transformative Learning:

"the emancipatory process of becoming critically aware of how and why the structure of psycho-cultural assumptions has come to constrain the way we see ourselves and our relationships, reconstituting this structure to permit a more inclusive and discriminating integration of experience and acting upon these new understandings."

Combined with Hayward's (2000) reconceptualisation of power as 'the network of social boundaries to action' and the very important observation that the very idea of negative freedom is absurd (she argues instead for a positive and political form of freedom), all this has amounted to a rather powerful set of concepts that have been making me continuously rethink the nature of and my engagement in the world.

On top of all this, I have been trying to familiarise myself with Ralph Stacey and the idea of complex responsive processes. Stacey has perhaps provided me with the most radical worldview of all. Three papers, all available for free, can be downloaded from his university website:

Together these provide a fairly powerful explanation of the relationship between the individual and the social, consciousness and unconscioussness, meaning, knowledge, learning, identity, power and communication all from within a complexity-based framework. I have been doing plenty of learning by explaining and this has really helped me to internalise some of these new ways of seeing the world. I really don't think I can think about anything the same way again!

In that fuzzy space where complexity theory, power theory and learning theory intersect, I will be conducting my action research; exploring the ways in which I can engage in conversations that bring about positive transformation in human organisations (both Seva Mandir and the communities). I think it's going to be a lot of fun! The essay, however, which will only be 5,000 words, is going to be a bit of a challenge. So much to say, and so little space!

On a somewhat different note, I have been having a lot of really great conversations. Feedback - and the need for it - has been one of the recurring themes, as has the need to explore power relations within our learning group, and my Analytical Paper (of course)... Tomorrow will be the second complexity world cafe in which we will recap the last session, go over the concepts that had not been covered previously and then have some further conversations to explore what some of this might mean for practice... It will be interesting to see what kind of energy is present in the room as it will probably be my last opportunity to participate in one of these sessions for sometime :) I can't help but hope that this process of exploring complexity gets the wind under its wings!

It is now way past my bedtime! Sweet dreams!

Complexity World Cafe

2008-11-18T17:43:00.000-08:00

On a radically different note from the previous post...

I co-hosted the first of what may be many sessions on complexity at IDS today! After extensive brain-scratching and chatting with colleagues and co-learners a World Cafe format was developed and we got a good mix of students - including some new faces from outside IDS - talking, sharing and co-creating knowledge!

I must admit that I was a little bit nervous before hand. I know the limits of my own knowledge and wondered what would happen if we didn't get the energy in the room that we needed (it was my first world cafe of this sort!). But we did! And after some initial concern that danced across the faces of people who felt like they didn't know much (most probably including my own!) once the process took off there were people buzzing around the big boards we had put up with marker pens in hand adding all kinds of wonderful ideas to the key-words that we had put up.

The key-words were: systems, self-organisation, emergence, chaos, non-linearity and attractors. We also had blank sheets up for people to add whatever concepts they might want. Everything got completely filled up and the curiosity and eagerness to share ideas felt almost electric!

The wrap up was a little rushed (and couldn't be finished) but it was really good to have Rosalind Eyben, a fellow(ess) here, to do some of the wrap up and guide the reflection on what had emerged. We ended with declarations of a desire to take the work forward, people volunteered to help out, suggestions rolled forth and I wondered how so much happened without my really doing anything. Quite remarkable!!!

Big thanks to Agnes for the photos ;)

rights or responsibilities

2008-11-18T17:14:00.000-08:00

Well, miraculously the essay slipped out without too much anguish :) Actually, the writing process was a really good exercise for helping me to digest a whole load of reading materials that I have found rather insightful. Now with that behind me I have got my senses set on the upcoming 'Analytical Paper' that I will need to have ready by December 10th. This will be the place in which I present the conceptual and contextual framing of the work that I will be doing when I return to India. Fortunately, it has been taking shape quite nicely thanks to some good discussions with fellows, researchers, students and myself ;) I will, however, need a designated supervisor (and don't have one yet!)...

The emerging framework for my action inquiry is one that uses complexity, learning and power lenses to study processes of facilitating learning for change at multiple levels including (1) myself (as a reflective facilitator); (2) individuals in the organisation; (3) the organisation as a whole; (4) the communities with whom the organisation works.

Otherwise I experienced a rather wonderful sense of joy recently as our class had a kind of epiphany about its responsibility for actively shaping its own learning process. I've been fascinated with the way the course is unfolding. Simply observing and reflecting on this has made for a very profound learning process indeed! I also believe that it has reinforced some of my thinking about the rights-responsibilities debate that surfaces quite often back at Seva Mandir. Knowing that we had the right to shape the process and realising that it was our responsibility to shape our process; how do these two ideas complement each other? Does the one need the other? What is a right that is not realised?

I read something today that talked of the right of people to create "...authentic, caring, sustainable communities, to control their resources, to govern themselves, and guide their own evolution..." In what way is this not the people's responsibility? Claiming rights or taking responsibility? Is there any difference? Rights only become realised when people take responsibility. But does the process of claiming rights somehow short-circuit the deeper cultural change that occurs when people frame their process as one of taking individual and collective responsibility for co-creating a different reality? Is it merely some combination of the two? Why am I so much more concerned with responsibilities than rights? Is it because responsibility implies rights but rights don't imply responsibilities? If I have a right but don't make any effort to claim it, whose fault is that? Perhaps this seems decontextualised!?

Back to our class, if we had the right to shape our learning process but didn't take the responsibility, then what would it mean? And if we were not told that we had the right to shape our learning process but were only told that we had the responsibility for shaping it - then might that have triggered a more pro-active reaction from the outset? I recently posted the following on a new wordpress blog that I am experimenting with (exploring the added functionality that might prove useful for my documenting my learning journey!) as part of my wonderings:

Is the language of responsibilities more powerful than the language of rights? Does it invoke more action on behalf of the would-be ‘right-claimers’? Is the whole ‘rights’ framework a ‘Northern’ construction that is being pushed on the rest of the world (along with so much else, like the modern Nation State) because asking the poor and marginal to take ‘responsibility’ for solving their problems sounds embarrassing when it is known that so many of their problems are perpetuated by the ‘North’? Are these questions harsh or unfair or am I onto something here?

I think that this is something we all need to think about very seriously: what is our responsibility in the world and are we honoring it?

essay writing

2008-11-09T07:37:00.000-08:00

Right now I am supposed to be writing my first assessed essay of the term. It's Sunday afternoon and the essay is due at 8.45 on Monday morning. Go figure!

Well, in any case, the title is: "Contribution of an inter-disciplinary approach to studying and/or practicing development."

It's quite an experience putting together my first assessed essay in years. I have written countless reports and documents over the last 5 + years since I arrived in India to do 'real' work but none of them really had any references. Exploring how to manage multiple data sources, to extract the key arguments that diverse authors are making, find suitable quotes, weave them all together and ensure that my own voice and thinking finds its space - and, that at the end of it all, the whole thing actually forms a coherent whole, is quite a fascinating process.

I have already made three mind-maps. The first one was supposed to be the overall structure of the essay. The second one I had to produce when I realised that I had underestimated the depth that would be required for the second half of my paper (which only became obvious after completion of the third half) but ended up just revealing the need for restructuring of the first half before being able to figure out how to proceed. The third was for the second half of the essay, laying out the key themes that would need to be addressed on the way to the conclusion. Wow! Last time I really used mind-maps in such a systematic manner was for revision guides back in my undergraduate days.

Anyway, here's something that doesn't fit anywhere in my essay. Some food for thought, I suppose:

I am calling for a confluence of worldviews... not a dismantling of diversity, but a kaleidascopic harmonisation of what we know and how we know to vastly expand the range of present and future worlds that we can perceive, experience and co-create!

Thank you and please mind your epistemology!

A sense of belonging

2008-10-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

N.B. This piece has been taken from my reflective writing journal and should be understood as tentative and incomplete :)

After our group session this morning [actually on October 28th], which surfaced many questions for me, I had a good long (much appreciated and really valuable) chat with one of my co-learners... It's hard to relate it all without the background so I won't try to get into the detail of it all... But the conversation also made it clear that I need to be more aware of and explicit about certain aspects of my own behaviour, thinking and worldview. It also generated a lot of conundrums for me. This is my attempt to make sense of it all!

Two main ones that stand out and perhaps permeated our whole conversation were (a) my desire to change people or want people to be a certain way or do a certain thing; and (b) my use of the word 'we' which taps into the bigger question of whether this is ok or not, why I do it and, ultimately, my sense of belonging in the world. I decided to ponder these ideas as I went out into the pastures and the forest of Stanmer Park. The walk led me up a hill, in the sunshine, to a little bench carved out of a tree trunk where I sat cross legged for some 15 minutes in contemplation. It then took me back through a little stretch of forest to my class, where I am sitting now.

I will start with a question around my sense of belonging. I came into this world as the product of two people from different cultures; a Jewish (culturally but not religiously) Tunisian mother who emigrated to France at the age of 18 to pursue her higher education in Paris, and an English father (from a down-to-earth middle class family) who had travelled to India by train in his early 20s. The two of them met while travelling in Greece. Various happenings led to my mother moving to England where my father was pursuing his Masters at the time and after some time they were married and my older brother was on the way. I came five and a half years later (during which time my parents and brother had visited India and lived in Hong Kong.

I was born in England in the Norfolk and Norwich hospital. Before turning one, I was in Qatar and Bahrein. My mothers parents and siblings had all moved to Paris and we would visit them once in a while. I was back in England until I was 4 when my family first moved to Hong Kong - where I stayed until I turned 8. During that time I visited Bali, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore - often more than once. I was studying in the English stream of the French International School.

By the time I was 8 and heading back to England, I had almost no recollection of what the place was or who my friends had been. My brother seemed shocked that I couldn't remember my childhood friends. Indeed, the whole house (where I had spent my first months and most of my first 4 years) seemed like a complete blur. It soon became normal. I completed primary school and then had my first two years of high school in England... By the time I was a teenager, I was headed back for Hong Kong where I spent the next 5 years. Again, plenty of travelling around South East Asia, this time adding Vietnam, Phillipines and China (proper) to the list. I remember during this time often being the one who was friends with everyone - including people who were not friends with each other... it was a fine line between belonging and not belonging. And I got that everywhere.

When I turned 18, I was headed for England for my undergraduate degree. I had chosen Environmental Policy with Economics at the LSE because it seemed to be the course that combined everything I was interested in. I already knew that I wanted to make positive change in the world. After the initial months in halls of residence I joined a group of friends that I clicked with. Only one of them was fully English. The rest? Turkish, Iranian, Singaporean-German, Korean-Irish, Indian, Mexican-Israeli, Luxembourg... And so it goes on... While there was a strong affinity on many levels, we were, I think, ideologically quite different. Nonetheless most of my undergraduate years were spent feeling that these people were as close to a family as I could have without actually being with my biological family.

When I finished my studies we all went to India together. I knew that I wanted to work for an NGO, to experience this 'development' thing first hand (as my course had seriously problematised it for me!). So we all went off together, they left one by one and I stayed for 5 years (that's how one of my friend's described their take on it). During that time I became part of the organisation where I was working, I lived-worked in a small town for one and a half years, dissolved whatever barriers existed between my life and my work, became almost fluent in Hindi... and here I am today.

Now. To what do I belong? How am I supposed to have a legitimate sense of belonging in the world? What am I a part of? Deep inside me, the overarching identity identity that really resonates with me is that of being part of the 'world family'; of being human. I am not English, or Tunisian; I am not a Hong-Konger; I am also not Indian, though there are many elements of all of these cultures and I do identify with each. Regardless of where you are from I look at you as a something much like a sibling; usually as a sister or a brother. When I speak of 'we' I speak as a self-proclaimed member of such a family attempting to establish such a relationship with those around me. I suppose it is a bit like a member of a regular family saying to another 'shall we go to the seaside?' or 'what have we done?' or 'we really know how to have a good time' or 'we've been through a tough time, lets put our heads and hearts together and try and sort this out'.

Now. My own family may ask me what right I have to use 'we' for extending my sense of what's going on, for making judgements about the situation or for making appeals. We are all individuals! Don't try to make a 'we' out of us as if we weren't unique individuals! Point taken. But how long would a family with no sense of 'we' actually hold out? Isn't this collective identity part of what gives us strength, what keeps us together and fills our lives with joy and meaning? Perhaps this is only my belief. My way of looking at it. At this point, I feel the need of putting in a disclaimer: I'm not saying I don't get joy from my own individuality, because I do. But my sense of belonging is important. Though I can't source the quote, someone said: "I am because we are". That's my point.

So I extend this 'we' to what I consider to be my extended family. People I have never met before. A bunch of 'total strangers'. Strangers? OK, I suppose that's a relative term, there are degrees of strangeness. But we all share the same home! We, effectively, eat from the same pot and drink the same water. We depend on the same biological or ecological life-support system (our environment). If some of us damage it for our own benefit at the expense of others, reality will pay us back - through terrorist attacks, through financial turmoil, through food crises, through water shortages and floods and countless other factors. We (oops, see how I have slipped into this 'we' thing?) are all in this together. Aren't we?

Now I recognise that not everyone might feel that they are part of the 'we' that I write about (it seems like a bit of a generalisation and could appear to lack respect for 'our' diversity). Does that mean that there is something not quite right about my usage of the word 'we'? Should I not be using 'we'? Perhaps I do not yet have an answer and this is something for me to contemplate. But do I plan to stop using it? Not yet. I do, however, feel that I can find ways of tempering my usage of 'we'. For example, I can weave in a little bit of 'I' to demonstrate that I see myself as an equally questionable part of 'we' not something above or separate from 'we'. I can also add a bit of 'you' to acknowledge the uniqueness of the reader. To invite them not only to engage with the ideas I put forth but also to challenge them.

The next question is about changing people - my desire to change people - what is it and is it ok? This is one of those awkward questions that tries to hide away most of the time because it's not an easy one to answer. Building upon some of the views that I have shared earlier about 'we', I do find myself feeling that a lot of change is needed in the world.

As a person studying development - whether I am for it or against it (whatever that means) - I clearly have some sense of what I value, what seems important to me and how I would like the world to be. Rather than seeing the world as immutable with myself merely as an entity that must adapt to it in order to attain some kind of ability to continue existing, I see the world as something subject to human influence, something we can act upon in ways that can be positive or negative from various stand-points. I, therefore, see that we all have a potential responsibility for influencing the world in ways that are positive - not just for ourselves, but for the 'we'. If I see people doing things that I see as being negative, then I will feel a sense of discomfort. A tension will emerge and I will want to see how such a situation can be transformed into something positive. For example, if I see someone beating another, I would want to step in. I would probably want to assess the situation first, however: after all it could be self-defence! So context does matter to me. Now, imagine I see people as being tangled up in a vicious cycle of conflict. I see suffering emerge as a result. I would like to find a way of addressing the issue. So I would come up with some kind of a strategy for engaging. I would want to talk to people about what was going on. About why there was a conflict. About how they felt about it. And if they both said there was no other option... would I simply walk away? Even if I knew that innocent children were dying? Even if I knew that the conflict was being fuelled by some external factor - for example, some unconnected geo-political concern?

Yes! I want to change people! I don't want to tell them what to do though! I want to invite them to inquire deeply, openly, honestly into themselves, into each other, into the systems of which they are a part; to gain and create knowledge about their realities that matter to them and that they can apply in order to live lives that are closer to what they want. But to engage in ernest, both individually and jointly, in a process of reflection and to act upon what emerges... this change I would love to bring! Does it make sense? I would like to help people who are locked in or trapped, in pain and discomfort, to break free from the shackles that oppress them, whether imposed by self, other or both.

And, of course, I know that I have much to learn. That I am probably still very naieve. That things are not so simple. That I will make many mistakes in my efforts to do this. That I will make judgements at times which later I see as wrong - or perhaps even regret. That I will have to change myself a great deal in order to be successful in fulfilling my aspirations. That it may not be possible. That I may be confused, or lost, or just plain wrong. But, and bearing all this in mind, I really believe right now, that this is OK. So long as I strive to be honest about it; so long as I continue to challenge my own ideas; so long as I invite others to challenge me and my views; and so long as I am respectful of the perspectives, experiences and opinions of those I interact with. So please help me to be helpful!

Fragmentation and Healing

2008-10-30T14:42:00.000-07:00

N.B. This piece has been taken from my reflective writing journal and should be understood as tentative and incomplete :)

It seems that we are all here in order to make sense of things. We look into books, we look into each other, searching for what is out there, what is right - and maybe also, who we are. Each of these is important. But it is often the last that is most neglected.

What we need now, is healing. Healing at so many levels. We need to reconcile our divergent worldviews, our pain, our joys and our shared destiny. We cannot exist the one without the other. The suffering that we continue to inflict upon our own family by thinking that we know best, that we have the answer, that it is this way not that way is causing such rotten damage that we are, in effect both the poisoner and the poisoned. The question before all of us now is how we can escape from this vicious cycle of harming others and harming ourselves. Where does the healing begin?

When I was working in a small town in India I became sensitised to the fragmentation that was all around me. The town where I have been working was populated by around 5,000 people belonging to over 25 identity groups - Hindus (over 20 castes), Jains, Muslims, tribals. That each community has its own neighbourhood - to this I am not opposed. However, that they should be pitted against each other? That they should be positioned in a hierarchical structure which exploits and results in suffering and pain? That politics and religion should be combined as a means to lash out, prevent progress or spread disharmony? That I cannot accept or tolerate - and am open and honest that this is where I am coming from - even if this makes me culturally insensitive! But then I ask, "What happened to vasudev kutumbh?" Where and when was that idea thrown out to rot? By whom? And how dig must the people of this planet dig into their souls to rediscover it?

So where does this loss take us? Youngsters - merely 10 years old will insult each other on the basis of their identity: Hindu dog! Muslim pig-fucker! For these youngsters it can be funny - or perhaps even grown-up seeming to engage in a testosterone, power-display with each other. But this is no small joke. When the right wing Hindu-ist BJP party stirred up a conflicy between the Tribals and the Muslims, threatening to destabilise an age-old and peaceful co-existence over something that was strictly a matter for the Tribals and Muslims to resolve amongst themselves rather than politicising it! I felt a great deal of fear at that time. Perhaps because I knew that we, as the implementers, had created the opening for such opportunistic communalism through our activities. It was not the first time we had done so either. I learned: never, never, never fail to do the communal calculations in any community development work. Make it an explicit part of the considerations of what is being done and make as sure as you can that you have left no little stone unturned. But how do we become immaculate? Not just as individuals able to be mid-wives to new and more harmonious realities, but as a collective; as an organisation?

So these little tensions erupt now and again. Perhaps that is a necessary or inevitable feature of what is, more or less, a state of peaceful co-existence. I would ask: where do we decide to place the bar of what wrong-doing we are ready to tolerate? How much pain and injustice can we tolerate? Can we really tolerate any? What are the world and its many people calling out for? Clamouring for?

Which takes me to the old man I met in the Muslim Mohalla. We sat down to have a group meeting. To talk about the new water tank that was being proposed and for me to get a chance to meet some of the people that I would be living with for the next year and a half. An old man, with greying hair, a weathered face and wearing dark-grey shirt and pajamas came toward me and slowly squatted down onto his haunches. I greeted him: "Salam alaykum!" "Alaykum Salam!" he replied. I asked him how he was. He asked "What can I answer?" I asked him what did he mean? He told me of his family. A broken family. Sons that didn't speak to him. It was heart wrenching to come close to understanding how he felt. The world was not like it used to be. Children used to respect their parents. Now all they wanted was to be free. To be apart. There was deep loneliness and pain emanating from the old man. And I said, "I'm sorry. I understand what you are saying."

And then there was the lady from the Meghwal community who burst into tears while one of our volunteers was out investigating the relationship between women and water in her community. After a semi-structured interview, in which a local youth (one of our hero's) was helping out as a translator, the woman began to cry. The questions had been probing the problems faced by women in collection and management of water and the idea was that some of these discussions would help to highlight some of the usually unspoken issues faced by the women. The volunteer and the local youth asked the woman what the matter was: "In all my life, my own sons have never asked me how I felt! Never asked me what difficulties I faced! Never offered to help me fetch the water! Never asked me what could be done. Today you two people, not of my own family are the first to ask me such a question!" So much pain - would it have ever surfaced without those questions.

So the fragmentation - that we see on the news at the international level, that we see in our big cities, that we see in our small towns, that we see in our communities, that we see in our families - how deep down does this fragmentation permeate? I have come to locate it within the individual. I am fragmented, you are fragmented he/she is fragmented. Our minds are fragmented. Our souls are fragmented. We are full of contradictions. Our very process of perceiving is, the vast majority of the time, is fragmentary in nature. Our relationships with everything around us rise up out of us, connect to that which is around us, and feed back into us. Just like a loop. On the one hand we see ourselves as victims of the outer world. But why do we not also see ourselves as victims of the inner world? Why do we not see that it is our own way of being in the world that we have control over? That it is the harmony that we can cultivate within ourselves that will enable us to bring harmony into the outer world?

And this is why I believe that what we need now is healing and not 'development'. If we were to focus our collective energies on healing the people, healing the families, the communities, the Tribes, what would be the need for anyone to 'do' development? If people were living in harmony, helping each other to live; co-existing, co-learning and co-creating, then what would be the need for projects and institutions? We need to redefine what we call a vibrant economy. We need to redefine what we call politics. We need to redefine our very own selves and become part of a living process in which there are not people doing things to other people; only people doing things, for each other, together.

This line of reasoning led me to wonder. Could we have created the world we have today, with its various crises, without injustice. Injustice is what has enabled us to produce this mess. And it is the ceaseless denial of injustice that allows us to perpetuate it. But how does one remove injustice? What is the process to be followed? Yesterday I watched a movie about samurai. In it one of them said: you cannot kill the weeds that choke the flowers by poisoning them, for you will then kill the flowers too. But you can plant flowers that draw their energy from the weeds, causing them to wither and vanish. Does this work for our approach? It makes me think of appreciative inquiry!

As the dust settles...

2008-10-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been a while now since I posted here! The dust is finally settling a little here at IDS and I feel that I have reached a comfort level where I can return to my blog!

I have not been inactive at all during this time! I have been furiously conversing, reflecting and also writing - it's just that none of it has found its way onto this blog. And there doesn't seem to be much of a way that I can do justice to the experience I have been having. I have started maintaining a journal using Tomboy on Linux, which allows me to link up all my reflections, reading notes, class/lecture notes, daily to do lists and so on with each other.

I have also set up a ning platform for our class (presently limited to just the 9 of us) after everyone agreed on it and have made a couple of posts up there as part of my reflective practice and also as part of the effort to get it up and running properly. There is much to learn about how my co-learners and I can and will function in this virtual space... There is, of course, at least as much to be learned about how we function in the real spaces that we share together...

In any case, this posting is merely to explain the absence and to point out that some slightly more consistent blogging can be expected here. I was thinking that, amongst other things, I could use this space for my meta-reflections - reflections on how I have been reflecting, learning and changing as part of the course. In the meanwhile, however, I will follow up with a few posts from the ning platform.

Also for an update, I have initiated a long with some co-learners a process for establishing a 'complexity' group. The remit is appropriately fuzzy at the time being but it is essentially supposed to function as a kind of platform for all those interested in and/or working with 'complexity' in any of its various guises to engage in dialogue and learning together... hopefully in order to figure out new ways of translating whatever emerges into new and more effective ways of being and doing... This should be most interesting (even though I won't be around to see it directly)!

Aside from that there is a 'Questioning Development' group (funny how that's been one of the labels I've been using in this blog for some time now!) set up by some co-learners that has started meeting regularly and this is generating some hot stuff for everyone to sink their teeth, minds and souls into. We seem to have quickly entered difficult terrain here; with one of the key subjects for discussion being around the need for deeper acknowledgement of historicity in development interventions and also the need for a deeper acknowledgement of the pain and injustice that has been (and still is being) meted out in much of the non-Western world as part a process that supports Western lifestyle and consumption patterns. Great. We will continue to delve into this, with all the pain and difficulty that it entails. There is much space to be held as we question the very notion of 'development'...

Which reminds me of what triggered me to return to this blog... I read just now, the following quote in a review of World as Lover, World as Self: A Guide to Living Fully in Turbulent Times by Joanna Macy (2007) on Amazon (see here) and thought it was really rather worth sharing with the wider world. It also makes me think I should be reading this book!

"Development is not imitating the West. Development is not high-cost industrial complexes, chemical fertilizers and mammoth hydro-electric dams. It is not selling your soul for unnecessary consumer items or schemes to get rich quick. Development is waking up - waking up our true potential as persons and as a society." (p. 132)

On that note, following are two posts that I had shared on the ning platform... Not perfect pieces, very much raw and unedited, but I've decided to share them nonetheless! So here goes...

Back to school!

2008-10-12T03:35:00.001-07:00

After 5 years of living in the 'wilderness', of gathering experience and of learning from the immediate reality, I am finally back to 'school'. School, in this case, is the Institute of Development Studies located at Sussex University. My course, for those who don't yet know, is the MA in Participation Power and Social Change. I have blogged earlier about the questions I had on whether to go back to school? so I won't give more of that here... Instead, my take on what I've experienced so far.

Firstly, I have no regrets about coming here. It is proving to be everything I could have hoped for and more.

Academically, we've had a very light first week. Most of the time has gone into dealing with all of the formalities and getting us introduced to our courses. More importantly, than this, though, it has focused on getting us to know each other. For example, Robert Chambers' (of PRA fame) introductory workshop enabled us to meet all the 130 or so students, break the ice and lay the foundations for a real state of community! The sheer diversity that is present is something to be happy about - and not just nationality but background, past employment, experience, knowledge, sector, interests... Wow!

So with the ice broken, the first week has involved lots and lots of conversing with as many people as possible on as many subjects as possible. Wonderful! Everyone is interesting. No one has been boring or arrogant or offensive in any way whatsoever! Quite amazing! And the conversations range from:

Trenchant critiques of development - like the wonderful conversation with someone from Kenya about the loss of traditional cultural values that were more participatory and inclusive than any modern democratic state structures, which left us with the question of why there is so little mention of 'love' in the development discourse... My thoughts drifted toward Arturo Maturana... to

Sharing of knowledge on development practice, within organisations, working at the field level - what's working, what isn't, where we're confused, where we're on the right track and where we aren't, drawing on our diverse experiences and backgrounds...

I must admit that I have been talking rather a lot.

Though I have only had one day actually focusing on my particular course, it seems like just what I wanted. We have started using participatory methods and reflecting on them, we have explored different modes or ways of learning (playing, gardening, reading, collaborating... and many more), we have divided into reflection groups, we have set up an inquiry to explore how gender may influence our learning processes, we have shared our life stories (visually and orally) and explained how this led us to IDS. We shared our hopes and fears and talked about them openly, offering each other support and expressing our common desire for solidarity within the group. The idea of forming an on-line learning group (e.g. through ning or perhaps through the ids intranet) that can be used while we are away to enable a continuous sharing of knowledge and experience has been floated and enthusiastically welcomed by the group. I am really quite excited by all of this!

As part of my course I will be maintaining a journal. This will involve actually writing with a pen so I am quite curious to see how this will compare and contrast with the writing that I do on this blog.

In the meanwhile, I am writing an essay today critiquing various definitions of development and will also be doing some further editing work for Seva Mandir's 6th Comprehensive Plan document. I also have plenty of reading to busy myself with. As the weeks roll on I will continue blogging my experiences here at IDS.

Future Uncertain 2

2008-10-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

After many months I made a return visit to www.opendemocracy.net and read this, an article by Paul Rogers presenting two scenarios for 2020.

The first is based on a business-as-usual kind of a story. To read it is to wonder whether bringing children into this world is the right thing to do. It is so horrific and yet so possible, that it hardly bears thinking about - except that if we don't acknowledge the risk, we might forget to do what we need to do to avoid it.

The second imagines that we really get our act together and a commitment to positive change at a global level is fulfilled by leaders. It seems just about liveable - but not easy - and can be thought as 'just about making it'... The contrast between the two, with the former seeming so upsettingly more likely than the latter, left me mind-blown.

I still have no idea where we are really headed and what that means for the lives of common people. All I know is that I want to be ready for anything, holding within me hope and love and the readiness to help humanity create a new reality that is fresh, liberating and wholesome - whether radically, out of the ashes of what we leave behind or as a gentle transformation of our existing systems. But really, now is a time to think and to act like never before.

Meanwhile, I thought I would share this resource (yet to be fully developed and populated!) that I came across (hat tip to Michael Bauwens of Peer-to-Peer Foundation - see many of their posts in my shared items box on the right - for this post, itself a great read) that might end up yielding some fruits in the quest for a better, more sustainable world :) Clearly just sitting around thinking will not get us very far!

protecting the ethnosphere

2008-10-01T04:02:00.000-07:00

The dilemma of what to do about 'uncontacted tribes' or, for that matter, indigenous peoples the world over has been a theme in some of my earlier blog posts. The real issue is the shattering of their worldviews and culture that 'development' almost inevitably brings. I ended my last post on the subject by saying that:

Perhaps, I should just stay well away and avoid even thinking about polluting them with my own confusion!

But this would suggest that there isn't even a role to play in helping them to exist... Though I still have no idea what to do, this wonderful video from the TED talks by Wade Davis (from National Geographic), warmed my heart and, despite the tragic undertones, left me with a small ray of hope:

The idea of there being an ethnosphere that is undervalued (I am trying to imagine, somewhat unsuccessfully, an ethnological economics, like environmental economics, that may offer us ways of protecting it) and, it would seem, whose destruction is considered to be an indication of development itself is really disturbing.

As Wade Davis says in this passage based on his time with aboriginees in northern australia:

...in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning.

This seems like the deepest recognition of everything being one that is conceivable: a life based on it rather than a life spent trying to grasp it. And how different a world this would produce.

So what do we do now?

Back in England... Future Uncertain

2008-09-24T14:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I last put a post up and this lull has coincided with my transition back to England. Amazingly, after two years at a stretch in India, I have not had any adjustment issues (at least, nothing serious). I have been gorging on my mum's fantastic food, propounding my theories about the world to anyone who cares to listen (and those who don't), reading Complexity Economics, immersing myself in blogs and the internet and trying to get a sense of what's going on and how it all fits together. This is my hobby and I think I'm onto something!

The implications of the financial mess that is slowly gripping the economy of the world is taking its time to really loom into the consciousness of the general public. I have read so many blogs and articles on the matter in the last few weeks that I would hardly know where to start pointing anyone who wants to see where things might be headed... All the same, here are some pointers:

And here's a quote from another:

Alan Greenspan has finally decided to admit, you know, this may be one of those once-a-century biggies. [...] There are seven sharks in the tank with the economy.

And the first is financialization because we’re so dependent on this industry that’s sort of half lost its marbles.
The second is that you have this huge buildup of debt, absolutely unprecedented anywhere in the world.
The third is you’ve now got home prices collapsing.
The fourth is you’ve got global commodity inflation building up.
The fifth is you’ve got flawed and deceptive government economics statistics.
The sixth is that you’ve got what they call peak oil where the world is, to some extent, running out of oil. So it’s not just commodity inflation, it’s a shortage of oil.
And then the last thing is the collapsing dollar.

Now, whenever you get this sort of package in one decade, you got a big one. And when Greenspan says it’s a once a century, I think it’s another variation but on a par with the Thirties.

– Kevin Phillips, in a conversation with Bill Moyers

Back to the grounded stuff. None of this bodes well for those who are looking for much comfort in the times ahead. I can see food is going to be a major issues - as is heating, transportation and the general absence of electricity. Would there be a free-for-all or would there be a re-discovery of real community as David Pollard proposes in this fable. Hard to say. I for one have already pledged to grow vegetables for my parents should the need arise!

But since returning from some fascinating community development work in India - which has given me some profound insights into the very essence of 'community' - I have found myself wondering... Do we have community over here in the UK? We're all so disconnected from all the things we depend on - food, fuel, shelter... A few farmers own most of the land - would they share it with us if we needed it? In exchange for work on the fields? As bonded labourers? Or would it be run as a community farm? Silly speculation or serious questions? Who knows?

While I continue to ponder these questions, I am also getting ready to go and do my Masters degree, long a source of confusion as I wonder whether it can be worth the cost. At least the subject rocks: power, participation and social change. What i learn may well be directly applicable to the kinds of challenges that we are going to come up against in the years ahead. For example, I will be learning in depth how to work with groups of people to bring about change in a way that is empowering for everyone.

But then again, if the unthinkable scenario really does unfold, where will that leave me? Will I be able to grow food, make clothes, heal myself and my family if we get ill, etc.? Will I have the relationships that I need with the people around me in my community? Will the skills that I possess or learn be valued by those around me?

At the moment, the work that I have been doing in India is backed by money and I facilitate a process through which that money gets spent in ways that support positive, citizen-led social change. This makes it easy for me to give the community the feeling that I have something that they need and so the process of community building becomes easier... I also have a position and a title that makes clear my role as a facilitator of change. But here in my village, I have none of that? For what am I known? Perhaps almost nothing? What skills can I report to offer? Facilitation? Community Development? Leadership building? Understanding how people interact and relate and how change happens? How to use participatory methods for decision-making? Who's going to elect me as a facilitator? Will people trade food for these things?

This all makes me feel that I would really need a different set of skills altogether! If I should want to put any of my present skills in practice I would still need something more than this that would help to bring people together and leave me in a position where I would be able to do facilitation, to host the process. Maybe just inviting people would be enough?! Is this wishful thinking? One idea that cropped up was trying to set up a community farm. Taking it up as a project in community building... More than anything, this all points at the urgent need to set about reweaving community and making the foundations of that community sustainable and self-reliant insofar as possible...

Whatever, happens, I am quite sure that we live in fascinating times and to be honest I am more excited than scared.

On that note, I would like to share these words from Doug at Footprints in the wind as I get ready for bed:

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 891

We have always expanded our
Confidence
Intellect
Vision
Courage &
Reach
By gathering
With each other
How much we need to
Now

Please pass it on.

© c 2008, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com . Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

What we're about

2008-09-11T15:39:00.000-07:00

All we propose, in return, is that you care for each other, help each other, treat each other with respect and dignity, work and play together and take your future and your children's future into your own hands and do your best to make existence into the most wholesome, meaningful experience possible for everyone.

Get it?

conversations, presencing, change and more

2008-09-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

A while back I had been talking about social objects - the things that give us a reason to be in a relationship with others - and how they are critical elements in the process of social transformation. Now there's a kind of magic that takes place in that fuzzy area where we interact around that thing. What goes on there? And how does it lead to transformation?

Well, recently, there have been some interesting posts on the subject. First by Chris Corrigan and later by Dave Pollard that present a distillation of how this change takes place. Here's what they look like:

Chris Corrigan's Map:
And this, Dave Pollard's:
And it would seem that all this is based on something called the U-Process, developed by Otto Scharmer and friends. The U-process is a kind of framework for bringing about systemic change in all kinds of organisations and groups through a collective change process and is being applied here and there to try and tackle seemingly intractable problems. It looks something like this:

All of this makes good sense in the context of the process that we have been following in order to help Seva Mandir prepare its 6th Comprehensive plan, the meetings that we hold on a regular basis in Seva Mandir and the workshops that we have been organising with the citizen's of Delwara. For example, during the recent meeting with the women or with the 'harijans' (members of the lowest caste group, victims of great discrimination and exclusion) we have to get from a group of disparate individuals, potentially in conflict with each other, to a collective with a shared identity and a commitment to each other. In order to do this, we must travel from 'I' to 'we'. We need to open up our hearts to each other and contemplate what being together means. This is the bottom of the U. At this stage there is a sense of vibration within the group - of being connected to each other - both through minds and hearts ... and it is elevating. Once we reach this stage, translating the shared energy into concrete plans of action becomes much easier. But the process is not always either easy or smooth... and sometimes we are only partly there...

Two stages jump out as being the real critical points that need to be examined in greater depth. One is the shift into presencing. How does it happen? How long should it be sustained? The other is the taking of personal responsibility after presencing - the co-creating... How deep was the presencing? Did it hit the nail on the head? Did it cause the shift deeply enough to take the members to a whole new level? What would this take? Once we get back in our old system, out of the U-experience, we are back in those old positions, old routines, interacting with the same old people reinacting the same old patterns? Sure, if we can maintain our separateness through our newly formed group we may be able to maintain the energy... But high fall-out can be expected...

And, well, it struck me that this process is a kind of fractal - in the sense that it applies to large groups, small groups and well, why not, I suppose... Individuals? Now what would this look like at the individual level? One thing is clear: whether we are engaging in this kind of a U-process at the organisation or group level, we are dealing first and foremost with individuals.

What goes on in the individual during this process? And is there a way that an individual can experience this same transition from one state to another on their own? Is it necessarily a collective process? Is it only through my being and doing with others that I can bring about transformation in myself? If not, is meditation or reflection what this looks like at the personal level? Do I have to disconnect myself from my daily life in order to get there? Am I already there? Can I do this willingly? Can I presence perpetually? Is it more about a state of being?

And can this be done at the level of a community as a whole? What would be the method? How would we get a multitude of fragmented individuals and groups to gradually 'vibrate in harmony' as it were? What is the deepest collective presencing possible for a whole community and how do we get there?

I don't know what the answers are to any of these questions... but they do look like they matter!

And, I suppose, this is where the work that Seva Mandir really fits in. It can provide not just the U experience but it can also do the groundwork to prepare for entry and do the follow-up work to support what comes after. It not only gets people ready to dive in, it not only helps them to access the source, but it also provides support in enacting whatever comes next. Still though, ultimate responsibility lies in the hands of the people themselves. We give no instructions.

But the real question is how deep we get in the U process. This seems key to everything. If we get to the source, where would it take us? What would it take for us to get there? I think we cannot know the answer until we walk the path... And convincing anyone to embark on something that has no clear destination is not easy - although it seems more and more people are talking about this - facilitators, knowledge management experts, and more. But, wedged in all the entanglements of organisational reality - accountability, reports, targets, and the like - how do we do this (by Tom Atlee, hat tip to Dave Pollard)? The unknown or everything that we know (however bad it may be)? How do we prepare people for this kind of trade-off?

My mission in life, forgive me for this, is to facilitate a conscious evolutionary process. Yes, I read these words today on Tom Atlee's site, but I have known this (in these very words) as long back as 6 years ago. In order to do this I need to understand exactly how we connect to the source in the most effective manner to bring about the individual and collective shifts that are required, to harmonise humanity with the flow of nature and liberate the full potential of human spirit. For this I need to know how to get people, systems and everyone else on-board. How to connect people in this quest in the most effective manner. This is what I need to learn. And this is what I need to get from my studies.

Let's see where this road takes me ;)

my tag cloud

2008-09-01T04:12:00.000-07:00

created at TagCrowd.com

the guru illusion (yeh guruwuru kya hai yaar?)

2008-08-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

I am increasingly feeling myself anti-guru - at least in the traditional sense. Some great posts from Mushin who deconstructed his own guru role helped strengthen this feeling in me - although it has been there for quite some time (this is one example). More recently, I was chatting to someone about Baba Asharam Dev here in India who has been implicated in the killing of a child in his ashram as a way of building up religious fervour... Now, this guy has a massive following and loads of money. But why do people place their faith in some distant bearded figure whose words and actions could well have nothing to do with each other!?

The idea that emancipation is possible through one of these bearded fellows who sits on a pedastal is bullshit. Until we learn to realise that God (for want of a better word) exists within ourselves and all those around us, we will spend our lives sitting in the shadow of obscure religious figures whose real nature is as elusive as the very truth we are searching for. What we need is an alternative model for guru. One that ties in more deeply to the social reality that we are confronted with in the present age: loss of community, fragmentation, competitive individualism and the spate of horrors that this brings with it. We need a new conception of guru that embodies collective, distributed wisdom that can transport us to higher levels of collective being.

One simple way of approaching this is to look for the truth in the people who share our immediate circle: one's partner, one's children, one's neighbours, one's community. Can we see the truth in each person? Can one see the wisdom and teaching that each carries? Can we embrace our total lived experience as the guru, seeking the truth, the love, the wisdom or the lesson that can transport us higher in everything around us?

As Lao Tse puts it: "...the good teach the bad/ and the bad are lessons for the good". There is nothing that carries no teaching.

To do this requires the greatest of all powers: having an open heart. Can I have space in my heart for the other? Can I embrace the unknown? Can I let go? Can I dissolve all my boundaries? Can you do it with me?

Let us speak openly and from the heart about things that matter to us. Let us reach out to those who are least heard and let each other into our hearts and let this be the foundation of our families, our communities, our work places and our societies. Then let the guru emerge from our collective interactions and let that be our guide for the future.

What need is there to give more advice than this? Surely the rest will follow from the process!

Women, unity, gifts and spirituality: the foundation for women led community development in Delwara

2008-08-27T02:39:00.000-07:00

In the small multi-caste town of Delwara, a women's group has been formed. This group is a platform for women to come together on a common platform across all kinds of traditional divides - caste, religion, class, etc. - to become agents of their own destiny. This morning, I spent a few hours with the group exploring some of the following questions:

what is unity?
how is unity created?
how is unity destroyed?
how is unity sustained?

Through these questions we covered a wide range of issues: the importance of knowing each other; what does it take to develop a meaningful relationship; making space in the heart for each other; listening with the heart to each others' stories; being there for each other; striving to understand each other; not letting divisive politics fragment the group (a responsibility of each individual); and the need to continuously nurture the group and retain courage in the face of all manner of challenges.

We also discussed the idea that each person present was bringing with them a gift. The group belongs to the women and it is nourished by the gifts that the women themselves bring. What are these gifts that the women bring? The ability to listen. A readiness to help those in need in whatever way possible. A spirit of cooperation and assistance. A desire to make a positive contribution in the world.

It struck me, as we engaged in this conversation, that we had reached a special level in the group. There was an emotional intensity, a sense of being part of something deep - perhaps even spiritual. The group was moving as a whole in a container that reverberated with the sense of collectivity that resonated from the women sitting there. This may only be my take on it though I do plan to check up on this feeling soon.

In some ways, I feel that I crossed a barrier, a boundary in the way that we usually dialogue. It is as though we made a shift from talking about mere practicalities or technicalities of rights, and government and frameworks and water tanks and pension schemes to tapping into the very soul of the women and its collective expression in their group. The words and emotions that were being exchanged were expressions of that individual and collective soul and, at the same time, the food that nourishes it. A deepening reminder of the fact that it is this level of conversation that connects the individual woman and her own soul to that of the group. In this sense it was both transcendental and palpable.

And what this really brings me to is something that I have felt for a long time but never really made a formal point of - and that is that this thing we call development really needs to be reframed as a spiritual process; a process of collective spiritual evolution. I do not feel that this is a dimension that finds adequate expression in the existing discourse around development - even in Seva Mandir. As we work on non-formal education centres, or village institutions, deal with targets and logical frameworks, worry about accountability and transparency, and so on... are we giving due attention to the fact that we are engaged in a process of spiritual evolution? Is there a space for this?

As an afternote: I really enjoyed working with Gulabji (who has replaced me as project coordinator in Delwara) today. He gave space where it was desired and support where it was required. He also was able to bring together spirituality across Hindu-Muslim divides in a seamless and natural manner and although we had not discussed our programme at any great length beforehand, it felt as though we were playing a familiar game. So my deep thanks and respect go out to this special soul!

who am i writing for

2008-08-26T05:16:00.000-07:00

It just struck me that my style of writing is kind of like: 'this is for me, not for you'. Which, is all very well for me, but then what about you? What I would really like to know is how I can combine my writing for me with my writing for you! I want to learn how to write directly from my very centre but write it as though I was listening from where you are - and still have it sound just right.

Because, though I am writing for myself, I like to hope that what I write has meaning that extends beyond myself. Like any songbird - quite content to sing to himself - I also want to be a part of the dawn chorus... the Great Awakening. The realisation, quite simply, that 'This is That'.

Let this be another area of inquiry!

the complan: where am i now?

2008-08-26T02:52:00.001-07:00

An interesting time to write: I'm really supposed to be converting the last 6 months of dialogue, head-scratching, getting tired and worked up, writing on flip-charts, making presentations and so on into a single document that will: (a) communicate to donors what it is that Seva Mandir is planning to do for the next 3 years; and (b) serve as a reference point for Seva Mandir reminding it of the emerging directions and strategies that it has evolved. This document - the 6th Comprehensive Plan - is due in 6 days. But my mind, as ever in these moments, is filled with a multitude of other thoughts - not entirely off topic but off-topic enough to distract me from writing that document!

I think there are questions I have asked in the past that would be very suitable for picking up at this stage in time. Almost all of these questions relate to the process that we followed; to the changes that have taken place (or not); to my hopes and expectations as compared to what really happened; to what i can learn from the path that has been followed (including what I could have done differently - or would do differently next time); to try to identify patterns in the way decisions were taken and the process evolved (and looking at who had what role in that process, including myself); to think about what the blind-spots have been/are - both my own, of key individuals and in the organisation at large; to think of what I will work on when I return...

I have blogged earlier about some of the positive trends that have emerged as a result of the process, so I won't get into the details of the answers to all these questions now...

However, I do feel the need to express one of the feelings that emerges in response to all these questions. That feeling is that Seva Mandir has some blind spots in terms of the way it operationalises its understanding of complexity, power, organisation and learning - and this needs to be addressed. So long as these blind spots remain unresolved, some very critical problems will persist and continue to serve as a source of much pain and frustration for all those involved.

Writing up the Comprehensive Plan document while I can feel and see all of these things - perhaps all brought into stark relief as a result of the process that we have followed for the last 6 months - and not having the time to properly engage with any of these issues is like a kind of torture! However, it is helping me to cultivate that wisdom of the Tao.

It is also showing me, quite clearly, that the kind of process I undertook here was not able to get to the real depths of the issues and that an altogether different approach would probably be required. Interestingly, I feel that it would not necessarily be one that piggy-backs or is incorporated into a time-bound 'comprehensive plan' type planning process. It may well be that such a process contains within itself anti-learning elements. Therefore, the real change process will be one that systematically builds deeper and deeper learning into everything that the organisation does.

This, it seems to me, is really a quest for profound inter-personal truth and understanding. It is a spiritual quest and it cannot be packaged in a 6 month process. Though perhaps such a process can help us launch ourselves on such a trajectory... And it's just too early to really say whether this has happened yet or not... And so, life in limbo for Andre continues. Now I should really be getting back to writing the comprehensive plan!

levers

2008-08-21T23:43:00.000-07:00

While the old saying - there is no 'magic lever' - does seem to hold true at some level, I have come to look at things a little differently. My current sense is that:

Everything is a lever if you look at it the right way!

All this is really saying is that every situation contains a pathway out; a particular route that will lead to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The real challenge that lies before humanity today is to become masters at seeing that pathway through all the other clutter that gets in the way or obscures our vision of what really matters!

And while there may be no single lever, starting to see the potential lever in every situation and learning how to use it (or them) in the best possible way could be, in its own right a kind of magic lever. Just as with a regular lever, this means knowing what it rotates around, how that connects it to everything else, whether it should be pulled or not, and what, exactly, it will take to get that lever moving.

We need methods and anti-methods for our madness!

blind spots and collective evolution

2008-08-21T12:02:00.000-07:00

A number of conversations and random readings over the last few days have really re-sensitised me to the need to understand the issues surrounding resistance to change... One idea that keeps on floating back is that change often seems to happen in spite of all the things that organisations do to prevent it. Change is about breaking patterns of behaviour or relationship that are by their very definition self-replicating, self-reinforcing. This is what creating novelty is all about. This is innovation. And a good reminder for an organisation working to bring about change in society is that it can only happen there if it is happening within us, within the organisation. We have to be in a state of creative, spontaneous change, always.

In order to do/be this we need to identify our blind spots – the systematic oversight that prevents us from seeing what it is that we are all doing that is obstructing us; the patterns of behaviour and thinking that prevent us from moving forward simply, creatively, harmoniously. These obstructive patterns emerge out of the simple interactions amongst us all every day. However, the process of their emergence is vastly complex – and that is one of the main reasons that they remain invisible to us. Understanding how the little, well-intentioned, self-righteous efforts we make every day add up to a vicious cycle that leads to stagnation at best and collapse at worst, seems critical. And that calls for a deep, collaborative inquiry into our very own selves; to know who and what we really are and to learn how to evolve, as both a collective and its individual members, in a more effective manner.

Just a test

2008-08-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

This is just a test to see whether I can get my blog directly published in my eldis blog... Then I would need to figure out how to select whether or not to get a particular blog posted to the eldis blog or not... Hmmm... now would that be too much to ask?!?!

the right course!

2008-08-17T12:13:00.001-07:00

Just came across the following in the Introduction chapter of the Handbook of Action Research (Reason and Bradbury, 2008) - one of my course texts.

...the primary purpose of action research is not to produce academic theories based on action; nor is it to produce theories about action; nor is it to produce theoretical or empirical knowledge that can be applied in action; it is to liberate the human body, mind and spirit in the search for a better, freer world.

If this is to be the spirit of the course, then I think I might have chosen the right one. But shouldn't this be the goal of all 'education'?

Peace yaars!

vehicles for social objects

2008-08-17T01:23:00.000-07:00

The last few posts on social objects have been gradually bringing a bit of clarity on how these social objects fit into the work that Seva Mandir and, I suppose, other organisations like it are involved in. This post is concerned with what, presumably can also be thought of as a social object: the vehicle or container for the social objects and the change that they have the potential to unleash. Although in the past I have tended to talk about containers, they have something too static sounding about them - which is not at all a good symbol of the dynamic process or context within which dialogue and action around social objects takes place!

The container-vehicles appear to have many levels. I will focus on only a few at this stage, and of these few, mainly on one. The few include: the organisation, the programme, the implementation team. The one will be the programme. My questions is basically this: what are the implications for the development and deployment of social objects (our medium for catalysing change) of being situated within a programme.

This line of inquiry emerges from a naggling sense I have that 'programmes' tend to function or be understood and interfaced with within a machine-like framework. By this, I mean to say they are defined by a simple, listed set of linear - almost mechanical - processes - such as making a visit, filling in a monitoring format, making a payment, holding a meeting, giving a training, which have the potential to be disembodied from the deeper engagement that is required to catalyse real change. That is to say, that the engagements see the creation of the social object(s) as ends in their own right rather than as means to a higher end.

For example, a day-care centre for children must be run (as targets have to be fulfilled) and running it is itself a worthwhile achievement (after all, we will be able to achieve our targets, for which we have requested funds and are now accountable), regardless of whether it is being used to the fullest to catalyse social change. Why does this happen? And why do targets continue to rise, year after year even when the desired quality of work on the existing centres has not been achieved? The answers to these questions (which I will not go into right now) are numerous and reflect the complex context within which development work takes place. All the same, it happens, to the detriment, I believe, of the quality of the work. Indeed, there is a kind of shallow engagement that takes place and expansion merely makes it more difficult to go into the kind of depth that is required to really understand what is going on. This feeds into some kind of vicious cycle and so it goes on.

Now, it may be unfair to attribute this 'problem' as an inherrent feature of the nature of 'programmes'. Instead, it might be better to say that this is an observable characteristic of most programmes, their potential for being more evolutionary and dynamic may simply be getting systematically missed because of the way people think, regardless of the existence of programmes or not. This raises the important questions of what the potential of 'programmes' actually is; why programmes are presently functioning within a 'machine' model; how would a programme operating outside the 'machine' model function (what would be its essential characteristics); and what would it take in order to make this kind of a transition within an organisational context.

Somehow, the understanding that can emerge from an inquiry into these issues needs to become institutionalised within the organisation. I suppose that a collaborative action-research-based intervention into the programme itself could be a good way to achieve this.

social objects as medium for change - v2

2008-08-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

After writing that last post, I came up with a slightly more elaborate diagram for thinking about social objects and how they fit into the social change process that Seva Mandir is trying to bring about... It's a skill I'm trying to develop (the diagramming that is) ;p

There are still a lot of question marks in my mind about this - and there are a lot of black/grey boxes that are in real need of getting opened up. This is especially the case with the design of the social object (and not just its actual design but the way that the designing itself fits into the overall process), and the issue of how convergence or co-evolution of the values takes place through dialogue and action around the social object.

I have also made a special effort to include resources as one of the attributes that communities bring to the table (rather than just needs) as I fear that we sometimes forget that communities do have resources - and I don't just mean Rs.5 a month - I'm talking more about knowledge and insights about what can work and what can't and why... and probably a lot more than that too!

Which brings me back to that oh-so-critical question of what, exactly the community is... and, if it's really so fragmented, then (a) can I still get away with calling it a community?; and (b) how can the social object and associated process be used to actually nourish community and make it vibrant? If community is both a means and an end (which means it implies something normative) - if it is our purpose-idea - if we really believe that the answer to all of the problems we are facing stem out of a severe loss of social cohesion, of community, then what we really need to be studying in a very rigorous way is just how, exactly, community gets built. And that is what this line of inquiry is all about!

On we go!

A new line of inquiry: social objects as medium for change

2008-08-11T03:24:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about social objects (a la Hugh of gaping void) for a while now - particularly in the context of the kind of work that Seva Mandir is involved in - i.e. 'community development'.

"The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else."

In this line of work social objects are our medium for bringing about change within a community. They are the objects that cause people (staff and community) to engage with each other and bring about change. This line of thinkin"g led me to the the following two questions...

What are the social objects through which our relationship with the community is mediated?
How, exactly, do these social objects mediate our relationships with the community?
What are the implications for how they contribute to a desirable change process?

... and the following little diagram (it's only version 1 and seems quite incomplete. Your suggestions would be welcomed!):

Essentially this diagram is trying to say that the social object is the interface between Seva Mandir and the community. It is then trying to point out that the social object is active or effective to the extent that it is able to find resonance at the level of such factors as 'shared values', and 'resources that meet needs'. Admittedly, this isn't saying a great deal. The really critical aspect of all this is how the social object leads to change...

The answer, as far as am I concerned is 'dialogue' or 'conversation'? Conversations that achieve convergence of the values. Conversations that match resources with needs. And then, there is the question of whether or how the conversations are able to influence the design of the social object itself! Do we simply deliver ready-made, pre-packaged solutions to the community or are we all engaged together in a continuous process of evolving these solutions based on local conditions? How might/does this impact on the direction and quality of the social change process?

Drawing on my experience to date, I have started thinking about what some of the answers to some of the first three questions might be and I have also started thinking that taking up these questions as new line of inquiry - possibly one combined with workshops and trainings involving staff across the organisation - and especially the front-line staff- could have a rather profound effect on how the work gets carried out on the ground.

Here are some quick responses to the questions that seem to be bubbling up:

1. What are the social objects through which our relationship with the community is mediated?
These objects seem to fit into distinct categories - some are more direct and tangible others less so.

The direct and tangible ones include things like: non-formal education centres, meetings, lift irrigation systems, forestry projects, a health camp...

The indirect and intangible ones include things like: objectives, values, ideas, images, metaphors, targets, responsibilities... perhaps these cannot be called social objects? Are they properties of the social objects or do they exist in their own right?

I think there's probably some kind of a matrix that can be constructed here...

2. How, exactly, do these social objects mediate our relationships with the community?
I suppose this question is really getting at the matter of how the social objects - the way they are lived (constructed, interpreted, understood?) by people - contribute to (enable, enhance or constrain) - the change process... At another (deeper?) level this is also a question of how they determine or shape the quality of the relationships that exist between the organisation and the community... which feeds back into the first question... What are the various factors that influence this?

One part of this inquiry would probably involving using a bit of ethnomethodology or something of the sort to really start looking at how the meaning of the social objects is actually articulated and lived by the various stakeholders... This would hopefully generate the kind of evidence that can be used to understand the dynamics of the process through which different relationships based on different sets of meaning and experience are brought to life... And this, perhaps, could be used to design interventions in a manner that more intentionally emphasises the positive transformation that we all (hopefully) end up desiring.

For example is 'a target' itself a social object or is 'target' a property of a more tangible social object - like' a non-formal education centre'? How does 'target' affect the relationship between staff and community? How does it affect the way that people relate to the social object itself and how does it affect such critical factors as the transfer of values and the occurence of social change? I think there is rather a lot to be explored here and some detailed case-studies would be required...

3. What are the implications for how they contribute to a desirable change process (and, therefore, what we ought to do about it all)?
This question follows on from where the previous question leads us... It probably needs to be taken a little further, beyond understanding the dynamics of the process towards the all important question of how we use our new understanding to make the social objects (however we end up framing them) more effective catalysts of 'desirable' change.

Now, one of the critical questions that I seem to be skirting around here is the question of what, exactly, constitutes 'desirable' change. Who gets to frame it? How do we judge if this really is desirable? Is joint inquiry with the community adequate or do we need something more? This is the real sensitive stuff and everything that we do - assuming we discover a way of being wildly successful - will have this 'desirable' element embedded into it.

And this leads us back to the really critical issue of 'conversations'. How do we structure our conversations around the social objects that we are creating or co-creating with the community as an interface for social change? Are there simpler or more effective ways of going about this than what we have already discovered?

If I can get deep enough into this inquiry then perhaps it will be possible to really uncover some valuable material and develop some deep processes maps... I'm especially thinking in terms of some recent questions that have been surfacing in my work, mind and conversations about what, exactly, we mean by community (does it exist yet?) and how we can leverage the rampant fragmentation in the communities we work with through the designs of our interventions, thereby enhancing our ability to actually build (or rebuild) community. It would also be really interesting to see how all of this can be woven into a process that simultaneously enhances the capacity of the organisation and its staff to engage within this kind of a framework!

A lot of questions. Far fewer answers. But something to get the appetite throbbing!

Some positive feedback on the 6th CP process

2008-08-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Another pleasing outcome of today's 'last' meeting for the 6th CP process has been the positive feedback on the overall process received by the team (which includes me). It was good to hear people voicing many of the points that I had mentioned in an earlier post based on my own observations. I guess it means that something has worked :)

My biggest fear, however, lingers: we have said great things, and committed to great actions... but when it comes to delivering, how will we avoid those old attractors - those negative, self-defeating behaviours and patterns encoded in our relationships and values that lock up our potential...

Having said that, I do seem to have been accorded (publicly) responsibility for helping to ensure that the conversations continue, that people from the organisation keep on coming together to talk about their work and to feed this into the organisation's ongoing evolution...This is great because it's definitely part of what I hope to work on when I come back for my field placement in January! It will be fascinating to help the oragnisation through the difficult process of untangling its great commitments in the form of new and more effective ways of relating to and engaging with the change process!

the giant organic organisational learning cycle

2008-08-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

A few posts back, I ended a status report on the 6thCP process with a question along the lines of:

is it normal to see or feel things happening as part of an organisational change process in a kind of staged manner?

Right now the answer looks like a glaring kind of a 'yes'. I got an insight into this today during what is probably the last big meeting of the preparatory phase of the 6thCP process. It was a good meeting, with a pro-active vibe and a good bit of laughter (despite an agenda that threatened to bore the living daylights out of people and to result in bruised buttocks).

In any case, i got my inkling while a discussion was going on about the newly created income generation cell, which I had sort of hoped would end up getting called a livelihood cell. The idea of calling it a 'livelihoods cell' appears to be more of my idea than anyone else's and, thus, it has not been given that name. Calling it a livelihood cell would carry certain implications for its functioning and its remit. Calling it an income generation cell seems more limited in scope. However, i held off from making a deal about this because I felt that there could be benefits derived from being more specific and focused here. This is what I foresaw:

Setting up a livelihood cell would bring together people from the different programmes. They would start talking about and trying to tackle large abstract issues and they would eventually have to narrow down their spectrum of issues to something achievable or manageable. Extensive discussions could take place around how NRD, GVK and WCD could perhaps work in a more effective manner together so as to encourage the emergence/support of more livelihood enhancing interventions/activities. However, the change would be distributed and may not have the potential to show solid results until deciding to shift onto the 'income generation' realm.

Setting up an income generation cell would also bring people together from the different programmes. It would start by trying to identify potential projects that could be taken up for achieving concrete results in terms of income generation activities for selected groups of individuals in different pockets. There would remain a disjoint between groups that were getting included and others that would get left behind. Questions would begin to emerge about how we broadbase what we have been learning. This would probably draw the cell to conduct a thorough inquiry into the efforts that it had made with different clusters/sectors and this would generate lessons learned that could be then taken up by the various programme units in a more systematic manner.

Both these stories are hypothetical, and the truth is that it could move in either direction. Clearly, this means I am in the 'complex' domain and probing will be the only way forward (for me, at this stage)... I feel that I am coming more to the conclusion that it won't make too big of a difference where the whole thing starts... If the team takes things seriously, has good quality conversations (and that isn't really just a little if!) and a fair dose of soul-searching it will gradually enable itself to do what it needs to do. In any case, I decided not to try and make noise about the livelihood issue - mainly because I couldn't decide whether it would really make a difference. It will be interesting to observe how the formation of the income-generation cell impacts on the rest of the organisation - especially the key programme units represented in it.

Anyway, the learning insight was this:

Take several similar units of inquiry and engage in a thorough action research process into them over a period of time that seems reasonable in relation to the timescale of the change that is being sought (hard to predict in advance really).
Then explore what worked, what didn't work and why, paying close attention to the way that particular factors (especially common factors) appear to have been influenced by context.
Use this to distill achievements, lessons, challenges, questions and principles that can be upscaled or mainstreamed
Repeat as required using new or existing units of inquiry as required

As I pondered this particular process later in the day, it struck me that this is a kind of archetypal action research process. Even a collaborative action inquiry would work the same way if the unit of inquiry is taken to be one of the collaborative individuals. It also seems like a kind of fractal pattern in the sense that it can be used on multiple scales, contexts and conditions. That makes it even more archetypal. Now if we could just see a little bit more evidence of this process being followed rigorously, with documentation that really goes in depth into how the change processes are taking place, I might just find myself starting to agree with Neelima about the idea that the whole organisation is one big action-research... Though I think I've said this before... that's not a little if :)

Peace!

social capital - possibility is in our hands

2008-08-07T06:58:00.000-07:00

Another long-standing topic that I am finally getting around to putting on my blog... and a good follow-up for the previous blog. It struck me one day in Delwara as I found myself trying to stop two 'community leaders' from neighbouring communities - one a tribal (Gameti) the other a scheduled caste (Meghwal - traditionally tanners/leather-workers).

The fight was over some misunderstanding/miscommunication rather than any real transgression though there were some territorial undertones. I was standing on top of a pile of sand on top of the hill upon which the tribal community has built their basti. It's a beautiful location and the houses there have the best view of the whole village - including the Devigarh fort. Of course, it's cramped up there, there's no water supply (a real problem for the women and young girls who fetch it), and the community is one of the poorest in the village so - relative freedom aside - life is pretty tough for the inhabitants.

I once watched an 80 year-old man on top of that hill crushing rocks next to a 4x6 foot stone cubicle with no roof (which, I discovered later was his home). This involve hammering a 6" iron nail into the rocky ground by banging it with a big stone. In the corner of the cubicle was a little hand-made earthern stove with some ashes at the bottom of it. The old man was too old to really earn any money through labour work. He got most of his meals from the neighbours - which they gave up with what seemed like a mix of reluctance and obligation. After the community sent an application to the citizen's forum, roofing was arranged - just in time to keep his home dry as the monsoon rains started a few days later. By the time we went to put the roof up, he had expanded his house to around 7x6 feet using the stones he had been crushing right there on the spot. Amazing.

In any case, back to the fight. So, there had been some miscommunication. The meghwal chap was working as a mason on the construction work of a water tank. Some mistrust had emerged over the issue of whether work was properly being distributed between therespective labourers of the tribal and the Meghwal community. By the time I was at the site, the situation was pretty bad. There was shouting, throwing of insults, angry faces, high BP, and people throwing their hands up in the air. It reached the point where the parties were shouting that no water tank would be built in that location. Well, there goes the reliable, convenient water source for about 50 families.

As I stood on top of that hill and calmed the people down, shifted the blame onto myself and my team (we did have an unfortunate hand in propagating the miscommunication - it happens sometimes that false information circulates unintentionally in the messy, complex chaos that gets called 'the community') , calmed the two people down, and re-established the fact that the water tank really was a good idea and that everything was going to be ok I found myself thinking about social capital... and my thoughts went something like this...

Social capital is a form of 'the commons'. It is, perhaps, the most fundamental form of 'the commons'. Traditionally 'the commons' has referred to natural resources - initially pasture lands on which shepherds could graze their cattle and later it has expanded to include things like the climate or biodiversity. But my sense is that we really need to start talking about what it is that holds all these things together - what it is that we need to restore if we want to address the tragedy of these commons. And that thing is social capital: our relationships and the potential they represent for enriching lives.

Social capital is the common resource that has been most ignored and most overlooked in the general discourse on the commons. It is like a vast, untapped - almost infinite - sea - like the internet - source of potential for creating the world in new and wonderful ways. If we have high levels of social capital - deep, meaningful relationships with each other that are bursting with opportunities for collaboration - jointly making things happen in ways that are mutually beneficial - then what can't we achieve?

Unlike the traditional and modern commons - our grazing lands and the ecosphere for example - social capital (can we venture calling it community?) has a direct link with our assumptions, biases and prejudices: the way we perceive ourselves, others and the relationship in-between. For example, do we distinguish people - either consciously or unconsciously - according to religion, caste, gender, age, class, education status, appearance, position within an organisation? Do we assign different levels of trust/mistrust based on this? Do we open or close opportunities for working together or, for that matter, even talking to each other based on this?

Every time I make a judgement based on identity and foreclose an interaction, an opportunity to understand, listen, engage and build a relationship, I am simultaneously denying myself and the other person an opportunity to acquire social capital. And this appears to be the most defining feature of what still seems to get called 'community' in this communally dilapidated age. Walls exist everywhere, between everyone, and the result is a bunch of isolated people who can't even have the conversations that they need to have to begin thinking about what it would take to change the world for the better.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm trying to get at here but I think the main point is that if we want to ever start the process of addressing the world's biggest problems we need to engage in a very real way with some of the very smallest. Why do I call it the smallest? Well, given my (perhaps naieve) sense of how the world works - one's own behaviour is the only thing that one really has any control over. I'm not trying to say that it's easy and I don't mean to sound corny but it really does make sense. So it seems that part of saving the world is helping people to realise that they can have control over themselves, and that collectively, if a group of individuals can wake up to this call for taking responsibility for their own behaviour, they can access a vast sea of social capital just waiting to be unleashed as a force for creating a better world together

Create the opportunities - the spaces and the call to get inside them and tap into the source of community. Let them do it!

community based organisations vs. organised communities

2008-08-04T01:04:00.001-07:00

So, I've had this long-standing thought about working with communities... I have this notion that it's not particularly original but all the same it strikes me as worth noting down - especially as I'm in need the middle of preparing a proposal that builds on this idea.

Most of the development discourse - and I suppose I'm talking here about the mainstream stuff - seems to talk about what they call CBOs - Community Based Organisations. This term refers to just about any type of organisation that consist of people who live within a geographically bounded area. In general, big implementing agencies like to work with 'CBOs' because they contribute to the 'sustainability' of the intervention being implemented and project the image of being community-centred and participatory. OK.

However, there's something I don't like about the term 'CBO'. Is it to do with the way that it doesn't really do justice to the very notion of community? For that matter, what is a community? Isn't a community form of organisation in its own right? And if it is, are we really treating it like one? How can we re-frame these questions and ideas in a way that gives them more meaning and brings them more to life?

These kinds of questions led me to the idea of talking about 'organised communities' rather than 'community based organisations'. The question then becomes not one of how strong is the community based organisation but one of how strong is the community. This then leads us to confront what we are actually talking about when we talk about community. What is a community? What would we like our community to be like? What are the fears we have about the future of our community? What are the hopes we have for the future of our community?

Community itself seems so much more rich and meaningful a concept than CBO. CBO doesn't seem to carry any sense of neighbours caring about each other, of people being engaged in celebrations or festivals together: it seems well and truly void of culture. This, I believe is one of the great dangers of most development work: it tends to ignore the vast realm of culture. And I don't mean preserving traditional culture - I mean thinking about 'development' as a process of bringing about intentional, positive, cultural change through a process of dialogue combined with action.

Community is all about relationships. The work that we really ought to be doing is helping to make these relationships deep, fulfilling, meaningful, mutually empowering. Somehow, this sees far more important and pressing than the idea of setting up some kind of a semi-formal CBO with management capabilities.

emerging patterns, outcomes and questions of the 6th CP Process

2008-08-03T01:13:00.001-07:00

So, it seems like it's about time to share the progress so far with putting together the Comprehensive Plan (CP). Around 6 months have elapsed since the process started. It started with some initial discussions with the CE leading to me preparing a concept note and a presentation of the same. The framework was approved and the process began.

Now that process of consultations has just about completed and I have started the process of turning it all into a document for internal and external circulation. This blog post contains some of the things that have really struck me as being profound and meaningful in terms of process-outcomes and also strategic direction-setting. It ends with some of the questions that are now with me.

Process-outcomes

rather than simply looking at our strategies, we were able to inquire into organisational culture (essentially our values, principles and how we relate to each other and our purpose) and structure (who sits where, holds what power, has what function and reports to who) – and many people who would usually not be so directly or openly involved in these discussions had the opportunity to contribute
participatory process enabled critical perspectives to find voice throughout the process and feed into strategic direction-setting process enabled all parts of the organisation to see what all other parts of the organisation were doing, inquire into this and also give suggestions individual
relationships amongst certain groups of staff have changed – more people have more of a feeling that they have had some control or influence over the course of events
topics such as organisational culture and structure were opened to discussion by all members of staff – critical questions have been asked and important directions have emerged
in many instances programme staff have given honest assessments of their performance and the issues that they are facing many assumptions and differences of opinion were aired in a non-confrontational manner and there have been signs of people from across various levels really changing the way they relate to each other and think about the work they are doing
created a positive can-do attitude amongst the staff discussions were held on many sticky, frustrating and also confusing topics

Strategic direction-setting

readying ourselves to double-up our efforts at working with the local governments (Panchayats) and also the other government departments
pushing for the idea of federating community organisations – including village-level organisations and women's groups - at various levels
conceptualising new staff induction as a 1 year long process rather than a 3 day workshop
promoting the idea of using monitoring and evaluation as a tool for facilitating dialogue with communities about their local development process (rather than simply a way of reporting to donors)
deciding to form a livelihood/income generation internal network cell that would bring together staff from different programmatic units (such as natural resource development, women's empowerment, and village institutions) to explore new ways of addressing what is now officially recognised as a cross-cutting issue
more generally getting integration across programmes onto the agenda – e.g. integrating livestock and agriculture activities to give a more integrated farming systems approach
deciding to look into the oragnisation's ecological footprint and find ways of minimising it

There are probably plenty more significant outcomes that I could present in a more structured manner after actually writing down the Comprehensive Plan. But these give the general gist of the sorts of new things that have been taking place.

Many of these – perhaps seemingly small – changes are of quite massive significance in the overall scheme of things. What is most exciting for me at the moment is that a whole bunch of decisions were taken by other people that I had dreamed about in the past. I was seeing the people around me saying the things that I had hoped they would say. I even had the experience of people saying exactly the points that I had written in my notebook. In some ways the last few months have felt like a bit of a dream. They have been intense too! I have been angry, overjoyed, frustrated, exhausted and at times almost ecstatic. The best moments have been the ones where it simply felt like everything was coming together for the best. The worst were the ones where I was wrestling with my own ego. Truly fascinating!

But I still have a lot of questions. For example, this morning in an email to the Chief Executive, I asked the following:

How do we sustain and even deepen whatever positive changes we have seen so far?
How do we keep open the dialogue and creativity that we have unleashed so far and make it a permanent feature of the organisation?
How do we avoid falling back into sub-optimal patterns of relations and interactions that mitigate our effectiveness as a catalyst of positive social change?

They all seem to be getting at the same thing. My concern is that there was a kind of tipping point that we could have crossed and that we didn't quite cross it... What does this imply?

Which really leads me onto this:

One thing that people don't seem to write about is whether it is normal to see or feel things happening as part of an organisational change process in a kind of staged manner... for example, we might not have transitioned to being a 'chaordic organisation' or something of that sort but hey! we might nonetheless have moved some way towards appreciating the value of meaningful conversation, of 'getting the whole system in the room', of challenging our present limits and so on. Now for the facilitator (for want of a better word for my role), these may seem like baby steps in comparison to the strides that were dreamt of. Is this normal? Sometimes, there's a feeling that it's a kind of all-or-nothing shift – especially when we're talking about complexity, chaos, self organisation, emergence, open space and so on. But is that even fair? Sometimes it seems as though we need one of those 'paradigm shifts' or some kind of 'turn the whole thing inside out' approaches. There will, of course, be some kind of a gap perceived by the facilitator between 'what could have been' and 'what actually was'. Won't there? Other people – perhaps because they are more experienced and take it for granted – don't seem to talk about this 'gap' so much.

Having said this, a recent mail (today) on the aoh list seems to be getting at just this point.

visions, dreams, problem-solving and change

2008-07-24T06:03:00.000-07:00

So, I’m pretty sure that I’m not saying anything new here (I have been thinking about it for a while and have taken inspiration from numerous sources and even woven it into my own practice)… but it does kind of strike me as being rather important… here it goes:

Vision-driven change is completely different from problem-solving-driven change.
For the most-part, people are uncomfortable with moving away from problem-solving
Vision-driven change requires an understanding of the problems but, instead of beginning with the problems, begins with tapping into people’s dreams, unearthing them, sharing them, building common dreams and then catalyzing collective action around these dreams
Vision-driven change and problem-solving-driven change are not mutually exclusive… but putting the vision gives a better context for the problem-solving
Vision-driven change is all about creating new realities – this gives a real sense of moving forward towards something that is desirable rather than simply away (or aside from) something that is bad
Problem-solving change is all about trying to get out of slippery holes – getting out of one doesn’t mean that you haven’t fallen into another
Vision-driven change is holistic, and presents an inclusive and clear goal that people can both relate and aspire to
Problem-solving change is fragmented, and often fails to consider how one problem is linked to the next – it also often encourages looking for solutions at levels that are far beyond people’s grasp

I have nothing against problem-solving. What I do lament, however, is the striking absence of vision-driven change. We go into a place and focus first and foremost on what the problems are. I even heard a very senior, experienced staff member (perhaps a little too old now?) say that one of the jobs we do is to show people dreams… as if the people didn’t have their own dreams before we turned up!?!? I was a little bit taken aback at this and wondered about the extent to which we may take ownership for people’s dreams and, correspondingly, perhaps, the extent that we fail to really tap into the potential of really engaging people voluntarily in taking action to realize their dreams…

One thing is for sure: the dream-based leadership workshop that we conducted in Delwara – which included an exercise for linking people’s own actions to the realization of their dreams – worked! Within a few days, a Muslim lady – a local leader – was out and about in her neighbourhood trying to collect money from each household to cover the cost of getting the neighbourhood cleaned on a regular basis. And just the other day, I was translating for a volunteer studying the relationship between women and water in Delwara, and two women quite clearly recounted: “it’s not that we didn’t have dreams before the Citizen’s Forum was established, it’s just that we didn’t have a way of realizing them”.

This is an urgent plea to not let ourselves start trying to possess other people’s dreams and to focus instead on trying simply to listen to, know and understand them, to get people to own up to having them and to cultivate a passion for realizing them – both individually and collectively!

I sincerely believe that these dreams are the source from which any glimmer of hope for positive social change emerges. As such, they are worthy of unfathomable respect.

dealing with tensions in conversation... a start

2008-07-24T05:17:00.000-07:00

I now have some questions on the role of conflict, taking stands, - more generally surfacing tensions as a self-appointed change-maker in an unofficial organizational change process. There are a lot of complexities here – especially in terms of how the roles and the situation itself is framed…

For example, the organisation considers itself to be a learning organisation continuously undergoing a kind of gradual learning and change process as a result of learning-by-doing. Another example is my own role as ‘person putting together the 6th Comprehensive Plan’ – a kind of in-house, part-facilitator, part-writer, part-outsider, but not with a totally clear organizational change mandate since we haven’t really been using that term (thanks to Hugh at Gaping Void for the cartoon)… But I do see myself as trying to contribute to organizational change… and in a way, this Comprehensive Plan is all about change...

Anyway, it seems to me that there is a general sense that facilitators should never utter harsh or strong words or express a stance on anything other than the design of the sessions that they facilitate – i.e. the meta-container. But often I have found myself not even really having proper control over these very spaces. Indeed, a lot of the ‘competition’ I face in my work seems to be around control of the container. In these situations, I need to think about how my individual actions, words and body language can be used to influence the container (or the people in it).

This, for example, is what led me to decide to simply keep quiet and out of the way on that day when I got upset about the attitude of a top manager during a staff gathering on strategies for not appreciating the open-space approach and wanting to bring more control into the process (see this earlier blog post)… In a way, I stepped back and the group then had to take ownership for the whole process… Though I was out of the way, at least the people were in charge and trying to figure it out themselves.

Anyway, several days later, and preparing for another event, I remember having a little clash over the idea of open space. I was trying to advocate for an open-space approach but the response from a top manager was negative. They said that they had seen open space in the past and that it hadn’t worked. They also said that they were concerned about the use of time by their staff – a process that doesn’t work out at a retreat for the whole organisation means that the time of some 250 people would be getting wasted – convert that into rupees and it really does seem like a big risk!

But then… it’s also a bit degrading for the staff at some level… don’t we have enough faith in our staff to want to use their time productively? Beyond that, in line with the general spirit of voluntarism and meaningful engagement, my sense is that a lot more value can be obtained from a group of people who are engaging with something pationately (while the rest wander around aimlessly or lounge in the trees) than forcing a group of disinterested people to sit in a circle silently, perhaps staring into space or at their navel, while a few people actually talk. Oh well…

In any case, the funny thing is that at the time I hammered my point, disagreed strongly with the evaluation of open space and cited an example of the villagers in Delwara (with whom we conducted an open space session as part of a visioning process) – which included a very mixed group (Hindus, tribals, muslims, women, men, adults and youth…) and yielded quite wonderful results! If they can do it why can’t we. Anyway, I feel as though I have been pushing this point on a number of occasions, occasionally arguing the case… and recently, I got the feeling that people might just be catching on a little to this idea… though I’m not totally sure about it…

There have also been a whole spate of examples of people using the ‘oh but we already tried that and it didn’t work’ statement – which pretty much ended a particular line of discussion. One was in the context of mobilizing the community to put pressure on the local government (panchayat) to secure better quality services and another was in the context of dissemination of improved agriculture through farmer-to-farmer learning. I have heard countless other applications of the same killer response to certain ideas that may have been tried in the past and they really do kill the mood. Generally, there is a reluctance – and perhaps the absence of the required time and space – to engage with some of these subjects in greater depth; the depth that would be required to get somewhere meaningful.

The first case, I tried to resolve – not by saying anything at the time – but by several days later talking to the person who had effectively ended that conversation and letting them know the impact of what they had said. What was most interesting was that the intended impact of what was said and the actual impact were quite different. Now it seems we are all quite happy about the idea of working with the government.

In the second case, I suppose I was lucky to have some kind of an inkling into the issue. I decided to start talking to the people who had proposed the idea and advocated the idea of us getting involved in a study to really explore the dynamics of farmer-to-farmer learning and the dissemination of farming practices within a community resulting from training a limited cluster… Really understanding these dynamics across several villages could help the organisation design much more effective dissemination strategies (which could involve various roles for local community organisations) that can get more people adopting good practices for a much lower cost… but for that we would have to know how the knowledge spreads! This would also help whoever is advocating the approach to counter the kind of ‘we did that in the past and it didn’t work’ kind of statements…

Indeed, there was a third case just today, in which there was a discussion about whether we should work to create model villages. A number of senior staff didn't like this idea (for various reasons - mostly, as far as I could figure out, to do with assumptions about what this implied). I tried to present an alternative conception of these model villages by suggesting that we view them as opportunities for conducting in-depth action research into what it takes to make really strong communities in these places - particularly in the context of securing real integration of all the organisation's activities, etc. This didn't go down too well. The basic response was that the organisation already has 40 years of experience so we don't really need to go studying these things and, in any case, the whole organisation is like one big action research process. To which I replied quite directly - 'you're wrong' - along with a whole host of other things explaining why (e.g. learning can't be taken for granted, it needs to be systematic, we clearly don't have all the answers, there are many things we are still struggling with, etc.). It's too early to judge where this will take us and the issue has now been flagged for further discussion (where I plan to present a more reasoned/structured version of my take on the issue and each of the 'blocks' will also present their thoughts...) Let's see where this goes.

I also find myself wondering about whether my somewhat unclear role has something to do with my need to take these positions… By this I mean to say the fact that I am part-way a facilitator of change and part-way just another person in the organisation… I’m not an external facilitator with an ‘expert’ reputation. But then reading Dave Pollard’s recent post (amazingly, I came across it in the middle of writing this one – is that synchronicity or what!?) helped me to realize that these are questions that one may have to face even as an external ‘expert’ facilitator.

I suppose that the best way to deal with it is to be open, honest and authentic, acknowledge that one is also learning and trying to make sense of things and do one’s best to accept that different people have different view-points and that one has to work with things the way they are. I also believe that sometimes leaving a little bit of a sour taste (that lingers) might be a good way of getting someone to ponder something a little… a kind of cognitive dissonance that resonates for a bit longer than usual…

innit?

on complexity, chaos and self-organisation

2008-07-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

Just the other day, I was reading a post by Dave Snowden on management vs. self-organisation that triggered a few questions in my mind... This is what I commented:

chaos and anarchy are not the same thing at all. anarchy would imply not having any ruler but this does not mean chaos since a group can be self-governing and leadership a dynamic and distributed process... take for example the classical example of a jazz quartet doing improvisation (would it mean anything to say that the underlying form of the music manages the player's interactions)? now, can the same thing be said of management? can a system be said to display self-management or self-organising properties?

i often come up across this question in the context of my work... is it about the coordinator 'coordinating' the team or is it about there being 'coordination' within the team and does thinking about it differently lead to different ways of trying to achieve the end result (i.e. a team operating with a high level of coordination or coherence)?

For some reason, I also thought that self-organisation was supposed to be a property of complex, not chaotic (= lacking any organisation or coherence) systems... tipping a system into a chaotic state may be a way of temporarily unlocking the system so that it has greater chance of self-organising in new ways (this would also be where the role of the 'manager' comes in - creating the container/parameters within which all this can happen)... It's also worth pointing out that self-organising does not mean 'good'.

I also think that you can call it management if you prefer the horse analogy but there can be many other words for it... one, possibly more appropriate one - given all the connotations - might be facilitation... but then perhaps there is a scale from command and control (absolute micro-management) to not doing anything at all (with facilitation somewhere more towards not doing anything)?

but what I understood from what I have read, practiced and reflected on of systems theory is that the whole point is that regardless of what you are doing in the system (i'm talking about an organisational -i.e. complex - system here), the system has its own complex dynamics, attractors, etc. - which leads to self-organisation (which could be good or bad)... so, like you said (but in different words?), the manager has to work with the self-organising characteristics of a complex system in order to help it continuously transition to levels which secure it a better fit with more of its external environment... in a social (human organisational) system, this would entail communication and quite possibly involving the whole system in the management of itself...

for some reason this always gets me thinking about the fact that little organisms had a big hand in making our atmosphere into something breathable... and plants which continue to play a critical role in regulating the earthly climate...

sorry for the rambling! does this make any sense?

Am I in a bubble?

2008-07-17T18:10:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, confusion sets in... and when it does, it tends to be everything at once. This leads me to believe that confusion is more about a state of mind than it is in relation to specific things... Though I may be off the mark here... In any case, a little bit of introspection always goes down well in these situations!

So, perhaps, it is time to review a few things:

Why did I come to India? What was I thinking before I came? What was my world view? What was my idea of change? What inspired me? How? Why?
What did I actually end up doing? What have I learned? How have I and my ideas changed over the course of the five years that I have spent here?
What do I feel right now? What is calling me? Am I in a bubble? Where do I need to be?

Now, none of these are small questions. But I will have a go all the same.

1. Why did I come to India? What was I thinking before I came? What was my world view? What was my idea of change? What inspired me? How? Why?

I came to India after finishing my BSc in Environmental Policy with Economics. I had also completed several years of cultivating an anarchist, anti-system philosophy with radical green fringes. The City of London was the Heart of Evil and the whole transnational, capitalist elite that it represented was a part of a global network out to dominate the world and take humans away from the true path of liberation and freedom by putting them in little boxes where they live futile lives to earn the $$s so they can pay the bills and muddle about in little meaningless circles without ever knowing the Truth. People, instead, were caught up in self-centred, individualistic lives based on material gratification - and in the meanwhile, swathes were living meaningless lives, like robots. Linked to that, the last 50 years or so during which 'Development' arose as a fabricated story of the West/North (post-colonial powers) to exploit people and take their wealth, had undermined the rich cultures and sustainable livelihoods of people from the world over.

Hmmm... So there were a lot of people in the Rest (as opposed to West) of the world who had been oppressed, marginalised, exploited, disenfranchised, broken. My idea of my work probably had two main components: (a) seeking ecological restoration of the world; (b) bringing about radical transformation of societies to achieve this - keeping in mind the issues of power relations and social justice. I remember at the time thinking that in order to achieve the former, work would have to be done on the latter. I had this idea that if the people of countries like India could be sensitised to the ecological problems and socio-economic injustice that was making their lives worse; if they could be organised to raise their voice and get their issues onto the agenda, then there may be some scope for pressuring the rest of the world to modify its own behaviour. But there was a lot that I also knew I didn't know...

At the same time, i was particularly inspired by the ideas of direct, participatory, deliberative - maybe even ecological - democracy; of sustainable communities linked to their natural resource base, engaging in dialogue in order to make decisions and working things out. People taking control of their lives and enabling the full potential of human flowering to take place in a simple, natural and joyful way.

Equipped with these ideas and also lack thereof, I decided that I needed to go to India. There were many reasons for this, encompassing: food, philosophy, culture, abundance of NGOs, relatively safe and democratic, having lots of oppressed people, my family having been there before I was born. The idea was: go to India, find an NGO, spend some time working there, get a sense of what the work is, what development is, how does change happen, learn a good deal, and then make a plan about what to do next.

2. What did I actually end up doing? What have I learned? How have I and my ideas changed over the course of the five years that I have spent here?

Well, I came to India immediately after finishing my degree - perhaps a little prematurely. I came with a bunch of my good friends, my ex-girlfriend and a reasonably unclear agenda. Although I had planned to come later and on my own, the enthusiasm of all my friends about going together swept me up and I headed of a good deal earlier - without a clear plan and without enough money to last very long...

My initial travels took me to Kashmere, where I was completely absorbed in the beauty of nature and the complexity of my own self. Lazy days, soaking up sunshine on Dal and Niggin Lakes and experiencing the bizarre atmosphere of a place filled with soldiers, death, fear, hope, loss and such tragic beauty... Trekking up to Sonna Marg and Gangabal, jumping naked into a glacial lake, catching fish, seeing marmots, sitting on goat skins with bearded, turbaned men in a little tent (to shelter from the rain) and eating boiled eggs... it was a very powerful experience. The travelling continued down to Dharmshalla and then into Rajasthan until one by one my friends had all gone... leaving me to fend for myself. It wasn't long before I hit Udaipur.

I got stuck in Udapiur, in the late monsoon season. The lake and the sunsets over it blew my mind daily. The other travellers were great company - so many good conversations. I made several excursions to Eklingji and Ranakpur. I wrote letters that I never sent explaining how I felt. And then, one day, I asked my rickshaw driver friend, Jameel, if he knew of a place where I could volunteer - and he said Seva Mandir. So I said take me there... and he did.

After some formalities I was accepted and assigned the task of helping the organisation prepare impact indicators. ? ? ? No-one, including myself, seemed to really know what this ought to involve... Gradually things became clearer - the result of a lot of muddling through. The main part of my first three years can be summarised thus: finding out about all the different work the organisation does by talking to people, thinking about indicators, talking about indicators, developing indicators, revising indicators, developing tools to collect data, testing these tools, training people to collect the data, getting the data collected, developing data entry modules, getting the data entered, cleaning the data, analysing the data, preparing reports based on the data, presenting the data back to people.

On the side, I spent a lot of time reading about evaluation, organisational learning, participation and participatory approaches/methods (including PRA, PLA, Open Space, AoH, Appreciative Inquiry, etc.), community development and complexity theory - and I was continuously trying to implement what I was learning in my work. I also wrote various reports - annual, progress, donor, proposals, and so on... Then, three years later (wait a minute... did you say THREE?), I couldn't work with my new boss and asked to be transferred somewhere else... So I ended up in Delwara, a small town 30 kms outside of Udaipur where Seva Mandir was working on integrated community development, focusing on responsible citizenship and local self-governance....

I was there for a year and a half - and I still am in a number of ways. I learned a great deal here that I still haven't managed to put into words. After this I was asked to help the organisation put together its 6th Comprehensive Plan which has involved facilitating dialogue across the organisation on issues of strategy, culture and structure (though mainly the former two). This has been my icing on the cake and this is kind of where I am at today. Almost 5 years have elapsed since I came to India. I never had any idea that I would stay in one place for so long.

So how have I and my ideas changed? The hardest question! I suppose that I have learned a huge amount about all the things that I have worked on, read and written about: evaluation, learning, facilitation, community dynamics (and what holds people together), organisations, empowerment, how change happens in an organisational and community context, complexity. I think I have also learned a great deal about myself... though I am not completely sure what. I have definitely evolved as a person - become more balanced, capable, in control of myself - maybe even wise... In many ways, though, I know that I still have a long, long way to go!
i have also developed a whole host of interests that I knew nothing about before coming - like facilitation, like complexity theory, like story-telling, like organisational change... I have become able to articulate one of the things that I would like to see myself doing in the coming years: working on organisational change processes as a means to attaining larger scale positive social change. None of the above does justice to what I have learned...

But I am still a green, spiritual, anarchist at heart. And I am still concerned with radically transforming power structures in the world, attaining ecological balance, claiming social justice and creating a world where humans live in harmony with each other and nature and where the full potential of all people can flourish. So in that regard, I think I have just gone deeper, not really sideways.

3. What do I feel right now? What is calling me? Am I in a bubble? Where do I need to be?
Another tough question. My decision to go and study - which I continue to question intensely from time to time - seems to signal something about how I feel... and it seems that I have to try and decipher my actions in order to really understand what is going on. The application (after 5 years of just thinking about it) is a sign that something deep within me (something beyond my simple, conscious chattering) wanted to go from here - for at least a while - and probably, eventually, for a longer time. My choice of course, one that lets me spend another year here though, shows that I really am not quite ready to just leave this place.

I have unfinished business here in Seva Mandir, in Udaipur. And there is a need for continuity - not just in terms of the work that I do but also in terms of my own personal learning trajectory: there are ideas that I am struggling with, trying to make sense of and trying to put into practice... and the place where I am now seems as fertile ground to work on as anything else... A list of some of the things that I would like to work on here can be found at: learn2act4change.

The items in that list seem to be what is calling me... But am I really hearing the greater call or am I in a bubble... is this just the local call? Am I really doing justice to what I am and what I believe in? Am I really doing justice to my ecological and environmental concerns? Have I found a way of weaving these dimensions in to the work that I do or have I somehow lost touch with these things by getting all caught up in other dimensions of the work? Is the scale at which I am working significant enough to really address the concerns - is it too big? is it too small? How is what I'm doing tying in to what's going on in the world? Is this work in Delwara - soon to expand to other peri-urban settlements - actually meaningful in the face of the bigger changes that our world is under-going...

I suppose I don't have the answers. I suppose that my decision to enroll in the Participation Power and Social change course, somewhere deep inside me, is an attempt to try and connect to people and knowledge that will help me make sense of all these things. Maybe it will let me look at my bubble from the outside, get a sense of perspective on things, understand how what I am doing and have been doing up to now fits in to the bigger scheme of things, the multitude of efforts for change going on at all scales and in all places... and then, perhaps, I will be able to make a more informed decision about what really matters... to me... for the world... and, therefore what I should do in the coming years.

half full or half empty... the muddle continues

2008-07-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

It's way past my bedtime but I feel compelled to write. Failing to follow on from my last blog, this is a return to a lingering question of growingly nagging proportions: appreciative inquiry - is it a biased way of looking at things and does this make it somehow less useful or worthwhile in the broader endeavour to make positive change in the world?

This question first began to move beyond being a simple blot on my landscape to a kind of subject for inquiry after reading an article by Dave Snowden. A recent blog post by Dave Snowden got me thinking about this again. He wrote:

One of my real concerns here is the frequent conflation of Cognitive Edge methods with NLP and that other current popular method Appreciative Inquiry (AI). Now there is a big difference. My concern about AI is that it privileges one type of story over an other. Why should anyone tell people what type of stories they should tell? Despite my disagreements I can respect its practitioners and see that it has utility in constrained circumstances. [He then goes on to talk about NLP - for which he clearly has less respect than he does for AI]

So, the question that I am really grappling with is: in what contexts does applying Appreciative Inquiry makes sense? Or even better, where does the role of purpose fit in to the whole practice of story-work?

It seems that Dave's approach is concerned with eliminating any kind of bias into the 'inquiry' or story-eliciting process. Now, I may be just fuddling my way through, but it seems to me that any process of gathering stories will need to have some kind of a purpose (am I missing something?) - whether it is simply to generate a database of contextualised organisational happenings from diverse perspectives (why would we want this) to something more overt like enabling an organisation to become more effective at what it does (e.g. by becoming more responsive to its clients needs, learning more effectively, improving leadership and communication patterns, etc.).

I recognise that I may have the wrong end of the stick (please point this out if I do). I also recognise that the very process of surfacing a question or purpose for 'inquiry' itself may require an inquiry in its own right... But even this sense that 'something needs to be done' will be informed by some kind of nagging notion that... well, there is something that needs to be done... about something!? Hmmm...

But Dave's critique focuses not so much on the subject or purpose as the 'type of story' - i.e. in the case of AI, this would be the story of what worked and what were the conditions that led to this thing actually working - a positive take. I suppose, the point is that it makes good sense to look at what isn't working and how things end up not working -because this might tell us what we ought to avoid doing.

In various articles of Dave's that I have read, he talks about using the story of the chap who discovered that latitude could be calculated simply by using a clock as a way of getting people to feel comfortable about telling stories of times when good ideas were scrapped because of bosses with old-paradigm world-views... Now isn't this as much an attempt at telling people what kind of story to tell as doing an AI would be?

So is the point that we should ask people to tell all kinds of stories - the good, the bad and the ugly? How do we decide how we should lead the questions? It seems that we have to elicit a certain type of story - at least in a number of situations - in order to get at the juiciest bits which may not respond to a simple question like 'tell me about leadership in the organisation' - it just seems way too vague - and therefore liable to elicit a vague series of answers that have to be gradually probed to get to the depth by gradually making it more specific (e.g. by using the latitude example).

The other tendency that I have observed is that people love talking about negative stories. Huge amounts of staff time go into ranting about problems, complaining about things, etc. My sense is that this tends to breed a negative mindset and can be very counterproductive. Just imagine if some more of this time was spent by people having constructive conversations about how to solve problems, or for sharing knowledge and experience, coming up with new initiatives and so on... Now wouldn't this lead to a dramatic increase in effectiveness? Perhaps I am completely missing the point!? What if bosses could listen to stories about times when their staff had really felt able to perform and deliver change?

In the end, I suppose that both the positives and the negatives are essential. It seems to be as important to know what we can do as it does to know what we shouldn't do. But when we are on the move, and we don't have vast resources to put in place high end knowledge management systems (as in the case of the NGO where I am working in India), might not an AI allow us to get rather a lot done - even if only in such constrained circumstances?

In any case, I have resolved to take this question with me into my practice and really have a go at unearthing all manner of stories - positive and negative - with the hope that I can begin to get a sense for what all of this adds up to...

Trying to get some bearings...

2008-07-11T05:31:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I managed to get back to the blog and I have a lot to say. At the same time, I really want to learn how to say whatever I am trying to say in less space. One approach could be to use several smaller blog postings (to create the illusion of using less space). Another is to try and use visual media (to really use less space). I think I will use a combination of the two.

In any case, here are the main things on my mind that I want to blog about a little bit more (though not in any particular order) in the coming days:

How most communication takes place (and why)
How this leads to the mess we're in (and why)
What getting out of it might involve (and why)
The place for spirituality in all this (and why)

All of these seem to be connected to each other - within myself at least. Making sense of this all will be an important part of my own learning journey. All this is inspired by various things I have experienced and read over the last couple of months, including:

Re-visiting my early reflections on Action Science
Reading Dave Snowden's work on stories and complexity
My recent engagement with anthropology
Reading the Katha Upanishad and the Tao Te Ching
Facilitating communication between a volunteer and organisational staff
Witnessing various conflicts within my 'home' and within the organisation
Late night and other engaging discussions with friends on much of the above
A good bit of improvised fictional story-circle
Some reflections on stepping out into the unknown and how this makes me feel

Let's see how this unfolds.

If I were God... Oh but I am - if only I could realise it!

2008-07-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

After that last outburst on narratives, which seems to have opened up an entire new dimension of reality to me, I started reading San Beck's translation of the Katha Upanishad. This marvellous story, and I really mean MARVELLOUS STORY, is a must read. This little quote gives a taste of what it is trying to tell us:

Know the soul as lord of a chariot,
the body as the chariot.
Know the intuition as the chariot driver,
and the mind as the reins.
The senses, they say, are the horses;
the objects of sense the paths.
This associated with the body, the senses and the mind,
the wise call 'the enjoyer.'

But why did I start to read this? To be honest I have a little theory about the Upanishads - one that I have long been nurturing but that makes itself clearer to me every day. Upanishads means (etymologically) 'to sit down beside/close to'. Usually, it is presented as sitting down close to the Guru - but I think that this is unnecessary Guru worship (and this is where I defect). Doesn't the Guru learn from his student? What, nothing at all?

Perhaps we all host a collective Guru when we sit down close together and talk from the heart about what really matters - at moments it is you, at moments it is I (for This is That) - and together we learn in communion with a self that is self-transcendent - more than just you and more than just me. And this is what is so beautiful. Even while having a conversation with Death itself!

Sounds like the foundation of a great community to me!

Full Circle? Maybe more of a spiral!

2008-07-02T06:25:00.000-07:00

Today, I am reminded of a dream I had when I first joined this organisation. I entered a room, lit by sunlight and decorated with potted plants. In the room there were a series of low tables (of the coffee table kind) with chairs around them. People were sitting around these tables engaged in conversation. The people were from all the different units in the organisation and they were excitedly and passionately sharing their ideas. The air was ripe with inspiration...

An odd dream, I suppose (it's not made up, honestly!)... Clearly a sign that I am obsessive! But today, having completed my first Appreciative Inquiry (at least the first part of it), having discovered World Cafe, Open Space and the Art of Hosting, having come across the work of people like Dave Snowden and Shawn Callahan of Anecdote, and having discovered all this gigantic world of story-telling and meaningful conversations, I feel a little like I am coming home. Is this the reason why I came here (here being this 40 year old organisation in Udaipur, Rajasthan with whom I am presently associated)?

The reason I came here, and stayed on, was simple: I wanted to make a 'sustainable contribution'. The more I worked, the more I learned about people, systems, organisational learning, systems dynamics and complexity theory, the more I came to understand what this 'sustainable change' really meant and what it might take to bring it about.

The more I think about it, the more i realise that the deep change will take place when the patterns of conversation within the organisation change. And changing the patterns of conversation within the organisation is, by and large (not meaning to sound overly naieve), a matter of opening spaces for conversations and asking the right questions to get the right kind of conversations. And the message that I am getting now, after reading and listening to all kinds of things on the subject, is that stories need to be the basis of this conversations.

Of course, the conversations can build on, manipulate, deconstruct, reconstruct and distill the stories in myriad ways - all guided, of course, by matters of purpose (why these stories?) and context... But those stories are the foundation of any learning and change that is going to emerge. They are the raw data for creating meaning collectively. Story, it seems to me, only really has significance, only really comes to life, in an inter-personal setting.

I have been using anecdotes throughout my time here at a personal level to explain or justify things. Not very effectively though! For the most part, I seem to have used them almost accidentally - not as the foundation of a carefully considered way of generating deeper understanding. Now I feel that a whole new universe has opened up before me based on story-telling. It is as though the entire organisation just dissolved into its basic unit: stories.

The story has the potential to connect the women's group leader who isn't getting the support she needs to the chief executive in a way that a target (30 women's group leaders trained) doesn't. It can also connect the health in-charge to the education in-charge through the story of the child in the community school who got ill and none of his friends had basic first-aid knowledge. (By the way, I just made these stories up... to prove a point).

Another realisation, and one that came just now, is that the real pressing need - to complete the learning cycle - is to link the stories of the villagers themselves (the local leaders, the users of the irrigation system, the trained birth assistants, the children in the community schools) to the stories of the field workers and to link the stories of the field workers to the stories of the block staff and the stories of the block staff to the unit staff and the executive committee and beyond.

Now I may be obsessing a little. But for an oral culture, of which Mewar (the region I am living in), I do believe, is a fine example (though it has its writing too), story telling should be a piece of pie as natural as herding goats or collecting berries from the forest! All we need to do now is navigate the donors and their out-dated obsession with de-contextualised numbers that drain time and energy away from meaningful, inspiring, change-inducing conversations based on stories!

This is all, perhaps, a gross simplification of what will probably take a lot of perseverance and (self-)mastery to apply. And I by no means intend to do injustice to story-work. But I feel I have just reached a new level in my understanding of something of great importance.

The excitement of the adventure continues! Or, rather, begins (again, only more so)!

Digging the Narrative Approach to Civic Driven Change

2008-06-27T21:09:00.000-07:00

I couldn't help myself, to be honest. The opportunity to participate in the dialogue on civic driven change in Jaipur organised jointly by Context, International Cooperation (a Netherlands based social enterprise/consultancy) and CECOEDECON (a 25-year young Jaipur-based NGO), especially getting to spend some time bantering with Fons and his friends/fellow-travellers was just too good to miss... Especially as the subject seemed to be a wedding of two subjects that I am passionate about: social change (of the civic driven variety) and complexity theory.

Admittedly, I was a little confused about the purpose of the gathering (as in what we hoped to get out of our discussion on these two subjects), and I also felt that I would have appreciated more time and space for genuine dialogue on the subjects raised rather than what turned out to be a rather linear (admittedly it was a circle) exchange of views (funny, considering all the concern with social change itself being a non-linear process!)... But there were great time constraints and I had the good fortune of sitting in the debriefing group at the end, where there was more space for this kind of an interaction.

Overall, what was most meaningful for me? I think, it is the insights I got into the following questions (which is also, I realise now, a reflection of my what questions I was carrying with me):

Why does a complexity perspective mean that should we look at ourselves as explorers rather than experts or traditional researchers? And how do we go about our exploration? Why is it important to do so in a collaborative manner?
What would a large scale, multi-stakeholder collaborative action research - with the objective of understanding how civic driven change actually happens - look like and how would it operate?
How I should deal with the ugly thing we know as the logical framework (LFA) in the coming 6th Comprehensive Plan and what kind of meaningful, participatory, qualitative-focused learning systems could be used to compensate for the horrible void that is the LFA?
What is the potential for taking up the strengthening of the inter-organisational platform for civil society learning and self-governance at the Udaipur level? How should I get started and who can I to talk to for this (thanks to Pradeep and Marieke)?

I'm leaving them all as questions because what I have gained is a bit more insight than clear answers. But all rather encouraging.

An interesting opportunity has also emerged for Seva Mandir to work with Fons and Co on the narrative based collaborative action research on civic driven change, including - but not limited to - child-centred change. It also seems to reverberate with conversations we have been having within Seva Mandir on the topic of distilling our own understanding of the change process (including the one we had during the annual camp) and our oft repeated pride in being an organisation that learns from and builds its knowledge based on experience!

Some questions, however, that I'm still not totally comfortable with are the following:

To what extent and what kind of NGO intervention can still permit us to call what happens as Civic Driven? For example, if Seva Mandir initiates a dialogue, makes available certain resources and provides facilitation inputs as a result of which citizens begin to organise themselves around certain resources, issues, commons and values - does this count as civic driven change? Where is that fine line between civic driven and not civic driven change (or perhaps we'd be better off talking about a gradient from totally self-organised civic driven on the one side to coordinated with some civic participation on the other)? It seems to me that the nature of the change that we talk about has some pretty serious implications and this need to be unpacked.

In any case, the wonderful company and conversations at dinner provided a great end to a very interesting day! So thanks to all for making it possible!

Post Delwara Realisations

2008-06-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

A view of Delwara's roofscape at sunrise while having morning chai at the house of the former Secretary of the Citizens' Development Forum

Today, sitting in Jaipur airport, on my way back from a fantastic day with Fons and team (to be discussed in more detail in the forthcoming post), I find myself remembering Delwara.

I'm not really a believer in regrets. I much prefer the idea of learning from the past in a positive, constructive way rather than dwelling in past failings or shortcomings. Having said this, I will permit myself a couple of backward looking thoughts in the context of Delwara.

First, I wish I had known about blogging while I was in Delwara. I kept a diary in an almost fanatical manner during my time there and was also working on putting together a website. If only I had thought of putting together a blog I could have killed more birds with one stone than you could shake a stick at (not that I am in favour of killing birds with stones). Based on this realisation, I have taken a vow to cover any project that I have the good or bad fortune of embarking on through blogging. It will be my tribute to the world and all the people who are part of my efforts.

Second, I wish I had not been (a) so arrogant; and (b) so confused about my role. Of course, there is nothing I could have done about it at the time - because that's probably where I was at as a person... But if I hadn't been so fixed on doing something related to Planning Monitoring and Evaluation - and more specifically Outcome Mapping - at the outset, I might have been better able to really engage in the change process.

I feel that I placed all kinds of barriers on my role and didn't quite manage to do what Ajay had advocated (going about and having meaningful conversations) - which, to be honest, seemed far too unfocused for me at the time... and my understanding was that more than anything, the project needed a fancy, participatory visioning and M&E kind of a process (which it did but not at that point)... Admittedly, I did manage quite a bit of what Ajay suggested, but still... far too bounded by my own thoughts. Easy to say in retrospect, I suppose.

Finally, I thought it would be good to include a link to a paper (soon to be published) that I prepared based on my experience in Delwara. Although it is rather long, and doesn't quite capture the full richness of what has taken place there (there are hundreds of good stories of change from Delwara), I feel that it distills the essence of the change process. It also offers what I believe may be some important insights in the context of the bigger debate on 'good governance'. Here are some snippets...

[...] this paper calls for a more culturally grounded understanding of the role of participation in the development of complex societies and is concerned as much with the value of participation in securing immediate instrumental objectives as in transforming the way that a fragmented citizenry relates to itself.

[...] it is critical to recognize that the Panchayat, at the local level, is a culturally embedded system and that its status is, by and large, a reflection of the society from which it is constituted. It is, therefore, only to be expected that an unaware, fragmented citizenry, deeply embroiled in conflicts of interest, mistrust, etc. will not be able to elect a Panchayat that is able to function in a democratic, transparent, accountable – or, for that matter, even remotely effective – manner. Nor will they be able to make or hold it accountable to themselves or to the village as a whole.

[...] the experience to date in Delwara indicates that when the starting point is a highly diverse and fragmented citizenry, establishing participatory governance systems is primarily a challenge of (i) enabling citizens to engage in processes of self-transformation; and (ii) enabling citizens to form relationships of mutual empowerment amongst themselves. To achieve this involves creating spaces and processes that support this transformation by bringing together citizens of diverse backgrounds in an organisational culture that embodies values of equality, dignity, respect, compassion, transparency, democratic deliberation, inclusiveness, collective strength and learning together.

An organized, cohesive and empowered community is far better placed to collaborate with and leverage the resources of the Panchayat than a fragmented citizenry. This means that the idea of responsible citizenship is about a great deal more than mobilizing people to demand resources from the state. It is, instead, about engaging people in a process where they have to confront themselves – both as individuals and as members of a social group. [...] Differences in ideology, values, worldviews, class, gender, geographical location - all provide pretexts for accentuating or shaping conflicts over decision-making processes. These conflicts have to be surfaced and [collectively] deconstructed in order for positive change to occur.

I will be thinking of ways to do justice to the Delwara experience in the coming months...

...indeed, the journey's only just begun!

2008-06-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

This appreciative inquiry thing is rather interesting. Although I had the sense that I wasn't quite managing to do what I ought to be doing, I think that I somehow managed to pull loose ends together and tie them up with a neat little bow. Thanks are due to the appreciative commons through which various ideas about how to present what had come out were made available. The feedback I have gotten so far on the appreciative inquiry and the presentation I made based on it, has been, for the most-part, very positive. Not only the (verbal) feedback though… People seem to have a little bit more spring in their step - though of course its far too early to tell whether (a) this is just because of my own perception; and (b) it is going to last.

In any case, some reflections. First, although I obsessed about what I was doing, it seemed a little bit too easy. It seemed as though I didn't have to do anything. Now, this is also nonsense - because I was working until midnight for several days during the run-up to the annual camp… But that was also due to other reasons.

Once the data had come in and once we had done our group work of analysing the data and converting it into themes and values with their quotes and stories to back them up, it was just a matter of figuring out the provocative propositions. I feel that I didn't do this properly. Somehow, it seemed to be too much a matter of me just piecing the statements together, one after the other… Yes, I did spend a night in the office with some of my workgroup looking at these statements but the word-smithing was mostly me… and that felt like a problem at the time.

Anyway, the first time it got air-space was at the meeting of the sanchalak mandal (the executive committee) meeting - the day before the camp was due to start. It was generally appreciated but there were some tensions and questions: the expected ones - where is the negative stuff? Why focus just on the positive? But you haven’t told us how we are performing in relation to these values (which I very, very clearly stated was in no way my objective whatsoever)? And all the associated points that back up the idea of dwelling on problems… (and the image - shown above - taken from Yes!andSpace (hat tip) didn't seem to help so much as aggravate the idea that things were one-sided, too positive… it triggered the response: "if we only focus on the positive and future things, we are not learning from history - so we will end up just repeating past mistakes" - which indicates that the whole concept of the appreciative inquiry had not been properly digested by the audience).

I tried an array of methods for explaining the principle and ended up using the kind of analogy that I don't usually feel comfortable using in front of people in high posts (because I worry that they will be degrading). I said: "If I want to know how to get to Delhi from here and you tell me - 'don't go to Ahmedabad, don't go to Kota, don't go to Jaisalmer, don't go to Bhopal' and so on it doesn’t really make it much easier for me. However, if you tell me - 'this is the road to Delhi' then I can set off along it more easily and with greater confidence." Which seemed to work a little - though I didn't ask for feedback to confirm this.

Anyway, I conceded enough on the basis of our discussions to incorporate a question that would give people the space to talk about what Mustafa (on of the structure consultants) called 'the shadow behind the values'… And this was a very interesting part of the whole event for me. Things were happening fast, there were pots and pans banging in the background (so it was necessary to make quite a lot of effort just to hear each other) and we'd just eaten ice-cream (which was very nice indeed). Everyone had just been sitting in the presentation looking and listening (to varying extents). And now we had to talk about performance in relation to the values.

It took almost one hour to get the group to move out of the comfortable silence on the topic of where we were failing to live the values. It took coaxing. It took trust-building, no doubt made more difficult by the presence of Sachin - a representative from PLAN who funds us. To get around this I eventually got the bright idea of getting Sachin to share his own experiences from PLAN. When it came up that they've been having their own challenges (all organisations do y'know!) people got a little bit more open.

After wrestling with conceptual clarity and getting over the fact that it isn't easy to talk about these things - especially as they may be personal, we got into a fairly heated discussion about the values. Some individuals became a little bit too garam and had to get up and cool off. Others sat cold as stones. Various stories came up of ways that leadership had not been sensitive, ways that the organisational system wasn't supporting workers' contribution to change, ways that there wasn't openness (of which the one hour it took to open up was the most striking example)…

The energy was fairly tense. I was doing some fairly active facilitation - though I can't recall many of the specifics - but almost as much energy as went into opening the discussion to the deep dark well of 'what ain't right' went into trying to pull the group back out to the world of 'what we gotta do then'… Eventually we did this and ended up with some suggestions that we then pooled with four other groups who had been talking on the same subject. We were able to compile together from across the various groups into a presentation that pretty much captured everything that need to be captured. This got presented the following morning and seemed to go down relatively well… This is basically what it recommended at the end:

How to take the values forward:

Start with yourself: be the change that you want to see
Use the values as a basis for staff performance evaluation
Create time and space for dialogue on these values amongst staff
Improve organisational systems so that they support the practice of these values
Establish a system for grievance redressal involving staff from all levels of the organisation
Take this conversation forwards

I suppose this means we are at least thinking in the right direction…? Of course, there's a lot more fleshing out to be done... Given the discussion we had the following day (mentioned at the end of my last post), I suppose, means that we are actually doing something about it all? And to think this is only the beginning!

One of my lingering questions though... was the negative patch useful and important? Did it add or subtract from the discussions we had? This is something I will need to ponder on and explore as I continue on my adventures!

And the journey goes on...

2008-06-25T06:15:00.000-07:00

Well, today, I'm sitting on the other side of the mountain. The annual camp is over. It was brief. Very brief indeed! And there was less space for dialogue than I might have liked. But the dialogue we did have was, for the most part, pointing in the right direction. In line with the framework that we've been using, there were three main components on the agenda - (1) strategies; (2) structure and (3) culture.

Each of these sessions started with a presentation and was followed by an open discussion (except for the the values one due to time constraints) and a panel.

For strategy, an organisational level perspective was given - highlighting the cross-cutting social issues that Seva Mandir sees itself as struggling with: an absence of trusteeship and too much spectatorship and complicity - issues as relevant internally as externally. It was made clear that Seva Mandir's concern lies with society more than it does with the government: for Seva Mandir, the government is a part of society. It then went on to flesh out the key strategies that Seva Mandir would be pursuing across different program areas to address these.

The structure presentation was made by some consultants and focused on the question of where Seva Mandir wanted to apply more of its 'energy' (a catch all for everything from manpower and resources to capacity, power and attention). While the model (based on ...) was rather confusing because of its ambiguities, abstraction and technical jargon (that people couldn't easily relate to Seva Mandir), it did play the important function of generating dialogue - largely with the intention of seeking clarity.

The culture presentation was based on the appreciative inquiry (AI) that we have been working on over the course of the last few months. This involved an incredibly brief section explaining AI followed by a presentation of 8 core values backed up by quotes from the appreciative conversations we had over the last few months within Seva Mandir and ended with six provocative propositions based out on these core values.

Based on these, the following sub-themes emerged as subjects to be taken forwards in group discussions: (1) how does change take place (and what is our role in this); (2) what are the desired roles and linkages between Seva Mandir, the community, the panchayat and the government; (3) what are the strengths, weaknesses and suggested improvements to the organisation's structure; (4) where do we stand in terms of living up to the organisation's values, what causes us to fail or live up to them, and what can we do to further cultivate our values within the organisation?

Four groups of up to 20 people participated in the discussions on strategy, structure and culture for not quite enough time. However, the basic sense of what mattered emerged in each of the discussions and presentations were prepared on each topic for the following morning. The need for continued, more extended and deeper dialogue on all issues - especially on structure and culture - came up as very important concerns.

The event wrapped up with thought-provoking ideas from Rajni Bakshi that helped to situate Seva Mandir's efforts within the international context - putting a special emphasis on environmental issues, broader economic development issues, consumerism, communication, dialogue and the need to cultivate spaces and individuals who can help to bring about a broader based social change.

All in all it went quite well. There is no doubt in my mind that we could have benefitted from more and longer conversations - possibly in smaller groups and with more of an explicit action focus built in - i.e. a kind of "this is what we're going to do" rather than a "these are things that we could do"... But the sense of a commitment to doing some of these things is present nonetheless.

This revealed itself the following day when a large body of staff gathered at Seva Mandir to celebrate the founder's birthday and do shramdan (cleaning of the office). At the end of this, there was a good discussion amongst members of the Seva Mandir community on such issues as maintaining cleanliness, how to become more environmentally friendly (someone was commissioned to lead this process), ensuring that suitable facilities (from hygienic water coolers to motor-cycles) were available for the staff and also discussing problems associated with delays in the purchasing system that held up getting work done. All-in-all a promising start for round 2 (of what exactly?)...

Now, it would seem, the focus of efforts will be on operationalising the kinds of changes that we have been talking about - helping people change their patterns of behaviour and relationships, develop more empowering organisational systems and ensure regular and open dialogue on values and structure, etc. This is long-term stuff...

In the meanwhile, I will need to get busy with looking at how to put together the organisation's 6th Comprehensive Plan document which means another round of discussions, thinking about targets, indicators and budgets and fleshing out strategies wherever this may be required... Back down to the dirty work!

The Perplexing Conundrum of 'Uncontacted Tribes' and Development

2008-06-16T21:55:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a post via the Neuroanthropology blog over at the Culture Matters blog. This post mainly focuses on criticising the nonsense and stupidity that surrounds the way that the 'outside world' (i.e. us) relates to what end up getting called 'Uncontacted Tribes' (even though this is a myth). And I really appreciate the efforts that these anthropologists appear to be making to put things in their right perspective...

But then, as I lay in bed last night after reading the post, I found myself wondering... How on earth does whatever I am doing and what I want to do relate to all this? And how does that make me feel and do I still feel ok about myself? Or better, what ought I do about it? Wondering what the issue is?

I work in a field that is basically called 'development'. It is a hugely contested field, replete with its hardcore proponents, its alternative champions and its dissidents. Its primary (official) concern is with trying to make the world a better place. Now we all know (don't we?) that a lot of what gets done in the name of development is horrible and damaging - to the environment, to culture and generally to life on this planet. But like I said, development is a huge field and contains lots of alternative conceptions of what positive change really is. I like to think that I am working on one of the more (though by no means the most) alternative and benign types of development.

The organisation where I work has the basic objective of strengthening rural, predominantly tribal communities so that they can become self-governing entities. In the modern age, this means that the communities have to have the power to negotiate with the State (I hate giving it a capital 'S' but it seems necessary in a world where there is no escape from it). These tribals are entangled in the modern world through roads, motorcycles, party-politics, trade, employment, education, mobile phones, radios and so on. So they're nothing like the 'uncontacted tribes' from the Amazon.

They also have a life of increasing hardship. Being a part of the State means being a part of the political, economic and social structure that it entails. Sustainable 'hunter-gathering' has pretty much died out (and the forests that once supported it have by and large been destroyed). Indigenous medicines have either vanished or are vanishing. Population has mushroomed as people have shifted increasingly to settled agriculture. There is a scarcity of food available and child malnutrition - in terms of calories and micro-nutrients - is just ridiculously high. A host of other health problems prevail. At one level, this sorry state of affairs can be linked directly to what would once have been called development. And before it was called development it was probably called something along the lines of 'civilising the savages'. It disgusts me to think about it like that.

What am I trying to get at? First a little bit more beating around the bush. I am about to enroll on a degree - its a Masters in Participation, Power and Social Change. Sound exciting? Well, I think it is. Why do I want to take it? Besides my earlier post which explains the superficial reasons for going to study, this degree will hopefully give the time and space to explore - even more systematically that I already have done - just how society is held together and how people can be brought together in a process that enables them to live the life that they 'really' want rather than one that is sort of imposed on them from outside. What's my point?

The basic conundrum is this: where do these 'uncontacted tribals' fit into my schema of inclusive social change? Now before I get labeled as some kind of destroyer of indigenous culture and human diversity, I would like to make it very clear that I am fascinated by these tribes, the way they live, their belief systems, their healing systems, their socio-political structures. I don't feel that they need to be 'civilised' and I am perfectly happy with them living just the way they do. So, if I feel that way about it, why am I happy to go off and study on a course that is all about interfering with people, getting people connected up and engaged and making them capable of incfluencing the world in a way that is meaningful for them.

These 'uncontacted tribals' are not animals. So why are we keeping them in some kind of giant nature reserve and tracking them (a bit like we do with endangered species). Perhaps this is our way of preventing the destructive force of Development from completely obliterating them. In that case, perhaps we should keep on protecting them until we (the 'outside world') become sufficiently benign so as not to present a threat to them (is this even possible anymore? will we eradicate the common cold?). Or else does this preservation thing go on indefinitely until the collapse of modern civilisation (which seems like an increasingly likely possibility, as Dave Pollard is keen to profess in his wonderful blog - How to Save the World).

And what does all this mean for me and what I do? On the one hand, my new job description ought to be something along the lines of: 'salvaging Development's cultural wreckage'. My work is to try and help people whose lives are falling apart as a result of Development to organise themselves and recreate meaningful and sustainable community as a way of life so that they can be free from hunger, exploitation and the misery and hardship that this entails.

But the next step after salvaging is to enable people to no longer be the passive victims of the Development-Monster-On-A-Rampage but be empowered agents of their own destiny, creators of their own culture, cultivators and communicators of their own values, evolving collectively in some kind of sustainable wonder-land where people live in a perpetual state of harmony, ecstatic joy, meaning and fulfillment.

Not realistic? OK. But really, I find myself wondering what I will be able to learn from my degree in participation, power and social change about how I should relate to these 'Uncontacted Tribals'. Perhaps, I should just stay well away and avoid even thinking about polluting them with my own confusion!

What do you think about all this?

Teetering toward the big day

2008-06-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

Today I read a brilliant harvest of a workshop in which a diverse group of people tackled the question of how they could move towards a 'Person Centred Culture'. As I scanned through the material, I found myself deeply inspired and connected with what came out. I will not try to paraphrase it but you can read the whole article here.

Over here in Seva Mandir we are engaged in the preparation of our 6th Comprehensive Plan. One important part of this is exploring our oragnisational culture. The discovery and dream phases of our Appreciative Inquiry have now pretty much reached completion. A small group of us will sit together next week and try to craft the 'provocative propositions' (statements about what the ideal organisation would be like based on what people have been surfacing). The plan is that when we get to the annual retreat (coming up in about 9 days - horribly close by!) we will present the major findings of our appreciative inquiry along with the provocative propositions.

These provocative propositions will then provide the basis for group discussions. The group discussions will have a set of guiding questions that aim to take the group from understanding what it (the provocative proposition) actually means (from diverse perspectives) to figuring out what concrete steps can be made at individual and organisational levels to make it real. After the group work, people will be able to take a break and reflect, go for a walk or chat with their colleagues... Then dinner and some relaxation.

The following morning the groups will present what they have come up with on each of the identified themes. And then we will see what we have got on our plate :) I am still not completely sure about how this is going to work and I have half a dozen naggling concerns to deal with. Is this all too pre-planned and do we need to build in more space for open topics (a la open space)? How will the little groups be facilitated and what preparation will be required for this? Will there be overall support for the process and what is coming out of it?

I realise that we can't do everything with the limited time we have... So more than anything, this is going to be about securing the optimal usage of our time - having contributions that lead us further in the right direction. And like I've mentioned before, this is my first time... ;)

What do I do?

2008-06-13T00:19:00.000-07:00

It just struck me today, right now, as I was walking down the corridor to respond to nature's call, that my work can be divided into three broad categories:

One. The work that I do directly for the organisation that is necessary (mainly from the organisation's point of view), routine and somewhat tedious - for example, writing progress or annual reports. I have an inbuilt resistance to actually doing this kind of work that I have to struggle against in order to get things done on time. Sometimes it actually hurts me to do these kinds of things. I still find myself unable to say no.

Two. The work that I do directly for the organisation that is necessary (more from my point of view), non-routine and in-line with my own passion - for example, facilitating group discussions on vision, strategies, organisational change, monitoring and evalaution, action research, participation, etc. Though I am not yet so great at this, I pine for opportunities to do this kind of work and struggle to create the space to do this in the way that I want, based on the principles that I either believe in or am trying to learn about.

Three. The work that I do primarily for myself, for my own learning and personal development - for example, reading articles, blogs and emails, writing my own blog or in my diary, posting comments on discussion forums and mailing lists, doing some meditation or reflection... and so on. This work fills me with satisfaction but has the danger of making me narcissistic or self-obsessed and tends to stop me from focusing properly on one. It does, however, have the fortunate advantage of helping me understand myself better.

Obtaining balance between these elements seems to be key. My service to the organisation (one) opens up a space for me to do what I am passionate about (two) - which (as far as I am concerned) is more of a service to not just the organisation but the world in general - and is, therefore, very important. On the basis of my experiences in two, I have a basis and grounding for my personal learning and development (three), which also helps me become more effective in two. Three, therefore, is integral to two and is also very, very important.

I remember someone, somewhere, talking about something called 'a social life'. As I struggle to retain a happy balance between one, two and three, I am still trying to figure out where and how this 'social life' thing fits in to my schema! That must be the bit where I go home and eat food with my house-mates, chat nonsense, jump about, have a beer and make silly jokes. And what, exactly does all that contribute to?

Grudges and Forgiving

2008-06-12T01:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, in the course of our interactions with other people we find ourselves not being able to understand each other, being unjust or receiving injustice... and more often than not this leads us to hold grudges. Perhaps there is a fear of appearing weak. Perhaps we feel insecure about something. These little mistakes and misunderstandings, inevitable in the course of our day-to-day interactions - if not dealt with in the appropriate manner, can turn into a grudge.

A grudge is rather like a virus. A virus spreads by infecting more and more cells. In some ways, a grudge is rather like the HIV virus - in the sense that it attacks the immune system - the very life-force that holds the organism (or organisation) together. I say this because grudges undermine the relationships that hold us together. It is through our relationships that we create meaning and achieve great things - none of this is done by individuals alone!

It doesn't take long for this little virus to grow inside us - at times it can become overwhelming - filling us with anger, frustration and negativity. This has direct effects on our behaviour - how do we relate to the person against whom we have a grudge, how do we talk about these people to others, what effect does that have on other people around us? Soon we are getting over-run by this virus!

Now, if I hold a grudge against you and this affects my behaviour towards you... it won't be long before you feel that there is something not-so-nice going on - and this leads to distancing. A little vicious cycle appears. I act unpleasantly with you. You act unpleasantly with me. The words I use and the way I use them suck you into my whirlpool of animosity. I bad-mouth you. I complain about you to my friends. Little undercurrents of mistrust begin to spread and soon the system is attacking itself. Like the HIV virus, this state of infection can remain incubated for a long time before it breaks out into full-blown AIDS.

Now, it may be that there is no cure for AIDS - at least not yet. But the same is not true of problems with our relationships. Relationships need to be nurtured in order to thrive. This is not some fluffy nonsense. This is real science.

And believe it or not, there is a special cure for damaged relationships. That cure is FORGIVING. It is a curious little action that is incredibly powerful - especially when it comes from the heart (superficial forgiving tends not to work). This little article might just help to make the role and importance of forgiving in the workplace a little bit clearer.

All this leads me to wonder: what is the relationship between organsiational change and organisational healing or reconciliation? Can an organisation really embark on a meaningful change journey without addressing its internal fragmentation - the rifts between people who are supposed to be collaborating with each other? Or is this healing process actually a part of the change process itself? Does the need to change bring to attention the need to heal?

It seems that so much of what organisational change is about is bringing people within an organisation together, helping them to understand each other (which may include forgiving when required) and enabling them to co-create a shared purpose that they can all strive for together. Many of the rifts that get created are of deep psychological significance - just what might it take to bridge them? What kind of conversations? What kind of facilitated reflection and interaction? Who would need to be involved?

My mind is already a-bubble with ideas! Please share yours!

Inside Out

2008-06-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

Today, I got a link to an article on Hypergene MediaBlog forwarded from someone on the appreciative inquiry mailing list (Stephanie West Allen). The article is an interview with Karen Stephenson and deals with the tricky question of trust - particularly looking at the whatsit 2.0 world of blogs and so forth. One part of this interview really caught my attention - perhaps because it gets to the heart of what people 2.0 (forgive me) are pining for from their institutions (can I call it institutions 2.0 without getting beaten up?). I would rather call it the authentic institution - where authenticity is basically about being inside out... In any case, I'm sure you know what I mean... So enough of my rambles and on with the quote:

Today, I trust no institutions. But institutions are made up of wonderful people. But often times those wonderful people aren’t the decision makers.

So, if you want me to pay attention to the institution, you let me see inside. Let me see the men and women behind the curtain. Give me their blogs. I want to know who they are. I’ll form my relationships with them thank you very much.

Then if I like what I see. I might trust your institution.

This is part of our evolution. To do this means that we are freeing ourselves of the so many complexes and structures that systemically obstruct our free association and our access to truth and what is right. It enables us to see through the institutional smog, greenwash or straight plain lies and deceit to what is really going on...

Of course, it demands great courage to go inside out and any individual, organisation or institution that is ready to swallow its fear, ego and pride to make this happen is, in my mind nothing less than a hero.

Lets all go inside out!

The (premature) tribulations of an uninitiated but aspiring mid-wife

2008-06-10T06:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the last-but-one meeting of our Appreciative Inquiry work group. The idea was that over the last few months a group of 12 people had been busy running about the organisation having conversations with people about such things as: "... a time when you feel you were really able to contribute to bringing about change...", or "... what you like best about the organisation and why"... and so on. Before the meeting I was, admittedly, a little bit nervous. What would I find? What would people have gathered? How many surveys would have been carried out? How representative would they be? Would the material be really useful? How on earth would we analyse and then present the output of a gigantic stack of interviews?

It is at this point that I humbly acknowledged that there is a great deal about the way I have handled this work over the course of the last few months that I would do very differently if given the chance. Easy to mumble this to myself in retrospect, of course - but that doesn't make it any less present right now. I would have tried to be more organised, sending out letters informing people what was going on instead of relying on word of mouth. I would have printed out lists of names for each of the people in my team to interview and tried to set fortnightly targets to avoid the last minute rush. I might even have explained the entire concept a little differently... But then it's not as though I hadn't thought about all these things... I just didn't do them... and I did have my reasons too...

So, before heading off to my meeting, I prepared what I considered to be a clever little meeting-plan that I thought might just do the trick. After going through the formalities (basically checking that at least 25% of the organisation had been conversed with) I would give a spiel in which I re-explained the purpose of all these conversations from a slightly different vantage point - one that I felt would gear people up to dig through their experiences, accept diversity and complexity and move, pretty rapidly, towards getting us some provocative propositions. After this (and making sure that I didn't drone on for more than 5-10 minutes), people would split into groups and start sharing, verbally, their experiences from the conversations, at four levels:

First, sharing of the stories, experiences or perspectives from the conversations that were most inspiring, most powerful. Second, identifying the various themes that seemed to be surfacing again and again. Third, culling out underlying values and principles that these pinnacles were founded on. Fourth, selecting quotes that communicated some of these complex ideas in very few words. And I got to spend this time sitting in silence. Then a break for lunch. Then the sharing.

The sharing is when things started getting really interesting (for me). The first part proceeded quite smoothly as the first group shared its points. There was a little discussion - mostly for the purpose of clarification - and I was primarily occupied with note-taking (which I did quite thoroughly thank you very much!). The second group then got busy with its sharing. This time, people were a little bit more eager to pipe up and share some of their own views in this context... Perhaps the sitting and listening during the first group's presentation had made them feel itchy?

Up until then, things had proceeded smoothly, there was only minor evidence of tension or emotional strain. Now, however, things got a little different as the discussion started to acquire a direction, tone and life of its own. It appeared that somehow, the discussion had got latched onto a personal issue of one of the group members. It was not long before the platform had started turning into a space for people to vent their frustration. For some reason I only seem to have managed to realise what was happening until it was a little late. The droning of the construction work going on outside was certainly not of much help!

Eventually, I managed to get us out of our ugly little rut by explaining that the issue was not getting neglected since the underlying positive principle had been duly noted by me and that we were running out of time a little and couldn't possible handle dealing with every individual worker's issues during the annual camp since (simple maths: we have 250 staff and three hours)... This led to a little bit of thinking and I got some good support from one of the most senior staff member present who explained that what we were doing could be looked at rather as (a) finding out what's best; and (b) giving suggestions of how what isn't best could become best... rather than simply pretending that everything is ok. It seemed to work. There was a pause.

I then shared a lesson I had once learned - it was about apologising. Apologies have secured me a great deal of internal peace when deep inside I have been furious. I think I have asked for apologies from just about (though not absolutely) everyone that I have entered into some kind of a conflict with. My asking for apologies is as much about me forgiving them as it is about me wanting them to forgive me... somehow asking for apologies entails a kind of general spiritual release on all sides and makes life much more bearable - certainly a great deal easier than having an ego throbbing in my chest, throat and brain and brutally suffocating what little of the divine might exist within me! There was a silence. Then I mentioned that sometimes tears would come to my eyes when I asked for apologies. There was more silence. Someone said what I had been thinking: "that's because you have to deal with your ego." There was some more silence.

I broke the silence. I wondered immediately afterwards if that was a mistake. Silences can be very good. Especially the meaningful ones. They can be better than words, I believe. But I ended it and we moved on with our work. It was getting late in the evening and some people had a long way to travel home and we were really running out of time. So we finished off with some formalities. A core team was formed to assist me in figuring out how we would get all the material that had come out into a meaningful presentation... and then I went home.

At the end of it all, later that evening, I found myself thinking. I imagined the proceedings of the camp,: groups of people sitting in circles and discussing Seva Mandir's burning issues; sharing perspectives; listening to and learning from each other; coming up with ways of creating a new organisational reality based on the emerging visions... It was really like a dream (the one I've been having for the last three years or so) - to early to say come true - but definitely imminent.

But how would I facilitate it? There would be at least 12 groups of as any as 20 people each. There is no way that I could be everywhere at once. What if someone starts ranting or getting upset? What if a cascade of grievances start to emerge? How could I get the genie back into the lamp? And then a whole load of other questions started emerging: what if management doesn't back our findings (this has been a latent, hanging around kind of a fear)? Do we have the right kind of data? Will they be picking holes in our methods? Will they challenge our 'objectivity' or question that we are not a representative sample of the oragnisation? Will they say that we have just been fed nonsense or been conned by simple, self-interested people in the organisation?

And that's the point where I wondered whether I hadn't chewed off more than I can swallow. I set myself up for something really rather big. I can imagine that for some management consultants this seems like a splash in a baby's paddling pool... but to me, this feels very much like the deep end. As I try not to drown in the multiple other commitments that I have - the organisation's annual report - things related to Delwara - I will need to pray for balance, strength and courage. There is a whole new world out there, waiting to be born. I feel like I am the mid-wife, about to conduct my first delivery, with no formal training, with no clear mentor - only concerned family members watching. And it's not just any old baby: it might just be the next messiah!

Now that is food for thought! I need to get myself ready!

Going to University

2008-06-08T07:31:00.001-07:00

Going to university is one of those things that I have been contemplating for the last four years while working with Seva Mandir, here in India. Every year I have looked at courses, every year I have ended up finding only one course that satisfied me - and even then, I found myself uncertain. Why is this and why do I feel ready now?

Over the course of the last few years I have steeped myself - mind, body and spirit - in the work that I am doing. I have been obsessive. I have tried out all kinds of experiments, methods, approaches and ideas. I have dissolved, by and large, the lines (if there were any) between my life and my work. I developed the habit of writing my thoughts, of reflecting on my self and my 'professional' practice. I have read vastly on the subjects that interest me and are related to my work - on evaluation, on organisational learning, on change, on governance, on participation, on leadership, on complexity science and its multifarious applications... the list goes on.

As a result of all this, I have learned a huge amount. I have also gained the opportunity to work directly at the field level in a community development process - crossing cultures - transforming my own perception of myself. Who I am and where I am from - questions that the answers 'Andre' and 'England' really don't seem to do justice to anymore (if they ever did). I sometimes forget that I wasn't born in India. I have known that this has been happening to me over the last few years. Before coming - although I didn't know what it would feel like - I knew that this is what would happen to me... and that is why I chose to come here.

As I traveled this personal journey of learning and change, the idea of going to university lingered on the peripheries. The more I read, the more I immersed myself and the more I strived to apply what I had learned - the action research and inquiry frameworks (internal and external, personal and participatory) and a host of methods and tools - the more I wondered what a degree might give me that I wasn't getting anyway. When I went to visit IDS (the place I just got accepted to) a few summers ago, I spoke to Robert Chambers - a hero of sorts in the field of participatory development. I told him about my work here and my interest in doing a Masters at IDS. He asked me: "If you're already doing these things, what do you expect to get from here?"

To be honest, I don't remember what I answered. I don't even know if I had an answer... But the question only added fuel to my general confusion about why I wanted to go to university at all. So I returned to my little world here in Udaipur and continued to immerse myself in my life of learning and doing. And the learning hasn't ended - it has only deepened, expanded, engaged me more thoroughly - taking me precisely in the direction that I had wanted to go in. The reason for my coming has been getting fulfilled - much as I had imagined it would - and much quite differently indeed!

So why off to study now? If I've achieved all this, then what's the point? I recently sent an email to my friends back home in England in which I laid out the following reasons:

There may be several reasons. One - it will help me to figure out if I am living in a bubble - and if so, to what extent. Two - it will put me in contact with lots of people who are basically crazy about and experienced in the same things as me. Three - it gives me a good excuse to take a break, catch up with family and friends and be a student again. Four - I might really learn something new and exciting that I hadn't had the chance to learn before. Five - it will end with me getting a little piece of paper that opens many doors faster than years of persistent effort (which sounds rather like another way of saying 'cheating' - hehehe... especially when considering the whole thing costs 11,000 quid!). Six - it's the only degree, after much searching, that I'm actually prepared to subject myself to! Six good reasons. There are probably lots more but after years of questioning... these are the ones that I'm confident about.

Is that it though? Isn't there more to it than this? One thing that struck me is that this is all about things that I hope to 'get' or 'receive'. What about what I am going to give? What about all the experience that I will now be able to take with me from here - experiences and insights that I can share with the people studying with me? Why didn't I factor this into my reasons for going? As I think about it, there is a great deal that I am already thinking about doing once I get there - ideas I want to share, experiments I want to engage in, processes I would like to set up, interactions I would like to have... Perhaps I should view my student experience not just in terms of what I get to take away but also - and perhaps more importantly - what I get to share and contribute. Indeed, perhaps this will be what I truly get to take away the most: what I put in.

Now isn't that a nice thought for the day!

Really taking it in...

2008-05-28T19:25:00.000-07:00

As I think back to the block level gathering of the 23rd and 24th, I increasingly feel that, for all the imperfections that might have bothered me, the event was rather good. My withdrawal from the centre of the scene gave me a wonderful chance to reflect on the entire process - the dynamics that were at work, who was speaking and who wasn't - a microcosm of the organisation in its 'natural state'!

It made clearer than ever who thinks what, which people share similar perspecitives, what are the latent tensions, and what roles different people have taken on within the organisation - challengers, representatives, mediators, etc. Rather fascinating.

All this brings home the following point: self-organisation was at work during the meeting as people impromptu - i.e. without planning - adopted various roles which both surfaced, heightened, reduced and and resolved tensions as part of a process of creating meaning and order.

This allowed me to focus on the task of harvesting - which will be invaluable as I continue along with the process of supporting the organisation in creating an integral future for itself...

I also have to keep reminding myself that this process - the run up to the annual camp, the annual camp itself and the preparation of the 6th Comprehensive Plan document - is merely a fraction of the journey that Seva Mandir has embarked on. The energy and effort that is required now must not be mistaken for the whole journey... It's just the beginning!

It can be thought of as Journey 2 -(as per this white paper from the folk at Anecdote): the phase where the organisation collectively chalks out the plan of how it is going to get to wherever it wants to go. The first journey is that of planning the process of getting ready. The third journey is the 'actual' journey.

Key lessons that emerge from this paper on Journey 2 that I really want to focus on are the following:

"It is dangerous to take an old paradigm into a new land"

"In our work with clients on the second journey, we help clients work with the narrative material in terms of making sense and meaning of it as the basis for interpretation, envisioning and planning. These stories will help them clarify: (1) What is the whole story? What are we missing? (2) What will we need to be successful in our search? (3) What is likely to challenge us? What will be our response? (4) What is the story that we are telling ourselves about this venture?"

In order to do this, it is necessary to: "(1) gather stories of past successes [that can be drawn on] to aid them in this new journey; (2) create an iterative design for reaching the vision; (3) establish the necessary roles; (4) develop the key skills and resources that will be useful for this journey."

I would add one other point to this list (though I am by no means an expert): (5) enacting the new relationships that will be required to sustain the team over the course of the next (actual) journey. Which leads me to wonder about the extent to which the process going on here has focused enough on creating a coalition of change-makers within the organisation - that is to say, people from across levels who are committed to change... Is this process too decentralised? Is it not decentralised enough? How do we balance a vision where everyone is a champion of change with a reality where only a few people are? As I think about it now, it strikes me as a good topic for a stealth outcome mapping operation... so my next side task will be putting together an OM application for an orgainsational change model!

This blog, as you may have gathered, is for my internal journey.

Taking it all in...

2008-05-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

Well, as my efforts at being humble go into overdrive, I've had the chance to think over a whole lot of things. All the same, I've had a whole bunch of 'not-so-humble' issues come to mind since the morning...

What is the change that I expect to see? Will I recognise it when it comes about? What if it doesn't look like what I expected? Is it already happening?

This is probably where I need the most grounding. I am a dreamer. I tend to get carried away with fantastic images of these flexible, light, dynamic and evolving organisations that are continuously shifting shape with highly porous boundaries but gradually organising themselves around a set of core values - such as equality, truth, mutual respect and tolerance, environmental sustainability, inclusiveness... and so on... I can further concretise this in specific contexts - and talk about groups of people who work creatively together, calling forth new realities through their interactions, nurturing linkages and relationships and bringing about an integral development process. But this is all too abstract.

I envision knowledge-holders from various fields, levels and backgrounds, sitting together and co-creating projects based on synergy and integration that help to refine, realise and replicate the values that they hold. Still too abstract? I hope to see units sitting together and talking about how they can work together to achieve common outcomes, involving the community in this process, helping them articulate their own values and visions, and then actually working together to help make these values and visions a reality.

I would not like to see separate units planning independently and expecting people on the next rung down to figure out how to coordinate things themselves.

Perhaps I will get a chance to see the extent to which this happens sooner than I imagine. Will these ideas form part of the discussions that follow the presentations of the 2nd and 3rd of June?

If there are underlying dynamics at work that need to be broken, how do I do it? What are my stealth tactics? Should I be measuring changes in relationships? At what speed do these relationships change? How do I measure this?

There is little doubt in my mind that there are underlying dynamics at work that need to be broken. The whole atmosphere gives off this feeling. There is a constant battle against negativity that has to be fought! This is not how it should be! But what are these dynamics?

To what extent do they emanate from people's own limitations and to what extent do they emerge from oppressive power structures within the organisation? And, perhaps more meaningfully, what is the equation between these two things? I am not completely sure that I can ever understand the totality of these dynamics - there are too many perspectives on this to end up with a really objective picture. And this is what leads me to think in categories like 'quality of relationships' or 'target versus social change'... 'Who talks?' is another big one...

And what are stealth tactics anyway? My understanding of stealth tactics is this: if i apply a model that exists within my mind without explaining to people what the model is (because I know that doing so would freak them out), then I am using stealth tactics. An example would be applying outcome mapping without actually ever using the words 'outcome mapping'. This can also back fire: trying to apply an open-space or spontaneous approach seems to terrify people who are more used to feeling in control of things. Knowing when to do what seems critical - all part of the learning process no doubt!

As for changing relationships... I feel pretty confident that this is the heart of what I am doing over here. A system can only truly be said to have changed when the nature of the relationships that define that system change. Is this too 'out there'? Is it too simplistic? Either way, I am quite convinced of it. What if one person changes their behaviour without being able to influence the behaviour of others in a way that could be said to amount to 'changing the behaviour of the system'? Well, it may seem nice but if it's not effective then it's really rather insignificant, which reminds of something I said somewhere: if a conversation doesn't translate into new action then it might as well not have happened! Rather extreme, but to the point! So obviously, I should be on the look out for these changes. Perhaps I need some categories for measuring them? Things like, did the zone worker argue their point in front of a senior? Did the zone worker question a strategy or activity? Did the zone worker challenge the way a decision was made? Did the zone worker get recognition (or were they considered to be just prattling nonsense?)... Something for me to work on, no doubt!

And so...

And so, all this leads me on to the topic of visions. Where are the visions? As I wrote a little earlier, I am a dreamer. I think - pretty much - in terms of visions. Without a vision, I wouldn't know why I am doing what I am doing. I wouldn't know how to even go about the task of thinking about how to go about the task of realising my vision if I didn't have a vision! I would be immobilised. But people don't seem to dream or imagine things on a very large scale. They don't seem to be hunting for that integral vision where all things are interlinked and working in synergy and people are open-minded and cooperative. There appears to be an inbuilt change negator at work! Why is this and how can it be broken?

Well, there is plenty for me to keep busy with. It's good to have gotten this off my chest for the day :)

My Pet Obsession (the saga continues)

2008-05-25T07:09:00.002-07:00

Calling myself a 'change agent', a 'facilitator of change' or a 'catalyst' makes me feel that I'm getting a little bit big for my boots. To be honest, I don't know what I should call myself really.

The last couple of days were spent with about 100 people from Seva Mandir's blocks (geographical units) and programme-units at Kaya (the organisation's rural training centre). Each block was to present its assessment and thinking on what the next three years was asking of them. The idea of having such a session was not actually mine. The organisation had come up with this idea itself, stating that it did not feel confident about the idea of presenting its strategies at the annual camp (now planned for the following month) without discussing them at least once before then.

When this decision was made, I had qualms because it clashed with what I had been proposing. In particular, it seemed like a way of 'fixing' things before the annual camp... such that the camp itself would merely be a kind of 'presentation' of what we had already decided with limited space for the manthan, or churning, that I felt was called for. In particular, I felt that it undermined the idea of using the annual camp as a kind of no-holds-barred, open forum for people to question and dialogue with the 'whole system in the room'...

It was tough letting go of that vision but I soon realised that there was not much hope of it working out - especially as the annual camp had already been postponed to the third quarter of the time-bound process of consultations (which itself had bothered me since I felt this reduced the scope for building whatever emerged from the camp back into the planning process). So, I set about visiting all the blocks, organising mini-workshops, or simply listening to their own dialogues, discoveries and internal churnings. My main and simple tool for engaging with the groups was to ask those difficult questions that force people to confront things that are easier avoided and to weave in anecdotes from all of the conversations that I had been a part of over the last few months. This often sparked discussions that got to, if not close to, the heart of things on a number of occasions.

It is almost entirely impossible for me to really know what my contribution to the outcome has been so far. What kind indicators can be used to gauge this. Perhaps it is naieve or self-aggrandising to even try?

Back at the block gathering, I had mentioned, the blocks were busy presenting their contexts, achievements, challenges, strategies and questions. I kept myself as tiny and out of the way as possible throughout the whole gathering. Indeed, I said but a few words, busying myself instead with the task of documenting all the discussions. Part of my withdrawal was triggered by a little conflict that took place at the end of the first day. The presentations for the day had finished earlier than usual and it had been proposed that we use some of the remaining time to digest some of what was emerging.

I had, without giving it great consideration, assumed that a fairly open and flexible approach could be used to get this done. I hadn't really been troubled by the structure, the format or the question of how we would identify our issues. It just seemed to me that things would flow and we would soon be able to organise ourselves in the best possible way. I was also not sure of how long the participants were eager to stay and thought that I would simply be able to find this out by putting the question out there. This seemed to worry the Chief Executive who thought I was being 'too process-oriented'... I didn't really get the space to articulate myself much more and felt pushed to the side by the CE's concern that things had not been fully planned out. I got the feeling the CE wanted to take the reins and decide on the structure herself. I have had experiences in the past where my facilitating gets disturbed by someone external who is feeling edgy - and I find it hard to keep my cool. This usually doesn't bode well for the facilitation process. My instinctive reaction is to withdraw. I retract into my shell and say to myself... "pass on this." I think, at times, this can be the best thing to do.

Perhaps this is something taoist in me? Perhaps not? At one level I made a good choice. There was energy present, eager to give 'constructive' direction and it was 'the organisation' itself (or at least someone from it) who was taking up the yoke. I left the room to let the CE and my co-facilitator figure things out themselves... which they did...

For some reason, this experience left me bubbling with resentment. I felt disrespected and violated at that moment; unfairly treated even. From this moment on, I remained concerned only with my documentation. I let the process be taken over by the CE and my co-facilitator. All in all, it worked quite well. Given the awkward timing schedule, we got a good amount of fairly constructive matter out of the discussions that ensued. I was still at war with my ego though.

Where is this going? Well, this morning I read an article from Consulting Today: Seniors of Organization Development, I came across several quotes which were rather timely, one of which, (by Kathie Dannemiller) I include below:

The biggest clue that I am inappropriately "taking over" is when I get irritated at my client for not doing the 'right' thing.

If this isn't medicine, then what else is? In the context of my earlier blog postings on the dilemma between 'me and the organisation', this puts things (I feel) in their rightful place.

At the same time, of course, it is unavoidable (for me, now), that these moments of tension will occur. Especially, when I feel that some kind of rich opportunity for meaningful dialogue has the risk of getting bypassed! All the more so when this is my first time doing this kind of work! I would still far prefer to spend a few moments dealing with a messy situation so that we could get some genuine dialogue going rather than simply allowing existing power dynamics and inequalities to get re-enacted. I suppose, at times, one has to make these kind of compromises. Not having something up my sleeve that I could just present at that moment - a kind of "hey! don't worry, it's all under control, this is how we'll do it!" lost me the space that I needed. This is no doubt a lesson for me...

On this note, I end with a little quote from Lao Tse whose words have helped me feel that everything is fine when any 'normal' person would clearly think the opposite:

To give birth and to nourish,
to give birth without taking possession,
to act without obligation,
to lead without dominating---
this is mystical power.

Amen to that! This is, i think, my pet obsession. How to do this? How can I genuinely nurture the organisation itself, address what I perceive to be entrenched power inequities and still try to stop myself from trying to lead the process? Does this even make sense? Ooooooh!

Hearing the Call

2008-05-18T06:42:00.000-07:00

Even as I wrote the title of this blog, I found myself confused. Which goes to show just how things are at the moment. Working on a process of organisational change is a rather tricky thing indeed. For whom, exactly, are we changing? What is this change and why are we doing it? These may seem like obvious questions with equally clear answers. However, I assure you that they aren't. And the more I get caught up in the process, the harder it becomes for me to really know what is up and what is down.

Working in an organisation with a particular culture and achieving particular results gives out a particular feel. A feel about what is right, what is working and what isn't. There is another set of feelings, which is personal, deeply internal: what do I feel it should be. In between these two domains there is a kind of space. Focusing on that space makes me feel cross-eyed. Maybe that's because I feel tired. Is this the same space that I had referred to in an earlier blog? The one between the two extremes of the pendulum swing from organisational worldview to andre worldview? Because that was a kind of pleasant space, a state to be achieved, one much desired, where all is open and flowing and just how it should be.

This space, however, is the other extreme. It is incredibly dense, like a kind of thick, multi-demensional knot that clearly demarcates this from that. It is not possible to really comtemplate it. It seems, in a way, like what a paradigm shift would look like if you could see one; a kind of thick wall where almost all the rules, logic and outcomes on one side are distinct from all the rules, logic and outcomes on the other. This wall radiates energy so powerfully that it almost repels any sort of an attempt to cross from one side to the other... mainly by making whoever attempts go cross-eyed or that their brain is going to, quite simply, snap.

I think this is probably a sign that I need to rest :) If I want to hear that call, I had better turn off my system for a little while and let things cool down, let the knots unravel, eat some good food, go for a stroll and then sleep like a dog!

Thanks,

Andre

Redefining Education in Seva Mandir?

2008-05-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Today I was sitting with the education people, facilitating a discussion about Seva Mandir's vision in the context of 'education'. I must say that I am impressed by the quality of the discussion that took place and the readiness of the team to push the boundaries of their own program and to question everything that they are doing. Most commendable!

The education program -like many of the others, I suppose - faces a lot of challenges from all sides. Explaining things to the outside world is one of the big challenges that Seva Mandir faces - I guess that's price of having one's own ideas!?

A major part of our discussion today went into trying to understand exactly what we mean when we talk about 'quality education'. These are the kinds of questions that we sat with:

What are the qualities we would like to see developed in the children as a result of receiving education?
What kind of an education is rural society in need of?

We ended up producing a nice list and there were a lot of questions as to how much of it we are presently doing and how much we would be able to do. But here is some of what came up:

Different forms of literacy (beyond just maths and Hindi - e.g. personal health, livelihoods)
Sensitivity to gender, caste and other forms of discrimination
Moral values and trusteeship/responsibility (for environment, family, community)
Curiosity and capacity to ask questions
Logic-based education based on the children's interest
Political awareness (and what does this mean in the context of children?)
Development of leadership skills

Getting this straight seemed like the first step before getting into our vision. Although we didn't get through to the end of it, the vision seems to include a little revolution. And, though I don't want to count any chickens before they hatch, there appears to be hope that there is interest in seeing some deep changes in what has, up till now, been called the 'non-formal education centre (NFE) program'. This is the emerging picture (as far as I can perceive it):

NFEs get a redefinition. Firstly, rather than preparing children to get better grades or better jobs, the focus shifts to the idea of creating responsible citizens. We would be looking to nurture citizens who are free from gender and caste bias and who see themselves as stewards of their community, of their environment and the collective well-being of their future. Secondly, the NFEs will be places that disseminate values within the community - like a kind of hub for the values that Seva Mandir stands for - truth, respect, community, dignity, trusteeship... and so on. This will entail linking with all the other children's spaces, concerned stakeholders (youth, parents, committees, etc.) and platforms at the village level and seeking, pro-actively, to spread the knowledge and values to the rest of the village through these platforms and other processes...

It's admittedly still a little fuzzy but it's out there buzzing on the fringes of the team's collective field of consciousness... There's a lot more mind-grinding required to figure out just what this thing on the horizon might actually be but there's also a readiness to engage in a long-term (3 year!) action research process (to be carried out in a small selection of centres) to really figure it out. Part of this process is thinking up a new name; something that will also radiate a new message!

There's plenty more to the education program that I'm not blogging here - both discussed and yet to be discussed. If this level of creativity and openness sustains itself across the rest of the discussions we have the recipe for something rather fabulous! For now though, I will pretend that nothing special is happening - only to save myself from the risk of getting disappointed! My biggest concern is that although the education team believes in what they are talking about, they might not yet have the confidence to stand behind it and defend it. Let us see what emerges

Morning Post

2008-05-12T20:20:00.001-07:00

This morning, I got the urge to share an article I recently read called Knowledge Ecology - Part of Getting Smarter Together by Helen Titchen Beeth and George Por. It was posted on the evolutionary nexus site. Here are some snippets that stand out:

Attributes of a healthy knowledge ecology

The qualities that make a great knowledge ecology are the ones that make it easy for users to transform the information in the garden into knowledge that they can apply in action.
Relevance: Information is focused on factors important to the task at hand.
Reliability: Users must be able to rely on accessing the information they need, when they need it.
Timeliness: Retrieval must be sufficiently real-time to enable effective decisions.
Accuracy: The garden must validly reflect the contributions of whatever source(s) contributed the information.
Completeness: There must be balanced emphasis on all the important factors.
Access: For authorised users, from anywhere, at any time.
Elegance: The goal is actionable insight, not data.
Expression: Everyone must easily understand it.
Relationship: Related information must be easily found.
Explicitness: Examples and uses must be adequately described.
Boundary: All exceptions must be clearly stated.
Glossary: All unusual terms must be defined.
What makes good [knowledge] gardeners?

The answer to this question is unexpected. Knowledge gardening is a sacred task, undertaken for the sake of the whole. It therefore requires individual emptiness - a readiness to engage the emergent field without self-concern or a personal agenda. This gives a spacious consciousness which can detect complex patterns and capture magic from the middle. In our role as knowledge gardeners, we are not just called to the service of evolution, we are called to the service of our own wholeness. So it is not enough to concentrate on doing what we're good at and love doing. We need to be whole to engage in this work. Hence the relevance and power of an integral life practice.

In the context of my previous posts, this seems rather a propos! Enough for now though... It's time to nip into the shower and complete the process of readying myself for the day!

The Main Shift (part 2)

2008-05-12T00:36:00.000-07:00

Something about my last post leaves me feeling like I pretended that I had resolved a dilemma. Back at work today, and this feeling is buzzing about inside me quite intensely!

Upon further reflection, I get the nagging feeling that it is a gross simplification to say that facilitating this organisational change process simply boils down to giving the organisation what it thinks it needs in the way that it wants it. Clearly it is also not simply a matter of me giving the organisation what I think it needs in the way that I want! This is the dilemma. It is neither of these things. Indeed, the place where I need to position myself is the interstice between these two horrible abstractions. I need to float about in a kind of limbo between worlds: my world and the organisation's world. I need to be able to tap into the organisation's great sub-conscious - and also my own. I need to be able to tap into the infinite sea of possible futures. I need to feel the call of our times and understand what this 'call of our times' is calling me to do and what it is calling the organisation to do. I need to influence things without really having any control. Indeed, I may be the only thing that I really have any direct influence over!

This makes me wonder. Am I here to make a three year plan or am I facilitating organisational change? How can I tell? Who do I ask? What might be the signs? Am I just doing a kind of dance routine to fool myself into thinking that I am actually having any influence whatsoever while things just continue on their merry way, flowing past me indifferently? Is this just about me wanting to be powerful? Influential? Notice me! Notice me! Listen to my ideas! I have all the answers! That sounds ludicrous and shameful - and shouldn't be coming from me if I am to be true to my values.

But I'm still puzzling over that dilemma. That little gap that sits between my world and the organisation's world; or better still, between my worldview and the organisation's worldview. Indeed, I would contend that it is that very gap that is my playing field. I must play in the interstice; I must live in limbo. I must learn to feel comfortable there. I must put myself above all kinds of attachments but at the same time be calm and persistent.

I recently read a nice article (thanks to a friend of mine for passing it along) by Adam Kahane. Some snippets that I really have to quote are given below:

"The first thing you have to do is commit yourself to changing the world ...

"The second thing to do ... is to listen to what wants to change in the world...

"The sensing and listening that you have to do have three dimensions:
You have to be able to see the world, to observe precisely [...] through your own and other people's eyes; to see new possibilities and new scenarios through the eyes of customers, of other players, of competitors, of heritics.
Second and more difficult, you have to be able to see yourself in the mirror [...]; to see your own role and influence, your own part in the dance; to be reflective; to see your seeing
And third and most difficult, you have to be able to glimpse the place where looking at the world and looking at yourself are the same [...] to see the underlying oneness."

Nowhere does Kahane make it clear just what this involves, but I think it is a pretty apt representation of what I am trying to do. So I consider myself as having a little authority to comment on what it involves: it's not easy. It's so not easy that it's not funny! Half the time, I feel insignificant. Half the time I enter a power-trip where I feel that I ought to be controlling everything. Neither of these are healthy.

As I swing from one extreme to the next, I cross a small patch of clarity. It might happen during a casual conversation, or while groups are presenting whatever came out of their discussion back to the group. It might even come in the morning after I do some stretches or in the late afternoon as I walk back home as the sun sets behind the temple on the hill beside my house. These are the moments when I feel neither insignificant nor on a power-trip. At these times, I know that there is a bigger process going on and that I have helped to give it shape, energy and perhaps even a little direction. At these moments I feel humble but joyful, at ease... I feel as though what I am doing is helping whatever is supposed to emerge to actually emerge. That is to say, that the dilemmas and paradoxes that lie at the heart of all the work actually find a voice and get set on the table for collective inquiry and dialogue... And out of this, new realities can be born.

I am still struggling to understand where, when and how to push and where, when and how to create the space for things to emerge of their own accord. What are the strategic moments, the tipping points where it makes sense for me to add a little of my own energy to the process and where should I stand back and let things take their course? This question is all the more challenging in a context where I know that I do not know everything! So it is not a simple question of pushing wherever things are not how I would like them to be... because that could very well backfire (as it has in small ways in the past) - for example by creating extra resistance (because every action has an equal and opposite reaction) or missing spontaneous opportunities that may present themselves (for example, by not being patient enough to recognise the new/different avenues that open up when a slightly different direction is chosen). At the same time, how do I make sure (if indeed I should) that we end up on the right course, or that the knowledge I bring finds a proper space in the outcomes of the process?

It seems a little as though I have different hats that I have to wear for different occasions. There is my 'facilitator' hat - which I wear when working with groups. My 'friend' hat, which I wear when I chat casually about 'what's going on'. My 'PME/outcome mapping/learning' hat, which I wear when I feel that people are not going about their process of visioning, strategy-making or whatever in a systematic manner. My 'comunity knowledge gardner' hat, which I wear as I zip about from place to place relating stories from one person, group or programme to others in order to give them a better picture of the totality... And so the list continues. Figuring out when to wear which hat is a bit of a challenge. I tend to do it spontaneously... But what effect is it having? And am I taking on too many roles?

I suppose this is exactly what I am learning through this experience.

The Main Shift

2008-05-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

The gradual discovery over the last few years that it's not really about me and my ideas versus rigid unhelpful people in the organisation has been rather seminal for me.

It's not that I don't have all these ideas that I want to put into practice: I obviously do and that's a part of why I'm here. But the way that I understand this entire process, I think, has become a whole lot more evolutionary or organic. I have come to see the organisation as a living community - with its own knowledge, energy, direction, concerns, processes, and so on. In some ways, it is like a dense ecosystem - with different bits fulfilling different roles and functions - each component having reached its own kind of equilibrium in relation to others, for better or worse. This equilibrium is a delicate balance of function, knowledge, power and quality of relationship and the way these properties are distributed across the system.

When I come along with my nice ideas, there is a need to explore the fit between my ideas and the organisation. The introduction of any new idea - or meme - then becomes a subject of inquiry. Taking as a starting point the fact that the people I am interacting with do not see things in the same way as me, it is important first for me to understand how people see things.

My first thought would then be that, by knowing this better, I can ever more carefully position myself and adapt, craft the ideas or whatever it is I want to bring, so that it appears more worthwhile. I think this makes sense up to a point.

My second thought is that, as I begin to know the system better, I would also start to look at things differently and shift my own sense of what really is a priority and why.

This triggers a third thought which tries to reconcile the first two: have I simply fallen into the 'hole' that the people I am trying to work with are in or am I developing a deeper alignment with that system that positions me better to really influence it. The former is the view that many outsiders tend to hold when I talk to them about myself, my work and my relationship with the organisation where I am engaged. To them, I appear to have become lost, failing to really get to grips with the real issues, taking long-winded approaches to solving problems that are actually simple and can be classified neatly with high-power consultants vocabularies or through catch all statements like: "you just need to change the management, you know..". I have never been convinced by such perspectives, though I have had definite quarrels with various leaders and often wondered why I they posed such immense obstacles to ideas that I found so attractive.

Today, however, I find myself standing somewhere else. I have come to understand more clearly the fact that the organisation is like a living system - like a giant forest full of different species all interconnected with each other, interdepending on each other, each with their own particular characteristics, habits, niche and so on. As with a forest, I cannot simply come trudging in and expect to reshape it in any way that I want and have much certainty - if any - that what will emerge or result will be any better than what is already there - particularly if I don't understand the properties of that living system. Even if I do 'understand it', the gap between what I know and what I can do and what the other people know and what they can do still needs to be bridged if any truly systemic change is to be achieved without conducting what is effectively a surgical operation - i.e. cutting chunks out and converting curved lines into straight edges. For some reason, I have a deep seated concern with the idea of overly rectilinear approaches to things. It seems like the antithesis of sustainable, systemic transformation - something which to me must be a kind of organic, slightly chaotic self-organising process - and our entire vision of empowering people/communities to take charge of their own development process by gathering the knowledge, changing the behaviour and developing the relationships required to achieve this.

I suppose the conclusion is that I have come to see myself as a kind of conduit for a whole host of ideas and the organisation as a kind of living system that I must come to understand so deeply that I become able to translate whatever knowledge and ideas are out there into the language and rhythms that are meaningful to the organisation: to give the organisation what it thinks it needs in the way that it wants it! rather than to give the organisation what I think it needs in the way that I want to give it! So simple, yet so amazingly hard to appreciate!

Wisdom in the Rickshaw

2008-05-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

While I was on my way to visit a friend in Delhi after a conference on Citizenship and Governance (organised by PRIA), I found myself on a rather long rickshaw ride. I decided to start up some casual banter with the driver, an old man from a village in Uttar Pradesh. After some small talk about whether there had been any change in Delhi recently, and whether the lot of the poor was getting any better, the conversation turned to the much loved subject of politics.

The old rickshaw driver took this subject seriously and displayed what I believe is a deep and rich understanding of what democracy is really about… his verdict: we are not living in a democracy! What we have now is politician-power, not people-power! Real democracy, he said, is about people sitting together, discussing things, making compromises and trying to ensure that everyone gains from an outcome. It is, essentially, a communicative process - or perhaps more than this - a community building process. What we have today is so far away from this that there is little surprise we are careering down a rather destructive path with things falling a part and everyone becoming obsessively self-interested, self-serving and just plain selfish!

The simple process of not being connected in any meaningful way to the plethora of decisions that really affect our lives seems like a perfect recipe for alienation. This alienation is supported - or made bearable - through an obsessive focus on things like wealth, status and mostly meaningless entertainment. The philosophical foundations of our culture - and economic, social and political systems that these foundations support - are all tuned perfectly to encourage this great lack of connectivity between people and the decisions the decision that they take every day. And the bizarre thing - in my mind - is that a very significant proportion of people living in this kind of a world actually claim to like living in such a system. They like not having to worry about who their neighbours are; they like not being called to meetings to discuss local development issues; they like talking about the new things they have bought, the new job that they have got, the payrise they secured, etc. And so we go along filling our lives with all sorts of things yet never really being in control of much because we have transferred our own autonomy to a system that we feel it is quite reasonable to be a part of… and gradually things fall apart.

My conclusion, I suppose is that the vast majority of the world has been or is being hypnotised by the lure of acquisition and status in such a way that it forgets the value of the simplicity and connectivity that it once had. This connectivity, this local democracy, I imagine, may have been the gateway to a sustainable way of life and a sense of belonging in the cosmos. I like to hope that we are just drifting through a transitory phase in the history of humanity… or does our future involve an endless experience of alienation?

Funny where you'll find wisdom really.

acculturising with the choklas

2008-04-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, last month, I was asked by Swati from Seva Mandir, to help out with some planning for a workshop with a group of representatives from several tribal (Bhil) jati panchayats (also known as choklas) from Gogunda, through Chali, all the way up to Godhaghati (stretching out north of Udaipur)... these people are the traditional leaders of their communities and have the responsibility for overseeing all manner of decisions related to social functions - marriages, deaths, births, customs, norms and various other kinds of family, tribe and other disputes and matters. the basic idea behind the workshop, as I understood it, was that there was a prevailing sense that these groups had some stake in various unfair practices against women - and that this needed to be explored so that changes could be made to help improve the position of women.

The workshop preparation a real last minute kind of a thing and although I was quite enthusiastic, I realised that I really didn't know a great deal about who these people were... So I talked to Swati and tried to get a sense of the purpose: is the focus on trying to get the jati panchayat people to change their practices or is it do find out what is happening and what they think about it (i.e. knowing where they stand)? Obviously, as usual, the answer was that both of these points were important. I brainstormed some workshop plans, doodled up a little, shared them with Swati and some other staff, modified it all and got ready to get rolling. The basic idea was that we would divide into manageable groups and focus on a series of issues:
re-marriages or nata pratha;bride price or dapa pratha (like dowry but the woman's family receives the money); women's exclusion from the jajam (the community's carpet upon which official decisions are taken); various customs in which women have to bear a heavy financial burden;Real stories would be invited from the various jati panchayat leaders related to each of the issues. Sitting in a circle, these would then be with a particular focus on how they impacted women and children, what the role of the Jati Panchayat was in this process and what could be done about it.

I don't want to get right into the depths of all the impacts and stories but, instead, I would like to share some of the most striking features of my discussion that day with the jati panchayat people:

The Jati Panchayat representatives consider themselves as people who are are responsible for doing seva (service) in their communities - which is not the way that they usually get presented in the 'development' discourse. Their notion of seva seems worthy of further exploration and investigation - no doubt that it would yield something rich.

Trying to get people to tell stories in which they make themselves complicit came across as being a rather counterproductive or non-sensical strategy.Following a discussion process based on this created less of an opportunity for building trust, mutual understanding and a better sense of how we could work together than deciding to let the discussion flow in a more open way and probing areas that were of personal interest to me and gave the Jati Panchayat people a chance to talk about their own concerns and how they feel, etc.

The Jati Panchayat people, essentially, feel that much of the change ('development') that is taking place is leading to a breakdown in their social structure, their community values and their hold on the community. This has a direct effect on their sense of identity and, my sense, is that it leaves them feeling threatened, defensive and marginalised. Not surprising then that they appear resistant to change! Any change to their culture simply seems like a threat to their identity. Given the overwhelmingly negative nature of change (from their perspective), it is not surprising that they demonstrate reactions around the idea of changing women's roles in their communities... Starting with their own concerns about what is going on (though not being such an obvious way of addressing our agenda) might end up being an even more effective means of getting to the same, ultimate outcomes.

Some points raised by some participants in the context of education really bring home their concerns. The leaders were blaming a lack of shiksha (education) on the high rates of young men who run off (apparently quite frivolously) with second wives leaving the first one (often with a child) in a bit of a mess. I questioned this, wondering how the increase in school coverage could correlate with a lack of shiksha. The answer was thus: (1) not all shiksha in the school - both family and community are important places where shiksha happens; and (2) the shiksha provided in the schools encourages selfishness rather than a sense of community or collective responsibility. Wow! And to think that we tried to argue that these people don't know what quality education means!?!? It seems to me that we never really tried to understand their point of view. If we had, we might have made much faster progress over the last 40 years.

Ultimately, the experience left me with a feeling that these JPP could (or should) be one of Seva Mandir's most valuable partners if we could only learn to understand them and work with them! It also left me feeling that I would really like to get a proper chance to engage with them in more depth in the future.

back to the blog

2008-04-18T05:05:00.000-07:00

More than a year has elapsed since I was last active in the general blogosphere. But now I am back with the intention of taking it all a bit more seriously.

The last year has given me the chance to work directly with the citizens of a small town called Delwara, working alongside them to strengthen local self-governance mechanisms and promote community leadership. The experience has proved fascinating and deeply enriching for me, enabling me to bridge some part of the giant theory-practice divide. Living and working amongst real people really brings one down to earth and puts one directly in touch with oneself (at least it did so for me!). It has all proved hugely demanding and hugely rewarding.

I have also been involved, though less actively, in an action research process to improve low performance pre-school centres in remote, predominantly tribal villages. This has also served to be a rich source of learning for me and, hopefully, the rest of the practitioners working on the project.

Right now, I am involved in the mother project - which is really what I had wanted to be doing all along - namely: working on organisational change in Seva Mandir. All of my reading and experience over the last four and a half years is now being called upon to be put into action as I help the organisation engage with itself and figure out how best it can bring about the change that it believes in.

All of these experiences have been pointing me at a common insight: I am not in control of anything. I am part of a whole series of ongoing processes that have their own life force. I can merely tend to them, nurture them, enrich them at the 'margins', respecting what they are deep down and striving to create conditions which encourage their best potential to emerge. This brings me back to the quote by Gareth Morgan from my last blog posting more than a year back, which remains as relevant as ever, I believe, to anyone seriously engaged in social change work.

May we all grow together in joy and wisdom!

quote for a change

2007-03-25T13:06:00.000-07:00

After much delay, today's blog is only a quote. Having said that, it is quite a satisfying quote.

"Using the image popularized by chaos theorists, the invitation is to recognize that although we may be no more than "butterflies" in terms of our power on the overall system we can have enormous effects, especially when we use our insights about system dynamics and the nature of change to determine how and where to intervene." - Gareth Morgan

visit this site for some nice all-around reading on complex adaptive systems including some nice summary/extracts of various worthwhile books all trying to help us get those insights into system dynamics and the nature of change...

Goodnight ;)

My neglected blog

2007-02-28T21:25:00.000-08:00

With a slight sense of guilt at having failed to put anything up on my still relatively fresh blog for almost two months, I'm finally sitting down to upload some nuggets of value that have accumulated in my mind... So here it goes...

I need to find a way of being less cryptic when I talk about my stuff because otherwise I might just risk exlcuding too many people from viewing my blog (not that I think I have many visitors right now, but the idea is important).

It is not that I have been doing nothing, thinking nothing or learning nothing since December that I have failed to post things on this blog. Locating the reasons, I think, is a very important endeavour because I feel that this blog is really important, both as an outlet and also as a way of documenting my experiences and consolidating what I am learning. So, in a way, failing to use this blog also represents a failure on my part to systematically strain the contents of my brain and seperate the sludge from the real essence... So, why this failure?

I think one reason has been my busy-ness... there has been a lot going on with my work - but this seems like an inadequate reason. A second reason is that I have been spending a lot of my time in Delwara where there is not a suitable access to the internet. How am I supposed to dump my thoughts onto a blog if I can't get to the internet? But then, its not like I don't come back to Udaipur from time to time. I could write down my thoughts there and type them up when back here... Another is that I have been very much 'in my head', churning over a lot of matter. The positive side of all this delaying is that right now I have a good deal of 'stuff' to write down.

This all emphasises for me the fact that learning is something that happens over time: the creation of knowledge is in some way an emergent process. Over time, a series of events, each individually significant (and each a learning experience no doubt) gradually converge to point to a bigger or deeper lesson or principle that challenges the way that I perceive things or the way that I want to prioritise.

This issue of prioritisation is something that has cropped up a fair bit recently. How do we prioritise? It is all very well to claim that priorities are sometimes imposed on us from above or from outside but this isn't really fair. It makes us seem like victims or passive subjects living lives that are out of our own control. This is not only a scary prospect (and possibly real for some) but also a kind of decision to shun responsibility; to deny the fact that we daily make choices about how we live our lives and that it is up to us to make the effort to define the principles by which we want to live our lives and to ensure that we really live by them. So what is important and why?

Our understanding of the world and our position in it (call it worldview if that helps) seems to be a key part of the puzzle of how we decide how to live our lives - but I also know that I have a good deal of 'knowledge' that backs up my world view and it is the accumulation of this knowledge that has helped me to build up this worldview. How do my values influence the 'knowledge' that I accumulate - and vice-versa? I imagine also that my background and academic training have conditioned me to certain forms of rigidity which some wild years while at university may have helped to temper - only by teaching me the importance of breaking boundaries and of realising that everything is connected to everything else. Discovering some of these barriers will really help me to get on the right track. How can this knowing be transferred to other people? This seems like the essential question.

This is my preamble. Now for some more down-to-earth thoughts....

One. Change has to start at the source. Whatever we hope to realise in Delwara needs to be happening as a microcosm within the project team. That means: (1) high quality, open communication - especially about our internal issues, feelings, conflicts - but also about what we believe in; (2) practicing what we preach (if we can't stop using polythene and end up hiding it in newspaper then how can we possibly expect anyone to take us seriously and how can we expect anyone else to give up polythene?). What we cannot do within the project we cannot achieve outside: the community that we create within the project will be a reflection of the community that we build outside the project. The mistrust, confusion, power-dynamics and way of living and being should be an example for the rest of the community. This does not mean trying to claim some degree of moral greatnesses over the rest of the comunity but it means that we should be integral to ourselves.

Two (which is a kind of extraction of one). I need to be more firm about my values and the way that the work is causing me to conflict with my values. I need to articulate how this makes my experience of working less satisfying and also that if we are not able to change these things, I will find myself unable to remain working on the project.

More will follow soon but now I have to hurry off...

Bye.

the next level or a whole new game?

2006-12-22T10:37:00.000-08:00

The most recent addition (in process) to my collection of concepts and tools for change is 'Action Science', as based on the book by Argyris et al (1985). The first song of praise is that this book provides the most lucid articulation of how to engage in a change process at the inter-subjective level that I have yet come across. Putting it into practice of course is likely to be an immense challenge at the level of the practioner because it demands subjecting onself to profound and systematic scrutiny (apparently something that gets easier with practice). The second is that it is availble for free download from the internet at http://www.actiondesign.com.

Meanwhile my experiences in Delwara have been interesting, challenging and exciting. Some key events included (i) a mini-workshop with the core members of the project team focusing on objectives, roles and funcioning of the team; (ii) a mini-workshop with the youth team focusing on both self and group assessment. The key issues surfacing in both groups were around the issue of coordination, communication and reporting though the particulars of the problem appear to be quite different in both contexts for a number of reasons. For example, in the context of the whole project team there are many different activities and functions that operate almost independently yet have to be synchronised (synergised?) in order to contribute to the common goal in the most effective manner. At this level, I have not been able to identify interpersonal issues as a major source of problems. On the other hand, in the three-person group of the youth team, interpersonal issues constitute the core of the problem. One importantissue that surfaced during this meeting (beyond the three major issues identified earlier) was 'understanding the other person'. Both groups were involved in a reflection and sharing process to identify purpose, strengths and enabling factors, weaknesses and constraining factors, things that could be changed at the group level and things that could be changed at the individual level to contribute to this change. Both groups succeeded in describing what they felt should change and there was broad agreement on this by all involved. Articulating change at the group level proved much easier than locating individual responsibility: in the large group all but one of the desired changes was at the group level rather than the individual level and in the small group participants initially felt that being asked to identify their own weaknesses was unfair or somehow not right: "how can we know our weaknesses? That is for others to judege."

Both discussions ended in a collective pledge to make the necessary changes (communicating more and more effectively, having more regular meetings, reporting more systematically, etc.) by the various participants involved. However, it remains to be seen whether these commitments are adequate to bring about the desired changes and the presumed resulting improvements in the functionality of the project and youth teams. My hunch is that the answer is: only to a very limited extent. If I take the youth team as an example, I see the problem as being entrenched more profoundly in inter-personal interactions based on people's theories-in-use (i.e. the tacit logic that informs the way they act as opposed to the theory that they claim to uphold). One of the key issues here is that espousing (or being able to articulate) a certain logic does not equate to being able to put it into practice. This is something that has to be learned through a process of collaborative inquiry into these theories and I hope that this is something I will be able to facilitate in the coming weeks (unless it is not necessary in which case I would also be quite happy)!

Some reflections that came about while reading Action Science and thinking back over the discussion with the youth team include:

(1) I have to learn how to use the group dialogue process more effectively to get deeper into the issue in question and to engage the participants in a more reflective process. I think this probably means I have to identify what it is that I am doing that prevents this from happening as I am in the position of facilitator and therefore it is up to me to intervene to help probe these areas.

(2) I should be more systematic about introducing hypotheses into the discussion process. For example, by making statements such as: "based on what you said [blah blah blah], i get the impression that you are trying to [blah blah blah blah] in order to [blah blah blah]." I should then invite people to inquire into this matter or try to disprove it. "What do you think?" More generally, I should perhaps be more explicit about patterns that I feel I can observe in the functioning of the group: "Things you have said [e.g. blah blah blah] have indicated to me that you do not really acknowledge each other's skills or competencies and that you are not making the necessary efforts to get to know each other, to learn from each other. I further believe that this makes it difficult for you to work together and achieve the kinds of results that you say you want to achieve. What do you feel about this statement?"

(3) I should be more explicit about the purpose of the session and the norms that I am trying to apply and should invite discussion on this.

(4) I should go more with the flow and probe into people's reactions more systematically. E.g. if the response appears negative, explain why I feel their response is negative (cite what they said), see whether the response can be taken as negative and ask for their feedback. I should also make more of an effort to ask participants if they want to try out or propose alternative ways of exploring the issue in front of us. For example, when people said that self-criticism was too difficult (implying something along the lines of 'we are unable to judge ourselves' or 'we do not want to do so publicly') and that others are better placed to make these criticisms, I could have proposed something along the lines of: "If you would prefer to discuss each other's weaknesses rather than identify your own, I do not have a problem with this. What do you think, shall we do this instead?" This may have led to some other interesting discussions.

(5) I should try to find out what about my own behaviour may be making it difficult for other people to say what they want to say. Hopefully doing some of the aforementioned steps will contribute to this but I should be busy trying to explore my own 'theories-in-use'.

(6) I should look for ways of reframing people's experiences without failing to acknowledge the significance of what they feel or experience in order to help the discussion or participants get out of ruts. The idea here is to help address a situation that is being constructed in an unhelpful frame (i.e. one that is not conducive to learning) by presenting the same situation in a new frame that adds more meaning and opens doors of possibility. For example, when one participants says: "Person X doesn't know anything about activity Y" this could be presented to people as a less extreme and more balanced perspective on the situation: "I think it would be fairer to present an assessment of the situation in this manner: Both you and person X look at activity Y in different ways. By finding out what each of you knows and doesn't know about activity Y you may both be able to learn something that will help you do activity Y in a more collaborative, complete and better manner. What do you think?"

These reflections are only really hypotheses that remain to be tested in a range of situations. Reading Action Science helped to put some of these thoughts into perspective. For one thing, I feel that I would be better able to deal with the kind of tension that surfacing inter-personal, work-related issues might unleash because I think I am more equipped with knowledge that could be applied to prevent unjustified statements from being exchanged and to facilitate the collaborative inquiry process. So perhaps there will be some news on this shortly...?

Other than this, the good news (latest, albeit brief and potentially incomplete feedback) is that the outcomes of the visioning workshop (for the state level network working on youth issues) were well appreciated at the national level where they were shared along with the outputs of 7 other states. My co-worker in this matter attended the national level general meeting and reported that everything went well and that everyone has basically agreed to what we came up with (although the vision and mission statements have undergone some kind of transformation) and also that the other states really had rather little to contribute on the matter. So, I can breathe a little easier. Upcoming workshops on strategies, monitoring and evaluation and proposal preparation are now also on the agenda so perhaps I can look forward to frequent and exciting interruptions to my regular work! I still need to do a comprehensive review of the last workshop to cull out important lessons that can be taken forwards to the next one.

Thank you and good day!

today's stew

2006-12-16T05:15:00.000-08:00

In my new position I find myself doing a lot of hopping between themes and projects. This gives me a sometimes fascinating and sometimes bewildering opportunity to connect together different sets of concepts in different parts of my brain. For example, one minute I am finding spaces for the application of elements of social network theory to community development and linking this with theories of empowerment, leadership, social change and even monitoring and evaluation; the next i am trying to figure out how an editorial team for a local newspaper can function better, or youth can be enticed to get involved in a youth resource centre without us having to sell the place as a career service centre; then I am making a comment about why prohibition of alcohol will not cause an end to violence (especially against women) - a decision taken by a committee of elders in a tribal village; or trying to figure out what threats are being faced by the Balwadi (full day pre-school centre) progamme and how we can start acting today to address them whilst simultaneously enhancing our contribution to the programme's vision; or maybe trying to help a 6 year old state-level network (working on young people's sexual and reproductive health - and now several other issues) articulate its vision and strategies for the next 5 years...

Today out of the general muddy puddle, the following thoughts and questions bubbled to the surface:

Use the connectors that are available in the optimal way
The most powerful change force is the inter-personal socialisation process based on values that connect and strengthen common aspirations (this doesn't always have to be 'positive' change)
How does one draw the line between commitment and foolishness?
How does one identify the optimal balance between local and global (distant) in one's interactions with others in order to secure high quality understanding of the totality of things?
There is a very big difference between providing people with a set of options and enabling people to formulate new options themselves

Fantastic. I also really enjoyed sharing some issues of leadership that have been nagging me for a while. Leadership can be looked at in two ways (or rather, I'm only going to mention two). One is about a person, an individual; the other is about a process involving people. Leadership is about finding a road that leads to common aspirations, making that road visible and walkable by many people and helping them travel it together. Why should responsibility for finding this road be placed in the hands of any select group of individuals? Would it not make more sense to systematically create space for all those who are motivated and able to contribute to finding the road so that they could all participate in the leadership process? The reaction was positive. I think it struck chords with a lot of latent thinking amongst the people present. Now how to operationalise this concept through a workshop? That will be another major challenge, if it is possible... For some reason I get the feeling that it can't be an easy job to work in a profound way on process-oriented localised connective leadership in a workshop conducted in a non-local place. Then again, this might have to be the challenge. Time to think of some fun games!

It would obviously have to be at the level of values - how does one person convince someone of something else... how does one person identify connectors (things, events, concepts, emtions, world-views, tastes, etc.) in another person and use these to establish a relationsihp upon which collaboration in achievement of goals can be based? Hmmm... my next personal research topic?!

Hmmm... i now return to the puddle; a small dilemma aluded to in the first paragraph of today's blog. The context is a 'youth resource centre' whose objectives remain imprecise but broadly relate to providing youth with the skills, capabilities and attitudes required for them to be able to look after themselves and also to contribute to the development process as responsible citizens so that they can secure a better future/society for their own children. This overarching aim is to be unpacked and applied in myriad ways according to the particular opportunities and constraints being offered in different locations/contexts. In this sense, the project is highly innovative because it is designed to be locally adapted. However, the balance between adaptation vs. conformity is something to be considered across various levels. Perhaps the deepest and most fundamental level is that of the values upon which the project is based.

I won't be cryptic any more. The idea that is being put forwards is to provide computer trainings (including provision of a diploma) at the centre as a means for getting youth to come on a regular basis. Despite the logistical limitations (waaaay to few computers) there is a more fundamental objection (on behalf of several key stakeholders within the project) to the idea as it would project an image of the centre as a place for youth to get employment skills and it is feaed that this would cause its deeper social objectives to become obscured. For the person running the centre, this is ok because it will get people coming (the logistical issues don't seem to be getting full attention) - social objectives can be introduced later - and anyway, the youth in the area are demanding computer training. The alternative strategy instead aims to get the youth using the computer as a means for preparing all kinds of work (reports, research, stories, etc.) that would form part of a deeper social learning and transformation process more fully integrated into the other development objectives of the project of which the YRC is a part. The youth will learn but only on condition of participating in 'plus' activities that add value to the overall village development process. The question before us then is whether the youth will get involved without the promise of a diploma (although we can, of course, offer them a certificate)... Personally, I don't see why not. But today left me with the funny feeling of having burst someone's bubble by arguing on the basis of a value-system or set of principles that were not their own. I may be a fool but I still believe that patience is a virtue (albeit a very complex one).

Good night and thank you!

i's a-muggin', we's a-muggin'

2006-12-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

Very much a-muggin'. With some more clarity on what lies before us, our humble network has decided to go for a fairly profound revamp and is now looking to contribute to something that I would call a youth movement - but right now it's couched in the rather PC garb of a youth forum... All issues (from sexual and reproductive health, through livelihoods to drugs and violence) now become means of connecting with the youth to enable them to make informed decisions to secure their own well-being and to create a series of forums at various levels from the block to the state. These forums are means too, as they will enable the youth to influence the government and society at large through advocacy and engaging with the media. Rather grand really - but also really, really cool :) We also seem to have most of the participants on just about the same page - no objectors... and a committed chair. Pukka strategies remain to be consolidated but are definately within grasp. Unity in diversity could be our little mantra as we abandon the 'one-issue-based-campaign-a-year' approach and launch into an effort at systemic transformation.

Weasling a bit of outcome mapping (only at the intentional design phase so far - and even then rather partially) into the process has proved both positive and not without challenges. Our next workshop will aim to consolidate strategies so this will be the time to finish off the strategies in an OM-ish sort of way. Yet another workshop will be required for PME and learning... So, no rest for the wicked.

But of course, without the requisite moral dilemma, such a peachy picture would not be complete (or at least not a reasonable reflection of reality). So tonight I battle with the question of whether to share knowledge freely (something I've always considered my responsibility as a human being) or permit interpersonal feuds (not involving me) to get in the way. The problem is presented partly as one of loyalty but with a bit of 'why help someone who has been rude and uncooperative in the past?' thrown in. 'Turn the other cheek' or an 'eye for an eye'? Teachings on this matter throw new against old. Some modern sources might point to the fact that adhering to only one of these strategies may not be the best option, but rather that a careful balance between the two is required to send the right signals to the right places at the right time. As I have trouble seeing how my knowledge can be put to a use any worse than what would be done without it, a powerful urge drives me to share it. Apologies to anyone I disappoint or any loyalties I disturb. It is not my intention to do wrong or harm but to spread a message of collaboration and openness, to nurture damaged relationships and create healthy synergetic linkages between those who could be working towards the same goals.

Thank you and good night!

spasmodic update

2006-12-11T09:30:00.000-08:00

Hmmm... Feel like i've been here before. I think this time it will not vanish from under my nose... that just wouldn't be right!

I am right now in the middle of a workshop (actually it is the end of the first day of a three day workshop) that I am supposed to be facilitating... Somehow I end up feeling that the workshop is facilitating me and not the other way round... How very distressing. A god night sleep is now required really badly. Tomorrow may be a long and harrowing day...

Good night :)