Complexity World Cafe

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 ;)

Fragmentation and Healing

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!

Back to school!

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.

conversations, presencing, change and more

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 ;)

the guru illusion (yeh guruwuru kya hai yaar?)

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

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!

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

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...

1. What are the social objects through which our relationship with the community is mediated?
2. How, exactly, do these social objects mediate our relationships with the community?
   
3. 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

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!

community based organisations vs. organised communities

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

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.

dealing with tensions in conversation... a start

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?

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

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!