This is a repost and update of a previous post entitled Changing the Nature of Conversation. Recent conversations prompted this repost.
Recently Wade Hodges’s blog linked to a booklet entitled Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community: Changing the Nature of Conversation. It is authored by Peter Block and others. The purpose of the material is to present a set of ideas and tools designed to restore and reconcile community by shifting the nature of public conversation. Although the subject put me off a bit, as I read through the material I found the information and ideas compelling. I believe the nature of our conversations can be a reliable barometer of the depth and meaning of our relationships as well as a powerful force in building and sustaining community. What follows is my interpretation/re-statement/paraphrase of some of the concepts and principles in the booklet.
Language has power. How we speak to each other is the medium through which a more positive future is created or denied. As we engage in conversation the questions we ask and the speaking that they evoke constitute powerful action. The questions we ask will either maintain the status quo or bring an alternative future into the room. There are traditional questions which have little power to create a future different from the present. These questions are, in the asking, the very obstacle to what has given rise to the question in the first place. For example, these questions seem to be universal to conversations about organizational issues:
- How do we hold people accountable?
- How do we get people to show up and be committed?
- How do we get others to be more responsible?
- How do we get people on-board and to do the right thing?
- How do we get others to buy into our vision?
- How do we get these people to change?i
- How much does it cost and where do we get the money?
- How do we negotiate for something better?
- What new policy or legislation will more our interests forward?
- Where is it working?
- Who has solved this elsewhere and how do we import the knowledge?
In answering these questions we support the dominant belief that a different future can be negotiated, mandated, and controlled into existence. They call us to try harder at what we have been doing. They urge us to raise standards, measure more closely, and return to the basics, purportedly to create accountability, but in reality maintain dominance. These questions are wrong, not because they don’t matter, but because they have no power to make a difference in the world. These questions are the cause of the very thing that we are trying to change: fragmented and unproductive communities.
In a related post I wrote about questions and how, in our conversations, they impact community. It was stated that the traditional questions that permeate conversation regarding organizational issues, have no power to change the future, to make a difference.
I recognize that truth in my own experience. In my corporate days, I sat in many meetings where the traditional questions dominated. They would create a frenzy of helplessness and hopelessness. On more than one occasion, I was compelled to comment to the participants that it was apparent that there was nothing that could be done and the company would be best served by us committing an honorable suicide. We didn’t and nothing changed. Sadly the process was repeated over and over. There was no enlightened leadership that understood the nature of great questions to lead us out of our squirrel cage existence.