Community

by Peter Block

  The weakness in the dominant view of accountability is that it thinks people can be held accountable. That we can force people to be accountable. Despite the fact that it sells easily, it is an illusion to believe that retribution, incentives, legislation, new standards, and tough consequences will cause accountability.

  This illusion is what creates entitlement—and worse, it drives us apart; it does not bring us together. It turns neighbor against neighbor. It denies that we are our brother’s keeper. Every colonial and autocratic regime rises to power by turning citizens against each other. To control a culture, fear has to be sold. Through the central control of the media. By the crisis-based story line of journalism. Community is built by the stories of success. Community is undermined by finding who was at fault. This is the methodology of empire.

  To see our conventional thinking about accountability at work, notice the conversations that dominate our meetings and gatherings. We spend time talking about people not in the room. If not that, our gatherings are designed to sell, change, persuade, and influence others, as if their change will help us reach our goals. These conversations do not produce power; they consume it.

  Chosen Accountability, Commitment, and the Use of Force

  Commitment and accountability are forever paired with each other and linked with creating community. None exists without the others. Accountability is the willingness to care for the well-being of the whole; commitment is the willingness to make a promise with no expectation of return.

  The economist would say this smacks of altruism, and so be it. What community requires is a promise devoid of barter and not conditional on another’s action. Without that, we are constantly in the position of reacting to the choices of others. Which means that our commitment is conditional. This is barter, not commitment.

  The cost of constantly reacting to the choices of others is increased cynicism and helplessness. The ultimate cost of cynicism and helplessness is that we resort to the use of force. In this way, the barter mentality that dominates our culture proliferates force. Not necessarily violence, but the belief that for anything to change, we must mandate or use coercion.

  The use of force is an end product of retribution, which rejects altruism and a promise made for its own sake. It rejects the idea that virtue is its own reward.

  Commitment is the antithesis of entitlement and barter. Unconditional commitment with no thought to “What’s in it for me?” is the emotional and relational essence of community. It is what some call integrity, fidelity, honoring your word.

  Commitment is to choose a path for its own sake. This is the essence of power. Mother Teresa got this. When asked why she worked with people one at a time rather than caring more about having impact on a larger scale, she replied, “I was called by faith, not by results.” If you want to join the chorus arguing with Mother Teresa, be my guest.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Transforming Community

  Conventional thinking about communal transformation believes that focusing on large systems, better leaders, clearer goals, and more controls is essential, and that emphasizing speed and scale is critical. The conventional belief is that individual transformation leads to communal transformation. Our explorations to this point lead instead to the understanding that transformation occurs when we focus on the structure of how we gather and the context in which the gatherings take place; when we work hard on getting the questions right; when we choose depth over speed and relatedness over scale. We also believe that problem solving can make things better but cannot change the nature of things.

  Community transformation calls for citizenship that shifts the context from a place of fear and fault, law and oversight, corporation and “systems,” and preoccupation with leadership to one of gifts, generosity, and abundance; social fabric and chosen accountability; and associational life and the engagement of citizens. These shifts occur as citizens face each other in conversations of ownership and possibility. To be more specific, leaders are held to three tasks: to shift the context within which people gather, name the debate through powerful questions, and listen rather than advocate, defend, or provide answers.

  • • •

  The mind­set that we can program and problem-solve our way into a vision does not take into account the complexity and relational nature of community. It undervalues the importance of context and the linguistic, conversational nature of community. If we want to see a change in our communities, we must let go of the conventional or received wisdom about how change occurs. This means we reject or at least seriously question the beliefs that communal change will occur in the following circumstances:

  • We count on an aggregation of individual changes. We have seen this in attempts by large organizations trying to change their culture through large-scale trainings and change efforts. Communities initiate large-scale dialogue programs and book clubs where many are simultaneously reading the same book. No matter how well intentioned, these efforts largely fall short of their goals. Why? Because individual lives are touched, but the organizational culture and the community are unmoved.

  What’s missing is that these efforts do not recognize that there is such a thing as a collective body. A community benefits from shifts in individual consciousness, but needs a communal connectedness as well, a communal structure of belonging that produces the foundation for the whole system to move. This is why it is so frustrating to create high performance and consciousness in individuals and in individual institutions and then find that they have so little impact on the social capital or fabric of the community.

  • We think in terms of scale and speed. As David Bornstein has so clearly pointed out, something shifts on a large scale only after a long period of small steps, organized around small groups patient enough to learn and experiment and learn again. Speed and scale are the arguments against what individual and communal transformation requires. They are a hallmark of the corporate mind-set. When we demand more speed and scale, we are making a coded argument against anything important being any different.

  • We stay focused on large systems and top leaders to implement better problem solving, clearer goals and vision, and better control of the process. Large-system change is useful, but transforming action is always local, customized, unfolding, and emergent. The role of leaders is not to be better role models or to drive change; their role is to create the structures and experiences that bring citizens together to identify and solve their own issues.

  Communal transformation does occur when we accept the following beliefs:

  • We focus on the structure of how we gather and the context in which our gatherings take place. Collective change occurs when individuals and small diverse groups engage one another in the presence of many others doing the same. It comes from the knowledge that what is occurring in one space is similarly happening in other spaces, especially ones where I do not know what they are doing. This is the value of a network, or even a network of networks, which is today’s version of a social movement. In paying attention to the structure and context of our gatherings, we declare our faith in restoration. All this needs to be followed up with the usual actions and problem solving, but it is in those moments when citizens engage one another, in communion with and in the witness of others, that something collective shifts.

  Keeping this focus is especially critical when individuals and institutions meet across boundaries. The key is to structure a way of crossing boundaries so that people become connected to those they are not used to being in the room with. Every gathering, in its composition and in its structure, has to be an example of the future we want to create. If this is achieved in this gathering, then that future has occurred today and there is nothing to wait for. Pretty Zen.

  • We work hard on getting the questions right. This begins by realizing that the questions themselves are important, more important than the answers. The primary questions for community transformation are “How do we choose to be together?” and “What do we wa
nt to create together?” These are different from the primary questions for individual transformation, which are “How do I choose to be in whatever setting I find myself in?” and “What am I called to do in this world?”

  • We choose depth over speed and relatedness over scale. The question “What do we want to create together?” is deceptively complicated. It implies a long journey crossing social, class, and institutional boundaries. Depth takes time and the willingness to engage. Belonging requires the courage to set aside our usual notions of action and of measuring success by the numbers touched. It also means that while we keep our own point of view, we leave our self-interest at the door and show up to learn rather than to advocate. These are the conditions whereby we find new places where we belong.

  Choosing Possibility over Problem Solving

  Creating a future is different from defining a future. If our goal is to build social capital and to change the way that citizens are engaged with each other, then we have to shift our thinking about the roles that traditional strategy and problem solving take. We talked earlier about valuing gifts and possibility over needs and problems. Now we can be more detailed about what this looks like.

  Our typical way of creating a future is by specifying the vision and the goals and then defining a blueprint to achieve them. This is called a destination strategy for solving problems. Here are the strategic elements of traditional problem solving:

  • Identify a need. Find a problem, need, or deficiency that we want to fix or improve.

  • Study and analyze the need. Do research, assemble facts, survey people, and organize survey results and data to make a compelling case for change.

  • Search for solutions. Brainstorm alternatives. Benchmark where others have solved this deficiency. Bring in experts, consultants, academics, former leaders, and former public officials to provide good approaches.

  • Establish goals. Set realistic and achievable goals, based on the vision. Define outcomes and narrow the effort toward results that can be achieved; the quicker and lower the cost the better. Search for the low-hanging fruit. Maybe initiate a pilot project to prove the viability of the strategy. Laminate the vision, mission, and goals to demonstrate the permanence of this intention.

  • Bring others on board. Sell to key leaders, meet with citizens to define the effort and name the playing field. Enlist organizations and individuals to create an alliance for change. Publicize the burning platform and stress the urgency and the need for quick results. Give wide distribution to the laminate.

  • Implement. Launch the program and drive it forward. Stay on message, and measure at frequent intervals. Hold people accountable for results, fulfilling promises, and showing outcomes. Declare to others how accountable we are.

  • Loop back. When the world intervenes and creates a bump in the road, begin the problem solving anew, identifying what went wrong and who was responsible, and initiating a clear oversight process so that this will not happen again.

  The essence of these classic problem-solving steps is the belief in a blueprint. We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now. And this all has such face validity that it seems foolish to argue in any way against it.

  Also, this way of thinking does indeed work for many things, especially for the material world. It does not work well with human systems or when the desire is to create something out of nothing. We still believe that in building a community, we are in effect building and operating a clock. Once again, problem solving can make things better, but it cannot change the nature of things. This insight is at the center of all the thinking about complex adaptive systems, emergent design, and the organic and self-regulating nature of the universe.

  The limitations of a clockwork strategy for the future can be seen in one of the most popular forms of community problem solving: creating a vision. Most communities have at some point described a vision for themselves—these visions are developed as a way of defining the destination. (The new millennium was a great occasion for this. Now the horizon has shifted to 2030.) These types of visions have value in that they bring many people together for the sake of development, and they give form to the optimism we hold for ourselves. But they are limited in their power to transform because they assume that a defined destination can be reached in a linear path from where we are today.

  Most visions are based on the belief that we know a lot about what constitutes an ideal or healthy community, which is true. There are many wonderful books that describe what a great community looks like. Jane Jacobs crystallized our thinking about the power of street life. Robert Putnam raised our consciousness about the centrality of social capital. John McKnight’s work has built wide support for asset-based community development.

  The challenge for community building is this: while visions, plans, and committed top leadership are important, even essential, no clear vision, nor detailed plan, nor committed group leaders have the power to bring this image of the future into existence without the continued engagement and involvement of citizens. In most instances, citizen engagement ends when the plan is in place. The implementation is put in the hands of the professionals. In concept, the master plan provides some parameters for development and the use of space, but in real life it usually is a call to let the arguing begin. For all its utility, it rarely builds interdependence or strengthens the social fabric of a place.

  What brings a fresh future into being is citizens who are willing to selforganize. An alternative future needs the investment of citizens—leaders not in top positions—who are willing to pay the economic and emotional price that creating something really new requires.

  Therefore, the challenge for every community is not so much to have a vision of what it wants to become, or a plan, or specific timetables. The real challenge is to discover and create the means for engaging citizens that brings a new possibility into being. To state it more precisely, what gives power to communal possibility is the imagination and authorship of citizens led through a process of engagement. This is an organic and relational process. This is what creates a structure of belonging. This is more critical than the vision and the plan.

  Example: Covington

  In Covington, Kentucky, several city institutions together chose to use this kind of community building as a way of developing a strategic plan for its civil servants and citizens. City Manager Jay Fossett; the head of the Center for Great Neighborhoods, Tom DiBello; and the head of the local business association, Gina Breyfogle, asked for help with a series of citizen gatherings to create the agenda for the city following the protocol suggested in this book. Under the leadership of Jeff Stec, a very talented local community builder, we invited the citizens of Covington to four public gatherings. Not to advise the leaders, but to define the priorities of the plan and to commit to making the strategic plan work. Five hundred people in a town of forty-four thousand showed up to do just this.

  Each session had people meeting in small groups, working with people they did not know but with whom they shared a common interest. They answered open-ended questions, were asked to choose among priorities, and, in the final session, were asked for their commitment to bring this planning process into reality.

  At the end of the process, the city had its strategic plan—and, more important, it had the commitment of a significant group of citizens signed up to make the plan work. Perhaps most important, they strengthened the fabric of their community in the process.

  What creates an alternative future is acting on the belief that context, relatedness, and language are the point, and that traditional problem solving needs to be subordinated and postponed until context, relatedness, and language have shifted. In this thinking, problem solving becomes a means, not an end in itself.

  We cannot problem-solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation, or community. To state it one more way: this is not an arg
ument against problem solving; it is an assertion that the primary work is to shift the context and language and thinking about possibility within which problem solving takes place.

  This shift requires us to change our idea of what constitutes action, so that what was once seen as a means to an end now is itself valued as action. Another key insight from Jim Keene, who has spent his life in the public arena, is that “perhaps the purpose of problems is to give us an excuse to come together.”

  Expanding Our Idea of Action

  Of course, just coming together has to provide some movement toward the future. Every time we meet, we want to feel that we have moved the action forward. Community has a purpose beyond relationship: it has to create livelihood, raise a child, care for our health, embrace the vulnerable. To have these communal effects, we have to reconstruct our definition of action.

  The question then is, what qualifies as action? Traditionally, in order to be satisfied that we have spent our time well when we are together, we want a strategy, a list of next steps and milestones, and then a combination of brick and mortar and the knowledge of who will be responsible for what. Any change in the world will, in fact, need this kind of action. To say, however, that this is all that counts as action is too narrow.

  If we are to value building social fabric and belonging as much as budgets, timetables, and bricks and mortar, we need to consider action in a broader way. For example:

  Would a meeting be worthwhile if we simply strengthened our relationship?

  Would a meeting be worthwhile if we learned something of value?