by Peter Block
Reinforce the Request
End the invitation by telling people that you want them to come and that if they choose not to attend, they will be missed but not forgotten.
Make It Personal
In an electronic, need-for-speed, texting, and email world, the more personal the invitation the better. A visit is more personal than a call; a call is more personal than a letter; a letter is more personal than email. A letter with six people’s names on it is less personal than one addressed to one person, and an email is about as impersonal as it gets. We are so flooded with emails and the medium is so senseless that I have come to believe that in the rank order of inviting, emails don’t count. But all are better than lying in bed at night waiting for the universe to provide.
CHAPTER 12
The Possibility, Ownership, Dissent, Commitment, and Gifts Conversations
Following the invitation, there are five other conversations for structuring belonging: possibility, ownership, dissent, commitment, and gifts. Since all the conversations lead to each other, sequence is not that critical. The context of the gathering will often determine which questions to deal with and at what depth. It’s important to understand, though, that some conversations are more difficult than others, especially in communities where citizens are just beginning to engage with one another. I present them in ascending order of difficulty, with possibility generally an early conversation to have and gifts typically one of the more difficult.
We are using possibility here in a unique way. Possibility is not a goal or prediction; it is the statement of a future condition that is beyond reach. It works on us and evolves from a discussion of personal crossroads. It is an act of imagination of what we can create together, and it takes the form of a declaration, best made publicly.
The ownership conversation asks citizens to act as if they were creating what exists in the world. Confession is the religious and judicial version of ownership. The distinction is between ownership and blame. The questions for ownership are “How valuable do you plan for this gathering to be?” “How have we each contributed to the current situation?” and “What is the story you hold about this community and your place in it?” It is important for people to see the limitation of their story, for each story has a payoff and a cost. Naming these is a precondition to creating an alternative future.
The dissent conversation creates an opening for commitment. The questions explicitly ask for doubts and reservations. The distinction is between dissent and complaint. When the dissents are expressed, we need to just listen. Don’t solve them, defend against them, or explain anything. People’s doubts, cynicism, and resignation are theirs alone. Not to be taken on by us. Dissent is distinct from denial, rebellion, and resignation. The questions for dissent are about doubts, refusal, retracting commitments we no longer want to fulfill, owning our lack of forgiveness, and naming our unexpressed resentments.
The commitment conversation is a promise with no expectation of return. Virtue is its own reward. Commitment is distinguished from barter. The enemy of commitment is not opposition but lip service. The commitments that count the most are ones made to peers, other citizens. Not ones made to or by leaders. The questions are variations of “What is the promise I am willing to make?” We have to create space for citizens to declare that there is no promise they are willing to make at this time. Refusal to promise does not cost us our membership or seat at the table. We only lose our seat when we do not honor our word.
The most radical and uncomfortable conversation is about our gifts. The leadership and citizen task is to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center. The gifts conversation is the essence of valuing diversity and inclusion. We are not defined by deficiencies or what is missing. We are defined by our gifts and what is present. This is so for individuals and for communities. Belonging occurs when we tell others what gift we receive from them, especially in this moment. When this occurs, in the presence of others, community is built. We embrace our own destiny when we have the courage to acknowledge our own gifts and choose to bring them into the world. The questions for the gift conversations are “What is the gift you still hold in exile?” “What is it about you that no one knows?” “What gratitude has gone unexpressed?” and “What have others in this room done that has touched you?”
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Conversation Two: Possibility
The possibility conversation frees us to be pulled by a new future. The distinction is between a possibility, which lives into the future, and problem solving, which makes improvements on the past. This distinction takes its value from an understanding that living systems are propelled by the force of the future, and possibility as we use it here (thank you, Werner) is one way of speaking of the future.
Possibility occurs as a declaration, and wholeheartedly declaring a possibility can, in fact, be the transformation. The leadership task is to postpone problem solving and stay focused on possibility until it is spoken with resonance and passion. The good news is that once we have fully declared a possibility, it works on us—we do not have to work on it.
The Distinctions for the Possibility Conversation
The challenge with possibility is that it gets confused with vision, goals, prediction, and optimism. Possibility is not about what we plan to have happen or what we think will happen or whether things will get better. Goals, prediction, and optimism don’t create anything; they just might make things a little better and cheer us up in the process. Nor is possibility simply a dream. Dreaming leaves us bystanders or observers of our lives. Possibility creates something new. It is a declaration of a future that has the quality of being and aliveness that we choose to live into. It is framed as a declaration of the world that I want to inhabit. It is a statement of who I am that transcends our history, our story, our usual demographics. The power is in the act of declaring.
The distinction between possibility and problem solving is worth dwelling on for a moment. As I have said, surely too many times, we traditionally start with problem solving and talk about goals, targets, resources, and how to persuade others. Even the creation of a vision is part of the problem-solving mentality. A vision is something we must wait for to realize and is most often followed by an effort to make it concrete and practical. Even a vision, which is a more imaginative form of problem solving, needs to be postponed and replaced with possibility. The future is created through a declaration of what the possibility is that we stand for. Out of this declaration, each time we enter a room, the possibility enters with us.
The communal possibility comes into being through individual public declarations of possibility. Much the same as witnessing in religious gatherings. Though every possibility begins as an individual declaration, it gains power and impacts community when made public. The community possibility is not the aggregation of individual possibilities. Nor is it a negotiation or agreement on common possibility. The communal possibility is that space or porous container where a collective exists for the realization of all the possibilities of its members. This is the real meaning of a restorative community. It is that place where all possibilities can come alive, and they come alive at the moment they are announced.
• • •
The possibility conversation gives form to one way the gifts of those in the margin get brought into the center. Each person’s possibility counts, especially those of people whose voices are quieted or marginalized by the drumbeat of retribution. In fact, what distinguishes those on the margin in communities is that they tragically live without real possibility. For many youth on the margin, the future is narrow, perhaps death or prison. They have trouble imagining a future distinct from the past or present. This is the real tragedy: not only that life is difficult but that it is a life that holds no possibility for a different future.
Just to be clear about the whole process: The possibility conversation alone does not restore community. The other conversations are just as critical. We have to act as owners of our commu
nity, there has to be space for dissent, a commitment has to be made, and gifts have to be embraced. Each conversation takes its life and impact from the other conversations. Even though each leads to the others, any one of them held in isolation reduces the chance of real transformation.
The Questions for the Possibility Conversation
There needs to be a point during each gathering when time is devoted to the private possibility to be developed and then made public. This works best in two separate steps. The best opening question for possibility is
What is the crossroads where you find yourself at this stage of your life or work or in the project around which we are assembled?
Later, the more direct individual question for possibility will be
What declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform the community and inspire you?
There are two overarching questions that point to the future but cannot be asked directly:
What do we want to create together that would make the difference?
What can we create together that we cannot create alone?
These two questions almost define community, for community is that place where these questions are valued. The challenge is that I have never seen them answered in a meaningful way when asked within a context of isolation and disengagement. When people who do not really know each other gather, they are incapable of answering the questions in this most direct and purposeful form. That is why we need the other conversations.
Conversation Three: Ownership
Accountability is the willingness to acknowledge that we have participated in creating, through commission or omission, the conditions that we wish to see changed. If we lack this capacity to see ourselves as cause, our efforts become either coercive or wishfully dependent on the transformation of others.
Community will be created the moment we decide to act as creators of what it can become. This is the stance of ownership, which is available to us every moment on every issue, even world peace, the overdependence on fossil fuel consumption, and the fact that our teenagers are slightly self-centered.
This requires us to believe that this organization, this neighborhood, this community is mine or ours to create. This will occur when we are willing to answer the essential question, “How have I contributed to creating the current reality?” Confusion, blame, and waiting for someone else to change are defenses against ownership and personal power. This core question, when answered, is central to how the community is transformed.
Innocence and indifference are subtle denials of ownership. The future is denied with the response, “It doesn’t matter to me—whatever you want to do is fine.” This is always a lie and just a polite way of avoiding a difficult conversation around ownership.
People best create that which they own, and cocreation is the bedrock of accountability. The ownership conversation most directly deals with the belief that each of us, perhaps even from the moment of birth, is cause, not effect. Again, the leadership task is to find a way to use this conversation to confront people with their freedom.
The Distinctions for the Conversation for Ownership
Ownership is the decision to acknowledge our guilt. To confess that the world is, in part, our construction. In this way, we become the author of our own experience. It is the choice to decide on our own what value and meaning will occur when we show up. It is the stance that each of us is creating the world, even the one we have inherited.
The key distinction for the conversation is between ownership and blame (a form of entitlement).
We have to realize that each time people enter a room, they walk in with ambivalence, wondering whether this is the right place to be. This is because their default mind-set is that someone else owns the room, the meeting, and the purpose that convened the meeting.
Every conventional gathering begins with the unspoken belief that whoever called the meeting has something in mind for us. We are inundated with the world trying to sell us something, so much so that we cannot imagine that this time will be different. This is why so much talk is about others not in the room.
The leader/convener has to act to change this, in a sense to renegotiate the social contract. We want to shift to the belief that this world, including this gathering, is ours to construct together. The intent is to move the social contract from parenting to partnership. Renegotiating the social contract for this room is a metaphorical example of how our social contract with the community can also be renegotiated.
The Questions for Ownership
Questions that address the idea that “I am cause” can be difficult to take on immediately, so lower-risk questions precede a direct approach on this one. The best opening questions are those about the ownership that people feel for this particular gathering. The extent to which they act as owners of this meeting is symptomatic of how they will act as owners of the larger question on the table. The extent of our ownership for larger questions is more difficult and therefore requires a higher level of relatedness before it can be held in the right context.
Here is a series of questions that have the capacity to shift the ownership of the room.
Four Early Questions
The most effective way to renegotiate the social contract is to ask people to rate on a 7-point scale, from low to high, their responses to four questions:
How valuable an experience (or project or community) do you plan for this to be?
How much risk are you willing to take?
How participative do you plan to be?
To what extent are you invested in the well-being of the whole?
These are the four questions to ask early in any gathering. People answer them individually, then share their answers in a small group. As mentioned earlier, be sure to remind them not to give advice, be helpful, or cheer anyone up. Just get interested in whatever the answers are.
The Guilt Question
At some later point, we need to ask the essential question on which accountability hinges:
What have I done to contribute to the very thing I complain about or want to change?
Sometimes people will talk about how hard they have tried to make things better. Nice answer, but not to this question. This question, higher risk than most others, is about what you have done to interfere with the community’s well-being. For people to answer it requires a great deal of trust. It can be asked only after people are connected to each other. This may be the most transforming question of all. If I do not see my part in causing the past and the present, then there is no possible way I can participate usefully in being a coauthor of the future.
The Story Questions
Another ownership conversation is to confront our stories, the stories we talked of earlier that limit the possibility of an alternative future. Werner Erhard is so brilliantly clear and creative about this issue. The sequence he has put together, which I have adapted, goes like this:
What is the story about this community or organization that you hear yourself most often telling? The one that you are wedded to and maybe even take your identity from?
Then ask:
What are the payoffs you receive from holding on to this story?
The payoffs are usually in the neighborhood of being right, being in control, being safe. Or not being wrong, controlled, or at risk.
And finally:
What is your attachment to this story costing you?
The cost, most often, is our sense of aliveness. Perhaps our faith.
These are the questions that allow us to complete our stories. Not forget them, but complete them. The naming of the story to another, in the context we have created, can take the limiting power out of the story. This allows the story to stay in the past and creates an opening for us to move forward.
A friendly warning: don’t ever underestimate the determination of people to hold on to their stories, no matter the cost or the suffering they sustain. Most of us are not willing to give up our story in the moment, but t
his process works on us over time.
Conversation Four: Dissent
Creating space for dissent is the way diversity gets valued in the world. Inviting dissent into the conversation is how we show respect for a wide range of beliefs. It honors Bohr’s maxim that for every great idea, the opposite idea is also true.
There is no way to be awake and to care about a purpose or a place or a project without having serious doubts and reservations. Each of us takes many walks in the desert, and in some ways our faith is measured by the extent of our doubts. Without doubt, our faith has no meaning, no substance; it is purchased at too small a price to give it value.
This sounds simple and true enough, but in a patriarchal world, dissent is considered disloyalty. Or negativism. Or not being a team player. Or not being a good citizen. America, love it or leave it. You are either with us or against us. This is a corruption of hospitality and friendship. Hospitality is the welcoming not only of strangers but also of the strange ideas and beliefs they bring with them.
Doubt and Dissent
A critical task of leadership is to protect space for the expression of people’s doubts. The act of surfacing doubts and dissent does not deflect the communal intention to create something new. What is critical, and hard to live with, is that leaders do not have to respond to each person’s doubts. None of us do. Authentic dissent is complete simply in its expression. When we think we have to answer people’s doubts and defend ourselves, then the space for dissent closes down. When people have doubts and we attempt to answer them, we are colluding with their reluctance to be accountable for their own future. All we have to do with the doubts of others is get interested in them. We do not have to take them on or let them resonate with our own doubts. We just get interested.
