I’ve kept a copy of some pages of the International Herald Tribune from my visit to Japan a couple of months ago. The article, on May 16, 2010, was titled: Challenging the king of economic statistics. The article described the sacred cow of GDP, I’ll just quote a bit of it:

High-G.D.P. Man has a long commute to work and drives an automobile that gets poor gas mileage, requiring him to spend a lot on fuel. The morning traffic and its stresses are not too good for his car (which he replaces every few years) or his cardiovascular health (which he treats with expensive pharmaceuticals and medical procedures).

High-G.D.P. Man works hard, spends hard. He loves going to bars and restaurants and adores his big house, which he protects with a state-of-the-art security system. High-G.D.P. Man and his wife pay for a sitter for their children and a nursing home for their aging parents. They do not have time for housework so they employ a full-time housekeeper. The do not have time to cook much, so they usually order in. They are too busy to take long vacations.

All those things — cooking, cleaning, home care, vacations and so forth — the the kind of activity that keep Low-G.D.P. Man and his wife busy. High-G.D.P. Man likes his washer and dryer; Low-G.D.P. Man does not mind hanging his laundry on a clothesline. High-G.D.P. Man buys bags of prewashed salad at the grocery store; Low-G.D.P. Man grows vegetables in his garden.

When High-G.D.P. Man wants a book, he buys it; Low-G.D.P. Man checks it out of the library. High-G.D.P. Man wants to get in shape, he joins a gym; Low-G.D.P. Man digs out an old pair of Nikes and runs through the neighborhood.

By economic measures, there is no doubt. High-G.D.P. Man is superior to Low-G.D.P. Man. hat we cannot really say is whether his life is any better…

The article goes on to say that Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate from the University of Chicago and his colleagues have concluded that assessing a population’s quality of life would require metrics from at least seven categories: health, education, environment, employment, material well-being, interpersonal connectedness and political engagement. They also decided that any country that was serious about progress should start measuring its “equity” — that is, the distribution of material wealth and other social goods…

The fact that author Jon Gertner continually uses “Man” grates on me quite a bit, but I think what he points out is a very useful perspective.  Now, add to this conundrum an article from Michael Synder of the Business Insider:  The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it.  This thoughtful article simply points out how ill-distributed wealth is in the U.S..  Some of the statistics from the article are startling:

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

In other words, G.D.P. further fails as a measure of progress since most of us don’t have enough money to succeed that way anyway! Our world is changing so rapidly we’re like frogs in boiling water.

In the last week as well, there is finally some public discussion about deflation.  Close friend and colleague Robert Theobald, a British Socioeconomist was warning 12 years ago that deflation was the real issue to be concerned about, not inflation.  That’s certainly been the case in Japan for the last decade where falling prices have taken people and the economy into completely uncharted territory.  This article by Paul Krugman:  CAN DEFLATION BE PREVENTED? gives a good overview of this new situation.

What seems to be true is that we’re entering a deflationary period with an increasing separation between those who have monetary wealth and those who do not with a system that measures progress by how much we spend and consume.  Seems like it is time to take Butan’s inquiry into Gross National Happiness seriously!

Once again I am awake in the middle of the Japanese night.  Head and heart buzzing from yesterday’s work.  I was invited to join KDI — Knowledge Management Initiative in Tokyo for a afternoon workshop with participants in their new Future Center.  KDI was started 10 years ago to work with knowledge creation and realationships to knowledge, building in part on the inspiring work of Dr. Ikugjiiro Nonaka .  There approach is one which places emphasis on “individual vitality” and the  “dynamic field,” or ba.

Crazy bunch, with titles like “Wild Knowledge Architect, “Ba Conductor,” and “Sexy Works Stylist,” they work together in an almost completely flexible workspace in the middle of Roppongi, the international district of Tokyo.  What caught my attention most is where they’re headed.  They’ve been looking at the Future Center idea currently being developed in more than 30 locations in Europe.  See The Reality of European Future Centres.  Last week I wrote about a deep resonance between the work being done by GreenHouse Project and Kufunda Learning Village in Southern Africa and the work of St. Luke’s Health Initiatives.  Guess what?  The resonance continues.

Future Centers, at least as envisoned by Dr. Takahiko Nomura, KDI founder, are incredibly similar to leadership learning centers in the Berkana Exchange.  The core work of Future Centers is to surface the knowledge, wisdom and leadership already present in organizations and to create conditions which all it to be used by all for maximum creativity and innovation.  AND, the same four core competencies we surfaced last month at St. Luke’s Health Initiatives show up as core in Future Centers:

• connect and convene
• peer learning
• source of research and information
• strengths based approach

So we spent the afternoon with about 35 people from a dozen or so Japanese companies who are thinking about embracing the Future Center concept, each creating a Future Center inside their company as well as a trans-local network which links these Future Centers as a community of Practice.

I think it is going to happen.  These folks are going to step forward and start using all forms of conversational leadership to invite innovation forward.  AND, like elsewhere in the world they’re not doing it because it is the next groovy thing to do, they’re doing it because they know their survival depends on it.

I continue to be impressed with the level of receptivity in Japan for new ways of thinking about leadership, creativity and innovation.  It is not just thinking about it — it is a yearning to step into new practice fields with new partners.

One last note.  We talked about the community of practice work KDI has done over the last 10 years.  The conversation is incomplete, but part of what we talked about is how in their communities of practice perhaps the most important thing that’s happened is that people have learned they are not alone. Others have some of the same intentions and ideas they do.  We’ve always looked at Communities of Practice as places where knowledge is created.  That’s part of their function.  What may be more important is that they are places which people discover more about their own identity and step into their own leadership.

Beginning of a fascinating several weeks in my adopted homeland.

I’ve had the chance to come to Southern Africa a couple of times a year for the last decade to work with wonderful people.  My work has been as part of The Berkana Institute and our efforts to create the Berkana Exchange as a translocal network of people and places building healthy and resilient communities.  Especially for the last couple of years I’ve been working with people from Johannesburg, Harare, Cape Town and Durban about how to find and support the people doing “our” kind of community work.  This work is based on beliefs that are resonant with those listed on the About section of Resilient Communities.  We find them everywhere  (next month my daughter Annie Virnig and I will be talking about these at the 2010 TEDxTokyo — but that is a different blog).

So, what’s cooking?  Over the last three months the GreenHouse Project in Johannesburg, South Africa and Kufunda Learning Village outside Harare, Zimbabwe, have been involved in an in-depth Appreciative Inquiry Process with the “Champions” of different community-based work and their partners.  They both asked certain key questions:

• What motivates you? What gives you strength?
• What do you value about your work?
• What are you working to change?
• Really Why are you doing this work?
• Where do you see yourself and your work in the near future?
• What do you need to take you and your work to the next level?
• What natural partnerships are emerging and will be necessary in your work?
• What practical lessons have you learned? Are you sharing them with others? How do they respond to your work and the lessons you have learned?
• How is your work and the lessons from it useful?
• What have you learnt from sharing with others?

In a word, these sessions have been amazing!  Listening to Dorah Lebelo talk about these conversations with people who are just getting on with getting on — who are changing their lives for the better by working with what they have without complaint — was inspiring.  And, at the same time, we noticed the difference in her energy when speaking about this work as compared to her protracted battle with the National Lotteries Commission to release funds already awarded to GreenHouse Project for two major construction projects.

I’m going to link their reports here — the one from GreenHouse Project is over 50MB so it will take a while to download — filled with lovely pictures and well worth the wait!  GreenHouse Project Report.  Kufunda Learning Village Report.  They are amazing, powerful and delightful reads.

As we talking about the learning from this process some different key phrases kept surfacing:

• growing the work while shrinking the institutions
• reclaiming relationships with people, land and food
• learning — doing – reflecting
• finding new meaning, creating new beliefs

At its core this is all really simple stuff.  And, most of us have forgotten it.

As our conversations continued we began to speak of the role of GreenHouse and Kufunda in all this.  They are hubs, seed crystals, catalysts, enzymes.  They play the critical role of helping people and systems see themselves and each other.  But what do they really do?

Okay, this is where it gets even more interesting.  They do the same things as the people ar St. Luke’s Health Initiatives mentioned in other places on my blogs.  Last month, working with SLHI in Phoenix we eventually said they have four core competencies:

1. They connect and convene
2. They support peer learning
3. They are the “goto” place for information and knowledge
4. They work from a strengths-based approach.

BINGO.  In their roles as hubs and catalysts, this is exactly what GHP and Kufunda do.  This is the core work which supports communities that practice what they believe and which aspires to create an influence beyond the immediate boundaries of their work.

Lots more to say about all this, but I’ll stop with this teaser!

That’s what is said in Japan when one returns home.  “I’m back, I’ve been out in the world and I am back.” 　ただいま.　And that is exactly how I felt this past weekend will leading a workshop in Japan.  This blog is both a bit about my personal journey and my amazing week in Japan.

My relationship with Japan began in 1970.  I “escaped” to Japan when the U.S. invaded Cambodia and the National Guard murdered four students at Kent State University.  I was finishing my Junior year at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA and was active in the student movement and the anti-war movement and on the fringes of the civil-rights, womens and environmental movements.  I left the U.S. with a combination of deep anger and deep grief that was characteristic of those times.

About the only thing I knew about Japan was that it was near China.  But once again my guardian angels were on duty and pushed me where I needed to go.  I began my own spiritual journey in Japan in 1970.  The culture and my host family have been part of my life ever since.  I met the grandfather of my heart in Kyoto.  He was 71 and I was 21.  For forty years our families have been intertwined.  His son is the only grandfather my daughter, Annie has ever know and her time with her ogii-chama and obaa-chama are special.  Japan has always been a place of my heart and spirit and I’ve never been inclined to take my work there.  That all has shifted, dramatically.

Last November at the Pegasus Systems Thinking In Action I was amazed to see 25 or so people from Japan.  Normally there are just several.  I wondered:  “what’s happening?”  I discovered that a lot was happening.  Over the last couple of years there has been a tremendous opening, a search for new ways of being in life and in work in the world.  People are working with systems thinking, Presencing, World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry and a host of other processes to see what else is possible.  They have not only embraced these methodologies, they have created a huge new opening for new ways of thinking and being.  And in Japan, when something begins, it moves quickly!

Conversations quickly evolved into an invitation to The Berkana Institute to put together an Art of Hosting.  My sense was that it would be important to precede this Art of Hosting with a design session which ended up evolving into a workshop which incorporated different elements of Art of Hosting and my own work on the Art of Change.  The two day workshop was followed by an evening of Dialogue Bar which was astounding in its own right.

I was amazed and deeply moved by the two events.

The weekend workshop  with 20 people in a workshop was a combination of Bob, Enspirited Leadership, Art of Hosting Sampler and Art of Change Sampler all rolled into one.  We met in circle and open space and world cafe.  We walked the “two loops” together.  We walked in silent pairs and in dialogue pairs.  We modeled with clay.  And the clay was so loved that it became a part of the rest of the world cafe sessions as well.  By Sunday morning the design and hosting team space was opened and we designed the second day together and much of the hosting was done  by the participants.

Monday night was “Dialogue Bar”.  More than 100 people from all walks of life and all ages came for what ended up being a 4 hour dialogue bar.  The atmosphere was incredible.  I spent 10 minutes speaking (and 10 being translated) to give glimpses of my life until 2000.  We began the first round of World Cafe with a question:  “what social innovation makes enough of a difference to make a difference?”  After 30 minutes, we did a brief harvest, and I spoke for another 20 (plus 20 for translation) about my journey of the last 10 years and about Enspirited Leadership.  Yuya, the organizer asked for my personal story as a weave and context for the World Cafe.  After I spoke a second time, we had two more rounds of cafe.

The response in both events was powerful.

How to explain it?  You know that Japanese know how to be silent with each other.  They know how to listen to each other with their whole bodies and to hear far beyond the words.  They know how to be respectful.  They know how to find questions.  AND, there is an expression in Japan:  “the nail that sticks up is pounded down.” Edward Hall speaks of Japan culture as being the most “high context” culture on the planet.  But what does this mean?  My friend Jeff in Kyoto, who has lived there now for 40 years (longer than any other living foreigner)  points out that even in Japan, high context is translated simply as “high context.”  What does it mean?  It means Japanese take in everything with their listening.  That is the cultural competence.  AND, the nail that sticks up is pounded down.

How does one continue to listen with one’s whole being AND, stick up, stand up, find courage and clarity to offer one’s leadership in a time of immense change?  This is the question that Japan is ready for and it has been cracking wide open for the last two years.  That is why there were 25 people from Japan at the Pegasus Systems Thinking In Action Conference this past November where there have been 4 or 5 in the past.

I’ll be back for some work in May and suspect I will be returning more frequently.  Since I first arrived in Japan in 1970, it has been a place of my heart and spirit.  In the early years, I wondered why I never tried to bring my work there.  Later, in this past decade, I realized it was my “upbringing” in Japan that allowed me to travel into and with other cultures.  Now, it seems that work around the world has left me with something special to offer in Japan and it feels wonderful!

It is a time of change, and I am interested in the parallels to the Meiji Restoration of 1868 when 250 years of rule by the Tokugawa Shogunate came to an end, rapidly.  I did my undergraduate comprehensive project on it 39 years ago.  What I saw happening then was that the underlying mythic structures of the culture were no longer sufficient to interpret daily experience and they were washed away in an almost bloodless revolution.  Extraordinarily different than the French Revolution or the later Russian Revolution.  I suspect a similar thing is beginning to happen now.

Bootcamp is over. Those are the words that came to me last month when I was working  in Phoenix with people from the St. Luke’s Health Initiatives.  My trip to Phoenix came right after I returned from almost a month in southern Africa.  What I heard and saw in Phoenix fit into the same pattern as my experiences in Africa.

My sense is that I, and many others, have been in deep training for this past decade.  We’ve been learning how to see our world, our selves, our relationships and our work in new ways.  The learning didn’t start ten years ago, and it won’t stop now, but I’m feeling like this is the time when we need to move on.

On a phone call yesterday my friend Chris Corrigan used three phrases which really caught my attention.  He said we are not yet a community that practices and we are not yet a system that influences.  He went on to speak about the work that needs doing now is practical decolonization.

• A community that practices… My friend Robert Theobald used to always talk about how we needed to listen to the music, not the words.  We’ve heard and used many words in the last decade.  And they are powerful:  presencing, hosting, healing, zero-waste, appreciation, feeding ourselves sustainably.  The list goes on and on.  Many of us have learned how to dance with words like power and love, warrior and midwife.  The dance is good.  But it is time now to practice, practice and practice.  It is time to hear the music with our bodies.  It is time to embody these practices.  It is time to practice together as if our lives depend on it.  They probably do.  No, I don’t know exactly what this means.  But I sense it means now is not the time to feel satisfied and complete in what we’ve done and learned so far.  Now is the time to push our edges more than ever before.
• A system that influences… Together we have a chance to create a new era, a step beyond the era which is disintegrating all around us.  Many of us have been pioneers, engaging in promising experiments with new forms, processes and ventures which carry the DNA of the era we might create.  Much of this work has been powerful, rewarding and exciting.  And, it is not enough.  We must find ways which allow this work to easily and naturally spread.  I’m not talking about going to scale, I am talking about creating systems of influence.  Systems of influence require the creation of eco-systems which are larger than our individual work and which connect that work so it can GROW.  Communities of practice can create systems of infulence, indicators can create systems of influence, scenarios can create systems of influence.  In South Africa I saw a reality TV show create a system of influence.  What else?  How do we help this work grow.
• Practical decolonization… I love the phrase, simply because it hasn’t yet been overused!  Decolonizing is the process of shrugging off the shackles of domination that have controlled our lives.  We’ve all been colonized.  Certainly the colonization and extermination of indigenous peoples all over the world has been the most obvious and most brutal.  Many of us have been victims and perpetrators of practices of power over which has separated us individually and collectively from our selves, each other and all other life on this planet of ours.  Now is the time for us to step out of our roles as colonized and colonizers — practically, clearly, irrevocably.

We know how to do this!  That’s the good news from our work of the last decade.  No, we don’t have a road map.  Hell, we don’t even really know the destination.  But we do know enough to continue, to deepen, to go to a next level.  But we have to move.  Part of this is, I am sure, learning how to be comfortable working with the Alchemy of Opposites.  All of it, I know is done collectively in community, not individually in isolation.

A lot of my own thinking about this over the last couple of months has been influenced both by Adam Kahane’s new book Power and Love and an essay from Barry Oshrey that grew out of a conversation he and Adam had, also called  Power and Love.  I’m personally a little leery of both these terms — power and love — but they have been an important doorway into my current learning.  Oshrey speaks of the need to develop robust systems which combine power and love and I think he’s got it right.  I think that I’ve spent much of the last ten years working on relationships and harmony and listening.  I think the focus of the next ten needs to be more on getting real work done.

Many blessings as we end the era of the “oughts” (aught 1, aught 2, …) and come into the era of the “tens” (inTENtion)  <grin>

I thought when I headed off to southern Africa in early November, I would have a spacious time for reflection, learning, and writing here.  That wasn’t the case.  I was engaged in pretty much non-stop work in various systems.  AND, because I went with the intention of reflecting and learning, I carried that spirit into my work.  I hope this will be the first of a number of posts here.

I started experimenting with a new Mac software — View Your Mind — and it was really help in chasing some ideas down.  What I want to write a bit about today is holding the tension of an alchemy of opposites.

I think that many of us are being called to find our balance in this ecosystem of forces which are seemingly in opposition to each other, but which are each needed to find right direction and right action in these times. We must learn to be equally skillful in the role of midwife and warrior. We must be clear about our intentions and also able to surrender them. We must step into our own power from a place of love. It’s critical that we learn to listen more deeply than ever before, and to speak out without blame or judgment. We need to rigorously apply everything that we’ve been learning and do so from a place of spaciousness. We need to learn to travel the spiral of work that is both planned and emergent.

Calling this tricky is, of course,  a huge understatement. It’s so easy to become trapped in either the upper or lower section of this ecosystem. None of us can let that happen any longer. I’m curious about where you find your self standing and working in this alchemy of opposites and look forward to some holiday discussion here.

I arrived in Zimbabwe several days ago, my first visit this year.  Since before Kufunda Learning Village was a glimmer in the heartmind of its founder, I have been journeying here.  When people ask what I do at and with Kufunda it is often with a typical assumption of people in the global north that I am coming here to teach them something.  I come here to learn.  Of course, this dichotomy between learning and teaching is a false one.  But mostly, I come to listen.  To witness.  To ask questions. To be present to the changes taking place at Kufunda and in Zimbabwe.  I also come to connect Kufunda with others around the world — calling forth connections and relationships which help us all learn.

I first visited Zimbabwe in 2001 and have been witness to many years of things falling apart.  Everything I’ve thought I knew or understood about collapse have been challenged.  Each collapse is unique.  Perhaps the only common thread is that times of collapse are a call for resilience.  In some ways the country “hit bottom” last year.  Some progress has been made since then, but for people who feel like they are at the end of their rope, it is slow and agonizing.

I came here aware of the pain and agony some were feeling.  It wasn’t until I arrived that I also felt how strong the winds of shift are as well.  So it is all present at the same time — agonizing stuckness, emerging creativity, willingness to change.  When you’re stuck, what do you do?  I was thinking this morning about cross country skiing on groomed trails (perhaps an odd thought since the daily temperatures here are in the 90s).  When I’m skiing and see a crash coming, it is almost impossible for me to remember to simply lift my ski out of the track, and to take it from there.  That first step, lifting out of the current track, can be so darn hard.

At Kufunda the need to do so is clear.  The structure and processes which brought Kufunda to where it is today cannot continue.  Among other things, the global economic crisis has shown up here in the form of fewer donor dollars.  But even beyond that, it is clear that changes are needed.  Kufundees have been able to spend a lot of time over the last five years learning how to host processes which help them develop deep relationships with each other.  They have learned how to do permaculture.  They have learned how to build with local materials and how to move towards zero-waste.  They have learned how to use herbs for healing.  They have learned how to share knowledge with surrounding communities and are beginning to learn how to help those communities reach out to others.  Everything from bee-keeping to “arbor-loos” are part of the culture.  There are many pieces in place and part of the work over the last several days has been looking at how to shift those pieces into a more productive overall pattern.

One of the questions I’ve had for years is about how Kufunda reaches out beyond the six communities it has ben working with since 2003.  Even that is more clear.  It does it through partnerships.  For example, one of the friends of Kufunda founded something called “Tree of Life.”  It is a process which works with victims of torture to help them heal.  It is a powerful process led by the former victims themselves.  Once people in villages are more healed, what next?  Perhaps a partnership with Kufunda provides part of that answer — Kufunda can come in and help them remember ways of being a healthy village again.

Enough for now.  Lot’s happening and I’ll be writing more!

One of the great challenges of the kind of work I and others are doing is figuring out how to measure our progress. We often have fundors involved who want to know what our metrics are, but more importantly our communities themselves need to know if their efforts are effective. All to often our work is sidelined when someone says where’s your strategic plan? Many of us don’t believe in strategic planning. We say show me a plan that was actually followed and that was helpful. But, still, we don’t have much that we work with instead. Sure, we follow our intuition and we’re good at using conversation and other tools. But it feels insufficient.

And I am so tired of hearing if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there . What does it mean to work with making the path by walking on it? How do we get collective reassurance that we’re headed in the right direction and not just spinning our wheels? One insight I had a few years ago was that in our new ways of working, we measure from the inside out. Rather than having a fixed set of reference points (goals and objectives) constructed in advance, we’re actually called on to learn how to watch what is actually happening in order to understand the direction that is emerging from within our system and then we have to talk about what that direction means.

One methodology I’ve come across that works in this way is something called Most Significant Change. The link will lead you to a version of the user’s guide from a couple of years ago. I have some problems with the methodology in that it uses a somewhat elitist process to refine data — but I think it has a promising, simple, fresh start. You ask people to notice what is significant about changes and then look for patterns and trends in their responses.

Someone recently forwarded an interesting article from a 2006 NonProfit Quarterly Evaluation for the way we Work. Michael Quinn Patter, the author, begins by saying The very possibility articulated in the idea of making a major difference in the world ought to incorporate a commitment to not only bring about significant social change, but also think deeply about, evaluate, and learn from social innovation as the idea and process develops. However, because evaluation typically carries connotations of narrowly measuring predetermined outcomes achieved through a linear cause-effect intervention, we want to operationalize evaluative thinking in support of social innovation through an approach we call developmental evaluation.

I’ve also been collecting interesting pieces of this and that for the last several years while this question has been bubbling in me including:

• Learning for Social Change
• A Framework for Learning and Results in Community
• Organic Evaluation at Santerpol Roulant
• Introduction to Outcome Asset Impact Model

And many more. I’ve been collecting these for some time and finally have an opportunity to read and think about them. I’m very curious. What are others here finding helpful in terms of Evaluation and Measurement? What are you doing? What kinds of resources and documentation are helpful? What can you share here?

Last night I was having dinner with an old friend, Francesca Firstwater. We were catching up on our lives and our work. Francesca is one of those remarkable people who has led a life of service. No drum rolls or trumpets — she just quietly shows up and discovers how she can serve. Right now she works as a child psychiatric nurse at a local hospital — when she is not tending the Buddhist stupa on mountainside near Spokane, or serving as a minister at a wedding or a memorial service. Our conversation turned to our work as listeners.

Listening to people is a key part of my work. Being fully present, listening with my whole heart and soul, noticing if there is a point at which something I’ve learned might be brought into the conversation as a question or a comment.

I remember a conversation I had last year with the person who had brought me to Queensland, Australia for a couple of weeks of work. I was able to spend time with four different groups of people working with people with disabilities. The National Disabilities Council in Queensland does fantastic work. They use a strengths based approach and they have done some wonderful recent work on Blue Skies Scenarios. More about that later. After two weeks of wonderful work I was having a final meeting with Valmae Rose, the DNS Queensland Director. Valmae starts to tell me about what she appreciated most about my work. I’m all pumped up after a number of very generative conversations and I’m looking forward to her saying things like the models you shared were just excellent or what you said about resilience was just brilliant. Valmae looks me in the eye and says, instead you’re a really good listener. My ego goes ouch, but after thinking about it for a while I’m pretty pleased. When we give people good listening, they learn what they already know. And most of us know a heck of a lot more than we think!

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about Listening. Ascent Magazine titled it Hear and Now and I think it gives a useful overview of this Language of Listening. A few years ago I came across a wonderful book Teaching with Your Mouth Shut which also speaks to the power of listening. Important territory!

Yesterday I was preparing for a phone call with the St. Luke’s Health Initiatives in Phoenix. They’ve invited me to participate in their December annual conference as a “not-expert” giving a “not-keynote.” After reading through the notes from their recent planning meetings, my attention went to the website to deepen my understanding of what they are doing. And I was blown away. The first documents I came across was StLukesHealthInitiatives-Fall03. It is an amazing look at resilience in health. It begins with a suggestion familiar to many of us: what if rather than being the absence of illness and pathology, health is actually the harmonious integration of mind and body within a responsive community?

In the frame work St. Luke’s has been using, there are at least three central components of resilient social-ecological communities: diversity, redundancy and feedback loops. They go on to define community as group of people with diverse characteristics who are linked by social ties, share common perspectives, and engage in joint action in geographical locations or settings — and then go on and define what each of these things actually are. It’s a powerful report and the points directions for each of us to attend to our own health. The video to the right is a work in progress which illustrates some of this thinking.

So, after reading it, I head back to the St. Luke’s website for more. And quickly I’m led to StLukesHealthInitiatives-Fall08, the report five years later. Take a look at it. The quality of the work and the directness of the language is delightful. The report ends with 16 lessons learned:

• FOCUS ON COMMUNITIES-AS-PLACE. We build healthy, resilient communities in physical, space-bound settings where we live, work and play. The siren song of communities of interest, practice and identity can enhance our ability to improve community health, but it can also direct our attention, resources and energy away from place-bound connections of social reciprocity and support.

• START WITH SHARED CONVERSATIONS. This will lead to shared relationships and shared identity. These, in turn, will contribute over time to shared meaning, shared trust, shared motivation and shared action. The result is the adaptable, engaged community.

• PULL, DON’T PUSH. ATTRACT, DON’T PROMOTE. Invite others in to build networks of engagement, involvement and shared action. Don’t treat people like consumers or clients. Attract others bymodeling the result you desire. Don’t promote an ideology or set of techniques everyone else has to accept.

• TAP INTO INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY STRENGTHS. Use these to build tangible assets (housing jobs, infrastructure) and develop the knowledge and skills (education) that create the conditions for optimal health and sustainability.

• DEVELOP AND EXTEND NETWORKS OF LEARNING, PRACTICE AND ACTION. Think associationally. Build up and out, down and in simultaneously.

• BE A CONNECTOR. Channel and connect ideas, energy, resources. Everything flows from this.

• SPEAK TO POWER. Find and encourage the community’s collective voice to connect with economic and political resources in ever wider circles of influence, investment and consequence.

• CONSIDER THE AUDIENCE. Adapt your language and message frames accordingly.

• MOVE FROM ACCOUNTABILITY TO LEARNING. Disseminate what you learn as widely and transparently as possible. Accountability will arise naturally from the shared learning (meanings) of the community.

• SEED AND FEED. Start with a focused task or project that has a good probability for success. Build on success by scanning for new opportunities and sowing seeds. Pursue those that take root and start to grow. Not all of them will.

• INVEST FOR LONGER TIME PERIODS. Seeds that take root do better with focused, longer-term investments of human and financial resources. Be watchful – but don’t be in a rush to hurry on to the next big thing.

• TAKE TIME TO MAKE TIME. Community building is long distance and never ending. Get off the clock now and then. Replenish yourself and others. It always winds back around.

• DRINK FROM THE WELL. Find, nurture and drink from community wells of trusted information, services and social connections. They are individuals and organizations alike. If you can’t find one, drill for one. Connect others to it.

• PLAN TO ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE TO PLAN. Do both in pencil so you can adapt to change.

• LISTEN, LEARN AND LET GO. People come from very different places. Let them speak. People learn in different ways. Give them options and time. Lead by example. We raise healthy children this way. Why would communities be any different?

FIRE, READY, AIM. In community building, clarity emerges from practice, not practice from clarity. Start with action (fire), refine your practice based on what you’re learning (ready), then develop your theory of change (aim). Use that theory and knowledge to inform further practice, and so on in a cycle of never-ending adaptability, learning and change.

This is good, solid thinking. What’s also striking about it is that it isn’t rare anymore. Of course, it would be a huge stretch to say it is common thinking — but that’s the direction.

Frequently these days I’m confronted by the fact that we know a lot about new ways of thinking and being. Many of us no longer have any particular faith in the ways things have been done in the past. We’re even beginning to develop common language. I loved it that these reports speak of using attraction rather than promotion, for example. In the Berkana Exchange community it was Unitierra in Oaxaca, Mexico where I first heard people talking about commotion rather than promotion. Exactly the same idea. Or Nipun Meta from Charity Focus talks about fire, ready, steady, but it is the same essence as fire, ready, aim in the report’s last point.

The question, of course, is what will help us all practice more consistently in the field defined by these principles, values and beliefs? What’s growing here that can be cultivated? How do we begin to create frameworks, processes and structures which help us practice and learn in this field rather than always being distracted and thrown off balance when someone comes asking for our strategic plan or pre-planned outcomes?