They’ve been called sustainable communities and thriving communities and resilient communities.  A whole Transition Towns movement has grown up to help communities see how to move from where they are now to where they want to be.  Just how similar are these different efforts?

Definitions

Many names are used to describe a similar possibility:

• One Thriving Communities website asks:  How do you know a thriving community when you meet one?  Information and resources flow smoothly through the community from where these assets exists to where they can be best applied. The people within a thriving community feel cared for, acknowledged, and yearn to give back to their community as a whole as well as to the people within it. There is a sense that the community becomes greater than the sum of the parts. The community becomes resilient to shifting outside forces and responsive to the needs of its members. A thriving community does not become passive, instead it holds a balance of tension to uplift  the community as a whole.

•  A website about Resilient Communities suggests Resilient communities are capable of bouncing back from adverse situations. They can do this by actively influencing and preparing for economic, social and environmental change. When times are bad they can call upon the myriad of resources that make them a healthy community. A high level of social capital means that they have access to good information and communication networks in times of difficulty, and can call upon a wide range of resources.

• Bay Localize says that we inspire and support Bay Area residents in building equitable, resilient communities. We confront the challenges of climate instability, rising energy costs, and recession by boosting our region’s capacity to provide for everyone’s needs, sustainably and equitably. We achieve this by equipping local leaders with flexible tools, models, and policies that strengthen their communities. Why local? Why now? Humanity is at a turning point. We’re using so much of the Earth’s resources that we’re endangering the very life-support systems upon which we all depend. At the same time, too many people in our communities are going without the basics to lead healthy lives. The task of our generation is to learn to live happily on fewer resources, to distribute these resources equitably, and to make our communities resilient enough to withstand the bumps in the road along the way.

• Transition US says that its movement  is comprised of vibrant, grassroots community initiatives that seek to build community resilience in the face of such challenges as peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. Transition Initiatives differentiate themselves from other sustainability and “environmental” groups by seeking to mitigate these converging global crises by engaging their communities in home-grown, citizen-led education, action, and multi-stakeholder planning to increase local self reliance and resilience.

• Shuli Goodman, a friend and colleague of mine, gives a robust definition of the term sustainability, a term that has fallen out of favor in many places (who wants to just be sustainable?).  Shuli suggests sustainability is conceived of as a journey, perhaps even a hero’s journey, with the promise of transformation and redemption. It is not something we arrive at and then are done with . We cannot buy it or make it–it’s not a product. Rather than a destination, sustainability is an emergent process with multiple developmental stages leading towards respect and care–a practice of non-harm to our collective natural capital. Or, from a more positive perspective, sustainability is a journey towards personal and planetary health.

These movements use different language to talk about themselves, but listening beyond the words, they embrace  a resonant set of purposes supporting the creation of healthy communities.  What would become possible if we started to be able to see this as a meta-movement of transformation?

Resources

Already an amazing array of resources has been assembled to support people working in these domains.  Much of what each movement has done is still relatively invisible.  What would happen if their knowledge became a common resource?  Some of examples I’ve seen for the first time in the last week include:

✓        Transition US has a delightful Knowledge Hub, personally stewarded by people in the field, which provides access to a wide range of resources.

✓        The Post Carbon Institute has grown a set of resources at Energy Bulletin which will soon be part of the core materials for a  new website: http://www.resilience.org.

✓        Bioneers website hosts a body of resources gathered over the last 20 years from a wide range or areas and with the guidance and support of both participants and  presenters in their remarkable annual conferences.

✓        Bay Localize has, among other things, created a remarkable Community Resilience Tool Kit which provides access to an array of resources.

These are just a few examples, of course, of what’s already out there ready for wider use.  It’s pretty amazing when I stop to think about all this.  Many, many people have been working away, often quite quietly, to discover how to make a difference in their lives and local communities.  They’ve engaged in numerous experiments, sometimes succeeding and other times failing and always learning as fast as possible.  The resources available on these and other websites are the fruits of many years of many people’s labor.  It’s now time to move them out  into the world, going to a wider scale.

From Emergence to Transformational Change

There’s a new way of thinking about how change is created that is present in this work.  For the last decade at The Berkana Institute we worked with many communities around the world that shared some key principles and beliefs about change which apply here as well:

• Every community is filled with leaders
• Whatever the problem, community itself has the answers
• We don’t have to wait for anyone. We have many resources with which to make things better now
• We need a clear sense of direction AND we need to know the elegant, minimum next step
• We proceed one step at a time, making the path by walking it
• Local work evolves to create transformative social change when connected to similar work around the world

In other words, we do this work together.  Stepping forward, experimenting, learning, and finding that elegant minimum next step.  In past years, those of us concerned about these areas have been engaging in a variety of incremental change efforts.  It’s great work.  Individual people are improving their lives and finding more contentment.  But overall our directions continue to be unsustainable.  One of my questions is how does our important work, which has been guided by principles of emergence, actually lead to transformational change?  How do we increase the impact of our work?  Incremental change just isn’t good enough:  Disasters are happening and systems are collapsing because of the choices we as humans have made about how to live on the planet.  How do we transform?

I’ve been reading Shuli Goodman’s dissertation on Organizational and Community Transformations after a Catastrophic Event.  Her entire dissertation is a fine and promising piece of work.  Shuli has looked at the journey of  a number of US that have used disasters as a springboard for transformation.  Her dissertation also led me to a remarkable article by Connie Gersick from the early nineties:  Revolutionary Change Theories: A Multilevel Exploration of the Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm.  The article uses the concept of punctuated equilibrium to distinguish between incremental change and transformative change.  I like the way Gersick distinguishes between incremental change and transformative change.  Incremental change, she says, is when we change the height of the hoops on the basketball court — the game is still basically the same.  Transformative change happens when we remove the hoops entirely — it is a whole new ball game.  Moving the hoops around isn’t enough.  We need a whole new plan for how we live on this small planet of ours.  I want to share a few excerpts from Gersick’s article:

Deep structures  persist and limit change during equilibrium periods, and it is what disassembles, reconfigures, and enforces wholesale transformation during revolutionary punctuations. And we, my friends are in a period of “revolutionary punctuations”

Gradualist paradigms imply that systems can “accept” virtually any change, any time, as long as it is small enough; big changes result from the insensible accumulation of small ones. In contrast, punctuated equilibrium suggests that, for most of systems’ histories, there are limits beyond which “change is actively prevented, rather than always potential but merely suppressed because no adaptive advantage would accrue.”  It appears that we’re now at one of those punctuated equilibrium points.  One of the ramifications of this is that the future — form, structure, relationships, content — does not exist and cannot be seen.  Our great challenge and opportunity is to work with it as it emerges.

This piece of research from the early nineties makes five key assertions based on comparative analysis based on analysis of change and transformation from seven different bodies of work on individuals, groups, organizations, scientific field, biological species and grand theories:

• Systems evolve through the alternation of periods of equilibrium, in which persistent underlying structures permit only incremental change, and periods of revolution, in which these underlying structures are fundamentally altered.
• Systems do not evolve through a gradual blending from one state to the next. Systems’ histories are unique. They do not necessarily evolve from lower to higher states, through universal hierarchies of stages, or toward pre-set ends.
• Deep structure is a network of fundamental, interdependent “choices,” of the basic configuration into which a system’s units are organized, and the activities that maintain both this configuration and the system’s resource exchange with the environment. Deep structure in human systems is largely implicit.
• During equilibrium periods, systems maintain and carry out the choices of their deep structure. Systems make adjustments that preserve the deep structure against internal and external perturbations, and move incrementally along paths built into the deep structure. Pursuit of stable deep structure choices may result in behavior that is turbulent on the surface.
• Revolutions are relatively brief periods when a system’s deep structure comes apart, leaving it in disarray until the period ends, with the “choices” around which a new deep structure forms. Revolutionary outcomes, based on interactions of systems’ historical resources with current events, are not predictable: they may or may not leave a system better off. Revolutions vary in magnitude.

It seems to me that our work now is to consciously create a new set of deep structures which simply support better ways for all of us to live on this  planet of ours.

Collaboratory

Some of us think that it is time to become much more intentional about collaboration.   Numerous synchronicities and synergies are available when people passionate about building healthy communities embrace each other’s work.  Leaders of some of these efforts have started to come together in a new effort — a Thriving and Resilient Communities “Collaboratory” — to share ideas, build and strengthen relationships and to begin to co-create a broader impact – a system of influence.   The Threshold Foundation has provided some initial support for  the development of this Collaboratory, helping to bring  these different bodies of work closer together.

We’ve begun to take some initial steps:

• We’re bringing people and organizations from these different efforts together to build relationships and to learn more about each other’s work. A limited number of face-to-face meetings, regular phone and Skype calls, sharing of ideas and documents in Google Docs, and beginning to build out of a project wiki are among the initial steps to understand each other’s work and strengthen relationships.

• Scott Spann from Innate Strategies  will be helping to build relationships and to increase clarity across the network.  We’re hoping that Scott’s approach can help these separate efforts understand themselves as a meta-movement.  His work is powerful.  For example, Innate Strategies designed and launched the RE-AMP collaboration of 24 members from utilities, government, non-profits and foundations who wanted to increase renewable energy in the Midwest U.S. Levels of confidence and trust among the participants by clarifying each of their individual needs and strategies and integrating all 24 perspectives into a unified view of their system with a single, shared goal.

• For more than 20 years, the annual Bioneers Conference has brought increasing numbers of people together to learn with each other about new ways of building enduring and healthy communities.  This fall’s conference will be preceded by a one-day intensive where we hope to draw together more than 400 practitioners working to create thriving/resilient/sustainable communities to learn with each other and to explore this larger movement.  This event will be one major attempt at further mapping this growing field of endeavor.

• The Collaboratory is beginning to call together this wide field because we believe that as these connections and relationships are made, even more compassionate action will follow.  It is an exciting time.

Our overall intent in doing this is to Name, Connect, Nourish and Illuminate this field. Berkana also articulated this four step process — name trailblazing leaders and communities, connect them to one another, nourish them with relationships, learning, resources, and support, and illuminate their stories as important examples of the future taking place right now — as one way in which important work grows to larger scale.

At Berkana, we spoke of this as the work of developing systems of influence.  In this case, we’re working to manifest a meta-movement which is truly transformative. Watch for more news of the Collaboratory as our work unfolds.

A Last Note:  Dialog

I want to add one more thing, in conclusion, to this somewhat long blog.  We’re not just talking about structural and technical changes here.  The only way these changes will endure is if they grow from a strong field of relationships in which we learn to  be in community again.

I’m told that one of the biggest limitations in current community movements is not technical — it is relational.  People’s egos get in the way.  They find it impossible to hold the tension of differences.  They are unable to listen deeply for understanding rather than rushing to judgments.  When there is an overwhelming and obvious disaster, we can put those things aside and work together.  However, we’ve lost some of the relationship skills which make it possible to continue to do this week-in, week-out for the rest of our lives.

The Art of Hosting Conversations That Matter movement, in the US and around the world, has been helping people learn how to reweave this relational field.  This is one of the essential capacities in building a transformational movement.

I’m beginning the “soft launch” of something that has grown out of my work in Japan over the last several years.  The Transformation Institute:  Community, Business and Personal Transformation is coming to life at web address Robert Theobald and I used for our work from the mid-nineties until his death just before the beginning of the new century.  Seems very fitting and appropriate.

Frankly, I don’t know exactly what the Transformation Institute is.  I just know it wants to be born.  Several questions contribute to its formation:

• We will encounter more and more collapse of existing systems in the coming years.  How use collapse (disaster/emergency/revolt) as a springboard to transform our communities and our lives into ones which are healthy, resilient and thriving?  A friend in Japan made a critical observation last April, speaking of the triple disasters in Japan.  She said “we caused this.”  Three simple words.  They make us face the fact that while a natural disaster occurred, it was precipitated by an array of human choices.  Many of our choices will lead to more collapses.  Will we try to reconstruct the old normal, or can we learn how to use the energy of collapse to transform to a new more desirable state?
• While there are differences in our community, business and personal lives, transformation of the three is interwoven.  How will we reconceptualize and recreate the relationship between these three aspects of our lives? One of my biggest lessons in Japan has been seeing what it looks like when business is still a part of community rather than apart from community.  I’m not trying to glamorize business in Japan or say there are not issues and problems, but what’s been striking to me are the ways in which community and social needs trump financial profit.  CSR isn’t enough, it feels kind of like an “oh, and, by the way, I wonder if there is something good we ought to be doing.”  What would it be like for community, business and personal to conceive of themselves as integral parts of a greater, related whole?
• There is a great, latent potential for great cooperation and greater learning linking the whole of the Pacific Rim.  We are an ecology together.  How might the diverse insights, questions, knowledge and experience of countries, cultures and peoples on the Pacific Rim be invited into a deeper co-creative relationship?  How do we honor the particular problems and potential present in each context and learn together a we work to create a future that works for all?
• Finally, the emergence of a new Tohoku Region in Japan will be a teacher to all of us.  How do we learn with and from the people of Japan as this beautiful Tohoku region comes back to life? What can those of us elsewhere around the rim contribute as people in Tohoku learn how to work together to create the communities, businesses and lives they want?  I remember the feeling in early April when I was co-hosting a group of 40 or so business leaders in Japan.  We began with grief, sadness and confusion that turned into excitement within three hours.  The shift was remarkable.  When I sensed into the shift these words came back to me:  we’ve been released from a future we did not want!  How can Japan lead the way in transformation?

It’s an exciting time.  Much is possible.  I invite you to help me think about how the new Transformation Institute might contribute to the possibilities which surround us!

Cheers,

Bob

What’s really true is that I am just blown away.  I’ve spent the last three days meeting people who are doing the work needed to stabilize and then re-create the Tohoku region of Japan that was ravaged by the triple disasters of March 11, 2011.

There are special names for these folks in Japan.  Some are called “U Turn:”  people raised in Tohoku who had moved away and have now returned.  Some are called “I Turn:” people who never had a connection with the region, but who have moved their lives to Tohoku.  Some are called volunteers:  people who have spent days, weeks and months living in the various volunteer centers doing whatever is needed.  And, of course, others are the people who have lived in Tohoku all their lives.  They arec sometimes are called victims or sufferers, but those terms turn them into applicants.  They are just people rebuilding their lives and their communities.

A year ago Suji Suzuki had no idea he would be living in Sendai.  He was happy in Tokyo, finding ways to use Appreciate Inquiry to change health systems in Spokane.  He did an I Turn and has now set up the Sanaburi Foundation to act as an intermediary foundation to create a bridge between people with resources outside Tohoku and those who need support within (see http://www.resilientjapan.org/content/id/c6c47e).  He came to the region back in April and just showed up for what needs to be done.  Gradually, as he worked alongside many other volunteers, he began to see this need for an intermediary function and he had some previous background doing foundation work so he stepped forward.  Each day he continues to find his way.  Brokering new partnerships and forming new relationships with others who are working to create a new Tohoku.

Watanabe-san worked for a firm in Tokyo that made log homes.  He did a U Turn to Tohoku after the disasters hit.  Now he is the volunteer coordinator for Minami-Sanriku-cho area where 7 communities with 2500 people were completely destroyed (see http://www.resilientjapan.org/content/id/41e63a).  He was born in Sendai and thinks that he will be in the region for a long time.  There was nothing in particular in his background which prepared him for the work he is doing now.  He just showed up and started to offer his talents. stepping forward to do what he could for people who needed his help.

I don’t have a picture of Chiba-san.  I was too blown away by his story to take one.  An older man with white hair.  So humble.  So unassuming.  He was born in the small village of Oosawa where all 188 homes were washed out to see.  He spent most of his life away, as a ship’s engineer and returned for retirement three years ago.  He’s been the servant leader of one temporary housing site where he’s managed to gather many member of the village together.  They’re organizing themselves to do all sorts of things because they already had relationship.  Although he waved his hands to reflect any praise, I have no doubt that most of what’s happened in the new Oosawa would have happened without him.

Or then there is Kawasaki-san from Shikoku. He showed up in Kesennuma in May to help.  He thinks he will be there for a long time, helping businesses and communities rebuild. In Rikuzentakada, I met with two met who had been friends for 35 years.  One is a former local politician and the other is the President of a large Driving School.  They are among the people who lived through the days of the disaster and who are now working together to build a new community which combines the strengths of traditional culture with new technologies.  (see http://www.resilientjapan.org/content/id/3114ad).

These and others I met are just a few of the ordinary heroes who are stepping forward because the times call them.  They each have a large portion of common sense, a lot of humility, a willingness to do whatever needs to be done and the courage to step into the unknown time and time again.

I feel honored to have met them and will look for ways to support their work.

I woke in the early morning from the first night’s sleep in my own bed after returning from Zimbabwe.  Suddenly things that had been churning in my stomach all week were clearer.  I’d like to share some of my observations.

We delivered the Art of Participatory Leadership and in many ways it was excellent.  In fact, just this week I proposed to colleagues in Durban that we offer a very similar workshop to community activists in the INK townships.  However we missed some important opportunities in part, I suspect, because we got trapped within our own form.

I left our meeting last Monday disquieted.  The evaluations were a bit of a shock.  After years of teaching in formal as well as informal situations, I usually take evaluations as indicators rather than prescriptions.  But in reviewing these evaluations, my body knew that something was out of kilter – even if my head didn’t want the information!

We offered what I believe we were asked to offer.  Unfortunately it was only minimally valuable to most of the participants and didn’t justify the investment of a full week of their time.  We saw the challenges on the first day, and chose to continue with the training we were asked to deliver.  If we had been able to fully discern the field, we might have made different choices.

Participants came to the workshop for many reasons.   Most had little to do with participatory leadership – even though more participatory leadership in their organizations can open up a wealth of wisdom, capability and resources.   Some came because they wanted to better understand their work as organizational leaders.  Others came because they wanted to know more about how to manage people and teams.  Some came hoping to gain perspective on confounding issues within their organizations.  A few came hoping for conceptual engagement around issues of leadership.  We did not work well with the needs and hopes present in the room.  I’m not sure we could have – but I woke this morning with a few ideas.

I wonder if we might have broken the group into tracks?  While we wanted to get to participatory leadership, perhaps we might have gone about it quite differently.  Especially with the addition of Chiku to our team, we had both the resources and the time.  Chiku brought  indepth experience working with African proverbs and stories about leadership as a way to engage others in thinking about their leadership.  What we might have done is spent some of our time together as a single learning community about participatory leadership and some of our time in separate modules or tracks.  With our available personnel, we might have offered three; perhaps:

• Working with Community Based Organization Issues – Marianne
• People and Teams in Organizations – Bob
• Hosting Conversations that Matter – Simone

We then might have offered several plenary type sessions for the whole community:

• What is Leadership Anyway?
• Traditional African Perspectives on Leadership
• Creating Meaningful Change in Turbulent Times
• Unlocking Capacity in Organizations

We could have used our Participatory Leadership Methodologies to offer these sessions and done a knowledge café giving people further information on these approaches.

I suspect this is a more major redesign than we could have done on the spot.  But I wonder, what held us back?  I suspect there were several things:

1. Deeper conversations, beforehand, with Sabi Consulting might have revealed more, but at some point this workshop got defined as one on Participatory Leadership.  Our pre-workshop materials said what we would do, but participants came for all sorts of varied reasons.
2. We were held back by our own knowing and preconceptions.  Based on meetings with the Program Design Team we made a commitment to offer a particular training and we stayed with the plan.
3. We operated with a certain level of determination, convinced that we knew what the participants needed rather than really listening to them.
4. While we know the aspiration, when working with Participatory Leadership, is to work with what is present in the room, we had our own blinders and limitations in terms of really doing so.

I’m not sure what comes next.  As I said on a number of occasions, this is a fine group of people doing important work.  I want to support them in any way possible.  I hope that what we were able to share will continue to work with and on people and will ultimately be valuable.  Some of what we were presenting contradicts models and practices of so-called modern culture and it takes a while to digest.  The methodologies we offered are sound and used successfully in a wide variety of settings.  I hope they can be of value here.

More than a thousand years ago, they came from the north of Africa, leaving the violence and seeking peace.  They came and they settled in an area that became known as the Great Zimbabwe, a kingdom from 1200-1500 AD which is estimated to have had a population of more than 10,000 and famous, today, for its unique stone architecture.  Little is known about Great Zimbabwe.  There was no written tradition amongst the people who came to be known as the Shona.  Some speculate that perhaps somewhere, lost in the archives describing the travel of Arabic traders across the African continent, there might still be records and more information.

I’ve just finished a week at the Great Zimbabwe, in the company of a little more than 30 passionate, committed, insightful and experienced Zimbabweans who are the leaders of a number of nonprofit initiatives.  My colleagues Marianne Knuth and Simone Poutnik offered a four-day training in the Art of Participatory Leadership under the guidance of Sabi Consulting, which is the steward of a network of nonprofits called Profile. When I arrived in Zim a little more than a week ago, it just felt good to be home as the spring Jacaranda trees release the majesty of their purple blossoms against the African sky.  I realized that I’ve been to this country more than any other in the last decade, except my own.  Zimbabwe has been a great teacher for me.  It has shown how people can come together to develop resilience in times of collapse.

My mind makes up stories when I don’t know what to expect.  I try to stop it – but it has a will of its own.  I arrived not knowing what to expect of this week.  Will the political stasis of Zanu PF and MDC hold a grip over this training?  So many have fled from Zimbabwe in the last decade, who is left that will come to this training?  Will they be eager to engage and learn or will they be reserved and cautious?  Who will they be?  Especially given that my work these past two years has concentrated in Japan, will I be able to speak and host in this culture in a way that is useful?  What will happen?

I’m just humbled and amazed.  WOW.  What an incredible group of people.  Each day as I learned more of their stories and their work I just felt deep gratification.  They are the people who are tirelessly working with what they have to build resilient communities.  AND, much of their work is confined within somewhat traditional structures where hierarchy is the only organizing pattern and where the priorities of the donor dictate many of the parameters of their work.

It was a difficult and demanding week.  They came expecting to be trained in participatory leadership, and found themselves sitting in a circle.  Some of them arrived wanting to know our definitions and expecting us to be carefully articulating frameworks and theories.  Instead, we invited them into exploration and questions.  Some wanted us to give them answers – we said good questions are more important.

In the Art of Participatory Leadership, we believe that a participatory experience is the key component of the learning field.  By the end of the first day, some of the participants were asking is your only theory one of keeping us confused??

 As our time together continued, there were many times of push back:  people here learn by being instructed – they are not asked questions, they are told answers?  People want to be delegated clear tasks with clear performance measures.  We’re not all that free, ourselves, to ask questions:  our donors tell us what they want us to do and how to measure it or our funding will be revoked.  In Zimbabwe’s crises, too many of our staff are just here because they need a job – they are not that committed and some are not all that well educated.  What is motivation for participation when the Director is paid eight times as much as others on the staff?

But beneath these questions was a yearning, and a knowing.  Some of our language didn’t make all that much sense, but as we hung in there together, there started to be a listening beneath the words.  I think the participants were beginning to connect what we said was possible with their own sense of yearning.  And the listening wasn’t all one-sided:  I certainly came to understand more and more how thoughtful, careful and strategic people will need to be in implementing more participatory learning processes in organizations.

In many ways part of this is the continuing burden of colonialism where people here were told that their own indigenous knowing and their own ways of building and maintaining community were woefully inadequate.  The white experts from the north would organize things in a proper sort of way.  They brought with them burearcracy for organization and new ways to measure, control and account for progress. The colonialists also brought a view that the resources and bounty of the world were there for the use of the most intelligent and powerful.

These views have been super-imposed on top of indigenous knowing and don’t fit. But formal education in Zimbabwe is based on learning from someone who stands in front of a classroom and tells them day-after-day that the world is mechanical and predictable.  Someone has to be in charge and tell others what to do.  Policies and procedures will guide actions under which people will use the authority delegated to them by the person at the top to achieve pre-determined results.

We worked in this dance between the really old – indigenous knowing, the old – traditional leadership from the colonial and modern era, and the new – participatory leadership to co-discover what would serve Zimbabwe well, now.  Each offer insights into ways of seeing the world and ways of being in the world.  The chart I drew, above, is pretty dichotomous chart and can lead to either/or thinking.  That’s not really useful for many reasons.   What is useful, I believe, is seeing how participatory leadership can be brought in to organizations to open up new insights, new possibilities, and new patterns of accountable action.

Those who came are more than able to work together to create a new Zimbabwe.  They have the fire and the will.  I suspect that many from this past week will take some of our ideas, structures, processes and tools and begin to adapt them for use in their own organizations.  I hope they will continue to find ways to support each other in stepping into this area of practice.  I know they have dedicated their lives to their work.  And I know they have perseverance!

Download Blog in PDF Form

Design of Four Days:   Day One; Day Two;Day Three; Day Four

Many thanks to Simone Poutnik for the photos and for the design day depictions!

Right now my work has taken me to Japan — in a big way.  We’ve launched a new website:  www.resilientjapan.org as host for this work and the commentary I am writing from there.  I will be bringing some of this over into Resilient Communities, because it is the same work.  But right now most of my writing is on this small new website.  Please come see what’s happening beneath the visible surface in Japan.

I’m working closely with Art of Hosting – Japan and KDI’s Future Centers — both described in earlier blogs from my work in Japan last year.

Blessings,  Bob

Yesterday we met for a day to sense why might want to happen.  Let me give a little background.  The KEEP at Kiyosato (http://www.ackeep.org/) was started in the 1930s by an American named Paul Rusch who brought modern farming practices to Japan.  He helped people here transform their mountainside into a demonstration center for new ways to raise cattle.  Along the way he helped to build a hospital here, another in Tokyo and founded a University in Tokyo.  Quite a guy, to say the least.  His spirit is deeply present here, although he died in his early eighties more than 30 years ago.  There never was a grand plan for the KEEP, it simply evolved overtime, working with the people and possibilities present in this one small area in Japan.

Among other things, it is a lovely space now where groups come to meet and people arrive for quiet retreats.  Last year we held two major training events for Art of Hosting here.  While the Tohoku region where the disasters struck on 3/11 is some 250 miles to the north, the disasters struck here as well.  First, and most powerful, it shows up in the subtle field.  The deep connections which hold people together in Japan also mean that the grief in one part is felt throughout.  So there is a deep collective grieving here.  People say time and time again is that the future for all of Japan is different now.  Some things may stay the same, but everything needs to be re-imagined.  The new Japan that emerges will be grounded in traditional values and beliefs, they say, and the future is different now.  Secondly, on a more material level, everyone is affected as well.  Occupancy at the KEEP is down to 30%.  Most young people have lost their part-time jobs.  Rolling power black-outs have hit all of Japan, including here.  Quakes have happened here in the last month as well.  People know their lives have changed.  They’re not sure how.

The week after 3/11, Yamamoto-san, a wonderful deeply present man who has been here for many years, got in the KEEPs bus and drove to Fukushima, the area where the power plants are.  He had to do something.  Somehow he found his way to one shelter among many.  A sports complex, it has some of the best conditions around.  2000 people — mostly in their 60s and 70s — now live there.  Only a small portion of the total number displaced by the disasters.  Only a small portion and totally overwhelming as well.  He brought 43 people back to the KEEP to stay in better conditions for a while.  A small drop in the bucket, but it was what he could do.  43 people who could sleep in real beds, have real baths, eat real food.  43 people who could be warm even while they still shivered with their grief.  Yamamoto-san took this small step, not knowing what was next — but trusting this beginning.

So yesterday we met?  What is next.  What can this small place do that might make a difference?  A difference in the lives of people who live near here, those from Fukushima, those from other parts of Japan.  A difference in the lives of those who work here are have seen the future they know disappear.  It is easy to get overwhelmed.  I know I did when I first heard Yamamoto-san’s story.  2000 people living with almost no privacy in a sports complex; for four weeks each day the government has brought them rice balls to eat.  Four weeks in which life as they know it is gone — and nothing in sight.  What can make a difference?

Kato-san had just returned from Sendai, a region he has been many times before.  When he got off the train, he knew the difference.  Not just the broken buildings — but what was in the air.  It just felt different.  Subdued, almost glazed over.  He saw some young people and talked with them.  Wandering aimlessly in the rubble they wanted to know — what can we do?  He had no answers of course.  Almost overwhelmed by his own sense of grief and loss, he could only stand with theirs.  Devastation, devastation, overwhleming devastation made even more real by the many pockets where life looks like normal.  Stores destroyed.  Stores shuttered.  Stores opened.  Side-by-side.

We spent the morning just dwelling in our confusion.  Sharing impressions.  Letting the grief flow.  Bewildered.  2000 people.  What could the KEEP do.  And what about the people here, and elsewhere in Japan, with their own grief.  We went on a trip to visit to the Paul Rusch Museum here to see what inspiration it might provide.  Paul’s story is quite inspiring.  By the end of his life, his motto of “do your best, and make it first class” was well know here.  It reminds me of the principle “get a clear sense of direction and then find the minimum elegant next step,” something Berkana has learned from the World Cafe Community.

What’s the direction?  Where are the starting points?  What resources does the KEEP have and how can they be used?  What can be done to invite people into their wholeness?  What might make a difference.  Many of us started drawing concentric circles  KEEP in the middle, then Kiyosato, then Fukushima, then all of Japan, then all of the World.  It’s all connected.  AND, one of the things Paul Rusch did was he connected people.

By the end of the day, there was still no clarity.  What’s the stone to drop in the middle of the concentric circles so they become ripples, leading outward to a newness?  A sense was present that some of what the KEEP might do is around youth and youth leading.  A sense that this facility has a new purpose.  A wondering if it might be one of the Future Centers — places of innovation to discover the future — needed now in Japan.

This morning an idea began to crystalize.  Yamamoto-san leaves tomorrow for Fukushima for three days.  He goes to discover what they have — not what they need.  He goes to look for several youth who have dealt with their grief enough to be ready to stand with each other to discover a next step.  Contours of a possibility began to be visible.  We will host an 3 day event at the KEEP in the middle of May.  It will be for around 100 people.  Most of them will be youth.  The majority will come from Fukushima and they will come from three sources — youth living inside the sports complex shelter who are starting to come back to life, youth serving in the shelter, and youth from the “normal area” around the shelter.  They’ll be joined by 25 or so youth from the Kiyosato area and 25 or so from Tokyo.  Purposes envisioned for this gathering include:

1. Be in our grief together.  Be in all the different griefs surfaced by these disasters.
2. Enjoy and breathe in this beauty.
3. Connecting youth of different ages with each other as well as with other generations.
4. Begin to see  the resources we have and how to use them.  What strengths, what assets, what dreams, what skills, what muscles?
5. Learn some about how to host dialogues that matter, which surface grief and joy and possibilities and actions.
6. Begin to support each other in making the changes we need ourselves, while visible to and connected with each other.
7. Sensing into what else is possible in each of our lives and in each of our regions.

Of course, this will emerge and shift and change.  It may be something entirely different when Yamamoto-san returns.  But I think the core will remain:  releasing grief while continuing to stand with it. Connecting with each other.  Regaining some measure of authority over our own lives.  Discovering the minimum elegant steps which will allow self-organizing to emerge everywhere, and especially in the Tohoku Region, in Fukushima, at this one shelter for 2000 people whose lives have shifted so dramatically.

Honored to be here in these conversations.  Providing a listening presence and occasionally being able to speak in stories and ideas from Berkana’s work around the world.

Blessings,

Bob

Over the last two weeks much of my time has been focused on Japan.  Connecting and supporting people, being in many conversations via twitter, facebook, skype, e-mail and even telephone.  Some ideas have been coming into focus that I want to share.  These are written as I see them.  They are based on many conversations and they are still my formulation of what might be helpful.  They are part of my starting point as I go home to Japan.

I see four main domains of work:

Grief and Possibility in the Tohoku Region.  Much has been lost:  25,000 people dead or missing; 500,000 people without homes; businesses, schools  and infrastructure destroyed.

• This grief must be hosted.  Spaces need to be created which support people in speaking of their grief and loss and disappointment.  A safe space of talking and of listening is needed now.
• And Tohoku can be re-created, stronger and more resilient than it ever was before.  What is essential is that people in Tohoku are in charge of this re-creation – not government, not NGOs, not well intended forces from outside.  People in Tohoku must come together in new ways to direct this recreation.

A new effort called  Japan Dialog -  is beginning to address these needs and possibilities.

A Wide Field of Possibilities. People around Japan and around the world want to support the people in Tohoku.  Think of this as an eco-system with many parts.  Some have ideas and resources for different community engagement processes.  Others know how to work with the strengths and assets still present in the communities.  Some know of more energy efficient and durable building techniques.  Others know of better ways to grow food sustainably.  These ideas can either be another tsunami that washes over the area, or they can be a rich ecology of possibilities which can support in the rebuilding.  Work is needed which can call this eco-system together.

The work of  Instituto Elos and the Oasis Game from Brazil may provide important tools for working in this area as well as the ABCD approach (Asset Based Community Development).  I’ve assembled some resources for this approach on my Resources Page

A Bridge to the Future. A third domain of work is the work of connecting Tohoku with this wide field of possibilities.  Spaces and places are needed which support this connection between the people in Tohoku and these many possibilities.  This bridge must be wide, solid and flexible, supporting robust dialogue and design which supports people in creating new future possibilities.  The work that the Knowledge Dynamics Initiative at Fuji/Xerox has done to bring Future Centers into Japan will be a foundation for this bridge.

New Relationship To Energy. The earthquake came.  The tsunami came.  What stayed was the radiation.  Perhaps there is an opportunity for a new dialogue in Japan about how much energy is needed to live happy lives.  Japan might choose to learn how to live with less.  If that choice were made in Japan, it would be put into action immediately.  Japan might provide critical leadership for the rest of the world on this important issue.  This is a deep dialogue that needs to be hosted well in the coming months.  There are no easy answers – just very important questions.

Who might help?

In many ways Japan is a large country and a very small community.  Over the last year I have had the opportunity to work with many people and organizations who might be, I believe, the key players to work in these four domains.  I know there are many others as well.  Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing stories from our work together.

And many, many more.  Japan is ripe for change.  Please visit some of my blogs here from November and December, 2010 to get a sense of the possibilities

And please come visit here from time to time.  I arrive in Japan on April 5th and will be there until the first of June.  I’ll be sharing stories and learning here from time to time.  Please also visit http://bit.ly/dMALkr for a story about Resilience in Japan from the latest Fieldnotes from ALIA — Authentic Leadership in Action.

Bob has been a long time sparring partner for me and so when I was reflecting on a year’s project of co-creating and activating a new collaboration model within our Hub, it was Bob I turned to for his usual provocative questions that tend to elicit a deepening of seeing patterns. It was a particular conversation with Bob that I invited my colleague Alycia of Instigation into that gave rise to an article titled Collaboration: The Courage to Step into a Meaningful Mess. You can read it here; it was just released in the last Berkana Institute newsletter.

However, beyond what we share in this article, I have some (fairly raw) thoughts on how collaboration is an essential ingredient for Resilient Communities, what this site is all about  First of all, with a lot of work in multi-stakeholder situations, I have come to see the importance of relationship for systems change – many people believe that it is the policies & structures that will shift an unhealthy system into a better state, but not without healthy relationships. So, in the act of collaborating and building true relationship – not just superficially working together at the same roundtable – resilience-as-social-glue enters into the system. Something that helps people stay together through the work they need to do. Secondly, and building on that, collaboration builds social capital. By collaborating, we are investing into each other and into something that is joint. By collaborating, we are learning to work with each other as equals, and thus re-investing into our capacity to keep doing that more fluently. This in-builds resilience into a community, a community that wants to continue to be together. Thirdly, collaboration contributes to a transfer of skills and capacities between people working together, or at least an awareness of other skills and perspectives. The more opportunities for learning more, and making more available to each other, the more a collaboration of a few people around a shared goal has the potential to truly become a community over time based on shared experience. The more a community knows about itself and the multitude of talents within it that it can draw on, the more agile and resilient it is in the face of any challenges that might come its way… and/or to take a stand for co-creating the new…

Thanks Bob!

- Tatiana Glad, Engage! InterAct / Hub Amsterdam / Waterlution

Stay connected.  Stay connected.  Stay connected.  Those are the words that dance across my heartmind.  So I tweet and retweet.  I find friends on facebook and sent them support.  I e-mail.  And I share what I am learning through my connections across other networks, inviting us into deeper connection with each other.

This is another of those times when the subtle, or the spiritual, or the non-material is so incredibly important.  It is hard for me to stay focused there.  My eye slides off and I want to do something more active, something that will make more of a difference.  But perhaps it is enough — creating a focus for goodness and kindness.

I watch the news accounts and I check-in with my friends and what I see more than anything else is a wonderful unfolding story of human goodness.  It is still easy to fall to the temptation of “yeah, sure, we know how to work together when tragedy strikes.”  There’s a kind of longing in that statement, a regret.  But I have to say I am in awe when I see the extent of human goodness.  When I remember that it is our natural state, our way of being.  Our deep human goodness steps forward in times like these. We know how to connect and support each other and ourselves.

Of course we need to bring more of this into our daily lives.  I suspect we’ll get more and more practice in the coming years.  So I hear these stories of the goodness and ordinariness of life from my friends (via twitter):

• We’re OK. Helping each other with sharing room for rest and sharing tips. After few min, Morning will come!
• I and my families/friends are safe and sound. I walked back to home from the office last night. took me 5hours.
• Many people had stayed at office or council center in tokyo. Train started running.
• I’m OK. My family,too. And my younger sister had a baby last night! I’m happy and keeping praying everybody’s safe in this situation.
• My family and I are all fine. I was in Hokkaido, and just cannot go back… But I think I can tomorrow.
• I couldn’t contact my parents for seven hours. They are safe and back home.All family are fine. Thank you.
• Now we are projecting a virtue of the Japanese that we have consideration for other people!!
• We are in Tochigi Pref, stayed one night since stopped express train heading for Tokyo. a bit closed to North Japan.
• We’re all ok. It’s amazing how calm and caring people are in many places even after such a disaster. Proud to be a Japanese!

We’re okay.  Helping each other.  Proud to be Japanese.  These are my friends and I love them.  AND they are just ordinary people.  Ordinary people discovering how to get along and how to help each other.  Ordinary people discovering how to take the next minimum step.  We know how to do this.  We know how to help each other.  We know how to be community.

Frequently we forget.  We get trapped inside our own little worries about being sufficient, or having enough. We build walls of protection which isolate us from each other.  When I am in Johannesburg from time to time, I see the literal walls — high, topped with broken glass or barbed-wire.  Intended to keep danger out.  And, of course, when danger comes in as it does from time to time, the walls isolate us from our closest neighbors who don’t know help is needed.

Disasters like the quakes in Japan and New Zealand reconnect us with our selves.  They help us remember what it is to be human.  A scene from Chris Bache’s book Dark Night, Early Dawn had stayed with me for many years.  He speak of a vision of people emerging from shelters, underground, in a time of vast devastation.  They rise from the rubble, look around and see who else has survived, and begin to connect again to make community and to continue our human journey.  These are the capacities which will sustain us in the times ahead and which we need to be cultivating now.

Let’s find the ways to invite human goodness and connection forward without these obvious disasters!