Collaborative Decision-Making: the Difference Between Being Willing and Being Passive
by: Miki Kashtan on September 4th, 2010 | 4 Comments »
This post is a response to Dave Belden’s comment on part 3 of my Personal Growth and Social Change mini-series. I believe what’s below will make more sense if you read part 3 of my mini-series and Dave’s comment before reading what’s below.
When I wrote the section on willingness and group functioning I was well aware that what I was writing would not be practical. What would be needed in order to put any of this into practice is beyond the scope of what a blog entry here and there could support people in doing. Instead, I was reaching for enough clarity so that the ideas and images could inspire some people to want to explore, learn, experiment, and ask questions. At least to hope instead of be resigned to how things are. We are much more often motivated by fear and anger than by hope in our actions, and I want to contribute to more hope if I can.
All that said, I would like to address at least partially the specific questions that Dave raised, because I treasure the opportunity for more depth and clarity they provide. This leads to a few key points.
The Significance of Decision-Making
Dave asks about starting and running groups or projects with the tools I point to. In truth, I don’t know of any groups or organizations that are operating fully in line with the principles that inform my writings in this blog. I am heartened by knowing that BayNVC, the organization I co-founded, approximates such operation to an extent I feel moved and happy about, and functions most of the time smoothly and without endless meetings because we have a high level of trust. Perhaps some stories about BayNVC operations will arrive in future posts.
So far I haven’t really given Dave much. Instead of the full stories he is asking for, I want to address decision-making in two ways. One is at the highest level, which has to do with the overall operations of a group or organization. Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of Nonviolent Communication, suggests that the most important decision to make collaboratively is the decision about the process of making decisions. If all agree that certain decisions are made by one person, then that person is likely empowered and entrusted. If, however, that one person decides to make those decisions, and others don’t have a say, they will likely experience the same behavior as imposition or domination. I suspect that many groups and organizations have implicit agreements about decision-making rather than explicit, and that can interfere dramatically with the experience of trust in working together. At BayNVC we have looked at these questions several times, and from time to time have reviewed who makes what decisions. I don’t think we have a perfect solution. I do have a sense that most people within the organization trust that their needs and perspectives are valued in arriving at decisions that affect them and the organization.
The second point is on the lowest level, which is the moment by moment functioning of a group or organization. Especially in meetings, everything that happens is decisions. Some of them are content decisions: which action is a group to take? What service is an organization to deliver? What product will a company create? Some of them are about what happens in the group as content is discussed: who will speak next? How will the group know when a topic is complete? How will the ultimate decision be made? What will happen to those who are unhappy with a decision? Facilitators who are skillful in this art create trust by handling these and the many other small questions that arise in the moment skillfully, such that movement is prioritized at the same time as everyone’s voice and needs are held with care. Such trust allows for willingness to be experienced within a context of everyone mattering, which makes all the difference in the world when the hard decisions arrive.
What Is Willingness?
As I read Dave’s description of an imaginary group in which people go along in order to maintain peace, I realized that I didn’t make enough distinctions to elucidate willingness – it is not such a straightforward concept. I had distinguished willingness from preference, and willingness from should. Now I want to distinguish willingness from resignation, apathy, or even “going along.” Willingness, as I understand it, is a true movement from within that is wholehearted and clear. I am willing because I know to what my actions are contributing, and those purposes are significant to me even if they are not preference. I am truly choosing, as opposed to having no clue what else I would do and therefore, essentially, giving up on participating fully (e.g. in the face of one person who is pushing for his or her ideas strongly).
As participant in a group, bringing the depth of my commitment to nonviolence means I will speak the truth, with courage, with integrity, and with care for others. It doesn’t mean I will allow everything to happen. The latter is the essence of passivity, which Gandhi was in moments more concerned about than violence itself.
As a leader in a group, my commitment to nonviolence includes keeping track of who is willing at any point in time, and if I see patterns of willingness emerging such that, for example, some people are always going along with someone else’s position, including my own as leader, I will stop taking “yes” for an answer, and engage such people in fuller dialogue to see what their needs really are, and to look for strategies that include their needs to their satisfaction.
A quiet person who sees such patterns from the side could begin the slow, complex process of connecting with the person who has the drive, and with the people who are “going along” to bring about more connection. I don’t know of shortcuts. If you are not the designated leader, the only power you have is the power of your heart and mind to listen, to love, to create connection, and to empower people.
Leading, Teaching, and Structure
Lastly, Dave wonders whether teaching is necessary in order to reach this level of skill within groups, and whether we need to see skillful leaders first before being willing to learn. Surprisingly, there is no simple answer here.
First, group members with personal skill do not necessarily make for effective group or organizational functioning. Several variables interact to affect the functioning of a group. Personal skill is only one of them. Others are the presence or absence of a (skilled, hopefully…) facilitator, and the structure of the process available. Many processes for group functioning exist that are very structured, and do not require a facilitator or any specific skill on the part of the people who participate in the group. Others require a high degree of personal skill and/or a facilitator. The process of decision-making that I have worked with and developed tends to require a facilitator, and requires a significant degree of skill. Even someone who is not the designated facilitator can support the group, although much more skill is then required. There is no need for everyone in the group to be skilled if a facilitator or leader is sufficiently committed to using this process and to holding everyone’s needs with care.
(Next on this topic I return to part 4 of the Personal Growth and Social Change mini-series, and picks up the question of what actions constitute social change within a principled nonviolent framework).
Two entries on The Fearless Heart have been combined to create this post: first, second.
Links to the complete mini series: Parts One, Two, Three, Response to a Comment on Part 3 Four, Five, Six and Seven.
Thanks, Miki. The more we get into this discussion the huger the topic gets. I have the kind of questions that would require my attending a weeklong workshop just to get started.
I think we are at a transitional time for the Left and for all social change activism. Think of all the voluminous writing, teaching and discussion that has gone into analysis of the structural workings and wrongs of society since Karl Marx, Max Weber and co. pioneered systematic socio-economic investigation of what ails us. Innumerable people have fallen in love with that kind of analysis as both explanation of widespread suffering and the ground on which battles will be fought to end the suffering. In this worldview we will win by envisioning a new social order of distributed wealth and power, by organizing to redistribute power from those who now wield it, and by feeling that we damn well deserve to do so and they have no right to their power. What I am thinking about right now is how much has been said and written and taught about all this. And still most people don’t get it or are not deeply attracted by it.
Meanwhile the spiritual and religious people have had other explanations of our suffering, and the psychotherapists and organizational process experts, in both nonprofits and for profits, have been developing their own processes for personal change and group functionality. The transition time we are in now is when these various strands — the left analysis, the spiritual response to the world, the psychological and the group/organizational experience — are groaning towards fusion. Still the spiritual and the psychological and organizational experts rarely really get the broad structural analysis or understand how much of our spiritual and psychological health depends on structural change; while those in love with structural change rarely understand how little hope there is of creating it without spiritual and psychological and organizational savvy. I was attracted to Tikkun because it has pioneered so much of this, but the piece we have been missing is a more conscious understanding of how to do the relational dynamics that you teach.
And what I am feeling from reading this post of yours is how hard it is for me to grasp it and understand what I would need to learn to be a good facilitator of groups of the kind sketched in your last section above. I think of the many meetings I have led and how poorly I functioned and how little I was even aware of what I needed to be doing instead! I imagine the voluminous writings and discussions, the vast amount of teaching, that will take place in the next hundred years as we all try to learn the ‘how’ of creating a world of distributed power.
Miki and Dave, please forgive me for butting in. What I am really looking for is a discussion of McClaren’s exchange with Lerner as printed in the current Tikkun zine under the topic of building the NSP. I want to hear what people think about 1) his distinction between a network and an organization (Miki uses the latter throughout) and 2) the disproportionate influence of those willing “to be mean.”
As Miki focuses on building an organization, she looks for strategies that she can use as a leader to strengthen the leadership group. That’s been the conventional goal. In the commercial world, some folks are making big bucks explaining their solutions. In view of our current economic collapse, I have not heard or read a single story from someone that credits their survival success to leadershilp training. It is not my primary interest, so it may be so, but I hope someone is exploring the relevance of such training to survival under current circumstances.
After more than a quarter century working as a professional in a voluntary organization, I am well aware of the disproportionate influence of those “willing to be mean.” Moving into the world of medium-sized for-profit corporations, the only thing that changed was the contribution of heirarchy of authority to being the meanest SOB in the valley. What non-profits get is that those willing to be mean (there, because they cannot at work?) now have less to lose, as they can walk away whenever they are not getting what they want.
I expect that identifying the goal or the problem is conducive to collaboration. McLaren’s frameworks seem very promising to me.
i think i’m on track with both Dave and Rex’s comments. My understanding: Dave summarizes the diverse strands of “our” history, which is the history of all who would bring our general lives closer to that beauty (or call it love, transcendence or sharing) that is in our hearts and we can sometimes create larger realities from. He sees us as groaning toward some fusion of these strands, with a crucial role for for a very focussed synthesis of spiritual/organiztional savvy, represented by Miki.
Rex reflects the shadow side of this history: that humans have been poor enough in spirit (“mean”) to turn good endeavours into useless or bad ones. (I would add that Dave is far too generous about those in love with structural analysis, etc., because the most famous of those have then fallen in love with the whole history from guillotine to gulag). He also points to the way any method that can be represented (hence a kind of “technology”) can be — and most surely is — used for selfish and nasty purposes. Thus the bad odor associated with “leadership training” (especially for business purposes”) and related organizational technologies.
So when I read Miki I find that it reads like mere intelligence, but I must track with the heart to see it’s importance. That’s an elaborate way to say must trust her. Also to say that we make our own “examples” when we listen, or at least I do.
No one should be surprised at how problematic this is. Tikkun and its incarnations have been around a while, and so has non-violent communication. The examples of King and Gandhi have been around longer. And look at Yeshua later considered Mashiach (that would be Jesus Christ — Yep, Willis Barnstone has blown my mind): At the least one of the most inspiring folks to have ever lived. With merely a bunch of centuries, those who claimed to be his “organization,” had in many senses becomes the Roman Empire.
I am not condemning religion (nor engaged sociology) wholesale. I think Miki would agree with me that what can’t be done in blog posts can’t be done in a long prescriptive book either. I would go further and say that what Dave sees a starting with a weeklong workshop is really however much we can make of our lifetimes to cooperate in making at least a little history.
As far as I can see (and that’s seriously limiting, not a mere phrase) it’s alway’s transition time. The danger is that we have grown so slowly spiritually, and so rapidly in our capacity to exploit/abuse nature and each other, that our long-wave influence (karma?) will be wrecked by those who have “fallen in love” with world-spanning Power.
That never stopped great souls from doing their work. But I think it is the most important context for discussions of both progressive leadership and the rest of our efforts based on non-domination.
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