How do we create the conditions necessary to bring out the wisdom in the groups and communities with which we work?
Our society hasn't figured out how to convene groups well and this creates an area of major opportunity. It can take 3 - 6 months to do convening well. The Study Circles Resource Center and the Public Conversations Project provide information and resources about this. One aspect is to have broad diversity of opinions and backgrounds as part of the team of people convening so that all materials and outreach are put in terms that don't immediately alienate people from the process. This diverse group of people also can reach out to members within their own constituencies to create a diverse group of people at the table.
Language matters - words like sacrifice and compromise should be avoided because they can cause people to dig their heels in in ways that aren't helpful and in the end, it may not actually be true.
There is a process happening in the Global South called a Listening Survey that draws on hairdressers, barbers & others that people talk to to identify generative themes in communities - in other words to identify the topics that community members are talking about and have energy around. We weren't sure what happened next with these themes. The Training for Transformation series by Hope and Timmel describes the process.
It's important to get to know each other as people outside of and separate from whatever contentious issue you're struggling with. This be built into processes in an intentional way and many public engagement processes do this. One way to do this in a large group is to randomly assign seats so that people do not sit next to those whom they know well and think like.
There was so much more we talked about.
We tried having this conversation with using the Sketch Up software as a graphic tool to illustrate the conversation. We discovered that some folks wanted to have the conversation above and some were more interested in talking about the Sketch up tool, so we split into 2 groups.
Adding to this wiki during our conversation didn't work very well for our group and didn't support our having the conversation we wanted to have very well. It then became a burden to make sure this write up happened.
It would be great to get more information about public engagement structures like those mentioned above out to the people at this conference. (Lisa Bedinger is particularly interested in continuing conversations with others about this and all of the ideas in the first paragraph under Big Ideas and is willing to be a resource if you'd like to know more).