CONSULTING: IMPLEMENT A WISE DEMOCRACY...
USING DYNAMIC FACILITATION & ITS LARGE-SCALE APPROACHES TO ENGAGE GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, ELECTED OFFICIALS, AND THE PUBLIC AS PARTNERS IN CREATING INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS TO PUBLIC ISSUES THAT ALL EMBRACE
Communities
and their governments face big, messy, impossible-seeming
public issues including inadequate resources for public
goods, taxing inequities, terrorism, a declining education
system, increasing citizen frustration, and a failing
environment. More and more these days, governmental leaders
are blocked from addressing these issues in any real way
because the public conversation is a partisan battleground.
Consider the ideal conversation of “Wise Democracy”—where
all citizens work together with government, face the
difficult problems collaboratively, understand the deep
systemic nature of the issues, and create a clear mandate
that everyone can get behind. If we could somehow structure
this kind of public conversation, many seemingly impossible
issues would go away. Plus, there would be radical new
solutions, adequate funds, changes to the structure of the
system, and people willing to help one another and
collective effort.
To envisage how Wise Democracy might come into being
imagine a device that when activated, sets up an energy
field of listening and creative thinking. Any person in
this field finds him or herself performing at a very high
quality, interested in different viewpoints and seeking
breakthrough answers that bridge those differences.
Regardless of partisan beliefs, cultural backgrounds, or
level of education each person feels fully heard and
accepted by the group. This frees him or her to become
curious, creative and collaborative. Breakthroughs and
shifts occur naturally.
If you could buy one of these devices you might set it up
in your house for your family, or in your organization for
meetings. Or, governments might buy big versions that work
for the whole city or the whole country. Just from turning
on this device, there would be less partisan wrangling,
more spirit of community, more trust in government, more
sense of fairness, more citizen involvement, increased
knowledge and empowerment, and better collective decisions.
Actually, in our society we already have this device in
operation. But the dial has been set to facilitate a
different field, one where we are all competitive,
partisan, and self-interested. The public conversation is
structured to be a political battle where collective
decisions are viewed through the question, “How will it
affect our bottom line?” Ordinary citizen involvement
strategies operate within that larger field. The Wise
Democracy approach is a deep systems adjustment to affect
the overall field of thinking. It involves four social
innovations:
#1
- Choice-creating
Choice-creating is the quality of thinking that our device
seeks to facilitate. This quality should be at the core of
democracy. It is where people face big issues creatively
and collaboratively, and seek answers that work for
everyone. Choice-creating is like dialogue because it is a
heartfelt creative process except it leads to unanimous
solution strategies. It is like deliberation because it
reaches conclusions, but different because it relies on
creativity more than judgment to reach those conclusions.
Choice-creating is like what sometimes happens in a crisis,
when everyone “gets it” that they have face the crisis and
work together. Empowering shifts and insights arise as
people accomplish more than they thought was possible.
Since most people do not experience choice-creating
regularly, they think of it as a fleeting and random spirit
that happens only occasionally. They don’t imagine that it
could be reliably evoked. But Dynamic Facilitation can
assure choice-creating.
#2
- Dynamic Facilitation (DF)
DF is the device we talked about earlier. It establishes
the creative field where people face difficult issues,
think at the level of choice-creating and create win/win
solutions. The DF’er encourages people to select issues
they care about, regardless of how impossible they may
seem, and to speak from the heart. He or she welcomes
divergent viewpoints and protects each participant from
judgment.
The DF’er asks simple questions like, “If you were in
charge what would you do?” designed to draw out what each
person is really thinking or feeling. She uses reflections
to protect each person from judgment, clarify his thinking,
and to help everyone understand and appreciate each
contribution. Using four charts — Data, Solutions,
Concerns and Problem-Statements —the value of each comment
is brought forward, and the group tracks its progress.
Participants enjoy this kind of meeting, finding it to be
close in spirit to a natural conversation, except with
exciting progress as the result. Since randomly selected
participants speak only for themselves, with enough time
they are able to put aside partisan positions and seek
win/win answers.
#3
- The Creative Insight Council (CIC)
Just as Dynamic Facilitation establishes a field of
choice-creating in a small group, the CIC extends that
field of thinking to a large population. It begins with a
difficult, impossible-seeming issue that needs addressing.
Twelve people are selected randomly from voter registration
roles to meet for a few days to address it. The group hears
from experts and stakeholders, meets in the spirit of
choice-creating, discovers new possibilities, and presents
its unanimous conclusions to the community. With complex
issues, a series of two or three CIC’s can be used. This
way the larger community can become more involved and
affect the public conversation more deeply. Each new CIC
takes the issue forward another step.
#4
- The Wisdom Council Process (WCP)
The Wisdom Council Process is like a CIC but ongoing. Every
four months twelve citizens are randomly selected for a few
days to engage in a creative exploration on issues of their
choice. Each Council arrives at a shared outcome, which
they present back to the community in large gatherings,
like a "state of union" address. This ongoing process
establishes the new public conversation and a new public
entity: “We the People” — all of us together. We figure out
what we want and provide responsible leadership to our
system, which is currently in charge of both itself and us.
In practice the conclusions of Wisdom Councils and Creative
Insight Councils are thoughtful and innovative. At
presentations most everyone who hears the results supports
them. Also at these presentations, each Council tells its
story. They talk about the awkward place they started,
facing some issue they didn’t think they could address.
They talk about insights along the way, and their
excitement as they became clear on what the real problem
is, what we really want, and how best to achieve it. It’s a
heroic story that all of us are on together.
The usual methods of citizen involvement are arrayed on a
spectrum from 1) informing citizens, to 2) finding out what
they think, to 3) considering their ideas, to 4) partnering
with them, to 5) turning over decision-making to the
public. This sounds like the whole picture, but it
doesn’t include the Wise Democracy ideal that we seek.
Using the four tools of Wise Democracy facilitates the
emergence of a clear, thoughtful, inclusive and powerful
voice of “We the People.” To the extent that this voice of
all-of-us-together emerges, We can change our system to
provide more of what we want in ways that currently seem
impossible.
Next
Steps:
If you would like to
talk with us about bringing a Wise Democracy approach to
your agency, elected office, or community, please call us
at 360-385-7118.
If you would like to learn more, read an article by Jim
Rough, entitled “Wise Democracy: A strategy to involve
citizens, overcome partisanship and solve impossible
public issues,” on our blog.
