Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community
Six
Conversations That Matter
SM
Change the Conversation, Change the
Community
These
ideas are designed around the power of language. How we speak and listen
to each other is the medium through which a more positive future is
created or denied.
A shift in the conversation is created by
being strategic about the way we convene and the questions we address.
In other words, how we create and engage in the public debate. It is the
shift in public conversation that, in our terms, constitutes
transforming action.
All of us want action and to create a future
we believe in. Our premise is that questions and the speaking they evoke
constitute powerful action. Many of the traditional questions we ask
have little power to create an alternative future. These are the set of
questions that the world is constantly asking. They are important
questions, but we have to be careful how we respond. For some of the
questions are, in the asking, the very obstacle to what has given rise
to the question in the first place.
For example, all of us ask, or are asked:
How do we hold
those people accountable?
How do we get
people to show up and be committed?
How do we get
others to be more responsible?
How do we get
people on-board and to do the right thing?
How do we get
others to buy-in to our vision?
How do we get
those people to change?
How much will it
cost and where do we get the money?
How do we
negotiate for something better?
What new policy or
legislation will move our interests forward?
Where is it working? Who has solved this
elsewhere and how do we import that knowledge?
If we
answer these questions in the form in which they are asked, we are
supporting the dominant belief that an alternative future can be
negotiated, mandated, and controlled into existence. They call us to try
harder at what we have been doing. They urge us to raise standards,
measure more closely, and return to basics, purportedly to create
accountability, but in reality to maintain dominance. The questions
imply that the one asking knows and others are a problem to be solved.
Questions that are designed to change other
people are, in a sense, always the wrong questions. Wrong, not because
they don’t matter or are based on ill intent, but wrong because they
have no power to make a difference in the world. They are questions that
are the effect of the very thing we are trying to shift: the
fragmentation of community and the belief that this is the best of all
possible worlds. In other words, the impossibility of anything really
changing.
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