Large Ideas Expressed in
Small Moments
By Peter Block
...continued
What disturbs me
about these meetings is, that they are still designed with the same two
questions in mind: who is going to speak and what are they going to say?
Even if the avowed purpose of the meeting is to build community,
empowerment, participation and accountability into the world, the
question remains: "Who is going to speak?" and "What are they going to
say?" As long as these remain the critical questions, we are still
designing experiences for the sake of the teacher, the leader and the
trainer.
We hold on to the
belief that change happens as a result of leaders' actions rather than
as a result of engagement and grass roots accountability. In our efforts
to transform our organizations we tend to over-focus on the "larger"
questions of strategy and scale. We want to know how to impact the
greatest number of people in the smallest amount of time. We talk about
large system change. We plot a sequence of events that build the
business case for change and involves top management in supporting the
change.
We struggle with
ways to enroll people in the change and achieve some alignment in goals
and values. We revise the reward system to reinforce the change and
design training to build the skills for change. And then we schedule
events to launch, roll out and sustain the effort.
The questions of how
are we going to run the meeting, in what kind of room, with what kind of
evaluation, are treated as the "smaller" questions. They become a later
consideration, literally an afterthought.
I want to advocate
reversing what we call the "larger" and the "smaller" questions. The
seemingly detailed concerns of how we engage the audience, in what kind
of room, evaluated by what kind of questions may have more to do with
transforming a culture, than the best strategy, structure and clear,
compelling presentation. Transformation is as much a shift in
consciousness, a shift in feeling, a change in relationship, as it is a
shift in thinking and practices. When we meet for learning, who speaks
and what they say makes a difference. We do need to be open to new
thinking, but it should not dominate our planning. But it does. Most
learning events still string a list of speakers, and use questions and
answer periods as a way of involving participants. As a speaker, people
who plan the event ask me three questions: when will I arrive, what kind
of microphone do I want and will I be using flipcharts, slides,
overheads or video?
What I wish is for
planning people to ask me three different questions; (1)How am I going
to engage the audience? (2)What kind of room would be appropriate for
our purpose? and (3)How are we going to assess how it is going? These
should be the "larger" questions of how we come together to learn and
evoke change. Get these right and who speaks and what they say might be
brought back into perspective.
Here are thoughts
about the importance of questions in creating serious engagement. Next
column I will talk about the power of the room and how to change our
thinking about assessment.
The Power of the
Question
We engage people more through the questions we ask than through the
answers we offer. We bring people together, fundamentally, to be faced
with important questions. What we need to understand is how the
construction of a question makes a difference. A good question has some
of these properties:
-There is no one or
clear answer. Each person has their own answer and each is right. The
question highlights the complexity and paradoxical nature of change. It
invites a diagnostic or inquiring stance rather than problem-solving
stance.
-The question is
personal. Through the question, we ask people to look at themselves - to
disclose a part of themselves that is not part of normal workplace
discourse. Learning quickens when we are vulnerable with each other and
the question should invite this.
-The question
carries the implication of individual accountability. It communicates
that we are each responsible for creating the situation we are in. We
are each, conscious or not, actively sustaining the existing culture and
whatever future happens will carry our fingerprints.
Here are some
questions that have these qualities:
· What crossroads
face you at this point in your work/life?
· What do you
personally want from the people in your group and what do they want from
you?
· What has been your
contribution to creating the difficulties facing the unit or the
organization?
· What are the
payoffs for operating the way we currently do?
· What gifts exist around this circle and in what ways have people
brought value to you this day?
Each of these is
hard to answer, takes some courage to state honestly and is also hard to
defend against. They also carry the message that everyone is guilty ( a
good thing..it means you are living your life ) and everyone is also an
instrument of hope. The questions carry the belief that the struggle is
the solution, that the dialogue, embodied by the questions we speak to,
may be the point and the true means of our life shifting.
A friend and
colleague, Cliff Bolster, wisely suggests that when we come together, we
should call it a conversation instead of a meeting. This makes the
detail of how we talk to each other important. Confronting difficult
questions and doing it openly with others that we work or learn with
brings us emotionally into the room far more directly than who the
speaker is and what they have to say.
Join the search for
questions that are hard to defend against. Try the above, invent some of
your own. Make the conversation the purpose of our gathering and by
doing so our institutional intent of involvement and personal
accountability is enacted in the design of each event.
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in November 1999
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