Thoughts on Community with
Peter
...continued
DL: What first motivated you to write Community:
The Structure of Belonging?
Peter: If you look at the cause of so many of
the challenges facing our society, most center on the loss of a sense of
community and the common good. The essence of the book is about the
nature of transformation and the fact that problems are the symptoms of
the breakdown of community. Writing the book is driven by my desire to
complete a set of ideas so I can have a new thought. I also wanted to
write a book which would make the ideas I have as accessible to people
as possible.
DL: How does Community: The Structure of Belonging
differ from your other books?
Peter: The importance that I give to community
- I have not written about that before. The other books have been about
institutional life. I wanted to expand the ideas that have mostly
applied to organizations talk about the public sector and civic life and
neighborhood life, so these ideas would be available there. There are
parts of the book that are tied to other things I’ve written, but what’s
new is that it condenses it, simplifies it and puts it all in one place.
DL: As you may know we ask individuals who have
read your other books or expressed an interest in your work to submit
questions about Community. The first question expresses concerns about
senior leaders, presidents and CEOs. They ask: How can you get the
support of senior leaders and the President/CEO on initiatives geared at
building a more healthy community?
Peter: Well first of all, we pay too much
attention to leaders and CEO’s so I would not worry so much about
changing their minds. I would just leave them alone because they’re very
busy. Plus if you want to create an alternative future, leaders are not
in a good position to do this. They are often helpless to really bring
about change. Everybody thinks that leaders are essential and the way we
construct leadership is too small a version of what they are; the
leader’s main job is as a convener of new conversations and to bring
peers together, it’s not to be role models. It’s not to be the answer.
There’s a lot in the book about leadership as convener
and developing in leaders the skill that used to be hoarded by
facilitators - you might say it’s a facilitative form of leadership. It
gives more attention to listening, to asking questions and to bringing
peers together than it is to being the surrogate parent we’ve been
looking for all our lives.
DL: Another reader asks, The majority of my
clients in my consulting practice are governing boards, both private and
publicly elected. An issue that crops up over and over again is the
difficulty boards have in extricating themselves from operations enough
to see the bigger picture, to be forward looking, and to find time to
connect with their constituency. What pearls of wisdom can you offer
that can help boards clarify their appropriate level of oversight and
see the connection between engaging the community and setting a
strategic direction for the organization?
Peter: First of all, that’s a great question.
Whoever asked that really understands the problem of boards and
oversight groups. I would suggest that the question to ask these people
is, what are the gifts they have to offer the organization? And usually
their gift is something much larger than oversight and micromanaging.
Micromanaging really hinges on the relationship
between the executive and the board or the city manager and the city
council. And early on the executive needs on to be clear about what
contract the executive wants from the board and not let the board define
that for them.
The customer model does not work well for elected
officials and board members. The citizens are not their customers-- they
are partners in the operation.
Boards in many ways are an unsolvable problem.
Everyone is burdened with them. The real challenge for boards is that
they don’t know how to be useful, so in the absence of that clarity they
tend to get too involved in the day-to-day operation. Which takes us
back to the great question for board members being, what is the unique
gift you have to bring to this organization, which obviously you care
enough to be a board member or an elected official for.
It really, really is a difficult, difficult thing to
handle in this culture because we have exaggerated the importance of
boards.
DL: A question about the planning process comes
from another reader. In the work that I do I notice that people not
included in the planning process to any desired change or shift
typically end up resisting it. These same people when included end up
being big allies and supporters, helping to push it forward. Could you
speak to that phenomenon?
Peter: Yes, I can. I agree. I would say that
the planning process is more important than the actual work or
implementation. The mistake is that people that want to rush the
planning to get the implementation done, I understand that. I don’t even
like the separation between planning and implementation. If you have an
intention or some possibility or future that you’re trying to create, I
would say that planning and implementation are one in the same, because
they’re constantly recycling.
The other problem with planning is that people think
there is a destination that you can blueprint a path for and this is
just silly. There is no way to predict the future or take uncertainty
out of the future, so planning has to be organic and embrace the way you
want implementation to occur. Whoever asked the question complete
understands that. People don’t resist change, they resist coercion.
DL: Communities aren’t only made of current
leaders; they also depend on the leaders of tomorrow. One reader asks:
What are some actions that lower income families can take to improve
their children's access to services in the community?
Peter: People need to decide that they have
their own capacity to create a future for their children and they need
to be less dependent on services and more dependent on family,
neighbors, friends and the associational relationships they have. They
expect too much from human service organizations and they’re incapable
of giving us what we want, so to keep trying to get better access;
better services isn’t going to take you anywhere.
Lower income people have gifts and capacities that
they don’t even realize and to even label them ‘lower income people’
doesn’t say who they are. Not having money is hard work. Part of what we
need to do is to focus on the gifts of people who don’t have money and
we need to stop calling their children “problem children.”
This means that people have to accept that what
they’ve been seeking from other places isn’t available so they need to
come together as a community, and expand their idea beyond schools and
service providers to determine how they can best educate and care for
their children. Without waiting for other people to “come around”. Now
that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t organize and collectively make demands
on systems but there’s a limit on what systems can deliver and most of
the time even if systems wanted to meet our demands they’re incapable of
doing it.
DL: You talked about lower income families
discovering their gifts, how do you suggest they discover these gifts?
Peter: Well you need to bring them together and
ask them the question. They’re not used to thinking of themselves as
gifted people. They’re used to thinking of themselves as people with
deficiencies. And all transformation is a shift in language and
conversation. We just need to initiate the conversation, what are the
gifts we have, what are the talents, what are the capacities that exist
within us? They are not defined by their needs.
And the other is to work with people and say : so what
kind of support; what kind of allies, what kinds of friends and
neighbors are available to you that maybe you have discounted in the
past?
Also another response to low-income people is that we
keep trying to put them into large system jobs, and often in low-income
communities there are all kinds of ways they can support each other
economically. By buying from each other, supporting local business,
buying candy from the person down the street, and start to boycott big
box stores that seemingly have lower prices, but in the long run cost us
much more. Chain stores cost us vitality in our community. So there’s
the politics of the dollar even for low-income people that they need to
be much more conscious about. Why wouldn’t a low-income person always
buy whatever they could from a local business or other low-income
people? That would help lift their whole economy.
DL: Our next question reads: How do you build
community in a region with significant economic pressures—with both
businesses and people moving out of the state?
Peter: Mobility is a huge problem and the only
real answer is to build the local economy and local businesses. Agencies
are not that mobile and so why not focus on building the economy in
those places that don’t move around a lot? As far as professionals
moving so much, they will stay in a community that welcomes them. They
aren’t just moving to get better jobs. There is a great deal of
loneliness in our cities and urban centers and communities, and we act
as if it is a given, as if it has to be that way. Most people who move,
move to escape their loneliness. They don’t move because they got a
better job or they’re going to another lifestyle or a fancier city. The
isolation is their problem; that’s why community is the underlying issue
for a lot of things we see, even mobility.
DL: Community: The Structure of Belonging will be
available on May 12 and from these questions, we know there
is a lot of anticipation surrounding its release. As a final question,
what three things you would like readers to get out of your new book?
Peter: One is that community is the point, and
leadership skills, individual efforts, ambitions, all of that is beside
the point. And if we just decided that community was important,
something would shift.
The other is that community is created by citizens
through the conversations they have with each other and the conversation
of what we want to create together is the heart of creating a future
distinct from the past. And all we have to do to create the future is to
change the nature of our conversations and go from blame to ownership,
and from bargaining to commitment, and from problem solving to
possibility.
The final point I hope to make in my book is to
realize that our own materialism and our own ambition and our own
accepting the conventional wisdom of what constitutes a good life is a
major obstacle to our happiness and our well being. And the real intent
of the book is to shift our focus and our thinking as much as it is to
provide the specific skills and methodology.
DL: Well we really appreciate you taking the time
to talk to us Peter. Any other comments to share with readers?
Peter: I would just request them to keep the
questions coming in. It’s a wonderful process. I think the questions are
more important than the answers at this point. The only thing I would
add to what the central point of what the book is about…there’s more
meaning in getting the question right than there is in finding the
answer so this whole process is very useful.
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