Hope is Where You Find It
by Peter Block
I attended a meeting a few months ago that was quite startling. It was a two day meeting convened by the Pacific Southwest Region of the USDA Forest Service. The meeting was part of an effort to find ways to engage new people and resources in the success of the Forest Service … a reinvention project, pardon the term.
In the room there were some friends of the service and also people who had spent a good part of their lives fighting it, plus members of the Forest Service who had spent a lot of resources fighting back. In addition to the Forest Service members, there were lumber company owners, environmentalists, biologists, river guides, lawyers for the lumber companies, a magazine publisher, federal policy leaders, libertarians, a sports clothing manufacturer and an environmental law policy professor. It was a group more used to confrontation than conversation.
Enter High Interaction Strategy
The meeting was run by Gifford Pinchot, author, consultant, good soul and his associates. Despite some concern, the tension they feared never arrived. I think it was the structure of the event that allowed these groups to talk in a different way.
First, they were really invited, not sent or nominated. Each could say no. They were invited with a phone call. Inefficient, but human. And they were asked to help create a future, not to solve the past. Plus a demand was made in the invitation: “You must come for two days, and come to participate, not to present.”
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