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Rural Community and Organization Dialogue and Strategic Planning Services

We are all living with an increasing number of important changes in the way our world works. Our economy is now part of a global system with the capacity to work as a single unit ‘in real time on a planetary order.’ Political power has moved away from traditional, national institutions to the networked relationships which connect the centers of production and consumption of advanced services. These relationships connect local businesses, local governments and NGOs in partnerships that can make a difference in political and economic influence and success. We are experiencing a cultural-spiritual rebirth that is becoming the driving force behind the emergence of civil society as a force for change, the rise of the creative class, and a new spirituality that is the source of our collective creativity and is characterized by simplicity, sustainability and social consciousness.

To not only survive, but thrive, in this increasingly complex world, rural communities and organizations are seeking strategies and options they can rapidly implement. Our modern world loves quick answers to challenging problems. We like to know what to do now. We don’t want to “reinvent the wheel”. We don’t want to “waste our time”. And when we have the answers we like to pass on the information to others. In fact we are so quick to get to an answer that we often forget what the question is.

This pressure on community and organization leaders to find quick solutions to complex problems misses the inherent desire that people have to solve their own problems. When someone else’s answers are imported or imposed from the outside, they meet resistance and often fail. Human beings have a deep impetus towards freedom and self-determination, and given appropriate circumstances, people are usually more resourceful than expected in finding their own answers. They buy into, and own, solutions they have been a part of creating. The success of implementing local solutions to challenging issues often depends more on ownership and motivation of those involved than on the cleverness of the idea. Is it any wonder that people are skeptical of the directions some leaders suggest we head?

Recognizing that there is a strong desire among rural communities and organizations to engage in conversations about their future that matter and then take wise action forward, Northern Great Plains is offering to co-host, with local leaders in rural communities or organizations, civic dialogues that are open to participation by all the residents of the community or stakeholders in the organization and provide follow-up strategic planning services for implementing ideas and opportunities emerging from the community dialogues. These dialogues can help communities or organizations develop a vision for their future, begin a strategic planning process, focus creative thinking on a specific issue, build a greater sense of community and belonging, identify and state core values and community ideals, and develop strategies for action.

Dialogue and planning methods that NGP staff is experienced in using include:

Scenario Planning

Scenarios are possible and plausible pictures of the future. They are created through a series of conversations, through which a group of people invent and consider several varied stories about how the world may turn out. Scenarios are powerful tools for challenging assumptions about the world, and in so doing, they lift the barriers of our own creativity and understanding about the future.

The real power of the scenario planning process is the ability to bring many different stakeholders into a conversation about the future, thereby creating collective ownership of these sets of pictures, and building important relationships across differences. By encouraging scenario planning processes at different levels of an organization or community, old paradigms are challenged, and innovation is encouraged through surprising possible stories of the future.

Technology of Participation

ToPs uses three highly participatory techniques to foster creative thinking, consensus-based decision making and team building. Its methods generate ownership, create clear goals, open lines of communication, broaden perspectives and motivate people to adapt to their changing environment while honoring the cultural traditions and diversity of all involved. The three methods are:
  1. The Focused Conversation Method: A common sense approach that leads naturally to a meaningful exchange of ideas. Outcomes include conducting purposeful discussions, capturing a group's best thinking easily, surfacing new ideas and solutions and stimulating candid feedback.
  2. The Consensus Workshop Method: This is a structured process that engages and energizes people as they come to consensus. Outcome include tapping into rational and intuitive thought processes, integrating diverse ideas, generating practical and creative solutions, and establishing group consensus around ideas and actions.
  3. The Action Planning Method: This process of practical steps help groups plan,organize resources and build commitment to an idea or action. Outcomes include: a clear vision of a successful result, an analysis the current reality, creation of a practical plan and maximum group involvement.

The World Café

The World Café is an intentional way to create a living network of conversations around questions that matter. It is a methodology which enables people (from 12 to 1200) to think together and intentionally create new, shared meaning and collective insight. The process of bringing the diverse perspectives and ideas together can really give a group a sense of their own intelligence and insight that is larger than the sum of the parts. One can use the World Café with as little as an hour, or convene a gathering over several days

The World Café is based on a core assumption that the knowledge and wisdom that we need is already present and accessible. Working with the World Café, we can bring out the collective wisdom of the group - greater than the sum of its individual parts - and channel it towards positive change.

Open Space Technology

Open Space Technology allows groups, large or small, to self-organize to effectively deal with complex issues in a very short time. Participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance. An Open Space meeting can last from two hours to several days. When people gather they co-create the agenda of the meeting together, allowing it to be shaped by the passion and interest of the people.

The greater the diversity, the higher the potential for real breakthrough and innovative outcomes. It works particularly well in moving from planning to action, where real action is facilitated by people stepping in and taking responsibility where they care. Open Space is all about handing the responsibility back to people themselves. Two core questions characterizing Open Space are: “What do you really want to do,” and “why don’t you take care of it?”

Learning Journeys

Learning journeys are about getting out from behind the desk, out of the comfort of the home, the conference room or the hotel, to explore and experience the world first-hand. Learning journeys are physical journeys from one place to another. They are also mental journeys, challenging participants’ preconceived notions and assumptions about current reality and possibility. The key distinction between a real learning journey and a typical “field trip” or “study tour” is created by introducing dialogue methods.

In a learning journey, when a group visits an organization or community, they are invited to sit down one on one or in small groups in dialogue with local stakeholders to understand their reality. Before a visit, the group members clarify their own intention and questions. During the visit group members suspend judgment and listen not only with an open mind, but also with an open heart and open will. After a visit they hear each other’s perspectives and through conversation come to a deeper understanding and a more whole picture of what they have experienced together. They become aware of what others saw that they themselves may have been blind to, and discover the value of broadening our understanding of what it means to see.

U-Process

The U-Process is a social technology that can be applied at an individual or collective level. As a group process it is generates shared commitment and the collective insight needed to produce solutions to complex social problems. It is convened by one or more organizations that are committed to effecting change and aware that they cannot solve the problem alone. During a U-Process change initiative an individual or team undertakes three activities or movements:
  1. Sensing the current reality of the system of which one is a part, carefully and in depth, by suspending judgment and redirecting one’s vantage point to that of the whole system;
  2. Presencing by letting go of past expectations and agendas, and reflecting to access one’s “inner knowing” about what is going on and what one has to do; and
  3. Realizing by acting swiftly to bring forth a new reality, through prototyping, piloting and institutionalizing new behaviors, activities, or initiatives.
A U-Process change initiative addresses problems that are complex in three ways:
  • Dynamically: cause and effect are far apart in space and time, resulting in the need for a systemic solution;
  • Generatively: the future is unfamiliar and undetermined, and traditional solutions aren’t working, resulting in the need for a creative solution;
  • Socially: no single entity owns the problem and the stakeholders involved have diverse-potentially entrenched and antagonistic-perspectives and interests, resulting in the need for a participative solution.

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry is an approach and process which turns problem-solving on its head. Instead of finding the best ways to solve a pressing problem, it places the focus on identifying the best of what already is in an organization or community, and finding ways of enhancing this to pursue dreams and possibilities of what could be.

Appreciative Inquiry can be used in several ways – as an AI summit where an organization, community or any system comes together for 2-6 days to go through the full AI process with the aim to engage in a large scale change or developmental process. It could be strategic planning, community development, systems change, organizational redesign, vision development, or any other process in which there is a genuine desire for change and growth based on positive inquiry, and for allowing the voice of people at all levels of a system to be heard and included. Appreciative Inquiry can also be done without an AI summit as an on-going process of interviews and dialogues that take place throughout a system organization, community, or city.

General Qualities of Good Hosting and Facilitation

All facilitators need to be able to listen. They need to listen to and hear the intention behind the dialogue in advance, and be able to listen to and hear participants during the process. This enables the facilitator to be flexible to design an appropriate process, and during the process to mirror back to participants what is going on and to help the group become more aware of itself. Strong listening skills depend partly on the facilitator’s ability to let go of their own agenda.

A strong facilitator needs to be able to understand what is going on within themselves when they are with a group, as much as what is going on in the group. The facilitator is essentially holding the group, and needs to avoid projecting their own issues and insecurities onto the group.

Asking good questions is an art form. The right questions will wake participants up, “light their matches”, link in to what they care deeply about, and make visible their interdependence in finding the answers. They will surface new insights they hadn’t thought of before in understanding the issue in focus. A simple phrasing of a question can determine whether people feel hopeless and despairing or curious, energized, strong and excited.

Being able to assess which method to use in a given situation, or whether one’s preferred method is applicable, requires a facilitator to understand the particular context. Taking a holistic approach is also about being able to see patterns and help the group make connections as they work, and recognizing that multiple intelligences are at work. The more the whole person can be invited in to a dialogue the more successful it will be, and the more equitably people will be able to engage.

Contact

If your community or organization would like to host a dialogue and engage in a strategic planning or action planning initiative using any of the above dialogic or community engagement tools, please contact Jerry Nagel at the Meadowlark Institute.

Jerry Nagel
701-364-1349
jnagel@meadowlarkinstitute.org