Creating New Futures Through Community Conversation: An
Interview with Peter Block
by Vicky
Schubert and Rachel Baker
from Leverage Points Issue 99
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 With
several bestsellers under his belt, Peter Block has
long been appreciated for his innovative organizational consulting work.
In his latest book, Community: The Structure of Belonging (Berrett-Koehler,
2008), Peter turns his attention to the reconciliation of fragmented
communities through the powerful tools of civic engagement. He recently
spoke with Leverage Points about his ongoing work in the public
sphere.
It was
possibilities, not problems that drew Peter Block to shift his focus
from organizations to community and civic life. "What distinguishes the
community work," he observes, "is that the people are really committed
to something they care about." In 1990, shortly after Corazon Aquino was
elected president of the Philippines and as the country struggled to
restore democracy after years of martial law, Peter was called in to do
a workshop with a group in the government and he discovered how
committed people show up at workshops. In his corporate work in the
United States, when he would break people into small groups, they'd say,
"How long do we have? Can you please explain the assignment? What's for
lunch?" "There's nothing wrong with that," Block says. "I've lived in
it; I am part of it. But these folks in the Philippines were hungry to
produce something important in their lives and in the lives of others.
No sooner had they broken into small groups than they were off doing the
work. They cared about learning. That awakened something in me.”
A few
years later, Peter was invited to speak at a conference on transforming
local government. As he met and worked with this group of city managers,
he developed a respect for them and their work. The technical aspects of
their jobs were difficult enough—holding cities together and keeping
them on track operationally. But these managers also cared deeply about
civic engagement and building community.
As a
result of these interactions, for the last five years, Peter has given
his time and energy to the question of how to build social capital. In
his new book, Community: The Structure of Belonging (Berrett-Koehler,
2008), he suggests that our major challenge is to focus on what we can
create, rather than what problems we can solve. He has stopped talking
about what's wrong and how to fix it. Instead, he observes, "No future
is created by simply solving problems. You have to tap into people's
longing, imagination, and possibility, to organize around something
larger.”
An Invitation That Promises Something Different
From Block's perspective, most of the conversations that we're used to
having in a corporate context center on the practical, definable,
predictable aspects of life—all of which are important, but tend to
emphasize short-term results. "Nothing new gets created by better
problem solving or by focusing on low-hanging fruit," he says. "No
matter how sophisticated we are as a learning organization, if our
conversations are limited to measurable outcomes, we are simply getting
better at a system, not creating a new future.”
In order
to create the possibility of a future different than the past, Peter
contends you need to broaden the conversation and get people into the
room who aren’t used to showing up. That means you have to craft an
invitation that promises something different. And when people do come
together for a conversation, Rule #1 is: Do not sit with someone you
know. He explains, “If you want a future that’s distinct from the past,
you have to be with people who you aren’t used to being with and have
conversations that you’re not used to having.”
An
invitation that makes space for something new to emerge needs to be
specific and contain some hurdles. For example, Block wanted to engage a
diverse group of people who cared about one of the more disinvested
neighborhoods in his home town of Cincinnati. He invited a varied group
of activists that included, among others, a preacher who champions
social equity and people on the margin, young professionals interested
in restoring vibrancy to the area, a social activist and a businessman
who heads the chamber of commerce. The invitation said, “Please come for
a conversation to get connected and build our relationships. In Phase
One, there will be no measurable outcomes. We are not coming to solve a
problem.”
Block
then added a second hurdle: “I want you to leave your interests at the
door. Because we’re not solving a problem, you don’t have to represent
your constituency; you just have to show up and make contact.” And as a
third hurdle, he said, “This isn’t a seminar, it’s not a lecture,
there’s no matrix on the wall, and no flip charts are allowed. We are
simply coming to see whether anything useful grows out of our
connection. Expect high interaction with the other people in the room.”
The response was terrific, and resulted in four stimulating and
generative two-hour conversations.
Questions
Are More Important Than Answers
In his work with communities, Peter builds conversations around
questions of accountability to create a context of possibility,
generosity, hospitality, and something new being created. He asserts
that a great question has three qualities: It’s ambiguous, it’s
personal, and it evokes anxiety. He often begins with a low-risk
question, such as “What’s the commitment that you hold, that brought you
into this room?” Block explains, “That’s ambiguous, it’s personal, it
creates a little nervousness—but it’s easy. You don’t pay a price for
answering that question; in fact, it honors you.”
Once
people have connected and learn they can trust each other, they tend to
be eager for higher-risk questions. At the top end of the risk scale is
a question like, “What are you unwilling to forgive?” he points out,
“That’s a rough one. You wouldn’t do that one in session one or two.”
Block
tries to create a facilitation-free experience in order to strengthen
the group’s ownership of the process. Breaking people into groups of
three, he admonishes them before each question, “Don’t be helpful to
each other, don’t decide anything, and don’t give advice.” He makes sure
that they sit close to each other physically, and that they’re not
helping each other. Then, he floats around the room and becomes a kind
of censor against advice. Peter will walk over to an individual and say,
“Are you trying to be helpful to that person?” When they say, “Yes, I
am,” he says, “I know you are. I appreciate that. Now you’re not
following my instructions, and I’m in charge here. Stop being helpful
and just get interested.” The trick, in Peter’s view, is to get people
to substitute curiosity—which is the ultimate form of care—for advice.
Going Where the Conversation Takes You Together
Block’s long-term goal is to engender a conversation around the
question, “What is the nature of communal or system transformation?” In
his view, the world is currently organized around individuals—individual
training and individual transformation. But there’s a larger,
interactive, interdependent way of looking at things that needs to be
nurtured. To help do so, Block offers five conversations for creating
shared understanding: Possibility, Ownership, Dissent, Commitment, and
Gifts. These conversations can take place in any sequence, because each
feeds all the others.
In his
book, Block presents stories of citizens who, with no funding and no
formal authority, have taken this approach to creating something new in
the world. What they all share is enormous patience. He notes, “Not one
of them asks the question, ‘How do we take this to scale?’ Nothing kills
possibility more than an early attention to scale. Scale will draw us;
we don’t have to produce it. As soon as we produce scale, we
depersonalize the process to the point of losing its depth.”
It is in
personalizing that the richest outcomes lie. When Joan and Michael
Hoxsey were hired to train inner-city youth in Cincinnati, they figured
that one way to get the youths to show up was to tell them, “If you
don’t come to this workshop, you can’t play basketball.” After the first
session, they realized this was not an invitation likely to create eager
participants. The young people were glazed over, not listening, waiting
for their time on the court. So, they decided to find out who these
people really were. They spent six months—two times a week, two hours a
night—just listening. They also brought cake.
After six months, everything had changed. The young adults had never
experienced professional, white, middle-class people being interested in
who they were. Together with these young people, Joan and Michael had
created a context and a quality of conversation that allowed the youth
to accept them and open up. As facilitators, they weren’t pushing a
particular future; they let go of any concerns about scale or speed. And
something surprising emerged from these conversations. Taking their lead
from Joe, who had an interest in screenwriting, they made a movie
together about the choices facing young people in urban neighborhoods.
It was a different outcome from the original intent of the engagement.
But it changed the lives of 15 people, those being “trained” and those
“doing the training.”
“It’s a
beautiful example of how all the conventional wisdom about where cause
resides is lopsided,” Peter observes. “To create something new, we have
to invert our thinking. Followers create leaders. Students create
teachers. It doesn’t even matter if that’s true or not. It’s an
incredibly useful exercise, because it changes where you pay attention.
And sometimes, where I pay attention is about the only thing in my life
that I can control.”
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