Other Cool Methods/Approaches/Ideas relevant to the 'Future of Democracy'

a participant-initiated session at NCDD 2014
(for a Word version see OtherMethodsSummary.docx)

Summary Notes: This post-session summary was created by Rosa Zubizarreta, based on the work of Cynthia Kurtz and Laurie Richardson. For a longer full text version including Cynthia's and Laurie's notes as well as Rosa's chart pad notes, see OtherMethodsRawData.docx.

Intro and context: The idea for this session originated in conversations before the conference. Several people had been thinking to offer independent sessions as optional "meet-ups": Tom was proposing to offer a session on the Canadian experiment, Jim wanted to offer something on Wisdom Councils, Cynthia was planning to offer a session on Participatory Narrative Inquiry, Rosa wanted to do something on Dynamic Facilitation. Then Cynthia suggested that we combine these various sessions, and also invite others who may have methods, approaches, or ideas that they wanted to share… and the rest is history!

1) Tom Atlee: Public Wisdom & Macleans' 1991 "The People's Verdict"
cii@igc.org

Public Wisdom as the possibility of generating a unified and wise voice of the public at large, by using dissonance creatively. We have experiences of taking 12 to 200 people (micropublics) and using good group process to elicit wisdom. This is not the "wisdom of crowds". Instead, am currently defining wisdom as "taking into account what needs to be taken into account for long term broad benefit." (This is a high standard.) This "We the People" voice can serve to uplift the conversation through engaging the public at large, and/or informing politicians. Engaging the public not just to inform them, but to generate a coherent voice we can use to address major crises, without suppressing dissonance.

Example of Public Wisdom: For Maclean's project, 12 people who reflected the larger diversity of Canada were chosen to engage for a weekend, and facilitated by Roger Fisher of Harvard Negotiation Project. Macleans' special issue, with 40 pages of photos and narratives, allowed for vicarious participation of readers. Coverage included blow-by-blow narrative description of the process, starting with bios. People had arms crossed in defensive postures at beginning, yet by end we see photos of former enemies hugging. Outcomes included a written vision, signed by all participants. Canadian TV also produced hour-long video documentary of the process. This is a scalable design. Go to www.co-intelligence.org and search for Macleans to see full magazine, also subsequent interviews with editors and one of the facilitators.

2) Cynthia Kurtz: Participatory Narrative Inquiry
workingwithstories.org

We can look at Maclean's as a pageant, an instance of societal sense-making through narrative play. We can explore societal issues thru narrative pageant. People used to play with the stories of the gods; now we have celebrities. Instead, we can listen to one another's stories as a way of learning.

The book Working with Stories describes participatory narrative inquiry. This is a pairing of narrative inquiry (which helps us understand stories) with participatory action research. Storytelling is an ancient device for understanding and for negotiating meaning, which is socially learned at an early age. It allows us to explore differences in a safe way, even in contexts where we do not have access to good facilitation.

3) Nancy Glock-Grueneich: Embedding Dialogue and Deliberation Attitudes and Skills Across the Higher-Ed Curriculum
nglock@post.harvard.edu

Higher education tends to frame stories of human experience in problem-oriented way, focusing on what's wrong. We need to reframe the stories. When we begin a course emphasizing humanity's stories of success in addressing many difficult problems, this enables hope and helps create a higher purpose. Current system rations success by defining success as doing better than others. This makes it logically impossible for everyone to succeed. Instead, we can define success as "eliciting and enabling higher purpose in community." This helps create the world we want, where we bring out the best in one another.

Working with undergraduates in China, infusing attitudes and concepts of deliberative democracy in curriculum. D&D skills can be embedded even into teaching ESL, since language is about communication. In China, much interest in "what is the moral life", and finding their own way to democracy. They want to do democracy collaboratively; think the way we do it, is fighting. Every profession involves D&D skills; should be taught, accredited, evaluated at graduate level. Professional associations need to focus on this.

4) Jane -- Advocating more use of Open Space Technology as tool for engagement, to enable more spontaneous conversations, both here at conference and elsewhere.

5) Young man -- Need for unified online engagement tools for use at national level.

Online engagement is one way to enable unified voice. It's an emerging field, with many people developing their own technologies. Instead of competing, we could be creating unified technology or world brain, a way for everyone in world to express their thoughts as humans. Would need to incorporate all important values and resonate with world a is, including capitalism. Money not evil, but only one value in mix; other values like love, respecting minorities and women, need to be included. Call for collaboration: What technology would a world brain need? What values need to be incorporated into online tech? How to create something accessible to all? How to guide all the voices to single point?

[Q: Can you give an example of a value being incorporated into online tech?] Current online tech is contradictory to current democracy. You can say yes or no, but no sense of everyone being able to submit ideas to bring them all together. Small groups of people submit ideas, and other people vote on them. Instead, everyone should be able to submit ideas and vote on everyone's ideas. Need something open ended from bottom up, to create top list of priorities world needs to focus on.

6) Manju Bazzell -- Coordinated "splash" around transpartisan work:
manju.lyn.bazzell@gmail.com.

Contact Manju if you want to participate in this. She is coordinating concerted effort to focus on a region/district or state within a certain timeframe, to make a "splash" that will spark interest.

7) Dave Biggs, MetroQuest -- Combining "high tech" and "high touch" D&D for maximum leverage
dave.biggs@metroquest.com

Early proponent of online tech. Online tech can do some things, but will never be able to achieve others. Thus we need marriage of online and f2f approaches. Tech can engage from 5-15K people in doing relatively sophisticated things – looking at alternatives, understanding & weighing tradeoffs. Can create broad picture of a demographic's priorities/issues. But online can’t solve problems that require collective thinking. Can't take those priorities and create solutions. Online is poor at solving problems that require collective thinking. Solution is not more new tech, but recognizing we can't do everything online.

Is working on paper on bridging online and offline strategies to make best use of each. Example of future vision for a metro area: first task is figuring out priorities, what is important to improve and solve. We can gather massive opinions online, then ask people to show up for f2f session. People may come wanting own priorities to be heard more loudly. But we can say, we've already heard from 15,000 people online, these are top 5 priorities, your job is to work on solutions to these. We can't do that online. Then, after f2f group creates solutions, we can go back online and get broad buy-in by getting 15,000 people to vote on solutions. Need to design collaborative projects where online component is meshed with f2f component in seamless way. I am doing projects with impact, looking for feedback, would love to work with you.

8) Steve Buckley -- Standard evaluation tools to judge what works and what doesn’t.
sbuckley@igc.org

Worked for Fed Govt. (Dept. of Energy) evaluating public meetings. Even with checklist of how to run meeting (3 min at microphone), I saw people leaving unsatisfied, more angry after meeting than before. Yet organizers thought meeting went well. Need way to evaluate meeting from perspective of attendees, such as survey where participants can say whether they felt this was a successful meeting.

Standard measurement tools need to be developed to raise standards of practices. Need a critical mass of people interested in this. Timeliness of issue: Obama signed an open govt memo his first day of office, directing agencies to be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. But that was high water mark – things petered out from there. Yet there is opportunity here: White House said by end of 2014 they will come up with best practices and metrics for public participation. Only 2 months left for this, yet people doing this have limited background in public participation, only social media.

9) Tom Murray – polarity management, integral theory, cognitive science, contemplative dialogue
tmurray@cs.umass.edu

Comment to previous speaker: "We need to develop metrics for muttering. The people in the front row can't hear the ones in the back, so they need help to hear them."
a) Recommends polarity mapping and management.
b) Currently working on article on contemplative dialogue processes, including insight dialogue and Bohm dialogue, and welcomes input.
c) Completing NSF grant at UMass on designing social technologies to support development of the skills needed to engage effectively. Current tech is designed to support efficiency and connection; can it be used to support mutual understanding and regard? For more info, see Socialdeliberativeskills.com.
d) Working with adult development models to explore perspective taking, working with feedback, reflecting on biases, dealing with complexity. Using automatic text analysis to look at developmental levels in deliberative groups.

10) John Kelley -- Interactive scenarios & budget games (not the same as participatory budgeting)
scenarioguy@yahoo.com.

Have great notetakers and graphic facilitators, yet these tools not enough for group to hold in suspension, ideas they neither accept nor reject but are continuing to evolve. Need another class of tools – "holder incubators". One example: play money. We give out play money – everyone gets equal share of budget. Real enough to hold participants' attention, not so real that they defend it to death. Other techniques also allow people to hold complex ideas in suspension, are support tools for holding ideas in memory.

Example: Interactive Scenarios. Not just "here is a story I developed", even if I got it from you. It's also not, "let's come up with a story." Instead, I do research, write the scenarios, take out everything except a few principles, to make them deliberately incomplete. I hand that to people saying, "this is incomplete, you need to complete it. Here's 4 scenarios. Which do you want to work on? Here's a deck of news stories from the future you can use." The point is make the room cognitively pregnant instead of divisive. This serves to both frame and hold complex ideas as they evolve in a group.

11) Linda Ellinor -- Bohm dialogue and collective thinking
lellinor25@gmail.com

Has trained people in corporate sector in Bohmian dialogue. Vision of this work, is to end fragmentation in human systems. Many individual efforts exist to do great things, yet we duplicate our efforts because we are not talking to one another. Current communication practices don’t allow us to do deep reflective work. David Bohm's version of dialogue has useful aspects for all the processes we are seeking to develop. Is grounded in the quantum perspective that all is interconnected, and seeks to help us all make better collective decisions. The more we dialogue, the more we develop the skills to move beyond individualistic behaviors. Bohm Dialogue is criticized at times for not leading to decisions, yet that is intentional. We are not trying to do that. This is a process approach to change.

My vision is to create local dialogue groups where we can practice this form of being together, being with emergent issues, learning to think together. This is a way to bring more reflectivity into our decision-making process. NCDD could be a good platform for this. Have written an e-book – thedialoguegroup.net.

12) Rosa Zubizarreta – Dynamic Facilitation (DF) as a collaborative sense-making process for complex issues
rosa@diapraxis.com.

Like to play with lots of processes. Right here right now, this is like 'NCDD TED talk': great format for listening to lots of people's ideas, but not an example of what I'll be describing next. Was intrigued by idea offered by earlier speaker -- helping a room become 'cognitively pregnant'. That's what we do with DF. Am deeply grateful to Jim Rough, its originator, for allowing me to open-source it. Many powerful social technologies for collaboration still kept under lock and key in business world, require expensive licenses to use. Was inspired to write From Conflict to Creative Collaboration by examples of Harrison Owen (Open Space Technology) and Marvin Weisbord (Future Search) -- they both share freely everything they know.

I see Dynamic Facilitation as "maximizing creative tension, while minimizing interpersonal anxiety." Barbara Fredrickson in Love 2.0 talks about micro-moments of connection where we 'feel felt' by another. Imo, this is essential to facilitator's role. People have amazing capacities to notice patterns, learn languages by immersion without being taught grammar. If we deeply welcome all perspectives & help people feel safe, people will naturally become 'cognitively pregnant'! I believe in experiential learning, am committed to offering people a taste of this process. Have markers, will travel!

13) Jim Rough – Wisdom Councils as strategy for whole-systems conversations
jim@wisedemocracy.org

Developed Wisdom Councils from teaching seminars in Dynamic Facilitation. Key question was: how to release people’s creativity, so we can use it to solve social problems such as wars, climate change, etc.? Breakthrough was Wisdom Council model, described in book Society's Breakthrough as a single amendment to constitution that is very safe, looks like would not do anything, but could transform system to where 'we the people' could face problems, figure out how to fix, direct government to help us do that.

When people talk about climate change, they often begin with, "We need to..." (say, "..create a carbon tax." ) Yet there is no we to do this; if we had a 'we', we'd be on different planet. That's what Wisdom Council is about. Years ago, assumed I could just tell people about it, they would get excited. Flew to DC and was rudely awakened! But now in Austria, people picked up on this idea and did change the constitution of state of Vorarlberg. More are starting to think about this. A week ago, did experiment in Asheville, NC; we had opportunity to demonstrate Wisdom Council. Several participants felt they had never been listened to like this before, and described it as "the best conversation they had ever had."

14) Robert Corman, Applied Concepts Group – Strong enterprises doing systems change
rcorman@gmail.com, or owlinthetree.com

Words we have been using here, beginning with 'love' and 'what can emerge', are important to me. There is something that is resident in the possible we. This emerges as the poetry of our lives that helps us in the now. I think democracy is not an outcome, but rather a state of being that we can help along.

Some aspects of what I've seen in this community, make me feel like you are trying to do more than you can do. Varying professional levels among NCDD members. I've worked with large organizations that want to get something done in specific field. Sometimes people with facilitation skills can help. Am interested in sustainable solutions, regionally focused efforts. We need to look at reasonable geographies: where we live, how we function in communities, how our communities can be supportive of one another. For example, rethinkhealth.org goes beyond health, because health does not stand on its own: includes criminal justice, transportation, etc. We need to focus on whole system. That's what generates "aha" magical experience, which is where birthing takes place. That's where we get the sustainability we all need.

15) Michael Smith, Our Global Voices – HerGlobalVoices.com
mike@onecounts.com or michael@herglobalvoices.com.

Worked with America Speaks on large-scale dialogues. Two years ago started United Americans initiative with goal of creating national text-based voting system. Current voting system not designed to be inclusive. New evolution of governance needs to be based on both masculine and feminine. Iterated on United Americans based on previous experiences, wanted to host meetings with thousands in lots of countries. But if you start something for everyone, no one wants to come.

Now have started Her Global Voices to connect women to re-imagine world. Launched from South Africa in June. $3/month membership. We take a Susan B. Anthony dollar each month and put it into a trust fund, gather votes on where to fund national and global projects. If we get to 1 billion, members will be directing 1 billion/month. Hope to get there in 5-6 years, can create many positive things directed by women. Making this an L3C – a global member-owned co-op. If you text FEM or FEMME to 89800, will get message back with link to Youtube video. [Q: Are there women at leadership level?] Right now I put together the web site, but there are women involved. So yes, and we are on shoestring budget. [Q: Are the only people getting paid men?] Nobody is getting paid right now.

16) Kimberly King, Global Dialogues – Co-creating the future we want.
kimberlyking2@gmail.com.

Michael and I experienced a powerful synchronicity, both of us carrying same vision. That same blueprint came to me 18 years ago. So it's time for that idea to be born. The blueprint that wants to emerge is held by multiple people. We need to do this cooperatively. We who articulate the message the most, often live it the least. If we don't live it ourselves, it will not live in the world. We must walk our talk. The reason we don't trust one another, is because we are walking in scarcity. We need to transmute the scarcity among us so we can shift from the 'talking tribe' to the 'walking tribe'. Wisdom is a behavior.

I am a global citizen, have been to 70 countries. Global Dialogues is local dialogues times many, around the world. It's about interconnected circles of dialogue, wisdom arising as us, and all these technologies we already embody put into linkages. In preparation for the Global Summit, we wanted to make our presence known. We had a cross-section of participation from kids to old women to people in prison. The future is a world where no one is left out. We are not lacking creativity; we are lacking community. That is our call to action and why we exist. Our success story is us. We are in service to it. We need to value each other.

17) Kaliya – A model for contextualizing our work.
kaliya@identitywoman.net

Here's a four-square grid: On horizontal axis, left to right, local to non-local. On vertical axis, bottom to top, affinity to non-affinity.
So bottom left square, local affinity, is things like local sports clubs. Bottom right square, local non-affinity, is our local town council, where we figure out how local people in different groups can get along. Upper left square, non-local affinity, is things like NCDD. We come together from different places, because we have something in common. Upper right square, non-affinity and non-local, is government. This can help us think about where processes fit, and how to scale.

Have co-founded a tech company, Leolagroup, to build next generation Internet for data. Each piece of data has its own URL, and ways to connect that with domain levels, etc. Am making this a consumer co-op, not based on elections but using D&D methods. Am keen to figure out how tech can be different, as so much of tech is toxic.

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In closing: Well, that's it for the summary notes. Wish we could harvest all of the many conversations that were sparked afterward, and that lingered on in the room for quite a while… and then led to other conversations over dinner! May the connections continue to grow and spread…
In closing, a great big thank you to everyone who came… especially to those of you who came to 'simply' listen and hold a space for those who wanted to make an offering. The contribution of your listening energy and caring presence is much appreciated.

We also want to extend a special thank you to Sue Woehrlin for her helpful "guerrilla facilitation"!

Please feel free to send any revisions, and/or updates about your subsequent conversations, to
rosa@diapraxis.com and cfkurtz@cfkurtz.com

***

P.S. Before the meeting, we had received a request to include some information about Future Search, since that is another great method that could be better known. (Maybe every method feels like "it could be better known"!?) While we had a very full plate, and no Future Search person on hand to offer a 5-minute spiel about it, we do want to acknowledge the great work of our good friends in that community of practice, and offer a link to their website: www.futuresearch.net