The above recording is of a presentation Manfred Hellrigl gave to an audience in Stockholm, Sweden, starting out with the following questions... (My notes below are not a 1-to-1 verbatim match to what Manfred is presenting, they also include some interpretations/adaptations)
- How can we secure our standard of living?
- How can we secure a good future for our kids?
- Who will take care of us when we need care?
- How can we deal with growing diversity?
- How can we deal with the growing complexity?
- Who will pay the debt?
- Why are we in debt?
- What's going wrong?
- Who is to blame?
Political dilemma of sustainability - people that face it are un-re-electable.
Who is going to solve these issues if we can't expect it from the
political system?
how can it be that the political system developed in a way that it
doesn't solve the big and important issues we are confronted with?
Citizens are treated as customers
Politics/parliament, economy and experts run the system, citizens are a
mere disturbance vulnerable to lobbyism
Study of volunteering in Europe - countries with the least engaged
citizens have the most trouble in the current economic crisis.
We need active, engaged, collaborative citizens
How can we support and promote civil engagement
How can we make people step out of there comfort zone and do something
for their neighborhood, community, town they are living in
How can we get them?
Doesn't work:
- laws and regulations
- to plea and call
- campaigns
- subsidies, grants
- awards and decorations
Appreciative inquiry: looking for what is working instead of looking
to fix what is not
- Acupuncture points (find the change makers)
- Self-organisation (let them do it their way)
- How to organize self-organisation (example roundabout)
Langenegg example: snowball method
- found the major
- major selected 15 random citizens
- 15 random citizens were invited to come back with 2 more each
- 45 gathered to make a list of key individuals in the community
- 200 people were invited to network
- encouraged to talked about whatever they wanted
Proposal for child friendliness:
Citizens jury:
- 2000 randomly selected, invited
- 75 agreed to take four days off work unpaid
also included 50 children in a future conference
and open space with 60 experts
Result:
what children and adults proposed was at least as interesting as what
experts suggested
Citizens jury is too expensive
Cheaper: wisdom councils
Random selection: can't use brochure/poster to invite. must instead
pick directly/randomly and tell that they were chosen
Problem --> solution --> ok, that may sometimes work
During the first half of June, political activist and writer
Richard Moore was visiting
from Ireland and we turned these two weeks into a project to not only provide him with a deeper understanding of Switzerland's system of direct democracy but also attempt the rethinking of the workings of democracy, civil society and the economy, looking for a consensus on a new way forward.
First we traveled around Switzerland to meet with various people able to offer unique insights into the political system, and dug deep into the psyche of Swiss democracy to look for lessons learnt as well as new ideas to be applied to deepen democracy in Switzerland, Ireland and Europe.
The weekend of June 9-10, 2012 we hosted an intensive discussion on "Deepening Democracy", exploring the directions in which democracy may be evolved. The group of people that participated was comprised of people loosely related to the
Espace Noir
project, people from the larger anarchist scene around St-Imier and people with an inherit interest in democracy living in the surrounding area.
All this resulted in the following diagrams and flip charts, and the emergence of the participants as the "beau-sejour" group founding a new organization that we named
"
St-Imier.org
",
with a mission to develop and search for conventions and best practices that allow civil society to better self-organize. These conventions should provide ways for different groups and organizations with an internal structure which allows them to reach consensus, to enter into a harmonization process with other organizations like that, in order to develop a larger whole system consensus. In other words, the outcome of this weekend session was that deeper democracy means democracy that relies much less on voting and instead focuses on consensus processes.
"Think for a moment of the complex reasoning this mama exhibited: first, she had memory — memory of her four previous losses, in which bringing her new calf to the barn resulted in her never seeing him/her again (heartbreaking for any mammalian mother). Second, she could formulate and then execute a plan: if bringing a calf to the farmer meant that she would inevitably lose him/her, then she would keep her calf hidden, as deer do, by keeping her baby in the woods lying still till she returned. Third — and I do not know what to make of this myself — instead of hiding both, which would have aroused the farmer’s suspicion (pregnant cow leaves the barn in the evening, unpregnant cow comes back the next morning without offspring), she gave him one and kept one herself."
In
Approaches to change,
Andrea Gewessler describes what I see as finally gaining momentum for revolving our institutions to a truly bottom up approach. People are really starting to get this.
"[...] they intended to adopt the approach of looking at what was not working as well as they wanted so that they could learn from their mistakes and improve. At that opportune moment they stumbled across Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and investigated what was working already instead. One of the big revelations was that their communities are already self-organising and that this self-organisation is a powerful change agent. So what works is creating an enabling environment rather than one that imposes change from the top. As a result of this finding, they revisited their entire approach to change. Instead of going into communities with a project idea such as an energy campaign, they offered communities their support with their own concerns that they wanted to work on and find solutions for."
"[...] The main fear that politicians have is that citizens could come up with fanciful wishes that require abundant financial resources and that are just not do-able. However, experience has shown that the opposite is the case – citizens generally recognise what is working and consider it their own responsibility to improve things further. Insights like this can only come from the people."
"[...] Another challenge is that once it is working, some politicians fear that their positions and roles become superfluous and again this is unfounded. [...]" ...Well, we'll see about that ;-)
In
A matter of democracy,
she goes on to give a nice description of the choice creating methodology in action:
"In a DF meeting participants sit in a semi-circle with four flipcharts and a trained facilitator in front of them. There is a flipchart each for problem-statements, solutions, data and concerns. The role of participants is to be authentic and bring their understanding of the problem, solutions, supporting data and concerns about the problem to the meeting at any time. There is no such thing as “not relevant at this stage” or “can you hang on to this thought till later” or even “maybe at a different meeting”. Every contribution is acknowledged and written down on the flipcharts. The facilitator sorts the contributions by putting them on the most appropriate flipchart, protects contributors and what they have said, asks questions to elicit further details and helps individuals to be brought into the conversation. It is tough work for the facilitator to keep the flame of a group of 8 to 12 people burning, whilst honouring each and every contribution and keeping the red thread going. This is challenging as participants can, with their words and contributions, be on any flipchart at any time. It is not the facilitatorʼs role to guide people to focus on solutions, problems, concerns or data but to get their contribution most meaningfully into the space. The group of participants goes through several phases usually starting off with what is referred to as a purge, the stage when all the feelings that have been stored up about the topic come out. This can be a very heated phase which because of its unloading function rarely reveals novel insights. However, once people have said whatever they needed to say a very productive stage is reached that often culminates in an insight for the whole group. Participants reach conclusions, reframe the problem and generate the energy to do something about it."
As well as a concise description of how that methodology is deployed in a political context:
"Wisdom Councils use Dynamic Facilitation with a group of about 12 randomly selected people within a community or organisation who come together for a day and a half, often a Friday afternoon and Saturday, to talk bout issues that matter to them. We are not talking about a topic pre-determined important by whoever is considered in charge but one that emerges from We The People, very often consisting of individuals who may not carry any formal authority within an organisation or community. Instead of taking decisions, which is a cutting-away, choice-creating delivers additionality. There is no voting on the best solution and no formal consensus but a working together till everyone feels it is quite clear what the intelligent responses to the issue at hand are. Participants bring the knowledge but also their feelings and experiences into the Wisdom Council.
After a day and half the randomly selected Wisdom Council then reports back its solutions and its thinking to a wider group, which in the case of large organisations may still only represent a small microcosm of the whole."
"[...] Wisdom Councils appeal because they want to work with this passion that people have for complex issues [...] These are the things that we often feel powerless to change. Wisdom Councils are a mechanism for organisations and society to reclaim that ability to influence and co-create."
Your email address:
The "Decentralize" Newsletter
Exchanging ideas for building a
decentralized fabric of society.
Making true democracy work on a larger
scale while decentralizing "everything",
benefiting from local diversity and
global synergies at the same time.
http://tinyletter.com/zumbrunn
