A recent IBM commercial had a man opening a office door to an empty room save for a group of people lying on the floor. The man asks, “what are you doing?” One the people on the floor answers, “We’re ideating.”  “Well,” the man responds, “good luck with that” and closes the closes the door, leaving the group to their ideation activities. 

For most this about sums up the usual ridiculousness and irrelevancy of the brainstorming and envisioning processes conducted in organizations. Yet the bosses want to boost the numbers, the productivity, the bottom line – and a good session of thinking outside the box is just what the doctor ordered.

Yet….even though these exercises usually end up wasting everyone’s time, the necessity of a vision remains, whether for an individual, organization, a community, a nation.  Such a perspective can easily become trite and easily parodied.

Yet…when someone is able to articulate a vision for us for our community, it can have profound impact.

Like Martin Luther King did, when we are asked to envision for our community or our organization or our selves, we usually asked to dream big.  His speech would not have resonated and inspired had he said “I have a dream that one day this nation will somewhat rise up and on some occasions but not that often live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal"

We need to envision the inspirational possibilities if we are to improve our selves, our organizations and our communities.

At the same time, we need to dream small, to limit our vision on the merely possible. 

A key point here is that Martin Luther King’s speech was as inspirational as it was because he was able to articulate and crystallized for so many people the dream of racial harmony that inside them already.  Some of them were already quite passionately striving for such a dream, and his words provided a powerful lift, intensifying that passion.  For others, it brought something under the surface and into the light of day, turning it into a passion.

Implicit in the claim above, however, is the speech did little to persuade the non-believers.  He was preaching to choir, and with that speech, the nation realized how vast that choir was.  But I would argue that there weren’t too many non-believers, those who resisted efforts to make the dream a reality in thought or deed, which after hearing the speech had an epiphany about the error of their ways.  The racist keep on being racists.  Except maybe they were a little less open about it.

It is worth noting that we are still dealing with racism and a lack of racial harmony in this country.  Even though we can say that there are quite a few people, a good majority, who have the same dream as Martin Luther King.

And we are confronted today with issues and problems which there is less agreement.  Sometimes we can’t even agree that what the problems are, let alone how to go about solving them.

KXRA Hal blogged today about global warming and this problem is as good an example as any to highlight the quagmire we face in resolving the problems.

It is also highlights the need to envision big and small simultaneously.  We need to sincerely acknowledge the consequences of global warming and envision our communities living in a sustainable manner, a manner through which we avoid those consequences.

At the same time, we are not making much progress on realizing this vision.  The reason for this is because of the resistance by others, not only against the implementation of solutions or accepting the urgency to move forward with that implementation, but in even acknowledging a problem exists at all. 

Like racism, one great speech isn’t going to change things.  There are those who were openly disappointed that Obama didn’t use the nixing the application of the Keystone pipeline as an opportunity to discuss global warming.  This takes us back to the on-going discussion regarding the utility and effectiveness of the bully pulpit.

Obama could have been inspirational and provided an injection of passion into the advocates and activists dealing with this crisis.  But it is doubtful he would have, no matter how powerful the speech, been any more effective than King in making a racist embrace the dream of racial harmony with just one speech.

If our hopes for a solution to global warming (or any other contentious issue) lie in a charismatic speaker giving us an inspirational vision, we might as well all be lying in a room ideating.

Which brings me back to my little exercise dealing with a fictional national visioning retreat as I detailed first in Time to Retreat and then in The Allusive Common Ground.

Such a retreat is based on local communities who have engaged in what is referred to as Community Visioning, a non-traditional approach that has emerged in the past few decades as a response to ineffective governance and community development. 

Karolína Miková in Community Visioning and Strategic Planning Process writes:

…traditional approaches to planning have proven ineffective to mobilize all stakeholders and available resources to address complex problems.  Planning professionals are searching for holistic approaches with long-term perspectives involving diverse stakeholders to solve persistent problems.

The stakeholders from all three sectors [non-profit, government, business] increasingly recognize that their individual success depends on the vitality of the other sectors. No longer can the public and private sectors make highly independent decisions and operate in isolation from each other. Civil society organizations have surfaced as strategically important participants in the search for a ‘middle way’ between sole reliance on the market and sole reliance on the state.  Emerging are public-private partnerships, join ventures, “collective strategies,“ and cooperative problem-solving programs that bring together representatives of diverse groups to reach and implement agreements. Creation of a shared vision may become an alternative to higher authority as a guiding force.

Whether it is a community, organization, or individual, the shift from doing things and thinking about things in the traditional way to a non-traditional way is never easy.  There are internal and external forces resisting the transformational process. 

The role of the visioning process when it is taken up by a community is in part to address that resistance by directly confronting those forces [emphasis mine]:

Community Visioning and Strategic Planning is a process whereby community stakeholders collaboratively imagine a desired future for the community and set strategies to achieve that future. It is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what a community is, what it does, and why it does it.

Vision clarifies what a community should look like and how it should behave as it fulfills its purpose. Vision embodies the tension between what a community wants and what it can have. A vision that motivates people will be challenging enough to spur action, yet not so impossible to achieve that it demotivates and demoralizes people.

The community vision should be shared and owned by the whole community; so that it is “our” vision in the inclusive sense.

Through the visioning process, participants express the values that are important to them. The process translates the individual and collective values into purposes of the community, directions in which it should move, and common interests, which build common ground for actions. Clearly defined vision helps to ensure focus and hope for the future. The vision provides the basis from which the community determines priorities and identifies strategic issues. It sets the stage for what is desirable in the broadest sense. Successful formulation and agreement on vision can serve as a first achievement of the stakeholder group. It is the first possibility to reach crucial consensus and because the task is typically not controversial, it could start to build the hope in the community and inside the stakeholder group that consensus is possible.

When we consider the diversity contained within our communities, whether a
neighborhood or a region of a state, let alone the nation as a whole, we can easily imagine the difficulties in deriving collaboratively an agreed upon desired future.

Even if we were able to reform campaign financing to our liking, there would still be problems associated with our governance – driven and exasperated by the partisan battles.  What can be called the cultural wars cannot be simply said to be a result of the shenanigans of the wealthy elites.  There are deep divides ideologically within the nation of the country. 

Going back to the twenty-five individuals developed as participants in the imagery national visioning retreat, I will pick just two who represent politically (and otherwise) two ends of a spectrum:

There is the 55 year-old, white male from the South, who is a Southern Baptist and a Republican.  He has identified himself as “very conservative.”

And then there is the 35 year-old white female from the Northeast, who is Catholic and an Independent.  She has self-identified herself as “very liberal.”

When even self-identified liberals easily slip into flame-war on the blogosphere, what hope is there that we can arrive at some kind of meaningful collective vision about how to deal with the issues that confront this country when we have such differing views as these two.

And to this I turn to Collaboration.  Karolína Miková writes [emphasis mine]:

The fundamental concept on which community visioning and strategic planning are based is the concept of collaboration. Collaboration can be examined from two main perspectives: as a relationship and as an emerging process.

For collaboration from the relationship perspective, aspects of sharing and mutual benefit become most important. To establish a collaborative relationship, parties need to share values, responsibilities, resources, goals, or a vision. Then, according to Mattessich and Monsey (1992), the collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more parties to achieve common goals.

Collaboration from the process perspective on provides and approach for identifying what is and is not shared among parties brought together around an issue domain, for making “sharing” work for all involved, and for addressing the issue.  Then, according to [Barbara] Gray (1989), collaboration is a process whereby parties who see different aspects of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what is possible. The collaboration process involves joint decision making among key stakeholders of a problem domain about the future of that domain.

It is this collaboration from the process perspective I am interested in.  If people come to the table already for all intents and purposes on the same page, collaboration is a rather easy task.  Getting our very conservative Southern Baptist Republican and very liberal Catholic Independent to get on the same page is a whole other matter.

Miková provides Barbara Gray’s “Crucial Characteristics of the Collaborative Process are:

• The stakeholders are interdependent.
• During the process common understanding of problem is developed.
• Process is based on face-to-face dialogue.
• Rules about process and decision making procedures are created and agreed upon by stakeholders.
• Process involves mutual learning/educating of participants.
• Attention is paid to building and maintaining respectful relationships.
• Solutions emerge by dealing constructively with differences.
• Join ownership of decisions is involved; decisions are made by consensus, when possible.
• Stakeholders assume collective responsibility for the future direction of the domain.
• Collaboration is an emergent process.

The first bullet point – interdependency – and the last bullet point – emergent features – in particular highlight a facet to the collaboration as process which is key to understanding how it can be approached successfully: systems thinking.  Or more specifically we are dealing with complex (adaptive) systems. 

I have already touched upon this in recent blogs Don’t Fear the Loop and Keep it Complex, Sillyhead.  Going forward, I want to explore why this a key to success.

But for now, I want to return to the beginning – why we should envision small. 

We still have our very conservative Southern Baptist Republican and very liberal Catholic Independent sitting in the circle with the goal of achieving meaningful collaboration about a vision for this country. 

I would add one more notion from Miková:

The collaborative process is often used interchangeably with the consensus building. ….Consensus is a decision whereby everyone can live with the final agreements without compromising issues of fundamental importance and individuals support the full agreement and not just the parts they like best.

In this little scenario, it is not about which of our two individuals can generate the larger alliance to achieve a majority and, thus, dictate to the others the outcome, the vision.

If either of our two friends decide to envision their desired and ideal future for the community, what a community should look like and how it should behave as it fulfills its purpose, we are not going to get anywhere.  Nothing like consensus will be possible.  In other words we can’t just dream big.  We have to envision small.  What is acceptable, rather than desired?  What is one willing to let go of?

If we can imagine those twenty-five individuals envisioning small, engaging the interdependence of the group through a sincere collaboration – what might emerge could very well pleasantly surprise us.  It might just save us from the consequences of what we have done and are doing.

The patron saint of Wales and vegetarian, St. David was quoted as saying: 'Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd' (Do the little things in life.) I think he might have had a good day ideating.