I’m happy to announce that in 2011 a group of us banded together to create the Detroit Facilitation Guild. We have our work cut out for us. Meetings are everywhere and they often suck. Especially given the many efforts underway to make things better, we don’t have time to waste on bad meetings. We can save the world a heck of a lot faster if this were addressed.

So, a group of us created the Guild to create a peer group for us to learn from, and a bigger public forum for getting better meeting practices in use around our region. So far, the efforts have been a great success and we’ve heard a clamoring for more information on that topic.

We’re slowly developing a toolbox of tips and techniques for facilitators, and I just posted up a handy cheat-sheet overview of consensus basics as well as the “How are my meetings?” self-assessment tool for gauging how those meetings are going and where they might need work (based on the consensus basics).

Anyway, it’s a fun effort and exciting to see it moving forward. Personally, I’ll say it’s been a great pleasure to work with the fabulous people involved, all of whom are also tackling a wide variety of other great projects in Detroit.

“Fail Faster” has become a mantra in innovation circles. And it dovetails well with our notion that Detroit can be a laboratory for the 21st century, solving problems that haven’t been solved before, in part because of its struggles.

But risk-taking is very counter-intuitive to most of us. So how do we develop this skill? Naturally, I’m thinking about games as a mechanism for learning this skill. Come join the conversation as we explore this idea in the Gameful community:

http://gameful.org/groups/the-game-collaboration-exchange/forum/topic/fail-faster-a-risk-taking-game/#post-10002

I won a game to design games! The gameful online community was founded by Jane McGonigal of TEDtalk, Steven Colbert and other-such-places fame. The community is dedicated to making games that actually improve the world. They regularly host game design challenges of various sorts. Over the summer, they hosted four challenges. And I recently found out that I ranked in 3 of the four challenges, winning one by myself, being part of a winning team on another, and getting an honorable mention on a third. Happy me.

You can read the overview and other fun designs here:
http://gameful.org/blog/2011/11/01/gameful-summer-challenge-series-winners/

I designed I Am the Genie, made the graphics for the simple and sweet Tint, and also created Curse of the Lost Doll (nee Curse of the Love Doll, but that sounded a little off…).

Car-Sharing options just got a WHOLE lot better (and therefore options for many people to get rid of their current cars without completely sacrificing car access just got better).

Peer to peer carsharing is this new model. The basic idea is you can rent out your own car when you’re not needing it, or others can borrow someone else’s car when they need it — but there’s a solid structure for scheduling, insurance, and other carsharing issues.

Using carsharing services costs much less than owning a car for many situations. And lending your car through a peer-to-peer carsharing program can offset costs for car owners.

The two prime service providers right now are RelayRides and Getaround. After an initial glance, I vastly prefer RelayRides simply because they provide a lot of information upfront. With Getaround you have to join in order to actually find out any details about the program – and to join you have to give them access to your Facebook account. Even if they’re not doing anything nefarious, it hits all the right warning signs to keep me away. RelayRides on other hand provides a bunch of FAQs and information about how they work up front.

The only drawback? The services only appear to available in a few select cities so far. I’ve contacted RelayRides to find out what their criteria are for entering a new market, so we can get it started here in Motown. If I get useful info, I’ll post it here.

After starting Motor City CarShare last decade (and then watching it fizzle out because it was the wrong fit of carshare model to local context and frankly being just about 4 years too early for Detroit but that’s a whole other story) I got a lot of questions from folks about how to set up something a little simpler that allowed them to do carsharing but with their own cars or with friends. While these new services aren’t quite the same thing, they’re a big step closer to that model and open a whole new field of options for folks interested in carsharing.

As the world embraces more sustainability practices and concepts, we need simple ways to sum up what this means. One of the most common ways to represent sustainability is the idea of the Triple Bottom Line, or the Three Stool Legs of Sustainability. Variations abound, but the basic gist is a Venn diagram showing the overlap of economic, environmental and social health. A particularly common mnemonic for this idea  is “People, Planet, Profits” — and in my experience, this phrase is particularly frequent in the business world and used with the concept of the Triple Bottom Line.

But it bugs me. And I think this is why: “People” is broad to the point of meaninglessness. What does it mean? I think the phrase “social sustainability” is already hard for anyone to really grasp, but  ”People”?!? If you have employees have you solved this part of the puzzle? What about people are you working on?

Correspondingly “Profits” is extremely precise. And while that saves this part from the vagueness I complain about above, it seems to narrow as to miss the more fundamental point. In my world view, we need to create a better link between profits and value. The two words  are used synonymously by most businesses, yet the reality of the world belies this equation. Economic health is not the same thing as profit.

So should we try for a phrase that’s more precise or one that’s more general? Personally, I’d rather we just had better ways of referring to this concept. Alliteration works for mnemonics, but I wish we had something better. Granted, “Economics, Environment, and Equity” is out there, but has an academic feel that makes it much less accessible than the three Ps.

So consider this a plea for more precise placeholders. And remember that the words we use for such a mnemonic would ideally be meaningful, measurable and mundane. Otherwise, we may inadvertenly create a conversation that is imprecise, imbalanced and therefore ulitmately immobilized.

Why can’t a broader group of people be motivated to take personal action for more livable cities, more personally rewarding lifestyles, and reduced risk for environmental problems for their kids and grandkids? Why do only a small subset of the US population bother to take simple actions such as replacing light bulbs with CFLs, using reusable grocery bags, taking stairs instead of the elevator, eating less meat, carpooling/combining trips, or, for gosh sakes, turning off the lights and AC when leaving the house?

These are tough questions, but a common answer I’ve heard is: “Since people don’t think they can have an effect on such large problems, they are not motivated to try to have an impact”.

Maybe some folks say this and some don’t, but it leads me to consider an analogy with nationwide (or worldwide) economic issues such as national debts and widespread unemployment. You know, I can’t fix those things. I can’t get millions of people jobs, or pay off trillions in US government debt. There’s nothing I can do to help the economy. So I don’t bother trying to make money.

Of course, only a few people actually say this, but it still sort of cracks me up.

The difference here of course is in immediate effects vs long-term or indirect ones. Probably a better analogy would be the US personal savings rate, which is often practically zero if not negative – and is among the lowest in the world.

If Americans are so bad at looking toward the future – even when their own economic future is on the line – it’s not shocking that they can’t extrapolate from buying so much plastic packaging to the Pacific Gyre. But it also makes me wonder if the pat thesis that people are just overwhelmed by the scale of the problem truly has validity.

It also makes me wonder if there are better ways of motivating people.

Our very own Cecil Scheib led the efforts that garnered a Clean Air award from the EPA for NYU.  Go Cecil, go!

NYU was one of only 12 recipients around the nation. Specifically note the co-gen project that he worked on which went operational this past winter. That project alone “mitigated an additional 23% of NYU’s baseline FY 2006 emissions and 68% of its baseline EPA criteria pollutants.”

You can see the full article at NYU’s website.

This article, titled “White Privilege Diary Series #1, White Feminist Privilege in Organizations, about the failure of many organizations to tackle the real work of anti-racism raises a lot of questions. The author, Kali Tal, does an excellent job at defining a well thought out process and general facilitation method for moving groups through the work needed when a group professes to want to become more diverse.

Yet, as the author notes, it usually fails.

And she basically leaves it at that in frustation and anger at the people in power who don’t want to change their organizations.

The phenomenon Tal describes makes a lot of sense and she brings a clear sense of history and understanding of a lot of the nuances that can plague these attempts at diversification. I appreciate that she isn’t willing to hold any punches about how racism manifests, and the article does a great job of honing in on the key space where this manifests. I had a question or two about the way those dynamics were described, but this mostly struck me as likely pretty accurate.

Nonetheless, it also struck me as too quick to succumb to pessimism and a good vs. evil paradigm which is limiting for everyone. I’m not laying blame on Tal as the facilitator for not overcoming these issues. But lacking culpability doesn’t mean that an opportunity isn’t being missed.

If this pattern becomes so sure and replicable, and the author is one of the only one’s with the experience to see it, then why doesn’t she change her approach? It seems that there are ways to approach this situation, knowing the likely pitfalls, that might make it easier to avoid those pitfalls.

For example, what if the facilitators forewarned the participants about the likely need for deeper structural change before the long engagement with the board and members? What if they asked for specific commitments, perhaps related to cost, percentage of programming efforts, or some other measure to prepare for the needed changes ahead? This would serve a number of purposes:

1. to test the seriousness of the interest in addressing the issue before walking the path;
2. to create clear parameters and commitments ahead of time which should make it much easier to hold the white women in power to those commitments later (and not just “hold them” coercively but pre-set their own commitment so that confirmation bias and people’s innate desire to create a consistent self-image, a well documented motivator, kicks in to help the later parts of the meetings run smoother); and
3. to create a clear playing field for the suggestions that come back from the people of color, so that the facilitators aren’t setting them
   up for failure from the beginning.

To carry people through a process with the expectation that the process is likely to fail not only undermines the process, but also sets up the entire group to be further discouraged and frustrated with the idea of positive change.

Again, I do not claim that the author is to blame for these circumstances. Nor that the institutions or people that she describes aren’t racist.  Certainly, many people will claim they want change until their power is actually threatened. And a power analysis is crucial to changing the dynamics that the author was brought in to help change. I do not lay sole responsibility on the author for changing this. But the author is the only window we have into this dynamic, and I would urge any party that I was talking to in this whole mess to look at what measures were in their sphere of control and influence and work from there, and I would urge each party to try to access their highest selves to determine their best course of action. As Tal is the only one we, the readers, are in dialogue with here, then I feel we must ask these thing questions of her. Not in condemnation, but in hope of finding solutions that help us all become unstuck.

The importance of community engagement and participation in planning major initiatives is getting more common, but going through a basic process isn’t enough to keep things from falling apart. This is the story of a recent experience I had watching such a process fall apart, and how we may have salvaged it.

This was the 6th meeting in a long community engagement process that had been going on for over a year to plan a community center and recreation space in a Detroit neighborhood. Things were really starting to move ahead, and the primary organizer, Susan, started things off with an overview of the exciting progress being made.  Susan is in her late 30s or early 40s, white, and a resident of Detroit, although not this neighborhood. She works for a nonprofit that is based in the neighborhood, which is helping to drive the development behind the community center. The community center is seen as the starting point in a longer term revitalization effort that will next focus on developing a deteriorated commercial strip.

She announced some new funding for the community center, and a meeting with the new governor to secure support as part of his urban revitalization effort. Then, meeting participants were to break out into 3 sections to work on furthering plans for two aspects of the community center and some starting ideas for the commercial strip.
The vast majority of the 40 or so people present at the meeting were from other nonprofits, local colleges, city and county government or activist organizations. Only a handful were actual residents of the community, which is a mostly impoverished neighorhood whose residents are people of color.

One of those residents, Mack, spoke up actively to ask several questions about the plan (who was invited to the meeting with the governor, what businesses were being planned for the commercial strip, and why the plans for the community center included the details that it did) with the overarching question of  “Why isn’t the community deciding what’s happening here?”.

Susan was a bit dismayed: “Mack, you’ve been at most of the meetings. We’ve been gathering your input and creating the plans from that.”

Mack: “But this isn’t what I want, or what we want. And how come the community isn’t leading this effort?”

The room was decidedly tense. The two talked a bit more, and then Susan said she’d be happy to talk with him more later, and moved the meeting on to the break-out sessions. Mack was pissed and vocal. “This is bullshit!” was his starting point and he just started going from there, in an agitated and loud voice.

Mack started talking to the folks sitting next to him (most of the other community residents) about “Well, this is how it always goes, and it’s all over now. This was a done deal before we ever got here, and now they’re just using us.” Increasingly the residents around him either joined in the frustrated discussion or left the entire meeting. One of the other meeting organizers from Susan’s nonprofit, George,  came over to talk to Mack, and two other interested parties, myself and Juanita, came over and joined the conversation. Juanita asked some open ended questions to hear about Mack’s concerns, which he began pouring out in rapid fire, condemning bursts. George kept countering what he was saying: “No man, that’s not what we’re about. We’re trying to get your input, and we’ve done all this work to hear from you.”

Mack was greatly concerned about the lack of community participation in the meeting, and gestured to me several times as an example of people attending the meeting who obviously aren’t from the community.  Juanita eventually moved on, but George and Mack kept going at it and were running in circles, with both of them tossing up their hands in frustration several times, with George exclaiming “But we’ve been asking for your input all along!” Finally, I jumped in and said to George, “Right, but you’re missing his point that input is not the same as agreement or endorsement.”  Mack spun around, looked straight me and cried, “Thank you! That’s what I’ve been saying!”

The conversation mostly turned back to George and Mack arguing about what was happening, and it spun around for another 20 minutes. Increasingly, I entered the conversation and I asked Mack more clarifying questions and then summarized back what I was hearing.  He focused his conversation more on me and calmed down a lot. Eventually, over the next 30 minutes, we got down to a basic outline of Mack’s concerns about the process, the need for more residents to be involved in the discussions, the decision making process and a clear commitment that the revilazation wasn’t just the beginning of gentrifying the neighborhood and driving the current residents out.

Now that I had much more of Mack’s trust, I was able to point out that Susan had expressed great interest in hearing about any concerns and suggestions that the community had. He didn’t totally trust this because he didn’t want to just provide input, he wanted to make sure that the residents were helping to lead the process. I asked if he’d like Susan or the nonprofit to provide some draft plans to ensure that and address his issues, and he said no, he felt that a draft plan should come from the residents. Sometimes George would interject his opinion or his view of what had happened and Mack would start arguing with him again. Every time this happened, Mack would quickly lose the calm he’d been building and started talking more drastically about a plan to go door to door stirring up his neighbors to shut this entire process down.

We eventually came up with a tentative plan where he could use his connections in the community to create a draft of what the wanted in terms of assurances and participation in the leadership team. He expressed great interest in this.  When Susan came over after the meeting, she said “Mack, you’ve been at all the meetings, we’ve had these meetings, asked for community input, done canvassing and phone calls to conduct surveys on community interests — I don’t know what else we could do. And if we don’t do something, this neighborhood’s going to deteriorate more and more.”  Mack continued to talk about the need for the community to be organized around deciding its own fate, and said that he’d pull residents together to shut this down if Susan went ahead thinking that this nonrepresentative input gave her the right to make deals with the governor based on the false premise that she had the community’s buy-in.

I reminded Mack that while it was true that Susan clearly had some power to work with, in terms of funding and political connections, and that he wanted to lift up the power of the residents to determine their community’s fate, that a marriage and melding of those powers had the greatest potential for creating the community that he had said he’d wanted. He was interested in that idea, but not very trusting of Susan. This baffled and annoyed Susan, since Mack had participated in most of their meetings and been supportive until now. Still, Mack agreed with my reflection about the core interests he’d expressed and that he felt it best if he organized residents to draft proposals on those topics. And Susan expressed clear openness to receive those proposals and work to incorporate any of them that were in her power to do so.

So What Happened?

Several people at the meeting treated this as though Mack was just a loud, belligerent individual who was best handled by giving as little attention to him as possible — the common parenting technique of  “don’t award bad behavior with attention.” And while it seemed clear that Mack was a bit hotheaded and a confrontational person who might not have nearly the organizing capacity that he claimed, it was also quite possible that he could have organized the community around an us vs. them vision of the residents vs. the nonprofit developers that could sewn years of distrust and difficult conversations.  By clarifying the major concerns and a concrete action plan that was in Mack’s court to follow through with, I believe the poison rift that seemed very likely at the beginning of the meeting was averted.

But why did it happen?

I drew three major insights from this experience:

1. Community input does not equal endorsement — This was one of Mack’s early points. That he and others had been participating in the process all along because they were interested in their neighborhood and it seemed like the polite thing to do – to follow the lead of the meeting organizers. But when things started happening, he quickly became cynical of the process and felt that having the community write down its ideas on big maps or pieces of paper, was really just an excuse for the nonprofit to do whatever it planned and claim that it had community support. In this case, the nonprofits process were actually much better than that, and they clearly moved forward with an interest and intention to present their evolving plans at each stage and get feedback from the residents on whether this was the right direction. Still, the input vs. endorsement distinction is a useful one to keep in mind for any community engagement process.
2. The need for basic listening, repeating and summarizing skills — while I often take these skills for granted as part of emotionally intelligent communicating 101, it’s amazing how rarely I see them used in business or community meetings. In the long argument between George and Mack, George was trying to respond to Mack’s concerns, but he kept doing it by asserting his own view of what was going on. Mack became more entrenched, agitated and distrustful with every assertion George made. The simple act of repeating back Mack’s point to him, instantly turned me from “example of outsider” to a prime and eventually trusted participant in the conversation.
3. Power changes the equation  — Susan was particularly confused about why Mack’s relationship to the problem had changed so much – and just from the last community meeting.  It felt clear to me that the key thing that had changed, was that this meeting was the first time that Susan’s plans had started becoming real. She’d started showing that she had power. The new achievements and progress that she was proud of and felt was a victory for the community was exactly the thing that made Mack highly distrustful and suspicious of the process.  As a person with a long cultural history of being powerless against the forces that shaped his world, Mack felt his powerlessness acutely as soon as Susan began showing the monetary and political power she was beginning to harvest. Even if Susan’s intentions are golden, it makes sense that people who’ve long been powerless in the face of big shifts and changes in their own community would distrust those intentions. The idea that they would feel powerless, even when being invited to participate in the guidance of the power being harnessed, is often hard for people without that history of powerlessness to readily see, much less understand. And in fact, Mack’s own assumption of powerlessness, could have caused him to dramatically harness his own powers of community networking and adamant persuasion to shut down the whole project — even though it might be the most promising vehicle for achieving some of his own stated goals for the community.

I was fascinated by this entire event (and have actually spared you all the retelling of many details) and what it represented about community engagement processes. It may be a pathetic sign of my conflict resolution geekery that I *enjoyed* this conversation. Still, I’ve seen these processes limp along or outright fail in other settings, and the dynamics of that evening are not unique. Understanding them could keep future processes from falling apart. With any luck, it might even open the door for a stronger engagement with the community. It yet remains to see if that greater potential will bear out in this case, but at least by the end of the conversation no one was talking about shutting the whole project down.

Note: some details of the story have been altered to protect anonymity.

Saving the world is hard enough without it also being boring. So here’s a smattering of ways to have fun while being more eco-friendly.

1. The Fun Theory - a great competition that came up with a bunch of creative ways to get people to do more eco-things by making them the more fun option. Their site features a bunch of videos of the entries. Shown here was a great recycling bin design that got people to run around gathering recyclables to use it.
2. Japan’s Fun Train – Want to make more people use trains? What if they were great places to be in? These two trains from Japan are great examples of using this idea to make trains more kid-friendly. But really the idea could be taken in many different directions with amazing results.
3. Seed bomb vending machine – Treehugger pointed this nice one out, and I don’t know if it really makes anything more fun, but it tickled me pink, so here it is.
4. Designers’ eco- coloring book – Now, I know that many alterna-folks aren’t crazy about coloring books, because of the notion that it’s spoonfed “coloring-in-the-lines” instructions. But that wasn’t my experience at all as a kid. Rather, it was a great way to get comfy with using color, discovering color combinations and playing with different techniques and materials. In any case, this book is even more fun. Professional illustrators were asked to contribute pages on an environmental theme, making for a fun, arty coloring book that you can also use to indoctrinate your child into the eco-hegemony! Shown here, an illustration from the book by Delphine Vaufrey.
5. Rep. Markey’s statement on Climate Change Deniers – This just stands as a great example of how activism is far more fun when we bring in humor instead of just polemics. It’s only a little over a minute and really worth a listen.  See vid clip below.