After 6 months of thinking *very hard* about the more controversial things of life, like democracy, creativity and the future of society, *quietly to myself*, I suddenly find myself almost ready to ‘think out loud’ again and publish some unfinished thoughts for others to consider. While this can feel very risky at times I consider that collaborative and public conversations around some of these difficult topics holds enormous value – so I invite you to agree, argue and criticise the ideas and suggestions below as strongly as possible – with a view that this process toughens thinking - hopefully making it more robust and useful.
Recap of earlier thinking
In May I wrote a series of posts which promoted the idea of collaboration between citizens and government and other organisations. The thinking that I put forward was that to adopt ‘pressure’ and ‘challenge’ as the primary lever of change means we are open to the possibility that we remain ‘stuck’ in a cycle of moving power and resources around and that this didn’t leave enough room for innovative research and thinking which could lead to smarter decision making.
I also argued that the ethics of activism was very important, and that while we might see the immediate usefulness of tactics promoted historically by ideas such as Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals – that this ‘means justifies the ends’ is not only unethical but ineffectual long term. A combination of indiscriminate activism and poor decision-making can leave us trapped in a cycle which describes the problem rather than the solution You can read these posts here, here and here – as well as links to responding posts from other authors.
Below is the 'thoughts in progress' diagram which I ended up with in May, which attempted to describe these various complex processes - with small amendments.
Current thinking
To challenge my own ideas and add more clarity where possible, over the last 6 months I have attempted to analyse more fully the current situation and dynamics. I have wanted to do this more thoroughly as a way of understanding where I think the future might lie - particularly in light of all the research we have been doing through Hand Made, Community Lover’s Guide and Social Spaces workshops over the last 3 years - where we continue to believe pretty strongly that there is ‘a new emergent community culture’ ... but we are still trying to analyse and understand the bigger picture as this emergence upfolds.
I found that this further analysis on different ways that people are participating in society helped to do five important things:
- It established more clearly in my own mind that there is a new participation paradigm emerging which I am calling the ‘Creative/Collaborative’ paradigm.
- It helped me to recognise the very real differences between this new paradigm and other more mature existing narratives.
- It helped to show possible reasons why trying to blend these paradigms can prove difficult.
- It helped to think about why some of the more mature paradigms are static or in decline
- It helped to show why Creative/Collaborative needs to be a context that is deliberately created - not a strategy deployed in the heat of battle.
So above is the chart which looks at these different paradigms for your critical consideration. Personally I have acted in all these different paradigms, and my own experience is that when I have been in a leadership position in either the ‘representative’ or ‘challenge’ situation I have tried hard to move activity to the ‘creative/collaborative’ way of doing things … with very limited success indeed … and one of my big questions about this analysis is can you do this…or indeed should you even be trying? Does the vital role of representation and accountability get eroded if you try to operate in the Creative /Collaborative as well? Or does that amount to 'unworkable duality'? I would really like your thoughts on this in particular...
1. Creative /Collaborative as a new paradigm
This isn’t a philosopher’s dream – it is a narrative being told by grassroots community projects popping up around the world. These are the people that are teaching us about how to create projects and ideas that connect communities in new and productive ways. I think this is a new way of participating because these examples I have been studying aren’t ‘representative’, ‘charitable’, ‘consumer’ or ‘challenge’….and largely they have their roots in new ways of thinking and designing… rather than in historical activity. They are not a progression from any of these other more established paradigms - although they often seem inspired by a very wide range of disciplines and thinking.
So you could define Creative/Collaborative firstly by what it isn't i.e we see activity that doesn't fit the other 4 mature paradigms, and secondly by the two strongest characteristics demonstrated i.e. Creative: they connect many existing resources to make entirely new things, and Collaboratively: they boost this work by collaborating widely.
2. Differences between the paradigms
The different paradigms use different social levers to create change in society: economic, political, power and ingenuity…. This requires different skills and attracts people with different ideas and mindsets. Although I included the idea of a ‘mode switcher’ into the chart, and I believe that as an individual you can learn to switch and work fluidly in the different paradigms depending on the context, I also think this can be difficult because these paradigms are often whole ‘world views’ in themselves. People can get really stuck, interpreting and responding to situations in a particular way depending on their world view. This can lead to a situation being 'misdiagnosed'... and negative patterns and cycles being reinforced rather than changed in a positive way.
3. Blending these different paradigms can be difficult
Some examples are popping up which present a confusing picture. One example could be a charity using an empty space to hold a fair, thinking they are working in the creative/collaborative narrative …but in fact aren't changing how the community interacts in any meaningful way. It is also where social enterprise is struggling to define itself clearly at local community level. There are also a few instances where people are swerving recklessly between the paradigms - occasionally by central government itself - mostly because we don't collectively have a good enough understanding of what these mixtures might look like and what effects they might have. If for example you mixed 'Charitable' with 'Creative/Collaborative', which one would dominate?
Most difficult of all is considering how elected council members in a Local Authority might collaborate with citizens to enable more people-led activity. If they are firmly in the 'Representative' paradigm, which is vital to democracy, how would they encourage Creative/Collaboration for the good of the communities they serve, whilst still challenging the opposition, holding themselves or the opposition to account? How would they be able to take suitable and ethical amounts of credit for that facilitation and enablement of resident-led activity in order to differentiate themselves from the opposition sufficiently to get re-elected?
4. Most mature paradigms are static or declining
Participating through the 'Representative' paradigm via democratic decision-making or voting is declining. Volunteering though the 'Charity' paradigm fluctuates by a comparatively small margin ... and all the evidence from travelling the country through the Travelling Pantry project and talking to hundreds of people is that many people don't find participating through 'opportunities' created by other people very satisfying any longer. They *want* to design their own opportunities to make and shape their neighbourhoods and communities - together with other people. They want to co-produce - not participate. They don't want to struggle with the old, often formal, sometimes boring, ways of doing things - through forums and committees - they want to do things differently.
But, this doesn't just show that old ways don't excite a whole new group of people who suddenly want be involved (and are able) in creating their communities. It also helps to illustrate that different paradigms suit different people, with different interests and passions, different talents and ideas, that naturally gravitate to the various narratives and work extremely well within them (particularly Representative and Charity), and should be supported and properly appreciated for doing so. There will always likely be a level where the make up of the population will differ and where economic conditions will threaten the continued expectation that different paradigms will continue to grow in a particular way.
The area of frequent concern is the rampant growth of the Consumer narrative - tipping us over the edge of sustainability into unconscious materialism. We are led to believe that as individual we have an important role to play propping up the economy by buying things - instead of collectively remodelling the systems to work in more sustainable way.
5. Creative/Collaborative as a cultivated, continuous context
One of the things that I was struggling with 6 months ago was that my own experiences had shown that there was an urgent need for ongoing, continuous dialogue to establish the conditions and relationships for real collaboration – particularly between citizens and government. I realised that people who responded to this assertion with the idea that collaboration often meant compromise or concession, were often coming from the perspective of collaboration in the heat of battle… when a particular serious ‘challenge’ situation is already in play. And I do agree with this view. Dialogue is often the only way of resolving a situation, but in an existing challenge situation the interwoven politics and power narrative can be very open to manipulation.
My thinking on this was reinforced by a thesis published by Mariah Thompson entitled ‘The Disappearance of the Neighourhood Assembly Movement in Bueonos Aires, Argentina 2001 – 2004: A Phase of Demobilization”. The research looks at the dynamics which led to the emergence of about 120 local community forums in a 4 month period (November 2001 - March 2002) in response to a ‘political and economic crisis of monumental proportions’ which led the government to freeze all citizen’s bank accounts - an action know as 'el corralito' - literally 'the little corral' - in an attempt to halt the crash. ‘At their peak one in every three citizens in Buenos Aires had participated in either a meeting or one of the movement’s activities. Within only two years they had all but disappeared. Today only a handful continue to operate in the capital.’
The thesis is fascinating, the researcher compares the reasons for the demobilization with theories by Sydney Tarrow. “Tarrow asserts that the end of a movement is marked by three sets of causal factors. These include 1) exhaustion of movement members, leading to member withdrawal and subsequent internal polarization 2) disputes within the movement over the use of violence, paired with the institutionalization of more moderate sectors, and, 3) repression of the movement by the State along with State facilitation of some movement demands.”
I won’t go into detail here but I recommend reading the full paper. One of the things that the paper helped to clarify is that when the situation is a big ‘challenge’ situation, that the ‘powers’ can manipulate a movement, separating moderates within a movement from more extreme members, and eventually drawing them back into traditional political paradigms where they feel most comfortable – especially people from more middle classes. In Buenos Aires this is what happened …. But also the political and economic situation stabilized, the bank accounts were unfrozen…. And collectively this led to the forums fading away.
As I mentioned in my previous posts I have seen this repeatedly in my own experience – people get together to fight something – passionately. But after they win or lose they lose their reason to come together. This is one of the really big differences I see with projects that fall into the Creative/Collaborative paradigm, the motivation to come together is to collaborate, to create something new, to make something, usually something that bridges and builds community and starts to solve real problems using the energy and imagination and knowledge of a lot of people. Coming together to make, learn or share can be heady stuff, it often sprouts more activity rather than shrinks.
My thinking around all this has been reinforced also by seeing how two real veterans of activism have moved into the Creative/ Collaborative space.
One person is Grace Lee Boggs, a 96 year activist, who has worked and lived through decades of activist movements – including the civil rights movement – who is inspired by the astonishing and fantastic resurgence of people-led community activity filling the vacuum in her home town of Detroit, created by the disappearance of economic viability that has accompanied the disappearance of industry. In the interview below Boggs talks about the Occupy movement saying, ‘you have to move from protest to start becoming the solution yourself’. I am hoping to meet Grace Lee Boggs on the trip we are planning to Detroit.
Grace Lee Boggs' Message to Occupy Wall Street Part 2 from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.
The other veteran is 94 year old Stephane Hessell, author of the French ‘Time for Outrage’ leaflet that has sold over 1.5 million copies. Hessell lived through WWII, was active in the French Resistance, survived concentration camps, was involved in drafting the Declaration of Human Rights, spend much of his life as a diplomat and an active agent of positive change.I wrote in more detail about this work here but his closing statement in “Indignez-Vous!” is: ‘To create is to resist; to resist is to create.”
And last but not least I wanted to draw your attention to a paper written by Eileen Conn, a long time activist from Peckham in London. I had to good fortune recently of spending an afternoon talking with Eileen and have subsequently read her fascinating paper called 'Community Engagement and the Social Eco-system Dance' currently being published through TSRC Below the Radar. In the paper Eileen describes the Space of Possibilities between the community and external and public agencies. She also goes into some very interesting detail about how she sees the two different systems 'co-evolving'. I highly recommend reading this paper.
So there it is ….. 6 months of thinking in 2400 words. Well, not quite… I have more to add on what I think are the strengths and vulnerabilities of Creative/Collaborative… how we might start to work to deliberately to create the context for this new paradigm… as well as addressing the more complex questions around blending paradigms ….. but I am hoping that I can do that this with the help of all the Social Spaces ‘thinking partners’ … including the readers of this blog!
And a special thank you to the people who might have laughed at the suggestion in the first line of this blog that I have been thinking about all this *quietly* to myself - those who contributed so much to the evolution of these ideas - and have given me so much time - and continue to put up with my obsessive questioning, talking and struggling to organise and make sense of some of this evolving thinking: Laura Billings, Maurice Specht, Michael Coughlin, Indy Johar, Alice Fung, Philip Colligan, David Gauntlett, Megan Deal, Matthew Taylor, Eilleen Conn, Zoe Hamlin, Cassie Robinson, Toby Blume,Tom Neumark, Jonathan Robinson, Yvonne Roberts, Nat Wei, Nick Booth, Noel Hatch, Karl Wilding, Jerry Stein, June Holley, Dougald Hine, Lorna Prescott, Nick Bird, Andrew Dick... and everyone I have worked with in workshops who have added so much richness and understanding of where things are right now in communities ....
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