Book: Community: The Structure of Belonging
Author: Peter Block
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3981449789
Book Highlights (unorganised)
In the professional world of service providers, whole industries have been built on people’s deficiencies. Social services and most of medicine, therapy, and psychology are organized around what is missing or broken in people.
McKnight points out that if you go to a professional service provider and say you have no deficiencies or problems, that you just want to talk about your gifts and talents, you will be shown the door and treated as though you are wasting their time. Go to an association or a group of neighbors and tell them what your capabilities are, and they get quite interested.
As soon as you professionalize care, you have produced an oxymoron. He says that systems are capable of service but not care
Possibility, here, is a declaration: a declaration of what we create in the world each time we show up. It is a condition, or value, that we want to occur in the world, such as peace, inclusion, relatedness, or reconciliation. A possibility is brought into being in the act of declaring it.
For example: if you declare that you are the possibility of peace in the world, though peace may not reign at this moment, the possibility of peace enters the room just because you have walked in the door. Peace here is a future not dependent on achievement; it is a possibility. The possibility is created by our declaration, and then, thankfully, it begins to work on us.
As earlier mentioned about Putnam, geography, history, great leadership, fine programs, economic advantage, and any other factors that we traditionally use to explain success made only a marginal difference in the health of a community. Community well-being simply had to do with the quality of the relationships, the cohesion that exists among its citizens. He calls this social capital.
Questions take on an almost sacred dimension when they are valued for their own sake. This is in stark contrast to the common need for answers and quick formulaic action.
The context that restores community is one of possibility, generosity, and gifts, rather than one of problem solving, fear, and retribution. A new context acknowledges that we have all the capacity, expertise, and resources that an alternative future requires. Communities are human systems given form by conversations that build relatedness. The conversations that build relatedness most often occur through associational life, where citizens show up by choice, and rarely in the context of system life, where citizens show up out of obligation. The small group is the unit of transformation and the container for the experience of belonging. Conversations that focus on stories about the past become a limitation to community; ones that are teaching parables and focus on the future restore community.
This means that if we want to change the community, all we have to do is change the conversation.
We believe that defining, analyzing, and studying problems is the way to make a better world. It is the dominant mind-set of Western culture.
This context—that life is a set of problems to be solved—may actually limit any chance of the future being different from the past. The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems as though we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.
Naming the challenge as the “breakdown of community” opens the way for restoration. Holding on to the view that community is a set of problems to be solved holds us in the grip of retribution.
Limiting stories are the ones that present themselves as if they were true. Facts. Our stories of our own past are heartfelt and yet are fiction. All we know that is true is that we were born. We may know for sure who our parents, siblings, and other key players in our drama were. But our version of all of them, the meaning and memory that we narrate to all who will listen, is our creation. Made up. Fiction. And this is good news, for it means that a new story can be concocted any time we choose.
Same with community. The stories of violence, crime, and wrongdoing that are constantly told are also fiction. The events may have happened, but the versions that let those events define who we are as a community—such as whether it is safe to go downtown, whether we need new leaders, whether people in this place are friendly, whether we are headed up or down—are all fiction. The decision to tell those stories over and over again as if they were defining truths creates the limitation against an alternative future.
The corporate model is the modern ideal, and the economy is the center story. The story in the stuck community defines the role of the media as framer of the debate. In community building, we need to realize that what the media reports is a reflection, not the cause, of the conversation that citizens currently hold.
But possibility is not a prediction or a goal; it is a choice to bring a certain quality into our lives. Optimism, which is a prediction about the future, has no power. Pessimism is equally irrelevant.
As part of a program on positive psychology, one exercise was for individuals to complete a questionnaire about their strengths. The members noted that this was the first time in their lives they had ever taken a test and gotten good news from the results.
The context of retribution itself is actually an ongoing argument against accountability. This happens each time I want to see a change in “those people.” Those people can be supervisors, top management, the mayor, immigrants, people living in poverty—the list is endless. When I develop prescriptions for “their” transformation, I am making them the cause of our troubles. I am expressing the belief that if “those people” were different, our organization, our community would be better.
To reclaim our citizenship is to be accountable, and this comes from the inversion of what is cause and what is effect. When we are open to thinking along the lines that citizens create leaders, that children create parents, and that the audience creates the performance, we create the conditions for widespread accountability and the commitment that emerges from it. This inversion may not be the whole truth, but it is useful.
Citizenship is a state of being. It is a choice for activism and care. As a citizen you are someone who is willing to do the following:
The role of leaders is not to be better role models or to drive change; their role is to create the structures and experiences that bring citizens together to identify and solve their own issues.
Keeping this focus is especially critical when individuals and institutions meet across boundaries. The key is to structure a way of crossing boundaries so that people become connected to those they are not used to being in the room with. Every gathering, in its composition and in its structure, has to be an example of the future we want to create. If this is achieved in this gathering, then that future has occurred today and there is nothing to wait for. Pretty Zen.
Leadership is convening.
The small group is the unit of transformation.
Questions are more transforming than answers.
Six conversations materialize belonging.
Hospitality, the welcoming of strangers, is central.
Physical and social space support belonging.
reconstructing leader as social architect. Not leader as special person, but leader as a citizen willing to do those things that have the capacity to initiate something new in the world. In this way, leader belongs right up there with cook, carpenter, artist, hair stylist, and landscape designer.
Community building requires a concept of the leader as one who designs experiences for others—experiences that in themselves are examples of our desired future
We change the world one room at a time. This room, today, becomes an example of the future we want to inhabit. There is no need to wait for the future. Creating the experience of belonging in the room we are in at the moment becomes the point, namely that the way we structure the assembly of peers and leaders is as critical as the issue or concerns we come together to address.
The small group is the structure that allows every voice to be heard. It is in groups of three to twelve that intimacy is created. This intimate conversation makes the process personal
The small group is therefore the bridge between our own individual existence and the larger community. In the small group discussion, we discover that our own concerns are more universal than we imagined.
In gatherings where there are more than twenty people in the room—which I am calling the large group—we need to move back and forth from the small group to the large group. The same if there are a thousand in the room.
The geography of this disparity speaks volumes as to who is important (leaders) and therefore who has the future in their hands. Juanita Brown and David Isaacs have expressed the profound insight that every moment is a combination of methodology and metaphor.
Another example: ask people making a powerful statement to the whole community to say it again slowly. They speak for all others who are silent, and in that way they speak for the whole. These can be sacred moments, and repetition honors this. One more detail along these lines: when people speak in a large group, they need to be acknowledged for the courage it took to speak out.
All this is true, but the larger insight, the meta-goal, is to realize that “how you do the mat is how you do your life.” That the practice of yoga itself is your life. Creating good postures, breathing, and flexibility are simply fringe benefits. It is your way of doing the practice itself that is the breakthrough, not some future moment in which a better state of being has been achieved. This way there is nothing to wait for, no future or objective measure of accomplishment to be attained.
Questions are fateful. They determine destinations. They are the chamber through which destiny calls.
Godwin Hlatshwayo
You no longer have the luxury of being a spectator of whatever it is you are concerned about. Regardless of how you answer these questions, you are guilty. Guilty of being an actor and participant in this world. Not a pleasant thought, but the moment we accept the idea that we have created the world, we have the power to change it.
great question has three qualities:
It is ambiguous. There is no attempt to try to precisely define what is meant by the question. This requires each person to bring their own, individual meaning into the room.
It is personal. All passion, commitment, and connection grow out of what is most personal. We need to create space for the personal.
It evokes anxiety. All that matters makes us anxious. It is our wish to escape from anxiety that steals our aliveness. If there is no edge to the question, there is no power.
initiate a new conversation, we have to give a reason for it, and we have to warn people against bringing forth the limitations of the old conversation—in other words, we must guard against solution finding and advice giving.
There are four elements to the setup:
• Name the distinctions.
• Give permission for unpopular answers.
• Avoid advice and replace it with curiosity.
• Ask lower-risk questions first.
One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness.
Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
the conversation has shifted from how to reform the existing health care system to how to create a system that nurtures the health and well-being of each citizen of that community. The cynic would say that this is just semantics; the activist who believes the future is waiting to be created would know that the transformation has begun
Here are the conversations that produce something more than just talk:
Invitation
Possibility
Ownership
Dissent
Commitment
Gifts
Hospitality, the welcoming of strangers, is the essence of a restorative community. Historically, if strangers knocked at your door, you automatically invited them in. They would be fed and offered a place to sleep, even if they were your enemies. As long as they were in your house, they were safe from harm. They were treated as if they belonged, regardless of the past. This is the context of restoration we are seeking.
A Seminar with Purpose and Nothing Practical
Genuine invitation changes our relationship with others, for we come to them as an equal. I must be willing to take no for an answer, without resorting to various forms of persuasion. To sell or induce is not operating by invitation. It is using the language of invitation as a subtle form of control.
This rather purist version of invitation offers one reason why you cannot judge success by numbers of people or scale. The pressure for scale will distort the integrity of the invitation. What caused Ken and me to finally go ahead with our Humanities Series was deciding that if only five people accepted the invitation, that would be a beginning and worth the effort. As it turned out, we had fifty seats open, and they were taken immediately. And after every session, the feedback was consistent: thank you for giving me the space to think on my own, share with others, and not have to worry about pleasing the faculty by reassuring them that what they offered was useful and immediately applicable. This is a glimpse into the face of freedom.
The best invitation I have run across, which got a lot of attention for a while, was from Ernest Shackleton, who in the early 1900s was recruiting for an Antarctic expedition. Supposedly he ran an ad in the London Times that read: “Wanted: Men for Antarctic Expedition. Low Pay. Lousy Food. Safe Return Doubtful.” Perfect. He reportedly got five thousand applicants.
A critical task of leadership is to protect space for the expression of people’s doubts. The act of surfacing doubts and dissent does not deflect the communal intention to create something new. What is critical, and hard to live with, is that leaders do not have to respond to each person’s doubts. None of us do. Authentic dissent is complete simply in its expression. When we think we have to answer people’s doubts and defend ourselves, then the space for dissent closes down. When people have doubts and we attempt to answer them, we are colluding with their reluctance to be accountable for their own future. All we have to do with the doubts of others is get interested in them. We do not have to take them on or let them resonate with our own doubts. We just get interested.
The fear is that we will make people more negative by giving them room for refusal. The mental model of the ostrich. If people say no, it does not create their dissent; it only expresses it. It also does not mean they will get their way. Restorative community is that place where saying no doesn’t cost us our membership in the meeting or in the community. Encourage those who say no to stay—we need their voice.
Same in community. The moment people experience their capacity to dissent or, in softer form, express doubts, and not lose their place in the circle, they begin to join as full-fledged citizens. When dissent is truly valued and becomes the object of genuine curiosity, the chances of showing up as an owner of that circle, that room, that neighborhood go up dramatically.
have heard John McKnight say that advisory groups speak quietly to power, protestors scream at power, and neither chooses to reclaim or produce power. The real problem with rebellion is that it is such fun. It avoids taking responsibility, operates on the high ground, is fueled by righteousness, gives legitimacy to blame, and is a delightful escape from the unbearable burden of being accountable. It brings great value when it occurs; it teaches us, holds us accountable. Occupy Wall Street was a useful wake-up call, but it was too easy to fall asleep after its moment. There was little in its framing of the issue that held citizens accountable for what they do with their money or how they think about their own choice to depart from the free-market culture.
We can ask anything, as long as we do not pressure people in any way to answer
promises that matter are those made to peers, not those made to people who have power over us (parents, bosses, leaders). The future is created through the exchange of promises between citizens, the people with whom we have to live out the intentions of the change. It is to these people that we give our commitments, and it is they who decide if our offer is enough—for the person, for the institution, for the community. Peers have the right to declare that the promise made is not enough to serve the interests of the whole. As in each act of refusal, this is the beginning of a longer conversation.
Promises are sacred. They are the means by which we choose accountability. We become accountable the moment we make our promises public.
If we really want to know what gifts others see in us, we have to wait for our own eulogy, and even then, as the story goes, we will miss it by a few days.
Who we are at work is our life. Who we are in life is our work. The leadership task—indeed the task of every citizen—is to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center. This applies to each of us as an individual, for our life work is to bring our gifts into the world. This is a core quality of a hospitable community, whose work is to bring into play the gifts of all its members, especially strangers.
This means we enforce a complete ban on denying gifts and discussing weaknesses and what is missing. No human problem solving allowed. Often, because they have been so conditioned by the retributive culture that we have experienced, people want negative feedback. This is packaged in the name of learning and growth.
Don’t buy the packaging. The longing for feedback that we can “work on” is really a defense against the terrible burden of acknowledging our gifts and getting about the work of living into them, which we can call “fulfilling our destiny”—language so demanding and imposing, no wonder I would rather keep swimming in the morass of my needs and incompleteness. Save me from constructive feedback. I can stand most of the time; I don’t need reconstruction. Eye contact will do.
Michael Freedman, an urban architect and planner, can show award-winning building designs that no one wants to inhabit and award-winning landscape designs that keep people from congregating and have no relationship to their neighborhood. This is a stunning reality. How could we design buildings and communal spaces that are not friendly to their inhabitants? Not so stunning perhaps when you realize that we design institutions, social structures, and gatherings that have the same effect.
After all the social scientists, historians, economists, biologists, authors, and experts from all disciplines have finished with their explanations, it seems that what I am calling political, avoidable suffering occurs as a result of our disconnectedness and the imbalance of power and resources that is such a dominant feature of our culture. This in no way puts blame on anyone or any segment of society. I do not believe that “those people” exist anywhere in the world. I have simply come to believe that when we are unrelated to those whose lives are so different from ours, suffering increases
When we see a growing distance between economic classes, an increase in protectionism and gatedness, and more resources coming into fewer hands, our capacity to value those exiled to the economic margin is reduced. This is not just about large societal movements; it is also about our growing dependence on experts, our attraction to celebrity and power, our increasing tendency to label and come up with new diagnostic categories in which to pour more services. All of this is rationalized in the name of cost control and greater expertise. These are what I consider the real politics of our lives. Where does choice reside, who decides, and at what moment is the interest of the larger whole given voice?
The efforts to transform our communities will be ignited at some point into a movement and a larger commitment to create this world that works for all. It will likely occur when there is some event to bring together our efforts to (1) construct an alternative economy, (2) bring the faith community out of the buildings and into the neighborhoods, (3) stem the tide of privatization and return to giving priority to the common good, and finally (4) declare—and really mean it—that businesses have a much larger purpose than profit.
If it is true that we are creating this world, then each of us has the power to heal its woundedness. This is not about guilt; it is about accountability. Citizens, in our capacity to come together and choose to be accountable, are our best shot at making a difference.
To act on whatever our intentions might be to make the world better requires something more than individual action. It requires, in almost every case, people who may have little connection with each other, or who may even be on opposite sides of a question, to decide to come together for some common good. The need and the methodology to make this happen simply and quickly are what this book is about.
choose to shift toward a context of possibility instead of staying with a context of deficiency
The word belong has two meanings. First and foremost, to belong is to be related to and a part of something. It is membership, the experience of being at home in the broadest sense of the phrase. Belonging is best created when we join with other people in producing something that makes a place better. It is the opposite of thinking I must do it on my own. That wherever I am, it is all on my shoulders and that perhaps I would be better off somewhere else
To belong is to know, even in the middle of the night, that I am among friends.
Experiencing the kind of friendship, hospitality, and conviviality that constitutes community is not easy or natural in the world we now live in, and that is why the storefronts stay empty, the children stay challenged, and suffering stays around us.
The second meaning of the word belong has to do with being an owner: something belongs to me. To belong to a community is to act as a creator and co-owner of that community. What I consider mine I will build and nurture. The work, then, is to seek in our communities a wider and deeper sense of emotional ownership and communal ownership.
The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole. The key is to identify how this transformation occurs. We begin by shifting our attention from the problems of community to the possibility of community. We also need to acknowledge that our wisdom about individual transformation is not enough when it comes to community transformation. The purpose here is to bring together our knowledge about the nature of collective transformation. A key insight in this pursuit is to accept the importance of social capital to the life of the community
Hospitality is the welcoming of strangers, and generosity is extending an offer with no expectation of return. These are two elements that we want to nurture as we work to create, strengthen, and restore our communities. This will not occur in a culture dominated by isolation and its correlate, fear.
The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, the structure of belonging gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?
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