The Question
Consider the first mile and the last mile.
Consider the facilitator as a link.
Current thoughts
1. Here is a definition:
A story is a share-able package with a lesson.
2. Here an assertion:
‘Communities will collect stories when they see that they have value to themselves.’
All of the communities that we considered told stories in the sense that they collect experience that in time evolves into a shared narrative that in still further time evolves into a communal myth. We wondered if a myth was ever just a narrative or did it always capture the wisdom of the community.
What we did decide that it was unusual for a community on its own initiative to stop and to reflect on an experience and to learn from that specific experience with a view to improvement. The role of the facilitator is to develop this skill within the community. The community will do this when it seeks the value of learning from its own experience (the community learning cycle). The recognition of the value will be increased when the community has the opportunity to learn-and-share with its local peers. Ultimately we would like them to recognise value in the use of the Global Knowledge Asset and we would thus be able to encourage them to contribute to the Global Knowledge Asset.
3. The task of the facilitator is to ensure that the community sees that stories serve their own interest.
This is another assertion:
‘The ‘documentation’ of an event is the process by which we learn from that experience. This documentation is a story’
Here documentation may mean no more than reflecting on the experience. It may extend to writing a book or making a film about it. In all cases, it is a creative process in which we make sense of the experience and thus learn from it. There is no guarantee that what we learn is ‘correct’.
When the community and the facilitator see a story in this light, then the creation of a story (stories) by the community and for the community is a natural part of the learning cycle.
In many parts of the world, communities have much more experience in this than we do. We should identify such communities and learn from them.
3. The next task of the facilitator is to give the community the opportunity to use these stories as part of the process of learn-and-share.
At its most modest, this may mean no more than bringing neighbouring communities together to share their experiences and stories so that they learn from them. It may be possible to organise their participation in the learn-and-share process at a larger scale. The community then learns that its stories have a value to others and that the stories of others have value to themselves.
4. What do we need to do to take learn-and-share to the global scale i.e. with a Knowledge Asset?
In the best case, the community can interact directly with the Knowledge Asset to use the asset and can interact with the global team to contribute to the asset. In this ideal case the role of the facilitator is to make the community aware of the possibility and to support them and encourage them in their interaction.
In the vast majority of cases, we know that language and technology will be a barrier to such interaction. The role of the facilitator is going to depend on the nature and size of the barrier that separates the community from the Knowledge Asset.
If there is a principle that the facilitator follows, it is that the community has to find value in the Knowledge Asset before it is asked to make time and effort available to contribute to the Knowledge Asset. So the facilitator should seek, in the first instance, to make available the Knowledge Asset as a resource for the community (when it makes its action plan, for example).
5. We discussed a lot the role of the facilitator in the story telling and collecting process. Is the facilitator part of the story telling process? Or is the facilitator someone who makes it easier for the community to tell its story. Ricardo's background places him firmly in the community. Phil's background places him firmly on the 'outside'. We used the metaphor of being in the steam with the community or being on the bank encouraging the community. The Constellation word 'accompaniment' doesn't really help the question.
We got to the phrase. 'The experience is yours .The learning is mine.' So the community could have an experience, but the process of learning from that experience could belong to a different group. So it wasn't necessarily the community learning from the experience. This is a very interesting topic but I don't think that we have got to the bottom of this. Who owns the story...so the experience plus the lesson
RW: I agree completely with the first assertion: that communities will collect stories when they see that they have value for themselves. And, in fact, all communities do "collect" stories, in the sense that they become accumulated over time. Experience becomes integrated into the collective mythology of a community - their own narrative arc - and people reference those stories all the time to illustrate commonly held theories (principles; opinions) about life in that place. The medium for the transmission of those stories varies from place to place, as does the mechanism for sharing them, although oral/verbal transfer appears to be the most effective. The more formal collection of stories requires intent and purpose, and this is less commonly in place.
The challenge to The Constellation CLCP is, in part, around positioning, and a way for the CLCP process to adequately embed facilitators and coaches within community life. If the spontaneous narrative arc of a community is compared to a stream, how does CLCP enable Constellation coaches/facilitators to wade into the stream, and be engaged by it? This is perhaps another level of participation in response.
There are some practical considerations for how to get better at doing this, I think, at least at the point of collecting stories:
1. I wonder what the next evolutionary stage might be for the CLCP, and whether there are ways to deepen our practise (particularly around more mature responses, where the first stages of CLCP have been executed) so as to better supplement the use of the instruments (self-assessment, etc.) with better integration of a community-counseling type approach. This has the potential to:
(a) qualitatively deepen the application of SALT as a way of working and thinking
(b) build in a more story-sensitive process (positioning; wading into the narrative stream)
2. Stories accumulate over time, as does trust within a community. Trust, I think, is a significant co-factor in getting close enough to local action to be truly "listening", and so it's worth thinking about time-investment with some locations in order to build that foundation. Practically, I think we need to think about how The Constellation commits to the longitudinal accompaniment of a few maturing responses around the world over time, to deepen our listening (for content/story) and learning (about how to listen and reflect and capture), and our technical skill for the narrative approaches that generate good stories. This will likely have implications for our business model, and the way we negotiate partnerships to finance this kind of accompaniment.
3. We could begin to talk about how to better standardise the requirements on coaches/facilitators within The Constellation, linked to a more universal "package" of documentation/capturing that is designed and built into CLCP coaching process. Personally, I don't think that our capturing/communications work from field-assignments is uniformly strong enough, or qualitatively deep enough. (and again, this will have relevance to the way our process is designed each time anyone hits the field).
4. We need ways to strengthen support at the institutional level of The Constellation (GST) so that facilitators and coaches are helped to:
(a) edit their stories so that they read better (structure, content, messaging)
(b) analyse and interpret those stories so that they adequately extract/construct meaning
(c) link the stories to a clearly defined set of themes/principles around which The Constellation and communities are learning/making a response.
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Thoughts it prompted to Geoff
You clearly had a terrific conversation! Your notes inspired so many thoughts I want to capture some of them. Sorry if it occurs like a ramble, thats the way my mind works!
Numbered by Phil’s numbers.
2. ‘Communities will collect stories when they see they have value to themselves.’
My experience is that the first story teller often has to be encouraged to tell their story. Often they think it is not worth sharing, and that they haven’t the skills to articulate it clearly. Once one story is told others think “well my story is at least as good (=valuable) as that one.” A bit like telling jokes - someone’s joke or anecdote often opens the floodgates to a multitude of others. The encouragement required may be as simple as listening and saying “Wow! thats good.” Asking a few questions may embolden the teller to say more.
For example, each of us has a travel story to tell, usually something that went wrong :). If I share my story of when I didn’t get a visa for India because I thought it was still part of the Empire, the message is remember to check if a visa is required before you travel. My story prompts others to share their story, sometimes reinforcing the message and sometimes giving another message. We can gather a checklist of what to check before and when travelling. We don’t have to experience all of these personally in order to learn and change our actions. The checklist itself is bland but the experiences memorable.
3. Your assertion on documentation. I assert that ‘documentation’ is the process of making tacit knowledge explicit. Even if shared orally it is codified and hence easier to share widely. On the other hand some of the richness of knowledge can be lost, knowledge usually better obtained by watching someone or questioning them. I really like and agree with your assertion that it is a creative process in which we make sense of the experience and thus learn from it. Sometimes I believe we don’t have to take the story literally, as long as we can make some sense for us. I’ve just been listening to a TED talk and the learning I took from it was tangential to the message the talker was giving. And my learning inspired me to action.
Thinking aloud here: When a community creates a story, is it like my example of the forgotten visa? One person shares a story and others agree and build on it until it becomes shared and with a common message. What I have seen to date is that a story is owned by an individual. If a story I tell you resonates then you tell it to someone else, it will not be quite the same story and it becomes yours as the teller. I share stories I have heard and even if I preface it with “Here is a story I heard in a fishing village in Uganda” it is still my story.
3. second one! Some of that richness can be recovered by giving the receiving community the opportunity to talk about it in their own context. A community or an individual learns that their story has a value to others when the listeners exhibit active listening by asking questions or by visibly writing notes for instance.
4. I totally like the principle of helping the community find value in the Knowledge Asset before being expected to contribute to them.
5. ‘In the stream’ I don’t believe it has anything to do with backgrounds Phil. My observation is that you are more comfortable with being an observer but once you jump in you enjoy yourself (witness your relationship with the Constellation as one example). I also remember you sharing the story of declining to sit at the top table on one of your visits in Africa. The impact of you sitting with people in the room reframed the conversation and changed the dynamic of the meeting. Ricardo you mention the importance of trust. One of the things I have learned is that we in the Constellation never give enough time to building the relationships and developing trust before we share our methods and elicit stories. There is no better way than the Salvation Army approach to SALT which is making consistent visits over a long period of time. Their stories come out naturally. A substitute of sorts is to visit a community with someone who has been doing that, when you are trusted by association. I have experienced that in Karnataka with local NGOs who made regular visits to villages, in Woking with Alison visiting asylum seekers and in Thailand with Usa visiting people living with AIDS. People felt comfortable to share their stories, stories which still have a big emotional impact on me.
In BP I was exposed to Breakthrough Thinking by JMW consultants. One of their concepts was ‘in the stands’ or ‘on the pitch’ (baseball analogy), the idea being that if you were on the pitch you were sharing commitment to a dream or outcome even if you didn’t know how at that precise moment. I prefer the metaphor of ‘in the stream’ or ‘on the bank better’.
‘The experience is yours. The learning is mine’ I too stumbled over this. I believe firmly that learning together is a powerful way to learn. What we each take away as learning may be personal, but the exchange of ideas helps us each move on in our thinking. So I think that is suggesting there is something between the experience and the learning.
Ricardo -
“ Experience becomes integrated into the collective mythology of a community” Is that the same as Culture (of a community, organisation, nation)? Your words make it sound like that to me, though I hadn’t thought about it like that before.
Your thoughts about wading into the stream had me think about the work Claire Campbell has done with Matthew and others on communities affected by fire in Victoria. They have embedded facilitators within community life.
Standardising requirements for coaches and facilitators seems heavy handed though I am tempted. It lands on me like teaching rather than learning. I have failed miserably in encouraging the use of templates for storytelling for instance. Again it is probably about allowing people to see the value of it to them before expecting it of them.
So far we have resisted editing, preferring instead to let people tell their own story their own way and have them post their own blog. We try eliciting the key message and other details by asking questions. I know that stories exist in other places that may help deliver the message better. Again we are back to who’s story is it? What face and name is associated with the blog? If the blogs become swamped with a limited number of faces then it will turn off the very community we have nurtured.