Faire autrement, voir autrement

Record des deux dernières années!  3 mois sans écrire ici…  Et ce n’est pas par manque d’idées ou de réflexions!  Grisvert roule à tombeau ouvert, ma pratique de stratégie chez Dancause poursuit son chemin et les projets s’accumulent…  Toutes mes énergies y sont donc concentrées.

Ce qui est tout à fait intéressant depuis quelques mois, c’est que les nouvelles idées générées trouvent leur application presque immédiatement dans les projets dans lesquels j’interviens. Ma pratique devient donc un lieu d’expérimentation en temps réel.

Bon. Ceci n’est pas tout à fait une bonne raison pour justifier le fait que j’écris peu..  Je promets donc de faire passer au jour plus régulièrement quelques un des multiples textes en attente.  ;-)

En attendant, je vous oblige à lire un billet de Chris Corrigan qui résume les 12 principes énoncés par Meg Weathley afin de maintenir une communauté en santé. Ceux-ci résument bien le fond de la philosophie d’intervention de Grivert et permettent de cerner les socio-dynamiques fondamentales sur lesquelles repose toute communauté (en fait, tout groupe ayant une vision et une mission communes les amenant à co-agir et co-évoluer). Je me suis permis de traduire les 12 titres afin de faciliter la lecture à ceux qui maîtrisent moins bien l’anglais et pour faciliter les recherches futures :

1. Les personnes soutiennent ce qu’elles créent. Where are you NOT co-creating?  Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design.  Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness.  Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?

2. Les personnes agissent de façon responsable lorsqu’elles sont engagées. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done.  We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love.  What is it you can’t NOT do?  Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances.  Are we working on the issues that people really care about?

3. Les conversations sont le mode qu’ont toujours utilisé les êtres humains pour réfléchis ensemble. C’est à travers les conversations qu’on peut fait émerger du sens et de la vision partagés. It is the primal human organizing tool.  Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together.  These are not “soft” processes.  This is how wars get started and how wars end.  It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.

4. Pour changer les conversations, changez les personnes qui y prennent part. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots.  Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract.  If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation.  If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted.  Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well.  What if your became the mentors to adults?  What if clients directed our services?

5. Attendez-vous à voir le leadership émerger de n’importe où. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting.  That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere.  Who is surprising you with their leadership?

6. Focaliser sur ce qui fonctionne, demandez ce qui est possible… pas ce qui ne va pas. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy.  Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented.  Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed.  Who is already changing the way services are provided?  Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed?  What gives us energy in our work?

7. La sagesse réside en nous. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us.  Rather, the angel is all of us together.”  Experts can’t do it, folks.  They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us.  It has to be.

8. Les échecs sont une réalité du processus de réalisation; le changement se produit en cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.”  How do we act when that happens?  Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?

9. Apprendre est la seule façon de devenir plus intelligent dans ce que l’on fait. Duh.  But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure?  Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.

10.  Le sens qui est accordé au travail à réaliser est un motivateur puissant. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?

11. Les humains peuvent tout affronter, du moment qu’ils demeurent unis. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next.  Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates.  The time for apologizing for relationship building is over.  We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.

12. La générosité, le pardon et l’amour. Ceux-ci sont les éléments les plus importants d’une communauté. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work.  If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness.  This is NOT soft and cuddly work.  Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact.  Love and power are connected.  One is not possible without the other.  Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening.  Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable.  But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?

Merci Chris pour ce résumé.

A+

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