3 Types of Community Conversations
The vibrancy of our community reflects the quality of our community conversations.
How we talk with each other in community about priorities ranging from housing to health and education to safety shapes what we do about those priorities. Three types of community conversations are common:
Organic conversations bubble up from the interactions of individuals and institutions within a community.
Controlled conversations are organized by one or more individuals/institutions with the capacity to convene and the will to define and shape the conversation.
Facilitated conversations are organized by at least a few individuals/institutions with the capacity to convene and a willingness to explore what emerges from the conversation.
Organic conversations emerge from shared observations and experiences. They often fail to result in meaningful, measurable change because participants struggle to engage effectively with individuals and institutions with divergent perspectives. Most of the organic community conversations about racial justice and racist policing spawned by the public, videotaped murder of George Floyd demonstrated the challenge of translating such conversations into positive change.
When individuals and institutions respond to such organic conversations by convening diverse players to engage in a more structured conversation, change is more possible. However, the level of change is limited by the constraints the convener puts on the conversation. People with power prefer framing the conversation in ways that assure they stay in power. This practice limits both who is welcome in the room and what is discussed. For example, a few philanthropists convened a community conversation on education in their community. Unfortunately, their assumptions about the performance of the public school district framed the conversation and the effort that evolved was limited to “fixing” the district. The conversation never surfaced other important issues, including how the practices of those with power limited the community’s ability to address the roles systemic racism and income inequality played in education.
Controlled conversations are often framed as “task forces,” “summits,” or “blue ribbon task forces.” Some communities love hosting such conversations and seemingly have a warehouse full of the 15-step strategic plans that emerge from them. That those plans are rarely implemented and even more rarely result in meaningful, positive change does not keep such communities from continuing to hold them.
Controlled conversations preserve the inequitable status quo.
Facilitated conversations are rooted in a refusal to tolerate the inequitable status quo. And they are possible only when those with authority are eager to share power with others. The conveners of such conversations recognize that they themselves contribute to and benefit from that status quo. They give up the power of controlling the conversation and instead trust a facilitator to move the community forward together. The facilitator is responsible to the community not the convener. What forward looks like is not pre-determined by either the convener or the facilitator. Rather it emerges from the facilitated conversation. How decisions are made also emerge through facilitation.
And enduring, positive change is possible when something else emerges from the facilitated conversation: A deep, lasting commitment from the participants in the conversation to hold themselves and each other accountable for achieving that change. In his book Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane shares examples of how facilitated conversations catalyze meaningful change, including peace in Colombia and the transformation of a First Nation health system in Canada. Such facilitation, Kahane writes, “offers an opportunity to contribute to bending the moral universe toward justice.”
What type of conversation do you want your community to have next?
