Acting on What We Know: The Environment for Example by Peter Block

Rachel Carson gave us an environmental movement in Silent Spring in 1962. She created a new narrative. Since then, we have accumulated all the evidence we need to prove that our planet, our water, our air, our climate, our land are at risk. In our advocacy for the common good, and in most of our efforts at change and transformation, much of the attention goes to research, the societal cost, the changing world, and what new policies and practices are needed.

This applies to how we advocate not only for the environment, but also how we advocate for social and economic equity, our safety, health, and education. The attention and demands for change are most often aimed at people in leadership positions: elected officials, police chiefs, business executives, superintendents, and, lately, college presidents.

What gets almost no attention is how we engage citizens with each other in pursuit of these important interests. We claim to believe in civic engagement, but what we practice is not engaging.  Citizens are surveyed, persuaded, and asked to write letters. Even when we protest on the streets or attend live meetings and town halls, the attention goes to the front of the room, the podium, the loudspeaker, the panels and experts.

What is lost in this process of persuasion is the understanding that sustainable change always has an essential local and relational component, something called social capital, which rests on regular citizens taking action, with each other and with their own hands.

There are exceptions, though, where the importance of a more relational and intimate form of engagement is being recognized.

I was invited to be a speaker at a water scarcity conference in Calgary. I’m on the plane, about to land, and I’m thinking, what am I doing here? I know nothing about water scarcity. When I arrived, I asked the organizers why they invited me.

They invited me because for years they had been promoting the science about the crisis of water scarcity. But it did not lead to action. This group wanted to learn how to get people to act on what they know and hoped that getting their audience more engaged in the moment and with each other would mobilize action. My job was to give these advocates a taste of how to more powerfully engage others in order to animate people to start doing something about what they knew.

I had an hour. And it is possible, in an hour, to provide the experience of deep connection with strangers. And make it simple and accessible.

We talk about engaging citizens, civic engagement, but when we gather people around a topic of interest, we don’t know what to do with the room. Most rooms you go into, whether it’s a business, community, university, or government setting, there’s somebody standing up front and a lot of people sitting down and everybody’s facing forward. We talk one more time about the need for more research and more action steps for the environment, neighborhood safety, social justice, or whatever we care about. The form the engagement takes is time for questions and answers.  Often the questions need to be written and submitted ahead of time. As if participants have the questions and experts have the answer.

This pattern of engagement is efficient and interesting, but not powerful. What we are blind to is the radical thought that transformation and change comes from the audience, not from the front of the room.

The way we bring people together with each other has more to do with outcomes than clarity of the content.

There is research that says that if you care about the environment, for example, the intensity of relationships among citizens, students, and neighbors has more to do with creating and sustaining change than any amount of expertise and knowledge. The land, the water, native plants are very much in the hands of citizens. One name for this is social capital.

That means that leadership is about connecting people with each other, even though they didn’t join a change effort for that purpose. Most activism is waiting for someone else to change instead of taking cooperative action ourselves, which some call becoming commoners.

An example of this is occurring at the Cincinnati Nature Center. Connie O’Connor and her team are engaging their membership in new forms of connection and agency. Members are being taught how to join their neighbors in exploring what matters, what doubts they have, what gifts they can bring. On the surface the conversation is about what they want to clean up, local development efforts, managing invasive species. The process, however, is about how to organize citizens and have them connected to each other first. Then they can more intentionally address questions of public good: setting limits on economic and real estate development, care for public land and spaces, and taking local land off the market.

This kind of acting on what we know is an alternative to people waiting for someone else to do something. This is where leadership comes in: shifting that narrative, shifting away from the conventional way of analyzing problems, complaining about government, or the schools, or capitalism. That thinking is so appealing because it absolves me of all accountability, and it creates a world where I choose certainty over ambiguity.

Leadership is about connecting people with each other.

People are not accountable when the attention goes to leaders, or ideology, or research. They become accountable when they are powerfully connected to others, especially those they did not know until that moment. The leadership that supports engagement and commitment is the one that says that wherever we are, whatever we care about, we move the action forward when we can get people connected into conversations they are not used to having, with those who are new to them.   And we do it because it produces learning, it produces outcomes, it produces productivity, and it gives us agency. And over time, this is what will heal the planet.

Back to the water scarcity gathering: we had people talk to each other about why water scarcity mattered to them. More important we made space for their resistance to conserving water. It is unusual in a conference to have participants talk about their doubts. When that is encouraged, in small groups, the context shifts from persuasion to dialogue. From certainty to curiosity. Once I tell you my ambivalence, my doubts, there is a greater welcome for all points of view. That’s why the dissent question in our protocols for Activating the Common Good is so powerful: until I say no, my yes doesn’t mean anything. This is also very different from the typical question-and-answer process that is so popular.

There are common good protocols that are about creating a space where it feels safe for participants to have doubts and ambivalence. Questions without answers. When we are invited to share personal things that make us vulnerable to our peers, and know that there will be no consequences, it produces energy and agency. One of the protocols that connects people is to ask, “What’s the no you’ve been postponing?” or “What’s the yes you no longer mean?”  Questions like these allow us to say things as part of the proceedings that, in the dominant culture and in typical advocacy occasions, are considered traitorous.

Another protocol to connect people is for the leader-as-convener to tell people, in small groups, not to help each other. Giving help, giving advice to another human, means I know what’s best for them. Now, if my child is four years old, okay, fine. But if the other is 24 years old, if I’m working with an adult, all that advice giving separates us. It is a form of criticism and control masquerading as generosity.

You get three people, in a small group, in the midst of many more small groups, talking about why sustainability matters to them and what doubts they have, and something has shifted. You ask each to discuss what their contribution is to creating the very problem we came to solve, and something has shifted. The focus now is creating agency among participants. If you just keep reenforcing answers on what to do to assure sustainability, energy is consumed, not created. We leave the room just as we entered. When you share why this matters to you, personally, and what your own complicity in the problem is, energy is created and we leave the room more accountable. Vulnerability evokes movement in what you care most about. Curiosity produces more than proof and need. This is what produces a sense of agency. When I am a listener, I become a consumer. When we begin with connection we become a producer. The focus is not that I’m going to change the world, but on ways we can together change the world that we inhabit. These kinds of connecting protocols become an example of how each of us can become accountable after this gathering is over.

We have all the information and data and technology we need.

The questions and the protocols for what we can call relational activism are the means to change the way we inhabit any room we’re in. There are some awful rooms out there, like courtrooms, city council rooms, auditoriums that are designed for passivity. Examples of an alternative kind of activism are all around us. On Long Island, there is a courtroom and a judge who took all the benches out of the room. He put everybody on the same level. He sits at a table with the accused. And he begins the session by saying, tell me who you are and what you’re up to. And guess what happens? Their recidivism rate is a third of every other courtroom on Long Island.

So, if we care about outcomes, we change the context within which we convene. This context is one where we acknowledge that we start slow and small. It changes the invitation we make for advocates in that it makes clear that in this occasion a different kind of participation will be required. You let people know what they’re getting into.

You declare that an important part will focus on participant connection. We will come together and talk about what our concerns mean to us, what choices we are facing. Things we normally don’t talk about.  And we will ask questions that are about each of us as agents. Let people know they are coming to be a little bit surprised. And we’re still talking about water scarcity, or caring for land, or air, or equity.  We’re still talking about how to deal with invasive plant species. We’re still talking about what to do for greater justice, or whatever.

One more example is another one of the questions we ask in small groups: “What’s the crossroads you’re at, at this stage of the game?” Nobody knows how to defend against that simple question. It creates the space for people to share personal experience and risk vulnerability. And you say, we’re not here to help each other or give advice, we’re here to be curious with each other. As we’re talking, try to see how curious you can be about what others are up to.  And every time you have an opinion, or some research results, or a judgment, let it go. Just be curious about what’s going on in the room, and don’t worry about what is next.

These are simple ways in which profound exchanges can take place and choices can be made. Simple, but not easy.

The most powerful gift to the environment we can make is to connect interested people in unexpected conversations that carry the thread that, together, we are a producer of our future.

The strength of this approach is that it declares that we are here to produce a world that we want to inhabit. The means to do this is by enacting conversations we’ve never had before with people we’re not used to talking to. That’s the task of leadership: convening not persuading. Call it relational activism. That is what produces sustainable commitment, sustainable commons, and a sustainable planet. This what deepens our capacity to act on what we know.