Apricot blossoms against the blue sky of an unseasonably warm winter's day
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.
(Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book X, Chapter XVII, emphasis mine)
In the last month or so I’ve attended two events whose purpose was to get a group of people to think creatively and do some collective problem-solving, and I want to write about a sense of frustration that I felt at both of these meetings. I hope I end up with something to say about how we ought to approach community conversations about big changes and challenges.
The first of these events was a meeting organized by the City of Powell River and facilitated by Emma Levez and CaroleAnn Leishman of GreenStep Solutions. The second was last week’s roundtable titled “Rebuilding Regional Resilience”, which was hosted by Transition Town Powell River. At both meetings we were given the opportunity of brainstorming to come up with possible next steps, and at both meetings I ended up feeling that something had gone wrong. I’m sure that brainstorming has its place in group work, but it’s a tool with a specific use and I think it’s being misapplied.
It’s clear to many people that we’re up against some very serious challenges: social, economic, and environmental ones, to name three dimensions along which we can can expect disruption as a result of short-sightedness, cussed human nature, or because we have a long history of letting the wrong people make the big decisions. Many talented people of good faith are working hard to deal with the challenges we face; many of those people are the ones who showed up at either or both of the two meetings in question. They are all working on various aspects of the predicaments that we find ourselves in. I keep seeing the same faces at all these events, so it’s not a huge subculture in the regional community. (Admittedly it’s hard to know how much serious work goes on out there without being represented at meetings like these.)
But many of us are working in isolation from one another and have little shared culture or experience. I see the recent Chamber of Commoners evening as a way to start developing a common culture among the many disparate pieces of the counterculture in the region. It was a great start, but we need many more such events, formal and informal, in order to nourish a clearer set of shared missions and visions, not to mention a sense that we can trust one another. For now, we are to a great extent brought together by a very broad vision of a different world and a future radically unlike the one that most people take for granted — a future of declining resources, endangered ecosystems, and economic degrowth. But that is more of a worldview than a movement; and we have many overlapping worldviews, and a larger number of less overlapping movements.
Most of us are probably baffled by how best to proceed in face of these enormous challenges. I know I am. We’re all casting about for ideas and possible solutions, not to mention trying to stay sane and cheerful. Our time is limited, so we want to be as effective as we can; but where to focus our energies: buy a farm? develop micro-hydro? run workshops? go off-grid? build bike trails? It’s overwhelming. There are no obvious right answers.
Another source of cognitive dissonance comes from the apathy of the general population: in both of these meetings the question came up of how we can communicate more effectively with the people who don’t show up and don’t seem to have any consciousness of the tremendous changes ahead. And at both meetings, that questioned hung in the air — unanswered — unanswerable.
And so we brainstorm. And, for me, here’s where things go off the rails. Now, I’m no trained facilitator, but I think of brainstorming as a technique for coming up with a broad range of possible solutions to a pretty well-defined problem. The essence of the technique is that everyone in the room should feel free to throw out any idea or half-baked thought, no matter how impractical or bizarre — the aim, as the name suggests, is to create a wild storm of lateral thinking, to crack apart the well-worn tracks of linear thought, to build a safe space for the unpredictable and the weird. In order for this to happen, the problem to be solved or the question to be answered ought to be something narrower than, “Given that the future is wide-open and waiting to be created, what might we do?” And the people in the room, I believe, need to be united by a pretty clear shared vision and sense of purpose.
I don’t believe that you can bring a group of people into a room, throw around some fairly vague and broad possibilities, and then expect them to converge quickly enough to produce anything other than a gigantic and disconnected shopping list of possible actions. And that’s more or less what happened in both meetings. I can’t deny that it’s a pleasant activity, but it starts to feel a little desperate after a few minutes, especially when the ideas being shot out are all over the map and don’t easily fit together.
Faced with a dizzying range of possible actions — to be done when? by whom? how? with what money? — some participants, not surprisingly, felt obliged to retreat from the freedom of the brainstorm to the safety of the known and the tested. And the failed. In both meetings, this took the form of offering reasons why such-and-such an idea would not work (this happened during the brainstorming session in the City’s meeting, and in the discussion after the session in the Transition meeting). In both cases I found this to be utterly dispiriting.
At the Transition meeting, we broke out to talk about some of the ideas raised during the brainstorming session.
We talked about the idea of creating neighbourhood-based workshops of shared tools and equipment and got to hear all about how impractical that idea was, how the tools would be lost and broken, how it would hurt existing businesses, and so on.
We talked about shared or free bicycles and got to hear how City staff would be forever pulling abandoned bikes out of ditches.
We talked about the waste of plastic in school lunches and got to hear why health concerns mean that we can’t do much about that problem.
In other words, the group’s reaction to a brainstorming session was to put the genii back in the bottle, to clamp down on the possibilities opened up, to return all tray tables and seat backs to their upright position, and to prepare for re-entry to Planet Normal.
I want to be very clear that this reaction of paralysis is not (wholly) the fault of the organizers of these events. Nor is it (wholly) the fault of the attendees. Where does it come from? I’ll take that question as a jumping-off point for next week’s post.
