In my book on building community, “Instructions From The Cook” (DesigningLife Books 2008), we talk about “recipes” for building community. Here’s a recipe.
What if countries across as many times zones as possible collaborate to create a program where people in any participating countries can spend 3 weeks every 3 years as “exchange workers” in other participating countries? They would be required to learn the language and culture and post appreciation stories on YouTube, and would be given free travel and coordination by the program.
Imagine the incredible collapse of cultural, political, religious, and economic walls.
If we decentralized strip and other reified shopping centers in the suburbs, we would perhaps see the emergence of mixed use/zoning walking/biking neighborhoods. Think of places like Lincoln Park in Chicago. It just takes an ounce of development imagination and political will.
The power of this vision is that it would create the kind of architectural metaphors that would spark new possibilities of small neighborhood businesses, like sustainable products and service businesses that could provide local living economic options to the bog boxes that ship local money out of the local economy faster than lightening. Imagine that.
The brilliant writer and film maker Sherman Alexie’s film, Smoke Signals, features a short chant that goes:
John Wayne’s teeth,
Are they false, are they real?
Are they plastic, are they steel?
It is an inquiry into the authenticity of multiple myths, not the least of which addresses the monolithic heroism of the famous film star where, uncannily, “the cowboys always win.”
More and more communities are wisely and thankfully losing faith in the silver bullet solution of the “hero”, whether locally or non-locally originated, who will “save” people from their collective deficiencies. These are the communities where authentic heroes have one message to the people in the community: “When you’re wondering where the leader is on this (name an issue), pick up a mirror.”
In all of the communities I’m working with around the country more and more people get that leader is convener of new conversations. Period.
A great example of cooperation, collaboration, and co-opetition:
Nike has partnered with nine organizations, including Yahoo, Best Buy, Creative Commons, IDEO, Mountain Equipment Co-Op, nGenera, Outdoor Industry Association, salesforce.com, and 2degrees to form the GreenXchange, a Web-based marketplace that Nike claims will allow “companies [to] collaborate and share intellectual property (IP) which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.” In other words, it’s a giant think tank for corporate sustainability.
The idea for GX came from “Wikinomics” author Don Tapscott and Nike’s Sustainable Business and Innovation Lab. The lab imagines that one possible subject for the GX is Nike’s Environmentally Preferred Rubber, which has 96% fewer toxins than Nike’s traditional rubber. If licensed on the GX, other footwear companies like Mountain Equipment Co-Op might be able to get greener footwear to market more quickly than if they had to come up with similar technology by themselves.
Participation in the GX doesn’t mean companies have to reveal all information about a certain product–instead, they are offered a number of licensing structures, including research and attribution recognition, non-competitive use and simple fee structures.
In a sense, the GX reminds us of Walmart’s recently launched sustainability consortium–a conglomeration of non-profits, companies, and educational institutions working to develop methodologies, tools and strategies to make supply networks more transparent. It’s not a coincidence that these organizations are starting to pop up at the same time. Corporations are finally realizing that sustainability is the key to thriving in the coming decades. And they will fail or succeed together.
From Fast Company
One of the things communities can do is have people collaborate on live web-cam-type shows that feature reporting previews to and real time updates from live community events like concerts, classes, yoga classes, live music, poetry readings, contests, and walking tours. The idea is that you could log onto your community web-tv site and see what’s happening in your community. Think about the possibilities, and perhaps a great student project.
The brilliant social scientist, Alfie Kohn, notes that:
In a comprehensive review of 245 classroom studies that found a significant achievement difference between cooperative and competitive environments, David Johnson and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota reported that 87 percent of the time the advantage went to the cooperative approach.
He argues that student, school, and district rankings foster a kind of competition that in theory should engender innovation, but instead provokes risk-aversion and the demise of innovation. Aside from that, the incredible unknown amounts of evidence are clear that cooperation and collaboration is hugely more effective in student performance than competition. This is the data which is a weak voice beneath the din of mythologies that continue otherwise.
I’m working on an article suggesting how we need to rethink the whole notion of competition.
In the “good ol’ days” when “building community” wasn’t even in people’s vocabulary, competition was revered as a sacred right and good for the whole. One of the clearest indicators of failure and irresponsibility was to be “non-competitive” as a business, non-profit, or institution. Eat or be eaten: one of the hallmarks of the reptilian brain.
So does competition continue to be an unquestioned value when we’re building community? Does it get defined any differently in a context where community has become more important collectively than zero-sum self-interest and the assumption that one’s gain can only occur at the cost of another’s loss?
Love to hear your thoughts and other questions … stay tuned.
Postscript: here is a brief article on breakthrough considerations: Rethinking Competition in a Local Living Networked Economy
Back this week at the Highlander Center in the Knoxville TN region, the training center MLK used to organize and energize the civil rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s. I’m training a group of the country’s brightest and most talented sustainability leaders in high engagement leadership.
People are amazingly invigorated by the notion that leaders must engage communities in the common consciousness of their strengths. After practicing this, one of the people in the group reflected that even a short time practicing a collective obsession with strengths “makes you feel like you just want to get going” in the direction of your vision.
This is the power of a strengths-focus. It’s why there is absolutely no power in conversations about problems, needs, faults, disappointments, deficiencies, and weaknesses - if our intention is to create new connections and the possibilities of a future different from the past.
Spent time this week with good friend and national economic development guru, Ed Morrison, whose model and mine completely align in principles, practices, and power. I love his languaging in work with communities around the country. He uses 4 incredibly simple and powerful questions to focus and engage people in what we call “strategic doing”:
1. What could we do together?
2. What should we do together?
3. What will we do together?
4. What can we learn together?
They are the functional opposite of questions that prevent community and economic devcelopment:
What studies and committees should we form?
What will other people do for us?
What are we lacking?
What kind of permission can we get for what we might do?
In the yogic traditions and practices, there are seven primary energy centers in the space of the body. When they are activated and aligned, we experience wholeness in mind, body, and spirit.
My model for designing our lives is centered around 7 time chakras, all related to how we define our desired future. They are what we envision: the next 20 years out, the next 2 years, 2 quarters, 2 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, and 2 hours. When our sense of each time chakra aligns with clarity, our life becomes whole.
So, wholeness is when our dream 20 years out for ourselves and our world is reflected in what we want as possible 2 years from now, 2 quarters, 2 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, and 2 hours from now. What we do in the next two hours will perfectly reflect the principles and qualities of our dynamic vision of 20 years from now.