Bringing diverse stakeholders together in a way that enables them to work effectively on their “stuck” issues is essential to what we do. While group members may be committed to the convening question, they may not agree on what the actual issue is, what is causing it, or what should be done about it.
One of the outcomes that we try to create through our Change Lab work is systemic change. While quick fixes can help in the short run, long-term fundamental change is really what is needed to address the complex social challenges facing the world today.
While participants in skill-building workshops can learn a lot in the confines of a conference room, it’s different to talk about change theoretically than to actually start changing ourselves and the systems we’re working in. To take advantage of the opportunity that workshops and trainings afford for beginning change processes, at Reos we use a specific issue as the basis for each course. In capacity-building sessions where we have a group that already has a focus, we use that topic. In broader public courses, we try to choose an issue that affects and involves everyone.
The purpose of the Change Lab is to enable groups to take concerted actions that will ultimately cause a deep shift in the system they are trying to affect. After members spend time immersing themselves in the problematic situation, developing collective wisdom, becoming aware of their role in the “mess,” and understanding what they must do now (using some of the tools described in previous newsletters), they arrive at the point of collective action and co-creation. To be effective, they need to find their “allies”—others in the group who have interest in a similar activity or approach.
In the U-Process, the bottom of the “U” presents workshop leaders with several facilitation challenges. First, by its very nature, presencing is thought of as a solo activity. But because this is an area where we often find ourselves needing to let go of some of the things we hold dearly, it can be scary. Having the support of the other workshop participants can be extremely useful.
The Change Lab process is systemic, participative, and creative, allowing new possibilities, insights, relationships, and innovations to emerge. One of its main tenets is to create systemic results—outcomes that will shift whole systems.
As our colleague, Bill Torbert once quipped, “In the 1960s it was said that ‘If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem.’ Today we say, ‘If you aren't part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution.’”
Dialogue Interviews are one of the most reliable and versatile tools of the Change Lab process. They are also foundational in that they can be used to build participants’ capacity in a number of different skills—from seeing, suspending and redirecting to talking and listening empathetically and generatively—and they can occur in many parts of the Change Lab itself. Dialogue interviews can help us engage with stakeholders during the convening phase; they can help us tap into the interviewees’ commitment and determine whether they may want to participate in a Lab process.
How many times do we walk into a workshop and find ourselves wondering whether or not we really want to be there, questioning whether the session will be a good use of our time and/or money, or thinking about how much we’ve been looking forward to it and waiting for it to finally start? Then once it begins, we trudge through the standard introductions and go through an overview of the course material. What a slow way to start a session.
One of the critical capacities that we need to develop to do social change work more effectively is “seeing with fresh eyes.” MIT professor Edgar Schein says, “We do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.” How can we practice really seeing what is happening, rather than just seeing what we expect or already believe to be true? One way is to use a “check-in.”
