In an environment where cynicism prevails, the challenge of tapping into new and creative actions seems daunting at best. To me, the driving questions at this point revolves around “how do we create a stronger sense of belonging, marked by authentic engagement (in its many forms), in our community”.

When we talk about community, belonging, engagement, systemic barriers, authentic dialogue, inclusive processes etc.. we are talking complexity. How do we have a meaningful and sense making discussion when we are constantly wearing our silo centred, agency representative hat? It’s a bit like seeing the fairy dancing on the head of the pin. You know that fairy is there but you just have to hold the pin in the right way to see him/her.

I think that one of the ways to see that fairy is to somehow suspend or put on the shelf for the moment our agency representation hat and just wear our community citizen hat. When we do that, we can engage with each other and talk about what community means, where does belonging fit into community and what might our community look like if we waved our magic wand and on and on. I think there would be wonderful lessons in that discussion that we can build on and potentially influence policy makers in our organizations. Even more importantly, those lessons can impact us on individual (personal) levels as community citizens, potentially creating a ripple effect in our relationships within our spheres of belonging.

This video by Mark Schenk from Anecdote expands the explanation of the Cynefin model. I like this model as a tool that can help us understand what we are getting into with our community roundtable planning discussions. I think there are some great tips in the Cynefin framework that we can incorporate in our planning for of the roundtable. I especially like the simplicity of the Cynefin framework and how it points to the importance of looking at patterns and building on patterns that show promise.

In my mind, when you choose to follow a plan that has cooperation or collaboration as the central unifying approach your intentions and approach is governed by your choice of these two concepts. I recommend (hope) that we in community round table style meetings, the planners don’t have both approaches in play at the event because that will be confusing and turn off attendees (i.e. The people who wear their resident hat will seek open dialogue, the agency representative person will seek problem solving and solutions).

I believe cooperation is the best course to follow for open forum, town hall style discussions.  If the choice is collaboration, I believe the event will end up defaulting to a agency driven agenda that has the usual need, problem solving, solution, outcomes etc as the over riding discussion and we won’t get very far in the goal of fostering community – engagement conversations.

Looking at Jarache’s matrix below, I see the open forum roundtable events as something that is attempting to tap into emergent (forming) dialogue and it resides in the complex, Networks, Emergent, Cooperation level. Choosing a cooperation approach will require us to structure the round table event with a well framed invitation, clear dialogue, positive, inviting, driven type questions, size of small groups discussion, reporting back to large group etc.

What do you think, cooperation or collaboration?