Community

How wonderful it was to come across Tieke, our saddleback, black with its chestnut coat and shining wattle. Noisily and vigorously foraging along the branch in the early spring sunlight. Its joyful call of long and short notes a chorus to the surrounding verses of the tui. Once widespread, but now limited to predator-free islands and sanctuaries like this one only a few kilometres from the city centre. It has suffered, like many, the predations wrought by mis-intentioned human behaviour. Yet, here it is outside its sanctuary giving me pause on my daily walk to think of the community of citizens who work to protect what would otherwise be precarious. Hard working citizens with a collective intent and commitment to conserving, protecting and nurturing the precious - by building community and the structures, relationships, systems and processes that sustain it. 

Community seems to be experiencing a resurgence in our world. And what a wonderful thing that is.

As people seek more meaningful re-connection with each other, with nature and with a more hopeful future. 

I don't hear 'community' talked about a lot in the organisational world that I inhabit in my work world. The conversation is almost entirely about a persistent litany of problems to be solved or fixed. Challenges, deficits, gaps, things that remain broken. A client recently identified 57 sub-categories after a thorough engagement with their people! So solutions are earnestly sought in frameworks, methods, work groups, services and technology - surely someone, somehow, is smart enough to have an answer that will fix them all. If only we had time! Sure many problems can be fixed, solved or completed with clever bits and bytes or post-it notes or scrums and huddles. But some can't! 

Seemingly ever present challenges with trust, communication, accountability, commitment, performance, leadership, awareness, willingness to change, joined-up-ness, systemic action - to name a few 'messy' challenges. 

These messy challenges, that I find almost everywhere, require something different. A more meaningful attention to the source from which they emerge - the thinking, seeing, acting and being of a community of people, vested with interest in their work. The social fabric. Imagine if we stopped, for a little while, trying to control and manage peoples' inner worlds (through cultural interventions and strong-arm attempts to coerce) and outer worlds (through structural and systems interventions). 

And worked, for some little, regular time, on building a more cohesive, more intelligent and aware, more responsive, more caring and a more powerful community, or communities, within an organisation. 

What would be possible? Less stress, less friction, less stuck-ness, less value-less. More potential realised, more resilience, more joy, more social contribution and true value, more love. Perhaps? So what is the work of building community within organisations? A community that is as alive as that Tieke on a sunny spring morning. Alive to its own possibilities. Embracing a collective ownership and a collective responsibility for the shared present and the shared emerging future. 

There is no softer, yet harder work than this. 

It calls us all to engage in more genuine, humanly dialogue with each other. A genuine dialogue that reveals the whole from the parts of different perspectives, different experiences and different identities. A humanly dialogue that embraces all voices, at all levels, internal and external, positive and negative, inquiry and advocacy, and challenge and support. A genuine dialogue that is suspicious of superficial understanding and easy answers. A humanly dialogue that explores and reveals deeper underlying assumptions that shape the sense we make of our world and our own identity. And can slow down enough to do so. 

A genuine humanly dialogue that truly values reflection and the patience to allow a deeper understanding and more systemic change to emerge. On the inside and the outside. And find time to do so! 

These are the precious conversations to be held in today's world of "don't just stand there, do something ... leanly, agilely". But who has the courage to stop, now and then, not just to do something, but stand there? To reflect and pay some attention to the social fabric that shapes the thinking, seeing, doing and being of our everyday work existence.

We need to better balance the persistent and urgent work demands for action and quick results with a little quiet, regular and deep reflection ... together. 

Kim and Bernie