Meeting Process
In the early days of the peace and civil rights movements in the 60s, most meetings I was involved with were profoundly dysfunctional, as were most of the anti-war coalition meetings I attended in the early 2000s. This was also true for the community meetings at my first ashram and within my spiritual community. Attending such poorly conducted meetings was enormously energy-draining and made it seem beyond our capacity to make any headway with the social, political, or environmental issues we had come together to address.
Good Meeting Process
In the early days of the peace and civil rights movements in the 60s, most meetings I was involved with were profoundly dysfunctional, as were most of the anti-war coalition meetings I attended in the early 2000s. This was also true for the community meetings at my first ashram and within my spiritual community. Attending such poorly conducted meetings was enormously energy-draining and made it seem beyond our capacity to make any headway with the social, political, or environmental issues we had come together to address.
Successful social change work requires excellent group process and meeting skills. There are important tools available that have the potential to substantially enhance our capacity to organize, work together, govern ourselves, live in harmony with one another and our environment, and thereby expedite the evolution of humanity’s collective destiny, which I understand to be our becoming a mature species capable of living in harmony with one another and our environment.
I had a major learning opportunity about the need for such group process and meeting skills in 2001, after the enormously successful Creating Our Future (COF) conference I organized on Memorial Day weekend that included Ram Dass and Julia Butterfly Hill amongst other notable speakers. Afterwards, there was quite a strong impetus towards forming a new, ongoing COF organization. There were follow-up meetings and workshops, with much initial enthusiasm. However, I squelched everyone’s enthusiasm about taking part because I was trying to control every aspect of what we were doing out of a desire to “do it right,” perhaps out of fear that we might not succeed. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: “Worry is prayer for things we don’t want.” Within a year, I had pretty much run this lovely new idea into the ground.
By the end of that year, I realized with some surprise that I did not know how to hold a vision, share it with others, and then allow them full participation in developing and shaping a collective vision. Since working effectively with others is so important to me, I decided to look for successful examples, primarily within the peace activist community with which I was most familiar. For the most part, I found that the organizations were either very grassroots-based, using a primitive consensus model in which it was very difficult for singular leadership to emerge; or, they were top-down, with limited avenues for grassroots participation in major decisions. I also found that meeting process in most organizations, and institutions at every level, left and right, social change, governmental, wherever people work together towards some collective end, administrative, production, education, governance, etc., was very primitive, making it virtually impossible for the greater collective wisdom to emerge.
My search for more effective and strategic meeting and project-planning processes led me to discover the United Religions Initiative (URI), which developed a meeting and governance process that seemed to really work. Beginning with their global summit in 1996, URI involved thousands of people from many different religions, spiritual practices, and indigenous traditions in establishing the URI Charter in 2000. They used a brilliant meeting process, Appreciative Inquiry, developed by David Cooper- rider, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, combined with the Chaordic Process developed by Dee Hock, founder of the VISA credit card. Impressed, I began to study both processes.
There is now a panoply of dialogue and deliberation processes available that can readily help any association, organization, or governing body achieve common ground between factions, solve pressing problems, and garner the highest collective wisdom. This is particularly relevant for progressive social change agents, because we must learn to work together strategically within our respective communities and organizations, and then in building alliances between organizations with shared goals and objectives. It took a long time for me to grasp that using good meeting and planning process in working on social change projects and campaigns is as important as their goals and objectives — first, because it is necessary to be effective, and second, because it is important to create and share examples of how to work together.
Successful social change work requires excellent group process and meeting skills. There are important tools available that have the potential to substantially enhance our capacity to organize, work together, govern ourselves, live in harmony with one another and our environment, and thereby expedite the evolution of humanity’s collective destiny, which I understand to be our becoming a mature species capable of living in harmony with one another and our environment.
I had a major learning opportunity about the need for such group process and meeting skills in 2001, after the enormously successful Creating Our Future (COF) conference I organized on Memorial Day weekend that included Ram Dass and Julia Butterfly Hill amongst other notable speakers. Afterwards, there was quite a strong impetus towards forming a new, ongoing COF organization. There were follow-up meetings and workshops, with much initial enthusiasm. However, I squelched everyone’s enthusiasm about taking part because I was trying to control every aspect of what we were doing out of a desire to “do it right,” perhaps out of fear that we might not succeed. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: “Worry is prayer for things we don’t want.” Within a year, I had pretty much run this lovely new idea into the ground.
By the end of that year, I realized with some surprise that I did not know how to hold a vision, share it with others, and then allow them full participation in developing and shaping a collective vision. Since working effectively with others is so important to me, I decided to look for successful examples, primarily within the peace activist community with which I was most familiar. For the most part, I found that the organizations were either very grassroots-based, using a primitive consensus model in which it was very difficult for singular leadership to emerge; or, they were top-down, with limited avenues for grassroots participation in major decisions. I also found that meeting process in most organizations, and institutions at every level, left and right, social change, governmental, wherever people work together towards some collective end, administrative, production, education, governance, etc., was very primitive, making it virtually impossible for the greater collective wisdom to emerge.
My search for more effective and strategic meeting and project-planning processes led me to discover the United Religions Initiative (URI), which developed a meeting and governance process that seemed to really work. Beginning with their global summit in 1996, URI involved thousands of people from many different religions, spiritual practices, and indigenous traditions in establishing the URI Charter in 2000. They used a brilliant meeting process, Appreciative Inquiry, developed by David Cooper- rider, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, combined with the Chaordic Process developed by Dee Hock, founder of the VISA credit card. Impressed, I began to study both processes.
There is now a panoply of dialogue and deliberation processes available that can readily help any association, organization, or governing body achieve common ground between factions, solve pressing problems, and garner the highest collective wisdom. This is particularly relevant for progressive social change agents, because we must learn to work together strategically within our respective communities and organizations, and then in building alliances between organizations with shared goals and objectives. It took a long time for me to grasp that using good meeting and planning process in working on social change projects and campaigns is as important as their goals and objectives — first, because it is necessary to be effective, and second, because it is important to create and share examples of how to work together.