If you've chatted with Walt over the last few months, or been involved in one of LSEN's discussions around community learning, you might have heard Walt talk about Wisdom Councils. Wisdom Councils are an approach to community engagement and eliciting 'community voice', which we in LSEN have been excited about for some time, and which we can see has real potential for organisational and community development and learning.
Image: Jim Rough in action during a dynamic facilitation session
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a three day seminar convened by the originator of the Wisdom Council concept, Jim Rough. The seminar was actually mainly about Dynamic Facilitation, a model of group facilitation developed by Jim and Jean Rough, which underpins the Wisdom Council process. As the WiseDemocracy website explains:
"The Wisdom Council is dynamically facilitated to achieve a quality of conversation known as 'choice-creating', where [participants] creatively and collaboratively determine an unanimous strategy to address this issue. Then they present this perspective back to the community, along with their story of how they got there. Everyone in the community or organization is invited to hear this perspective, reflect on it with others in small groups, and report back his or her level of resonance."
'Choice-creating' is a crucial aspect of the dynamic facilitation process - and Jim makes the contrast between choice-creating and decision-making. As one of the seminar participants pointed out, the word decision is derived from the Latin 'to cut away' - so, in other words, a decision implies that a variety of options or perspectives have been rejected. In a decision-making model, either one person makes the decision, or a compromise between different perspectives or options is reached. A choice-creating conversation is premised on diversity of input, and focused on making breakthroughs which represent the feelings of all participants, rather than hammering out a compromise that partially reflects each person's views.
Dynamically facilitated events are therefore a space for identifying the ideas, concerns and proposals of a group or community. A Wisdom Council is a particular type of dynamically facilitated conversation, involving a random selection of people from a community or organisation - which, through this random selection, seeks to circumvent many of the commonly acknowledged issues within community engagement processes (such as only the loudest voices getting heard, and only the 'usual suspects' engaging in the first place). Wisdom Councils have been used successfully in the US and Canada, and the approach has really taken hold in Austria - see info here, and this report on a national research project about a two-year engagement process, with the collaboration of the Austrian Department for Agriculture and the Environment. It is clearly a powerful process, which aims to tackle some of the biggest challenges faced by groups, communities and organisations - challenges that participants often initially feel are too big to even take on at all. See more on the WiseDemocracy website.
In terms of my own experience, I got a huge amount not only from learning about the techniques, but also from learning with the other seminar participants. It was a small group, which had the benefit of allowing all participants to get lots of practice, and to share lots of experience and ideas amongst ourselves. Because of the nature of the facilitation technique - which is premised on valuing diversity of perspectives, and depth of mutual engagement - we each had plenty of opportunities to share our innermost concerns, thoughts and visions about the world, in wide-ranging and rich discussions. Given this extensive space for sharing often very personal perspectives, and the fact that it took place over three days with a small group of people, it felt quite like a retreat! It has given me so much to think about, and invigorated me in addressing some of the big challenges in the world - which, as Jim and Jean pointed out, is a common outcome of Wisdom Councils or dynamically facilitated processes.
In practical terms, LSEN will be looking to put this methodology into practice over the coming months. We are considering options for initiating a Wisdom Council (or series of Wisdom Councils) in Manchester to elicit 'community voice' on particular issues that concern specific groups of people - whether geographic communities, communities of interest, or organisations. One such process may be specifically focused on community learning, feeding into our ongoing work on developing a community learning strategy for Manchester. If you have any views or ideas of your own about this, please get in touch with us.
We're also excited to be part of an emerging network of Dynamic Facilitation and Wisdom Council practitioners within the UK - which was one of the key initiatives that the seminar participants were keen to establish. This network will allow us to continue sharing experiences of using these methods, and will provide a resource for us to build our capacity as DF/WC practitioners. We're also keen in LSEN to help disseminate this approach to other groups and individuals who might be interested in this or similar facilitation and community engagement processes - as well as thinking through how the approach might be extended and expanded through the use of new technologies.
Watch this space for further developments with Wisdom Councils!