By Jim Rough
“Everyone participated and was honored, small voices had large impacts, consensus was easy and tension resolved.”
“It was an example of collaborative effort resulting in a positive end. Democracy can work.”
Two descriptions by participants in an innovative approach to transforming the public conversation called the Wisdom Council.
Twenty-five years ago I unknowingly developed an “innovation in democracy” in a Northern California sawmill. This innovation now offers the prospect of transforming the public conversation—how we talk, think, and make decisions as a society—into a respectful, creative, collectively intelligent process. If we can facilitate this overarching change to our way of “hanging out” together, we could achieve breakthrough progress on basic issues of society, including social justice, citizen involvement, the environment, special interest dominance of government, heath care, you name it.
In 1981, I was a consultant within Simpson Timber Company encouraging management to try a “Quality Circles program” in a sawmill as a way to improve people’s work-life, production levels, and product quality. Union vs. management battling was ugly at the time, so management jumped at the prospect of having employees feel better about their work, but they didn’t want to be involved themselves or to spend money on training. In the end I had a rare opportunity to experiment with different forms of facilitation, helping employees solve their most pressing issues.
We held ongoing meetings in which I adhered to underlying principles like helping people to address issues they really cared about, to speak authentically and be safe, and to stay creative. Employees often started on issues that would normally be out of bounds like, “We hate the foreman. We want him fired.” It seemed to me that even impossible issues like this could be solved if they could think creatively. But the time-honored approaches didn’t work in this emotionally charged environment. I experimented with different processes, trusting their energy, and evolved my own process that did work. I reflected back what employees were saying, capturing their problems, solutions, concerns, and thoughts on different charts and followed people’s energy rather than an agenda. The process eventually became what is now called “Dynamic Facilitation.”
Through this process employees discovered that the real problem was not the foreman, but the low-trust environment within the sawmill. Although this was bigger than the issue they started with, they worked on it enthusiastically. Through the meetings they grew to like one another and became more empowered in their work. Productivity and quality shot up, as did the level of trust throughout the mill.Over the years I’ve come to realize that Dynamic Facilitation generates a particular type of thinking that is different than what happens in our normal meetings. It’s like “decision-making” in that people reach specific conclusions, but it’s more heartfelt and creative, and the “decision” are unanimous. I call it “Choice-Creating.”
After leaving the mill I began teaching “Dynamic Facilitation” in workshops as a consultant. In the seminars I encouraged attendees to practice it on high-care, impossible-to-solve issues from society, like healthcare, welfare, the environment, prejudice, materialism, and terrorism. No matter what issues the groups started with, they often had the same breakthrough insight: the “real” problem is “our system.” Our system does not allow us as a “We the People” to be creative and figure out what’s best for all. The ways it allows us to address societal issues, such as through legislation or education, mostly focus on fixing “the people” rather than “the system.” From this realization a new way to frame our collective problems arose: How might we transform and address all these issues at once by fixing our collective thinking process?
On the night of May 9, 1993 I experienced an insight on how to do that. The innovation is called a “Wisdom Council.” It is not about assembling wise individuals or representatives who make judgments for the rest of us. It’s about facilitating all of us in one “Choice-Creating” conversation where we think creatively and collaboratively about how things are structured, what we need to be working on, and how we might address societal issues in a way that works for all of us. It uses a series of randomly selected groups of twelve people who meet for several days every four months. They are dynamically facilitated to choose issues that most concern them, creatively address them, and reach unanimous positions. Then they present their conclusions and their story of how they reached them back to the whole community. The whole community is invited to dialogue face-to-face, using the media, and through the Internet. If some people disagree with these unanimous statements they are met with respectful interest. Every few months a new group is randomly selected and the cycle is repeated. Ultimately, the conversation builds a perspective that practically everyone shares.
The Wisdom Council promises a way to facilitate all people in a city, organization, or nation to hold one, respectful conversation about the most important issues and reach near unanimous conclusions.
We have experimented with this process among citizens in a town, in a government agency, employees of a bank, members of a food coop, parents and teachers in an elementary school, among homeless people in a city, and conference attendees. The results indicate that it works. With adequate resources and media support, we believe it is possible to transform the public conversation of a city, state, or nation in short order. It would empower each and all of us, including elected leaders, to create a shared vision and to work together to achieve it.
This approach is both unique and complementary to other approaches for transforming the intelligence of our society:
- Assure high quality political leadership and laws;
- Raise the consciousness and educate people until there is critical mass;
- Transform organizations and build networks of small groups; and
- Facilitate everyone into one creative conversation that reaches near-unanimous conclusions.
Developments in dialogue, deliberation, organizational development, and communication technology have revolutionized what is possible in citizen-based decision-making. But until now, these approaches have been limited in their scope. With the Wisdom Council sparking one all-inclusive conversation, however, these other tools can contribute at a new level in helping us transcend partisanship and address issues intelligently.
In 2003 three people met each other after hearing me in an interview on the local NPR radio station in Ashland OR. David Wick, Lance Bassacia, and Karen Gosseti decided to try an experiment with the Wisdom Council in their county. At the same time Joseph McCormick, a former Republican candidate for Congress in Georgia, was reading my book Society’s Breakthrough! Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People and contacted me. He drove from Virginia to Ashland to document the process. His efforts resulted in a 22-minute video titled, “Democracy in America”.
This experiment with the Wisdom Council taught us that we can “just do it.” We can spark a “We the People” conversation into existence, with the potential for deep systems change, without getting approval from existing leadership, such as big business, elected officials, special interests, or political parties. With adequate resources and media support, a few people can set the whole process in motion for a community.This is the vision of our non-profit organization, the Center for Wise Democracy. We seek to leverage the power of the Wisdom Council to transform the public conversation. We help people establish Wisdom Councils in their local communities, learn from that process, and grow the level of understanding and awareness to larger audiences. Ultimately, we think a small group of people can spark into being an inclusive, legitimate, wise, and responsible “We the People” conversation for a state or the nation. If we can do this, all of us together can start achieving breakthrough progress on the biggest problems of society.
Our experiments thus far support this claim. These experiments are happening within organizations like the Department of Agriculture in Washington State, at the Port Townsend Food Co-op, and among parents and faculty of Salmon Bay Elementary School in Seattle. As one parent who participated in a Wisdom Council at Salmon Bay put it,
“I want you to know that [this] experience was one of the most important experiences of my life. We were strangers, for the most part, who shared being a part of Salmon Bay with differing thoughts about what that meant. But we came together and realized that we all cared deeply and we had a common vision for what could be. It was so powerful to be a part of that happening… I felt heard. I will never forget this.”
Beginning in the near term, with the help of the Columbia Learning Center, we plan to begin a yearlong Wisdom Council process in the town of St. Helens, OR. Researchers from Lewis and Clark College will assess the results and help spread the word. We expect that media coverage of this event will give impetus to similar projects in the nearby communities of Vancouver, WA and Portland, OR, where committees of interested people already exist. We also plan to begin a national trial of the Wisdom Council in collaboration with Joseph McCormick’s “Campaign to Reunite America.” A randomly selected group of registered voters from around the country will be assembled as a symbol of “We the People.” They will choose the topics, work them through to a set of unanimous conclusions, and then present their results to a gathering of media luminaries and high profile people from the Left and the Right. The Wisdom Council will provide this gathering with an unbiased way to choose topics and a strong foundation to reach unanimity.
Our primary strategy is to “just do it,” like what happened in the mill. People in your community or organization will just find themselves in an exciting productive conversation, making headway toward shared goals. Some will recognize the role of the Wisdom Council in this, but most will wonder why there used to be strong partisan feelings and dysfunction, but now we’re talking and thinking differently together. You can help spark this shift.