cc  >> Thanks and good morning to  everyone and welcome to today's  workshop.  I'm sure you'll learn a lot  today that will help bring to  life, in your specific  workplace, the things you learn  today.  I do want to thank the Office of  Human Resource and Development,  as well, and Harry Webne-Behrman  in particular for helping make  today's event happen.  So thank you, very much.  [APPLAUSE]  I see great community  participation when we had a  chance to talk to Kathy Hubbard  from United Way a little bit  earlier, and I see Barb Hummel  and quite a number of community  members, we're pleased that  you're here today.  And I think that's just another  example of the exemplary  partnership the campus has with  the community, and I appreciate  that representation that we have  here today.  But we're all delighted to have  Dr. Wheatley here with us today.  Her record in the area of  leadership speaks for itself.  Not much I can add to her  record.  She has helped hundreds of  organizations find the answer to  complex challenges through the  use of collaboration. 

 Her writings on leadership and  how to think about organizations  have been nothing short of  ground breaking, and it's great  to have her here  on the UW campus today.  So thank you for being here.  As you spend time here today, I  really encourage you to think  about the possibilities of the  words and ideas that will be  shared with you.  These are complex times that  present increasingly complex  challenges.  Using yesterday's solutions to  address these challenges clearly  is not the answer to successful  conclusions to some of the  issues that confront us.  Collaboration and partnering  across organizational boundaries  have been, not just important in  the past, but never more  important than as we consider  the challenges that confront us  today.  We can accomplish so much if we  listen to and learn from each  other, and that's what today is  really all about.  New approaches to breaking  through artificial barriers and  emphasizing empowerment,  inclusion, communication,  respect, will help us achieve  the vision described in our  campus strategic framework.  Dr. Wheatley is here to work  with us this morning and later  on you will have an opportunity  to talk and to share what you've  learned and how you can apply it  back in your place of work.  This should be a most  interesting day for all of us,  without a doubt. 

 So once again, thank you  Dr. Wheatley for being here with  us today and thanks to all of  you for taking part in this very  important learning opportunity.  I'm sure it will be a rewarding  experience for all of us.  So thank you much and, Harry,  let me turn it back over to you  and you can get the day going.  [APPLAUSE]  [INAUDIBLE]   [LAUGHTER]  >> Harry Webne-Behrman: She is  an educator, organizational  consultant, author of dozens  of articles and four  truly profound books, including  the landmark "Leadership and the  New Science," of 1992, which is  now in its third Edition.  She has been an inspiration to  those of us seeking a different  way of understanding the chaos  and trying to find simple ways  of being able to navigate  through turbulent times.  She's taught us that we are not  in this alone, we are in this  together.  We need one another, we define  one another.  And through our interactions  with one another, we synergize  in unique ways.  Today, is a very special point  in our learning together and a  tremendous privilege for me to  be able to welcome you to our  community, University of  Wisconsin community, and for you  to be able to share all that you  bring with and for us to be able  to share together with you.  Thank you. 

 [APPLAUSE]  >> Meg Wheatley: Good morning.  I think if I turn this mic on  we're going to get feedback.  Let me test it.  Good morning.  [MICROPHONE FEEDBACK]  Yeah, I'll use the handheld.  [MICROPHONE FEEDBACK]  That was just to wake up your  ears.  Good morning, again.  So we're all in tune now, right?  So what do you think about this  statement?  When an old culture is dying, a  new culture is born from a few  people who are not afraid to be  insecure.  Are you willing to be insecure?  Yeah?  Because what we're about to talk  about, which is the value of  community, how we come together  and how the world changes from  the bottom up, all of those  things are countercultural at  the moment.  So it doesn't help if you're  going to be clinging to some  great need for stability and  security or fame and praise or  all those things. 

 What will work best today and  going forward is if you're  really willing to understand  that any of us who take on  exploring the power of  community, the power of  collaboration, the requirements  for collaboration, any of us who  take that on are kind of like  stepping forward, stepping away  from the dominant culture.  And that is a feeling of oh, my  gosh why am I doing this?  I do have a new book coming out  by fall called "Perseverance,"  and it's written, you want it  right now, yes.  Me too.  [LAUGHTER]  I'm right now arguing with  a publisher about how quickly  they can get it out, because  I know we need this.  But for me the real motivation  to write a book that helps us  persevere, it's not about  perseverance, it's just what  takes us down, what lifts us up  and how we have to keep going.  But it's because of this quote  that persevering in this culture  is very difficult.  So we'll cover a lot of these  topics today, but I invite you  in to this wonderful community  of people who are not afraid to  be uncertain.  And who willingly admit we don't  know what we're doing.  But, you know, nobody does.  And at least we're willing to  experiment. 

 In my own work, this has been a  truth that I am happy to  declare.  There simply isn't any power  greater than a community  discovering what it cares about.  And the more I work out in the  world, I realize that community  is an invisible resource.  We do not really understand its  power yet, and we certainly are  struggling with trying to figure  out how we work together, how we  collaborate, how we work as  community.  But I do think this is the work  to discover how we can work  together because then there's no  power greater than us working in  collaboration.  So the iconic photo of 2009  is this one for me.  And that's a common phrase these  days, right?  We're all in this together.  But I don't think we know what  it means, I really don't think  we know what it means yet.  But I would hope that, here we  are we're all in these sinking  ships of large bureaucratic  organizations, and the only  people that are going to rescue  us, by the way, are us or other  people.  Here is my favorite quote to  describe this time by Nassim  Taleb: "Never in the history of  the world have we faced so much  complexity combined with so much  incompetence in understanding  it's properties."  Nassim Taleb is a brilliant  commentator, financial whiz who  saw the crash coming. 

 And he has a wonderful Web site  called Fooled by Randomness,  if you're interested.  He also wrote the book  "The Black Swan," how we don't  see anomalies and difference.  But let's just think for a  moment about whether this quote  makes sense to you.  Where is the skillfulness to be  able to hold complex problems?  What I observe is that we  simplify them and the ways we  simplify them, which I will talk  about in a few moments, but the  ways we simplify them do not  lead to solutions, they just  lead to simple cause and effect.  Well, this problem is caused by  this therefore we just fix this.  Often we say this problem is  caused by the leader, let's get  rid of the leader.  Complex problems are solvable  but not from a simplistic mind.  Complex problems are solvable  when we're willing to enter into  the complexity of community, the  diverse interest, the multiple  stakeholders, the many aspects  that create a problem like  school dropout rates or  increasing poverty or increasing  mental health issues.  These are all, as I'm sure you  well know in your own  professions, very complex  problems.  We seem to, this is just my own  view, but we seem to avoid the  complexity of life because we'd  like to control it. 

 And one of the ways we try and  control life is by creating  numbers to tell us what's going  on.  How many of you have seen an  increase in measurement and  demands for numeric efficiency  in your own organization?  Only half of you?  [LAUGHTER]  Where are the rest of you  working?  I want to go there.  [LAUGHTER]  And how many of you have felt  that this is a time when there  is no time for relationships,  there is no time, even in your  schedule maybe to serve, if  you're working in a community  service way, to serve the needs  of the populations that you're  responsible for, because you  just have to keep producing  reports?  And filing reports and taking  quick measurements that I find  in most people who are working  within communities this is a  heart-breaking situation.  So much of the time goes to  filling out reports, meeting  some stupid system of  measurement in order to get more  money, measures that show how  many people you reach but not  how many people whose lives you  change.  I was just with someone from  South America who said that in  his quite large NGO they had  taken as a new measure of their  success whether the people in  the communities they served  could now write their own  grants.  It wasn't about improving the  community, but just about  whether you could work within  the existing system.  That's how warped it gets in  many cases.  So I'm on a campaign now to  really help us understand what  we're losing here.  And one of the things we're  really losing is an awareness of  the power of relationships.  This is a universe in which  relationships are the key  elements. 

 So a little bit from quantum  theory here.  When quantum scientists have  tried to probe as deeply as they  could into the workings of the  universe, the imagery is still  is we're looking for building  blocks.  What are the basic distinct  individual units that make up  the universe?  And all they found is  relationships.  So why we have particle  colliders is because you can't  see elementary particles by  themselves.  They have to be spun around  at incredible velocity, and it's  only when they collide with  another source of energy that  they appear momentarily visible.  Same is true of everything in  the universe.  I believe we don't have any idea  who we are until we're in a  relationship.  And this is also a statement  from another quantum theorist.  That everything is a bundle of  potential.  Isn't that a nice phrase?  A bundle of potential that  manifests only in relationship. 

 What this means is that every  person we meet will probably  elicit something from us, either  negative or positive, that we  didn't even know was there until  we met them.  Or when we encounter a new idea  or we encounter a new thought or  we're in a new culture, suddenly  we are manifesting potentials  that were there but did not  exist until we were in a  relationship with each other,  with a culture, with a  tradition, with a new idea.  This is very good news, by the  way.  The universe is constantly  inviting us to be curious about  who we might be rather than  exhausted by your preconceptions  of who we are.  Now, whether we greet each other  with this kind of curiosity, you  just have to notice your own  behavior.  And we'll talk about in a little  while about how difficult it is  in this culture right now to  encounter each other with  curiosity.  But one other principle from  science that I'm relying on  these days comes from biology.  And it's that if a system is  suffering, the way to bring it  back to health is to create more  connections.  And this is in the word health  itself.  It's an old English word  for wholeness. 

 And the word for wholeness  comes from an earlier word  for holiness.  Bible says whenever two or more  are gathered,  there will God be also.  So we got really off track  in not understanding how the  universe works.  We, instead, come from a culture  of fierce individualism which  says if you make it, you're a  good person, if you don't make  it, God is punishing you.  We will not talk about Pat  Robertson right here, but I  could.  I worked in New Orleans  post-Katrina and one of the  conversations that I hear  is God was punishing them.  So when I once heard this from a  cab driver in Utah who told me  that God was punishing them, I  just asked him, I said so is God  going to strike Washington, DC,  next.  That would be my candidate for  people who were destroying our  democracy.  So think about all the negative  ways in which relationships are  spoken about in our western  culture of supreme  individualism.  They're called soft,  touchy-feely, the newest one  I've picked up here is kumbaya  moments or group hugs. 

 Can you think of other negative  terms that you've heard where  people are dissing  relationships?  Any come to mind?  >> Female.  >> Female, yeah.  >> Enmeshed.  >> Enmeshed?  In a negative way?  Okay, yeah.  >> Fluff.  >> Fluff, oh, yeah.  Fluff, definitely.  I just picked up a phrase in  Australia which I actually like.  They call relationships  oh, that hippy (---).  [LAUGHTER]  But fortunately as we have  really gotten lost in our  individualism and our social  Darwinism which says that if  you're doing well in life it's a  sign that you are better than  others and God has blessed you,  and we have a lot of crazy  doctrines in American history  that explains success in terms  of evolution. 

 Fortunately, there are still  cultures which know the power of  relationships.  In this country it seems to me  any minority culture, any new  immigrant culture, any poor  economically impoverished  community knows that you can't  get through anything alone, that  we really truly are all in this  together.  Here's a South African  expression of this truth, which  is truly found around the world.  This is Zulu word ubuntu which  that's one phrase definition up  there from Archbishop Tutu that  we can be human only together.  But another definition, a common  one is a person is only a person  through other people.  And another definition is I  exist through you and you exist  through we.  But I'm starting to collect  other culture's words for this  because it is such a common  human truth.  Recently learned from Senegal  that they say people are  people's best medicine.  There's another thing I've  learned from Senegal in that as  a west African country they have  all the problems and some  unusual ones of poverty,  illiteracy, health, terrible  pollution, but they also have a  problem that's growing in the  western world which is  over-literacy.  They have over 100,000 people  who have graduate degrees and no  jobs. 

 But the one thing they do not  suffer from is suicide.  And this is stunning.  Suicide, which I'm sure has  touched many people in this  room, is the second leading  cause of death among  adolescents.  It's a worldwide problem.  Japan, for the 12th year,  recorded more than 30,000  suicides.  But how is it that a culture  doesn't have suicide?  Then is shows us it's not  natural for humans to take  themselves out and remove  themselves.  So when I asked them how it was  possible, they said, well, we  have each other.  It was a very simple expression.  We have each other.  Nobody goes hungry, nobody goes  homeless. 

 You're always taken in.  You always feel that you belong.  And this was really reinforced  for me by a friend who was  working in a northwest Native  American community outside of  Seattle which this one  reservation had nearly a dozen  kids kill themselves.    And things changed when the  following incident happened.  A young man was standing on a  bridge who was going to kill  himself by throwing himself into  a river that ironically was  called the River of Life.  And while he was standing there  a car drove by and somebody just  did this, just waved to him  casually and that stopped him.  And as that story got out in the  community it stopped the  suicides, and the community  started to focus on the fact  that the issue was lack of  belonging, lack of  connectedness.  So this is why we really need to  focus on the power of  relationships and the power of  working together and this thing  we call collaboration, I would  just call it natural human ways  of existing.  But it is countercultural, as I  said.  So I have been focused on not  needing to develop large numbers  of connections which is included  in the phrase critical mass. 

 But instead realizing that it's  the power of a few connections  that really are important.  So critical connections is how  the world changes.  How we are fed and nourished and  supported by each other.  Now I would like to present the  work of some other colleagues  who looked at healthy  communities around the country.  And they found there were  certain characteristics or  patterns of these healthy  communities that showed up every  time no matter their  demographic, their socioeconomic  information.  And I think these are very  useful.  I would like you to really think  about them and which ones feel  like you're on track and which  ones feel like things you might  need to talk more about.  So use this please as a lens to  looking at the health of your  own community.  So the first thing about a  healthy community is nobody  denies that they're in this  together.  They don't pretend that certain  populations are not really part  of us or we don't have to deal  with the people who live over  there or with new immigrants or  whatever. 

 Now this is about geographic  community, you could take this  as organizational as well.  But we make sure that we are  embracing all the members,  either in a work organization,  but more importantly in a  geographic space.  Who's really with us.  And the second is so important  and so ignored still, involving  youth in significant and  respectful ways, not in casual  ways but in respectful ways  where they really make a  difference.  Chicago started this wonderful  process many years ago with last  name is Bliss, what's her first  name?  I can see her but I can't  remember her first name, of  involving youth and envisioning  the future of Chicago and that  process now has really gone  worldwide.  One of the great benefits of  involving youth is that the  adults behave better.  And the youth are so frustrated  by our meetings that actually if  you want them there you have to  make your meetings much more  useful.  So that's a plus.  That's a real benefit.  People have told me the adults  don't swear when the kids are  there. 

 That's a plus.  They help control our behavior.  And they do have important  insights and perspectives, as do  all elements of a community.  One of the things I learned by  listening to someone who works  with gangs in south-central LA  is that these children are  furious at us adults because  they think we are destroying  their future and the future of  the planet by our selfishness,  by not being willing to change  our behavior.  So they actually think that  we're just acting like  adolescents and not working hard  to protect the planet.  I found this very, very useful  perspective.  We can look really, not caring,  ignorant, selfish because we  don't get it together.  And that is one of the things I  think that youth may see.  Now I also want to say quite  strongly that when young people,  I've done a lot of work with  younger leaders now around the  world for 10-12 years and I get  really annoyed when adults say,  I listen to these young people,  they're so filled with idealism  and actions, I feel really  hopeful for the future now.  They'll fix it. 

 Then the corollary that also  annoys me just as much is when  someone who is 20 or early 20s  or late teens says, just wait,  as soon as we get in there we'll  fix it.  Well, none of those statements  are true or helpful in my  estimation.  We really need to find ways to  work together with all  generations because we each have  different perspectives, and we  each have different levels of  knowing and wisdom.  So separating out or just  relying on the youth to fix this  mess doesn't work.  But really how we engage with, I  would say all generations  because there are significant  differences in decades and  attitudes, how we engage  together with what we each  bring, for me, feels to be the  path going forward.  Now healthy communities have  learned what some people have  learned a long time ago which is  when you focus on what's  possible, you tap in to human  creative energy.  When you focus on what's wrong,  you illicit anger, depression,  frustration, just rage at times.  This is said very brilliantly by  a colleague of mine, Marvin  Weisbord, who is one of the  elders of field of  organizational behavior.  He said, I used to go into a  organization and ask what's  wrong and how can we fix it.  And we all do this still. 

 We write down all the issues.  Tell me what's wrong.  Have a hearing, let me hear all  the problems.  But what happens in those  meetings?  What's the emotional levels of  frustration and anger and rage?  And how do the leaders feel just  to be a target for all this  anger and aggression and  frustration?  So Marvin Weisbord said, I  learned that the question isn't  what's wrong and how can I fix  it, that the right question is  what's possible and here and who  cares?  Who cares enough to work on it?  Later this morning I will  describe how the world changes  from small groups of people,  just as Margaret Mead told us  many years ago, small groups of  dedicated people.  And those are people who care,  who start to act because they  see something that needs to  change and they just begin.  It's a very powerful, hopeful  understanding of how change  happens from us.  But it doesn't happen by sitting  in a meeting and asking  everybody, okay, so what are  your issues.  Don't do that ever again.  But instead to focus on the  kinds of processes that really  illicit people caring.  What do you care about?  What would you like to work on?  What feels useful to you to  start experimenting with?  We'll talk more about that. 

 Another pattern of a healthy  community is that it uses  conversation.  It brings itself together,  people talk to each other and  they keep expanding who is in  the conversation.  They keep noticing what voices  are missing.  And they notice when they're  closing down.  Another Marvin Weisbord truth  was he said, every time I widen  the circle of inclusion, more  becomes possible; every time I  close it down, less becomes  possible.  And one of the things that's  happening to all of us is we're  so busy, there's so many  problems, there's so much  aggression out there that we  tend to close down.  We trust fewer and fewer people.  We trust our few friends or  advisers or colleagues.  And to feel like opening  ourselves up feels like putting  ourselves in danger.  We'll just become targets for  other people's aggression and  frustration. 

 This is a very real dynamic.  But it won't change anything if  we just continue to hunker down  and have a bunker mentality.  So this is it why I started with  insecurity.  Because our basic gesture has to  be about opening and approaching  others and not fleeing or  closing down.  And this is something, by the  way, you can track quite easily  in yourself.  I mean if you just even ask  yourself are you willing to go  talk to somebody or are you  retreating from that.  Are you willing to move closer  to an issue or are you just not  wanting to deal with it.  How do you feel, for me this is  an actual physical test of  whether I am willing to open or  I am just no, sorry, I can't  deal with you right now.  You can test this out for  yourself.  Healthy communities know, this  is a statement that my own  institute -- has worked with for  years, that the leaders we need  are already here. 

 We're just not looking in the  right places.  Healthy communities have learned  that leaders emerge because they  care about an issue.  At -- we have defined a leader  as anyone willing to help.  Anyone who sees something that  needs fixing in their home,  their community, their world and  steps forward.  Again, that gesture of opening  and moving forward, moving into  the issue.  That's how leadership happens.  I want to say categorically that  leaders are made, not born.  They are made when an connection  between that person's heart and  an issue occurs.  And then we find courage because  courage comes from the old  French word for heart.  Courage is always found by that  deep human emotion of caring. 

 We do not analyze our way into  courageous action.  Our heart opens and suddenly we  step forward and then someone  like me comes along and says  you're a leader, you just  stepped forward.  But that is how leadership  emerges, when people make a  connection between something  they care about and then they  can't help themselves.  And I hear over and over again  from these newly emerging  leaders that suddenly they're in  it and they're in it for a long  time.  Think about your own experience  here.  How you first got engaged with  the work you're doing.  And what was the emotional feel  of that at that time.  And then why have you  persevered.  So many of the people who are  working in very difficult  circumstances, much worse than  anything we face, continue to  keep going because they say I  can't not do it, I can't stop  now.  It doesn't make any sense, I'm  getting exhausted, I'm getting  vilified, I'm getting sick, my  family doesn't understand why I  keep doing this. 

 Your friends and colleagues say,  don't worry about it, it's not  that big a deal, nobody else is  working this hard, get a life.  But still we keep going because  there's a keep connection with  our heart energy in all of this.  I love this photo of a Maori  woman, Maori elder with one of  her totem ancestors that healthy  communities actually know who  they are over time.  They know their history and they  draw on that history.  They understand that they've  lived through other hard times.  The Vietnamese community in New  Orleans was the first to bring  themselves back, in part because  they had such a strong community  to begin with and they had a  very clear leader in their  priest.  But they also had all these  elder Vietnamese war survivors  who just kept saying this ain't  so bad.  Well, they probably didn't use  of the word ain't but whatever  colloquialism it is in  Vietnamese.  This isn't so bad.  We've gone through much worse. 

 That actually gives people  resiliency.  So each of us has gone through  other difficult times,  personally.  And you're still here.  And we each come from families  and ancestors and cultures where  people have been fearless, where  people have survived, where  people have kept going.  And I think we all need to  explore this question of who in  our own lineage as shown us the  kind of strength and courage  that we now need, and we've  probably already been fearless  many times in our lives.  When a whole community is  engaged in this question,  drawing on its different  cultural traditions, it's a very  empowering process to discover  that we're all standing on the  shoulders of people who've come  before and also we take greater  strength.  From the Maori perspective one  of the strengths they draw on is  that our ancestors crossed the  sea in very small canoes.  So they were very brave and we  can be brave now also.  One of the informal definitions  of a healthy community that I  received from someone, I just  adore this statement, that a  healthy community is one where  the children are singing the  songs taught to them by their  elders.  This says everything about  family, tradition, culture, art,  relationships. 

 So here's a question for you to  think about, not at the moment  but maybe when you go home or  when you go back to your  organization, which is how do  you sense when you're in a  healthy community or a healthy  organization or a healthy  school, what are some of the  indicators that you use?  We all have them, by the way.  Haven't you had this experience  when you walk into a certain  building and you think this  doesn't feel good.  Well, why doesn't it feel good?  What are you seeing or picking  up?  And then you walk into another  place and you just kind of feel  your whole being relax or you  say people are really happy in  this workplace.  How do you know that?  These little informal indicators  are really important to notice.  I had my own personal behavior  changed when a woman offered one  of her indicators.  She said I know I'm in a  community where people care  about each other if I drive in a  Wal-Mart parking lot or a  supermarket parking lot and I  see where the carts are.  If they're left strewn all over  the parking lot, I know I'm in a  community where people aren't  paying attention to each other.  So ever since she told me this,  which is now two years ago, I am  the best  put-back-your-shopping-cart  person.  [LAUGHTER]  Because I don't want to be held  accountable for destroying  my community by this.  It's just really interesting. 

 Next time you go to a parking  lot, check it out and see what  you find.  So here are two images and then  I'm going to talk about some of  the really difficulties we  encounter now in communities.  But just look at these two  images.  That's one.  It's from a small town press.  And this.  So for me this is hell and this  is nirvana.  [LAUGHTER]  But for some people, this would  be hell because there's all  those people there I have to  deal with, and we just assume  they're not going to be helpful,  right, they're going to be  annoying or angry or selfish.  And some people are more  comfortable with this.  This is a little Rorschach test  for you right now. 

 I'd like to spend a few minutes  on stuff that's very dark and  depressing, and it is around  this topic of what seems to be  normal in communities these  days.  And again please use this to  assess your own community work,  where you're involved with  people and whether these  dynamics are true.  And then you'll have time to  talk with your colleagues  about these.  So one of the big dynamics is  denial.  This is human, especially when  they're so much information out  there.  We just push it away.  We'll talk later about ways to  be open to information.  But what's the level of denial.  Like what happens when you bring  somebody an issue or they bring  you an issue.  How tolerant are we of bad news  confirming information, things  we don't want to hear?  And then how open do we stay?  This is just little indicators. 

 So denial is a big problem but  so is this one.  Gosh, blame, blame, blame.  This is how you could  characterize the news right now.  Who's going to blame whom first.  This is part of the incompetence  of dealing with complexity.  Thinking if you just fire  somebody you solve the problem.  Or looking for reasons to blame  people rather than talking about  the underlying issues.  Another approach in communities  is that when something goes  wrong we just pass a law or  regulation.  Now yesterday when I was  speaking at the Wisconsin School  Board Association, I talked  about this is a sign from  Australia.  Australians, in my estimation,  are the best country for passing  a law to solve any social  problem. 

 So when they had too many teen  deaths from driving, which is  the number one cause of death of  teenagers, they were passing a  law that said that teenagers  could not drive cars over a  certain horse power.  So they were going to put all  the teenagers in clunkers,  basically.  And that's how they were going  to stop them from driving fast.  So after I showed this and made  that statement, a woman from  Australia came up later and said  you are absolutely right.  My brother has a picture of a  beach north of Sydney,  Australia, which he calls the No  Zone because it's just filled  with these signs.  I went to a park that had 12 of  these out so you feel really  welcome.  But think about in your own  agencies or organizations when  something is really troubling  and is a recurring issue, how  often do we leap to, well, we  need a new policy.  We need a new directive.  We need to curtail behavior by  controlling people through the  use of regulations.  This is the way we operate right  now. 

 Another thing that communities  do is they look for the perfect  leader.  Somebody who has a plan who will  lead us out of this mess who,  again, very simplistic thinking,  they'll correct all the problems  we have, instantly.  Now a woman who raised ducks  told me that mother ducklings  have this characteristic,  they're very bad mothers because  they'll lead their offspring,  their little ducklings into high  grass and then not notice that  two or three of them don't come  out.  This became and even more  powerful image to me of  leadership.  I see so many leaders who are so  focused on what they want, they  don't notice how many people  they've lost or how many people  they've harmed.  Another thing we do these days  is we decide that to bring in an  outsider, an expert, a best  practice, a new program that's  worked brilliantly elsewhere.  We're really stuck in this  culture and this is where it's  very mechanistic thinking.  We're stuck on the belief that  if somebody creates a great  program somewhere else, that we  could just import it or use the  image of parachuting in and it's  all under the name best  practice.  But look at the belief.  The belief is that these things  work independent of context,  independent of people and  instead of seeing the complexity  of relationships that led to its  success, we instead only look at  the technical parts of the  program and import those. 

 And it doesn't work and we still  do it.  So I work with a group in South  Africa in Johannesburg that has  really converted a very  dangerous park in downtown  Jo-burg into a place that's rich  in programs and a family setting  now and they've done it over  many years.  And so another community said,  well, we want to know what you  did.  We want to do what you did so  come tell us exactly all the  details.  And instead this very wise group  of people said, well, no.  This worked because we were in  this community.  You have to figure out what  works in your community.  What are the dynamics, who are  the key players, all of that  stuff.  What's the history?  So I don't want to completely  diss best practices, but I do  want to underline all dangerous  it is to think that we can  import things, wholesale, and  they'll work.  What I find is most important to  focus on with the whole approach  to best practices is to take  inspiration. 

 So if somebody else really  rehabilitated a very dangerous  park, that could inspire us to  know that it's possible but it  won't tell us exactly what to  do.  That we have to figure out  ourselves.  Another way I'm thinking about  this recently is to say we do  have to reinvent the wheel but  first we have to know that  wheels are possible.  So if another community does  something and shows us that it's  possible to lower the suicide  rate, to clean up the water  system, to petition the state  legislator and get what they  need, they show us what's  possible but then we have to  figure out how to do it and it  has to be ours.  Other dynamic that's just  killing us is this infighting as  displayed by that photo.  That's happiness for me again.  Okay, let's talk just for a  moment and then I am going to  give you time to really think  together about these things.  What happens to people in this  very fear-laden, stressful,  competitive, anxious time is  several negative things happen  to our relationships.  Here are just a few.  We start competing for scarce  resources. 

 Does this feel familiar?  It's not we're all in the same  boat or we're all in this  together, it's like I need that  money and they got it.  We should have gotten that  grant.  It's a sense of competition that  is actually being promoted by  funders and grant givers.  Now the way they work with it,  and I've got an article up on my  Web site if you're interested in  this topic, they tell us if  you're applying for a grant that  you'll have to collaborate with  some other agencies.  Nobody tells you how that's  going to work.  Nobody actually gives you enough  money to foster the conditions  for collaboration.  It's just they put the burden on  the grantees.  Read the article if you like.  I was really angry when I wrote  it.  It came out in The Nonprofit  Quarterly so it was a good place  for it to come out. 

 But this competition for scarce  resources actually doesn't work  on our behalf but it's a very  powerful dynamic that keeps us  separate when, in fact, we  really are all in the same boat.  And the second thing is you have  to look at your own behavior in  this.  This is my younger son Nico who  is actually a very lovely young  man.  But how are you changing in this  environment?  What's your suspicion level or  your jealousy level or your  distrust level?  Which direction are you headed  in?  Because the environment and the  demands in the environment are  pushing us into some very  self-protective states.  Which include these behaviors of  jealousy and distrust and  hunkering down.  And to not be affected in this  way requires a commitment to not  want to be affected in this way.  So even though we're dealing  with very aggressive  environments and very aggressive  public meetings and angry people  and frustration, even though  that's in our world now, we can  still make a commitment not to  go there, not to become angry  and aggressive ourselves.  But you have to watch yourself  because it's so easy when  encountering aggression to just  want to get right back and be  the stronger bully or the more  powerful destroyer even of  negative people.  So you just have to watch this  because it's impossible, at  least I don't see it happening,  it's impossible to avoid being  affected by these very negative  energies that are out there  unless we make a commitment that  we don't want to be affected  and, therefore, we hold  ourselves responsible for not  getting angry or noticing when  our frustration just destroys a  relationship.  But this is personal path here,  a commitment to not want to be  taken down by the negativity  that's out there. 

 And there is more than enough  defensiveness, self-protection  and aggression.  This is something I'd really  like us to think about.  Because we're so busy,  because we're under so much  pressure, because decisions have  to be made so fast, what I'm  seeing is just the rise of snap  judgments and stereotyping.  And when you don't have time to  sit with someone and talk to  them and ask them why do you  think this way, why are you  doing this?  If we don't have time for that  kind of conversation, then we  very quickly fall into the,  there they go again or people  like that they always say stupid  things like that or you can't  trust that person, you can't  trust that community.  We just fall into these things  even if we know better.  And this is why having  conversational processes leads  to a healthy community because  in conversation we actually take  the time to listen to each other  and listening always brings us  closer together, without a  doubt.  You still may not like the  person, you may feel different  about, you have different  values, but you do have a  relationship with them and that  is incredibly useful.  I think for me the great sadness  of this time, and I hold myself  right here as well, is that  we've given up on each other.  It's like, well, you can't talk  to those people.  We are so polarized that, and my  awareness of this, when people  are in an entrenched position  and don't want to talk to me,  then I become very entrenched in  my position and then it's just a  battle, then it's just  aggression meeting aggression. 

 But at a local community level,  there still is a lot of  potential for conversation.  But we have to trust the  process, literally, and the  process is that if we take time  to listen to each other, we will  develop more understanding of  each other.  And in that understanding we  have the capacity to possibly  even work together even though  we're coming from different  positions.  But conversation softens the  boundaries and opens our hearts  in a way that I haven't seen any  other process do that except in  natural disasters.  So I just want to spend a little  bit of time sharing with you  what I see happening in natural  disasters, and of course we all  have Haiti in our hearts and  imagery of true horror unlike  anything I think the world has  experienced.  One of the things that is very  clear in a natural disaster, and  I've worked with a lot of people  now who have experienced floods,  fires and hurricanes in this  country and in Australia, is  this is a beautiful quote for  me, that these days we tend to  think of disasters as acts of  gods and governments.  Regular people only feature into  the equation as victims, which  is a shame, because regular  people are the most important  people at a disaster scene every  time.  This is a photo of the Cajun  Navy which was a self-organized  flotilla of small boats that  people appeared with.  Anyone who had a boat went to  New Orleans with it and tried to  offer it to the authorities.  They were rebuffed. 

 They were told consistently, no,  your boat is too small, you  don't have the right license, it  doesn't meet our standards, and  they were pushed aside.  So they operated in a very  self-organized way.  They moved people, pets, corpses  and medicine and they all  contributed a great deal.  This is always true in a  disaster that most people, we  always get the reports of the  looters and the criminals,  that's just the media.  What we see is the majority of  people are there to help each  other, are there to want to save  and rescue and comfort each  other.  General Honore, who really got  New Orleans back on track after  FEMA failed to appear, said this  about Haiti, this is a photo  from Haiti, that you can't fear  the people you are trying to  help.  But we do this consistently.  Now this is a great statement  for anyone who is in social  service.  We can't fear the people we're  trying to help, in fact we have  to respect people and see that  they are really the greatest  resource we have.  So my own conclusion, and this  is again from post-Katrina, when  people were evacuated very  quickly in a horrendous fashion,  nobody had their names, mothers  were separated from children,  mothers were told you get on  this bus and the children got on  another bus, just horrible,  horrible things. 

 But still here's a photo of  people welcoming the stranger,  the brother and the sister to  their community when we arrived  in an airport.  You have to see if you believe  this statement in your own  experience that most people are  generous, caring and want to  help others.  And again in this day and age  it's so easy to find evidence to  refute this.  What do you mean most people are  caring and generous?  What about terrorism, what about  gangs, what about the criminal  element in our community?  We can't trust them.  That's right, we can't.  But who's the majority still?  Who's the majority?  It's who's in our communities.  And for many years when I was  first working in corporations  and I'd be talking about things  like human goodness and people's  creativity and desire to  contribute, the first question  was always well what about the  saboteurs, what about the people  who really are after us, who  really want to do harm?  And then I learned to ask, okay,  they're there but what's the  percentage?  Is it 10% of your people you  can't trust?  And I found when I kept asking  that question it was a much  lower percentage, it was maybe  like 5%.  So we just have to notice where  our own trust levels are and  why.  Like are we focused on the  really negative elements or the  few people who really are out to  get us.  There are really nasty people  out there these days working for  their own ends and they're not  all politicians and they're not  all in Congress but a lot of  them are. 

 [LAUGHTER]  I've just watched in my own  town the local government  being taken over by people  I feel are ruthless and selfish  and I'd use the word evil.  We just watched what they did  and we couldn't stop them.  So you have to be smart here but  then what's the antidote to  these few people who are  ruthless and really nasty?  Well the antidote is us.  It's collaboration, it's  community, it's working  together.  One last thing about the human,  two last things about the human  potential.  This is from the World War II  monument that went up in DC a  few years ago.  Very, very beautiful, moving  monument.  And this one is about the Battle  of Midway.  And it says they had no right  for win yet they did, and in  doing so they changed the course  of a war.  And this is why I have it up  here. 

 This beautiful statement: Even  against the greatest of odds,  there is something in the human  spirit, a magic blend of skill,  faith and valor that can lift  men from certain defeat to  incredible victory.  When was the last time you even  thought about this statement of,  yes, in my community among the  people I serve, among my  colleagues there is this magic  blend of skill, faith and valor.  Do we even think that about each  other anymore?  Again these are just little  tests to see how we're being  impacted by these times.  I like that word valor.  It's a nice old-fashioned word.  Muhammad Yunus, who gave us  microcredit, said this about  poverty, I really recommend the  book I took this from called  Creating a World Without  Poverty.  It's an incredibly easy  heart-opening book to read  filled with statistics about the  success of Grameen Bank and the  way they work.  So he's told us, and he knows  where of he speaks, that poverty  is a concept, it's not an  accurate description of anybody.  He goes on to say in this book  that giving people money or even  giving them a job is not good  development work.  He uses the phrase, we have to  turn on the engine of creativity  in each person, that's good  development. 

 When you reacquaint people with  their own skill, faith and  valor.  And this works anywhere in the  world.  Now an interesting thing about  Muhammad Yunus' experience here  is that Bangladesh is one of the  poorest countries in the world,  has, through microcredit, worked  with 80% of the poor, all women,  80% of the poor in Bangladesh,  given them microloans, 60% of  those 80% are no longer in  poverty.  Bangladesh is the only country  that is meeting the United  Nations' millennial goals for  the eradication of poverty,  increases in education,  literacy, etc.  This man knows where of he  speaks.  And if you don't want to read  the whole book, I have a book  review I did that included this  book on my Web site called  Capitalism and Community that I  would urge you to look at.  So I have talked now for an  hour.  It's time for you to talk.  What I'd like to suggest is that  you start with the people where  you are at this table, but we  are going to mix it up a little.  I'd like you to just reflect  back to each other something you  think I said, whether I said it  or not doesn't matter, you heard  it. 

 [LAUGHTER]  But something that really got  your attention.  Or that's really sticking  with you.  Or it's disturbing that you  think I said it.  But something that's really  right there for you.  And please listen for this  wonderful experience that we  each sat in the same room and we  each noticed very different  things.  That's the power of diversity,  but it also shows us how we each  hear and listen through our own  filters.  So we'll take, I think some of  these tables could use more  people, like down here, so if  you could come over here.  And if you've got more than six  people, would you send someone  to another table.  Only because we won't have a lot  of time.  So we're going to take about  20 minutes for this.