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Participatory Decision-Making

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I’ve just come across the work of Dr Sam Kaner from Community at Work on facilitation and group decision-making. Sam is a clinical psychologist whose work focus has been in organisational decision-making. His book Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making is a global top-seller. The table of contents is here. Frankly, it has the most boring graphic design in the world, but already in the first section I’ve found some very helpful stuff for a current project. The book itself is pretty much Facilitation 101, which means that it is full of the bleeding obvious as far as I’m concerned. However in terms of teaching a range of techniques to wannabee facilitators, it certainly covers a lots of territory. It is very systematic, so for me it will be useful in thinking more thoroughly about facilitation approaches, and in teaching facilitation to others.

So this is the bit that got me interested – thinking about how groups move from brainstorming to a shared result and why they get stuck in the middle. You’ll have to get the book to find out more about this. Suffice to say that there are a number of process issues in the middle of going from familiar options to new possibilities to group consensus around a preferred way to proceed.

Kane has worked on a bunch of books and there’s a great set of free downloads here.

Kane is part of the Collaborative Leaders Network. This is super-interesting as they provide a range of frameworks for approaching different kinds of group decision-making, from community transformation to collaboration incubators to a “collaboration strategy grounded in Polynesian values”. Here is an overview. There are free downloads explaining each approach.

Here’s a taste of Sam Kaner from Youtube.

The Cynefin Framework

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Thanks to Ruth Harvey, the new leader of the Iona Community, I’ve just discovered Dave Snowden and his work on the Cynefin Framework.

Dave is a former IBM scientist who founded Cognitive Edge. His framework is based on real world analysis of how people respond to complex situations. It’s a fascinating piece of work.

Here’s Dave’s explanation video from his website. Note that he now calls the bottom right quadrant “Clear”.

So it’s a tool for thinking about how and why we deal with situations by approaching decisions in certain ways.

Here’s another one from Youtube which has several (just search on Cynefin Framework).

Mission Pilot Project

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Our Presbytery Mission Pilot Project kicked off last weekend with a training intensive weekend led by Phil McCredden, Duncan Macleod and myself with teams from the two participating churches plus others in our presbytery team. We had a stimulating weekend of getting to know one another, exploring changes in church and society, and reflecting on discernment in mission.

So what is the Mission Pilot? It is a twelve month partnership where the presbytery helps congregations to do two things:

1. Discern and take up a new Mission Experiment

This is about learning mission by doing it.
– seeing their local community with fresh eyes
– building new or deeper relationships with people
– seeking the hospitality of strangers
– discerning where the Spirit is at work and seeking to join in
– partnering or collaborating in creating a missional initiative

2. Help their congregation develop a Mission Posture
– sharing learnings from the mission experiment with the congregation
– seek to reshape the culture of the congregation and its leaders towards mission

The elements of the weekend included the following:

* Exploring Acts 2 and Luke 10 as early church narratives about Christian community and being sent in mission. We discussed the early church as being both a spiritual and a social transformation.

* Looking at changes in church attendance and participation in recent decades and reflecting on the challenges and opportunities for the church in a post-Christendom era.

* Phil introduced the Three Zone model by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk as described in The Missional Leader. I’ve since discovered videos of Mark Lau Branson describing the zones in a series of short videos starting here.

* Reflecting on the breadth of mission and gospel and the multiple dimensions of these.

* Examining change processes and how to lead change.

* Exploring the nature of discernment and how we being to look and listen both to our communities and the Holy Spirit.

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Intentionality in Christian Education

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Intentionality is one of the key threads running through my doctoral thesis. I’m playing with some nested statements to provide a summary of one of the main threads:

  1. Growing disciples requires intentional formation and education in Christian faith.
  2. Christian formation and education require intentional Christian faith practices and community-building.
  3. Christian practices and community-building require intentional leadership.
  4. Leadership needs to be intentionally adaptive in order to connect past traditions with present contexts.
  5. Adaptive leadership intentionally involves people in (re)forming Christian learning in the present and for the future.

For leaders, intentionality means being proactive and purposeful in these areas:

  1. Leading a learning community
  2. Fostering growth in Christian practices
  3. Exercising the ministry of teaching
  4. Choosing and/or designing curricula (resources for teaching and learning)
  5. Fostering a positive relational climate for learning
  6. Improvisation and innovation in learning
  7. Connecting learning with mission

What might this look like in terms of congregational leadership?

Here are some possible indicators:

  • A high and regular priority on the Church Council agenda
  • Designated leaders for formation and education
  • High level of participation by the minister/s and church staff
  • Equipping and encouraging leaders
  • Forward planning in terms of programming
  • An adequate budget and resources
  • Positive language and expectations about growth in this area
  • Regular communication with the congregation about this area
  • Constant conversation among key leaders about this
  • Formal and informal evaluation processes
  • Celebrating growth in individuals, groups and the congregation as a whole
  • Active experimentation about how to do things more effectively
  • Active promotion and recruitment to increase participation

What do you think?