instructions from the cook

Instructions from the Cook

Published by DesigningLife Books1020 Kenilworth AvenueCleveland OH 44113www.DesigningLife.com

Copyright 2008 George Nemeth & Jack RicchiutoAll rights reserved.

ISBN 978-0-9661703-8-2Paperback

1. Community developmentI. Title

First Printing, July 2008Printed in the USAProduction: BookMasters, Ashland OH

Cover Design: Tia AndrakoCover Photography: Jack RicchiutoBook Photography: Maurice Small

| 2 |I n s t r u c t i o n s f r o m t h e C o o k

http://www.DesigningLife.com

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Contents

6/ Invitation 7/ Stone Soup 9/ The New Conversations that Build Community10/ Improbable Collaborations11/ Gifts Together13/ 5 Indicators of Vital Communities13/ The Recipes Explained16/ The Power of Slow & Small18/ The Power of the Intangible19/ The Power of Possibilities25/ The Power of an Intentional Model26/ The Model28/ The Dream Space Conversation29/ The Small Acts Conversation30/ The Gifts Conversation31/ The Invitation Conversation37/ The Innovation Continuum41/ The Problem with Problems49/ Shadow Conversations50/ How Many Leaders Does it Take to Change a

Community?50/ Planning that Builds Community59/ Authentic Engagement71/ Frequently Answered Questions72/ Postscript77/ Authors


Recipes

15/ Local Foods21/ Studio Launching21/ River2River22/ Poets on the Road33/ InterGen Tea Party34/ Landlord Welcome Wagon35/ Supporting the Well-being of our Animals36/ Literacy Breakfasts36/ eBay Nation46/ Engaged Students47/ Virtual Hospice Gratitude Community48/ Professional Entrepreneurs64/ NextGen Energy Workers64/ New Green Lease on Life65/ Tool Exchange66/ Boarded up Solar Houses67/ A Thriving Built Environment68/ Church Kitchen Incubators69/ Salsa Barter69/ Pavement Garden Paradise


Invitation

Instructions from the Cook is an introduction to a powerful and simple model of building community. It is based on the observation that communities thrive when people intentionally engage each other in conversations that energize, engage, and empower them.

The model we present here is an introduction to the deeper and compelling model Peter Block presents in Community from his work with A Small Group.

The model we present in Instructions from the Cook is a way to become familiar with the kinds of conversations Peter talks about that eliminate the fragmentation responsible for many things we call problems in communities. We invite you to practice and unleash its power in your community.

We deeply appreciate the contributions of Tia Andrako for the cover design, Maurice Small for the book’s photos and his recipes, and to Mark McDermott, Patricia Ross, June Holley, and Linda Fabe for their recipe ideas and Elaine Barnes with editing. Thanks to BookMasters for production and to all of our friends who have supported the evolution of this project.

George Nemeth & Jack RicchiutoJuly 2008


Stone Soup

Once upon a time, a wise cook came upon a villageplagued by a terrible famine. “We have nothing, what have you brought us?” pleaded the villagers.

“I have only these four magic stones,” the cook humbly offered. The villagers gasped as one of them came forward and asked. “What can you do with them?”, to which the wise cook replied, “I will need a large pot of water and a fire.” Some of the people set forth to their houses and brought a large pot and started a fire with what they had.

The wise cook filled the pot with water and carefully placed the four stones in the pot. After sitting silently, the cook said, “It is always good to have some carrots for the soup.” And after a heavy pause, some of the villagers said, “We think we have some carrots at home,” and they disappeared behind the crowd that gathered.

A few minutes later, the villagers appeared with some carrots from their garden. The wise cook was pleased, and continued, “Wouldn’t be great if we had some potatoes?” A villager responded, “I have some potatoes. They’re all I could grow this season.”

And quickly returning, the potatoes were added to the pot, followed by requests for some herbs and all sorts of vegetables until a great soup was assembled to feed all the people in the village. And with Instructions from the Cook, the people of the village discovered the power of their gifts together.


New Conversations that Build Community

We have been studying communities for a long time and have observed that there are 4 kinds of conversations that build community, conversations that call us to realize our power. They are conversations that emerge from our expectation that we are smarter, stronger and more whole together than we could ever be in isolation or opposition.

The four new conversations of our model are Dream Space, Small Acts, Gifts, and Invitation conversations.

In Dream Space conversations, we talk about what we imagine the qualities of a thriving community to be. Our best Dreams are declarations of possibilities we desire for our shared future.

In Small Acts conversations, we talk about small experiments we can engage in to realize our Dreams. In a world of fragmented and limited assets, small is the new big.

In Gifts conversations, we talk about the talents, resources, and assets we all bring to the table. The Dreams and Small Acts that matter most to us are those that engage our Gifts.

In Invitation conversations, we talk about who else we can invite as partners in co-creating new futures together.


These are the four kinds of conversations that have always brought people together in community. Explore the history of any jewel in any community and you can see how it emerged at the intersections of Dreams, Small Acts, Gifts, and Invitations.

Improbable Collaborations

Many new Dreams require new levels of collaborative creativity and innovation. Joining our Gifts together in Small Acts inspired by Dreams we Dream together requires new kinds of collaborations we have never seen before in our communities.

We have come to discover that new ideas that work are more likely to emerge at the edges and intersections of networks, where improbable collaborations are most likely. This is the reason why diverse groups can be more creative and innovative than homogenous groups where everyone looks, sounds, and thinks alike.

Improbable collaborations happen between and among people who share common interests but are usually not connected in creative ways. They may have been fragmented for historical or political reasons. Or they don't think of themselves as parts of larger networks of collaboration or resource sharing. They may have considered each other competitors constrained by deficiency beliefs.


Many of the community building recipes we present throughout the book feature improbable collaborations where people cross boundaries to do together what they couldn't do alone.

Inspired and engaged in new conversations, the possibilities of new kinds of collaborations are endless.

When communities start to think in terms of improbable collaborations, people are surprised by the new chemistries of strengths and passions coming to the table. Best of all, the more connections across boundaries, the more the community grows and the more likely new innovations will emerge.

Gifts Together

When we become fluent in the four new conversations that build communities, we can easily move together in the directions of our Dreams. Four truths enable us to come together and offer our skills generously:

✦ Everything in life happens the moment it becomes fully possible

✦ Whatever story we tell ourselves about reality is only one possible story

✦ Whatever we're doing right now is only one possible thing to do


✦ We don't need a different reality to do what else is possible right now

When we allow these truths to permeate the culture of our community, we move from being victimized by problems to being empowered by possibilities. We discover that we can do more together than we could ever do apart. We discover what all living systems on all scales have known for millions of years, that our Gifts have the most sustainable value when we bring them together.

Community. Gifts together.


5 Indicators of Vital Communities

The origin of the word community is "gifts together." Community doesn’t exist simply because people occupy their own houses in a neighborhood, their own jobs in an organization, or their own seats in a church. Community exists to the degree that people actively engage and connect their Gifts in the realization of shared Dreams realized in Small Acts.

When a community is vital, people know each other, look out for each other, connect each other, barter with each other, and engage each other. We don’t need to order complex studies to notice; they are obvious just living in the community.

When a community is vital, people don't wait for institutional or political leaders to make this happen. They continuously take and share responsibility for being the kind of community they Dream to be.

The Recipes Explained

Instructions from the Cook is written in the spirit of two books of the same title, one by Bernard Glassman and Rick Fields and the other by 13th-century Zen Buddhist monk Tenzo Kyôkun: Instructions for the Cook. Written as manuals that teach zen principles, Kyôkun’s offers an ancient


how-to for the preparation of meals for the monks of a monastery.

Glassman and Fields’ book details the modern-day Zen communities of the Greyston Mandala, a thriving network that includes a commercial bakery, apartments for the homeless and other not-for-profit community development projects in Yonkers, New York.

Throughout Instructions from the Cook, we present several recipes for building community. These are short narratives describing conversations that will catalyze change wherever they’re convened.

Each recipe has four unique features:

✦ The articulation of a Dream✦ A Small Act that can realize the Dream✦ The Gifts that people bring to the table✦ The Invitations to others who can contribute

We present them to you to inspire innovations and experimentations with your own recipes. The possibilities are infinite, limited only by your imaginations.

Expect to get better at thinking in recipes. Expect that simple recipes will lead to more complex and interesting recipes with creative ingredients and synergies.


As any cook will tell you, a recipe serves as a guide. We encourage you to try the recipes we’ve included here, substitute available ingredients, increase or decrease the proportions to suit your tastes, create your own, share them with others and most of all, enjoy the experience and the community that emerges from it!

Local Foods

Dream/ A neighborhood Dreams of a thriving restaurant district that serves delicious food, while supporting local organic agriculture

People gather 2-3 local farmers and 2-3 local restaurant or college/university chefs to explore chef needs and farmer capabilities for growing seasonal vegetables, herbs, meat and dairy products, cheeses, and table flowers. They begin with established restaurants, adding one menu item every growing season weekend that features locally grown food products.

Ingredients

* 2-3 local organic farmers * 2-3 local chefs * 6-8 menu items


The Power of Slow & Small

We live in an age of fast and big. We impatiently wait for a 10-second technology delay. We expect everything to move at the speed of electrons. Instant is the measure of our tolerance for results.

Our bias for big continues to eclipse our appreciation for the power and possibilities of small. Local enterprises and micro loans pale in public esteem compared to globally sized strategies. In this era where maximum and optimum are equated, we have our greatest faith in megastores, megachurches, megawars, and megasolutions.


People with small and intangible assets are described as “needy”, while those with large and tangible assets are described as “powerful.”

In a culture of big and fast, we risk postponing the power and possibilities of small and slow. Engaging the Gifts of the community is always about engaging the small that people have rather than the big they don’t. It’s always about moving at the speed of trust since trust is the only currency that has the power to authentically bring people’s Gifts together.

We need to start thinking about what's possible given reality as it is. What are our assets and what can we do today with them? Why should we wait to have more in order to do differently? What’s wrong with moving at the scale of our Gifts and the speed of our Invitations?

Different is the point of transformation and the good news is that different is possible at any speed and any scale. So much of what is big and fast that thrives today started small and slow. The reality is, authentic and sustainable growth always happens in organic steps, stages, and phases.

Skipping foundational steps in order to get to scale fast results in eventual collapse. Building in steps makes efforts sustainable and allows for more creativity and innovations along the way.


The Power of the Intangible

There are two kinds of assets in any community: tangible and intangible. Tangible assets are things like private money, public funding, properties, buildings, public infrastructure, green and open spaces, natural resources. Intangible assets are things like talents, expertise, skills, knowledge, experience, connections, and the social capital of trust and trustworthiness.

If we constrain our conversations to tangible assets, we constrain our Dreams, Small Acts, and Invitations. Discovering even a little-known intangible asset opens up all kinds of new possibilities in the community that would never be considered in a world constrained to tangible assets.

The fastest way to keep intangible assets unengaged in a community is to focus exclusively on tangible assets.

Many community master plans leverage tangible assets to create a built environment of commercial, residential, financial, and public spaces. What happens in these spaces is ultimately determined by how the community engages intangible assets. That’s the profound power of intangible assets.

New conversations thrive in communities passionate about the discovery and engagement of


intangible assets. The bottom line is that where tangible assets are finite and easily hoarded, intangible assets tend to be more open-sourced, and easily shared.

The Power of Possibilities

When people come together to build their community, it has often been from a problem focus.

Many communities still believe that by focusing on problems, they can energize, engage, and empower people. The reality is that while problems have the power to bring people together who have been otherwise isolated or fragmented, they don't have the power to help people move toward a new future together.

Nothing creative or collaborative comes from talk about what's wrong, what we don't like or want, what bothers us, what we don't have and haven't achieved or who's to blame and be held responsible for the solutions. These are the old conversations that only have the ability to divide, depress, and disengage us.

People move forward with conversations about possibilities. People have the ability to create new futures together when they have conversations that focus on what they want and like, what attracts and


calls them, what they are already in the process of achieving, and what they have and can do.People move forward together when they spend more time making promises rather than excuses and accepting responsibility for action instead of postponing it until other institutions and leaders in the community take action on their behalf.


Studio Launching

Dream/ Graduating art students have the space and mentoring to start their first studios and careers

Art enthusiasts envision a thriving artistic community were patrons support emerging artists. They convene art institute faculty and area commercial employers with unused industrial and commercial spaces, who are willing to donate these in exchange for utility contributions from graduating art students who will use these spaces as incubators to get their studios and careers off the ground. Retired artists are invited to mentor these students on getting these projects launched and successful.

Ingredients

* 1 art faculty * 2-3 graduating art students * 1-2 local commercial firm owners * 1 retired studio artist

River2River

Dream/ Cyclists can transverse neighborhoods with path continuities from one river to the next

Bike riders wonder about the big possibility of being able to traverse single routes between watershed rivers in urban areas. They join with local


government planning folks who help them create bike lanes that span continuous surface street routes through urban and suburban neighborhoods, connecting rivers that run perpendicular to the routes and parallel to each other. Small business owners at the two ends of river-route intersections convene and decide to collaborate with local brewers to craft an ale that celebrates the new connections river to river.

Ingredients

* 4-5 cyclists * 1 river to river bikeable street way * 2 local businesses * 1 local micro brewery

Poets on the Road

Dream/ Local poets have ample opportunities to read their work in community settings

We want to give local poets support for publishing their work, so we connect them to local catering groups who have upscale suburban and urban clients. Caterers and clients collaborate to host "the best of" poets and poetry as pre-party features at their events.


Ingredients

* 3 local poets * 1 poetry reading organizer * 1 local catering group * 1 party event host/planner & client * a handful of "best of" poems


An Intentional Model of Building Community

2008 George Nemeth & Jack Ricchiuto

An introductory model to Peter Block's work on building community

New conversations

Small ActsInvitations

Gifts

Conversations about

possibilities

Conversations about assets

Conversations about

engagement

Conversations about

projects

DeficiencyProblem

Blame Consensus

What's wrong? What are we lacking?

Who's to blame for these problems? What can we all agree on?

Dream Space

Conversations that have the power to reveal, inspire & engage our strengths

Old (Shadow) conversationsConversations that have no power to reveal, inspire & engage our strengths


The Power of an Intentional Model

We’ve found that when communities have a model for moving forward together, more is possible.

The community’s assets become more transparent and engaged. People express more courage in their Dreams because the Dreams they have together can be bigger than Dreams they have alone.

When communities lack a model of having new conversations, they stay stuck in the old shadow conversations that have no power to move things forward. They insanely repeat solutions with the hope of different outcomes. They paradoxically maintain the very status quo they Dream of transcending.

Using an Intentional Model gives us a new and sustainable way to move from isolated and fragmented efforts to collaborative and cohesive efforts in building communities that are attractive, affordable, and agile in the seven core areas of quality of life: learning, housing, food, health care, transportation, public spaces, and economic opportunities.


The Model

We build community with conversations about Dreams, Small Acts, Gifts, and Invitations.

✦ Dream Space: how we describe the qualities and characteristics of a thriving community

✦ Small Acts: small experiments that help us realize our Dreams

✦ Gifts: the talents and assets we bring to the table

✦ Invitations: the inclusion of those who can bring other Gifts to the table

The Dream Space Conversation

The Dream Space conversation is about future possibilities that have the power to inspire, empower, and bring us together as never before.

Anything we imagine one generation out is a worthy Dream. What do we want to be true about our communities in 20 years? What choices do we want people to have? How would we love our community to connect to others? How would we like to see this community renew itself?

Dreams are the ways we would love to describe the world far beyond tired and failed solutions to


today’s problems. In Dream Space we see the world with the eyes of hope, courage, and faith.

When people come together in community, they are drawn together by faith in a different future. They yearn to be inspired by new possibilities rather than just relieved from present crises.

There are many ways to invite and frame the Dream Space conversation:

✦ What kind of people, businesses, and institutions would we love to attract into our community?

✦ What would we love to create together that we couldn’t create alone?

✦ What would we consider ideal features of our community?

✦ What kind of community do we want the next generation to be born into?

Dreams can start fuzzy and gain more power when we make them as specific as we can.

Because the future is uncertain, it is important to understand that Dreams are not predictions, speculations, or arguments about the future.

Dreaming is a description of what makes us feel most alive when thinking about the possibilities of our shared future. Dreams are ideal states we want to become prepared for. They enable us to see


present Gifts and opportunities more clearly. We Dream not to see the future, but to use the future as a lens to more clearly see our power in the present.

The Small Acts Conversation

A Small Act is something we can do today to begin to realize what we Dream as possible. It’s what we can do with what we do have, what’s possible given reality as we perceive it. It’s the opposite of what we might be able to do if things were different. A Small Act is what we can do with things being exactly as they are.

A Small Act doesn't depend on the permission or support of others. It's within our capabilities and willingness. Small Acts are the opposite of actions that seek speed and scale beyond our Gifts and Invitations. Small Acts aren't constrained by speed and scale.

They are enough to spark movement in the direction of big possibilities. Small Acts are always small experiments inspired by a compelling future possibility. Each of the recipes throughout the book are examples of Small Acts inspired by our conversations in Dream Space.

Small Acts are relative to the capabilities of the people engaged in them. To an investor, a Small Act is a micro-loan or grant. To a group of teachers, a


Small Act is an event with a few students, parents, grandparents, and business owners. One person's Small Act may be another's large one.

When Small Acts are connected, they create larger and often unpredictable impacts. In a dynamic and interdependent world, one Small Act can be like the small seeds or microbes that start rich ecologies and habitats.

The Gifts Conversation

Everyone in a community has some talent that has engaged or potential value to the community. Talents include assets like imagination, aged wisdom and experience, degreed expertise, researched genius, and passionate entrepreneurial spirit. Child raising, teaching, manual labor, cooking, and gardening are all examples of Gifts. When we're engaged in Gifts conversations, we aren't distracted by what we're lacking, our deficiencies, obstacles, weaknesses, threats, or our shortfalls.

In a Gifts conversations, we're talking about assets, talents, and resources in the community that aren't yet being engaged as they could be. We're talking about our own Gifts and how we can engage them in Small Acts inspired by big possibilities. We're constantly exploring, identifying, and discovering unrealized and hidden Gifts. This is a self-fulfilling


expectation. The more Gifts we expect to find, the more we’ll find.

In Gifts conversations, we’re talking about what each of us brings to any conversation in community--any form of knowledge, ability, resources, or funding.

The Invitation Conversation

Sometimes our Small Acts require Gifts beyond those present at the table. As communities learn to Dream more expansively, they easily Dream Dreams beyond their available assets. As people learn how to translate Dream Space into Small Acts, they think of Small Acts that call for other talents and assets in the community.

In these cases, we need to engage other people with Gifts complementary to our own. There may be times we need to invite other people to help us transition from a Small Act to Dream Space, or transition from Dream Space to a Small Act.

In Invitation conversations, we're not interested in talking critically about people outside the room, no matter how tempting or routine that may be. We are clear that doing so is a distraction from engaging them and their Gifts.


New futures always depend on new collaborations. Small Acts often require more people than those in the present conversation.

Instead of talking about people not present, we invite them and their Dreams and Gifts into the conversation. We engage them in improbable collaborations that have the power to move us in steps closer to futures that call to our hearts.

The Innovation Continuum

When we want to efficiently create support for any Dream or Small Act, it matters who we invite to the table. When it comes to reacting to change, there are five kinds of people in every community: the New, Nexus, Norm, Never, and Napping.

New people are those who are interested in anything new - any new idea, solution, product, service, or experience. Invite them to the table and they will try anything new we have to offer. They make great participants in small experiments and pilot projects. They will also help your group research and develop anything new.

Nexus people are those who embrace change and new things simply because they have trust relationships with New people. Norm people only accept change when "everyone else" embraces it, starting with the Norm people who are influenced


by their trustworthy Nexus friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors.

Never people are simply against a change and will do anything to defend and protect the status quo - the "way we've always done it." The Napping are simply not paying attention to anything emerging or changing and don't notice.

If we want to get a new idea going, we are wise to get a lot of New people involved. When we want to get Norm people involved, we get Nexus people involved. People are interested and passionate about change to the degree that others they trust are.

Change happens through relationships, not mass communication, marketing, threats or incentives. People support the change that the people they trust support. People trust change trusted by people they trust. In the early stages of a project, do not squander a lot of time and resources trying to convert the Norm, Never, and Napping. Leverage the right people at the right time and see the results.


InterGen Tea Party

Dream/ A neighborhood where no one locks their houses, garages, or cars, where children and parents feel free to allow children to play outside the supervision of parents.

We start by inviting a few grandparents into the Dream conversation, in part because some neighborhood grandparents are visible and engaged on first name basis with children and their parents. We consider Small Acts of children hosting tea parties for neighborhood retirees, exchanging Gifts of food they make by hand for each other. Invitations go out to one or two local grade school full time and substitute teachers. Invitations go out to local student musicians to play, using their emerging Gifts, at the tea party.


Ingredients

* 4-5 children, any size or shape * 9-10 cups of child brewed teas * 2-3 senior neighbors with hand made food * 1-2 local grade school teachers * 1 local student musician

Landlord Welcome Wagon

Dream/ A neighborhood filled with tenants who feel as engaged & invested in the quality of life

An urban neighborhood group has come to the collective conclusion that many community "problems" derive from tenants of houses and buildings managed and owned by neglectful landlords. A small subgroup studies good renters and realize that they tend to have good landlords. They decide they want a neighborhood with all good landlords. They collaborate with good landlords to create a new landlord welcome wagon and network group so old and new landlords can support one another with peer support, connections, help, and services.

Ingredients

* 2-3 neighbors * 2-3 good landlords * study of available services and support


Supporting the Well-Being of our Animals

Dream/ Every shelter dog gets walks and exposure to the community

A retired husband and wife couple who love animals notice that animals in the shelter are chained up daily as their cages are cleaned. Animals cannot be walked because of recent staff reductions. They arrive at the shelter at 8:30 and walk the dogs as cages are being cleaned. There are not enough dog walkers, so they enlist more family and friends. They, with 2 children & 4 grand children, walk the animals 5 days a week. Others walk the dogs, too. They have established a regular dog walking program. One person does organizing and scheduling, another holds volunteer orientations twice monthly. Now all dogs get walked daily not to mention the love and attention and people in the community area get healthier in the process.

Ingredients

* 1 animal lover/couple * 2-3 volunteer walker family & friends * 4-6 shelter dogs


Literacy Breakfasts

Dream/ Local income challenged parents start to become savvy consumers, creating budget efficiencies for themselves and their families

Local high schools train students in financial literacy, specifically the many ways to stretch their limited consumer dollars. Students team with libraries to host breakfasts for grade school parents where they pass along their training to these parents.

Ingredients

* 1 high school finance teacher * 4-5 finance students * 1 library * 1 librarian * 6-10 grade school parents

eBay Nation

Dream/ Struggling parents have zero unused items from raising their children and instead gain income from unused items

Local web designers and bloggers team with libraries to teach block club members how to use their cell phone cameras and library computers to sell their unused clothes and other valuables on


eBay. Portions of profits go back to web designers and bloggers. Libraries hold classes on consumer literacy to help people discover best quality low cost options in their areas for the money they make on eBay.

Ingredients

* 1 student and web designer and/or blogger * 1 library & librarian * 2-3 block club members * 1 cell phone camera * a small collection of sellable goods * library sponsored classes on consumer literacy


The Problem with Problems

The problem with problems is not that problems are invalid ways of inviting community engagement. We can always find victims of anything willing to come to any table to give voice to their grievances.


The problem with problems is that they tend to keep people talking in circles of old conversations where movement into productive action becomes less and less likely. Talking about problems tends to invite conversations about what's already been tried, why it isn't working, and who's to blame.

It's the shortest distance to inaction and maintaining the status quo. In fact, many people who fear and resist change sustain a problem focus because this focus almost guarantees the kind of inaction that can keep things from being too different.

As long as we focus on problems and not possibilities, we prevent real research, design, and experimenting with more innovative approaches.

The opposite of a conversation that begins with a problem is a conversation that begins with a Dream.

Instead of talking about violators and violations, we talk about better engaging the community in volunteer and employment opportunities. Instead of talking about drop-out students, we talk about co-designing schools and programs so compelling that students want to stay later to work on new projects that engage their Gifts and speak to their passions. Instead of talking about the high costs of health care, we talk about how to build healthy living into each of the community's institutions.


Dream Space automatically creates larger spaces of possibility, innovation, and creativity. When we start out 20 years from now, the breadth of our vision inspires the depth of our passion.

Dreams invite and inspire approaches we've never thought of or talked about before. We become less likely to get stuck in ideas that win little support, excitement, or investments of time and assets by the community. We become more likely to consider and explore that which has no precedent in the community, that which we’re not so prepared to argue about or defend.


Shadow Conversations

When we come together in community, there are conversations that protect the way things are. Everyone knows these conversations. They are the ones that encourage speeches followed by inaction and cynicism. They are conversations that may engage loud and large voices lost in the noise of endless and futile debate. They are shadow conversations.

The problem with shadow conversations is not that they're wrong or invalid. It's that they have no power to make a difference in the world. They don't have the power to build community, only to divide it.

The four shadow conversations are problem, consensus, deficiency, and blame conversations.

Problem conversations are about what bothers us. It's a conversation about what we don't like, don't want, what annoys and frustrates us, and the people we call enemies and adversaries.

Problem conversations bring out the worst in us individually and collectively because they are a denial of our Dreams and Gifts and a postponement of Small Acts and Invitations.

All communities have complaints, grievances and wounds and there is always mythology around the


notion that venting toxicity will create space for Dreams, Small Acts, Invitations, and Gifts. This is good in theory but in practice, it is often a postponement of new conversations. There is little empirical evidence that a problem focus moves communities forward. It has been mostly a superstitious mythology passed along from one generation to the next. There is however, much mounting evidence that a possibility focus has the power to bring people together as never before.

Consensus conversations are about the kinds of agreements and permissions we think we need before we engage in a possible Small Act on our Dream. It's a focus on the political endorsement and majority agreement we lack and think we need for Dreams and Small Acts.

By definition, Small Acts are actions we can take without complete agreement by the community, permission from opinion leaders, or support by the majority of people at or absent from the table.

Waiting for consensus can be a postponement of Invitations and Small Acts. Trying to get everyone to sign up to any one idea prevents people from pursuing their own Dreams as owners of these Dreams. The reality is that we don't need to agree on everything for a small group of us to engage in Small Acts in the direction of our Dreams.


There are many Invitations and Small Acts that do not require permission, support, or even interest from the whole. One of the more effective ways to slow down action in a community is to use voting to narrow down the rich diversity of projects and possibilities.

Deficiency conversations are about what we're lacking. They're about gaps and needs, obstacles and constraints, threats and fears. They fuel fear, asset hoarding and win-lose competition that adds no value to a thriving community.

Many communities have a long history of viewing people and institutions as needs and problems rather than as Gifts. It’s a self-fulfilling expectation where the less we look for Gifts, the fewer Gifts we see, and the more needs and problems keep people stuck, divided and trying to compete for and hoard assets.

Deficiency conversations are about what we don't have and can't do. Focusing on deficiencies can be an excuse to avoid commitments to action. Truth is, we will always have deficiencies of one kind or another. More than that, every advancement in the history of human experience came about in a context of incredible amounts of deficiencies.

Focusing on what we lack distracts us from what we have. Engaging imperfect Gifts can do more than any amount of waiting for better or more Gifts.


Blame conversations are about who we hold responsible for the deficiencies we believe are holding us back from our Dreams. They are self-inflicted declarations of our innocence.

They’re about who's not in the room that we can criticize and mount campaigns against. It is always tempting to assign responsibility for our future to the people, leaders, and institutions that we believe are more powerful than we are or ever could be. It’s easy to blame people who are doing big acts to save us from our perceived victimhood.

Blame conversations are about who hasn't taken care of the problems we believe we need to solve in order to have a better future. It’s blaming our politicians and police, pastors and professors in ways that takes from us our freedom and responsibility to create our own futures together.

Talking about the absent and guilty is easy and excuses us from acting with the freedom we have to move toward a new future. As long as we don't invite them into the conversation, they may never have the opportunity to partner with us in creating a new future together. Blame is a declaration of our innocence that galvanizes our identities as victims. It is how we give our power away generation after generation.

These are the conversations that start with questions about how we can change the minds of leadership,


the board, funders, or community members who "don't get it." The problem is that these conversations postpone the engagement of the willing and interested few who can help us inspire new Dreams and act in small, significant ways.

The shadow conversations keep us stuck, at odds, feeling like hopeless victims of forces and changes outside our control. They prevent access to our sense of imagination, our capacity for passion, and the depth of our individual and collective strengths. They take away our vision and power; they make us sightless and helpless.

Some shadow conversations are sincere, driven by heart-felt agendas. Others are more divisive, expressions of unhealed injustices people either experienced themselves or inherited.

What’s important is that we keep inviting people to refocus away from shadow conversations, no matter how compelling, and into the four new conversations that build community. Any time spent in shadow conversations takes away people’s sense of shared responsibility for doing together what can’t be done in isolation or competition.

However attached people seem to be to shadow conversations, we need to keep inviting them into community building conversations until they either engage or leave to pursue other interests.


Engaged Students

Dream / Local high school attendance is over 90%

High school faculty team up with local employers and retired mentors to push learning outside the classroom into the community in ways that tap into the interests of students who fail to thrive in traditional classroom environments because they're more kinesthetic than visual or auditory learners. Math classes are held on construction sites, chemistry classes in chemical engineering plants, writing in newspaper and marketing firms. Students learn in the context of doing actual projects that benefit the sponsoring organizations.

Ingredients

* 2 high school faculty * 5-10 students * 2-3 early retirement mentors * corporate sponsors

Virtual Hospice Gratitude Community

Dream/ People in hospices around the world can post daily personal reflections on gratitude while grieving families and others can find unique inspiration from their posts.


Hospice staff working with young hospice patients realize that a practice of gratitude enriches the quality of their life. They team up with local bloggers to design and host a blog where patients can daily post what they’re most grateful for that day. It becomes an inspiration website for patients, their families, and anyone suffering from grief.

Ingredients

* 2 hospice staff * 1-2 hospice patients * 1 local blogger


Professional Entrepreneurs

Dream / The talents of local retired professionals are engaged

Local law, medical, and nursing school faculty collaborate with local economic development organizations to identify graduating students who want to start their own businesses and clinics. They also identify local retired professionals who commit to mentoring these students before they graduate on career and business entrepreneurial development.


Ingredients

* 1 law school faculty * 1 medical school faculty * 1 nursing school faculty * 4-5 graduating entrepreneurial students * 4-5 retired professionals with entrepreneurial

experience

How Many Leaders Does it Take to Change a Community?

If a community says it has a 100 leaders and none have competencies in inviting, convening, and engaging new conversations that build community, then the community has 100 leaders in the community but not 100 community leaders. If they're all good managers of businesses and institutions, then they are good managers but it may be unfair to expect them to be community leaders.

For someone to be a community leader, they need to develop the skill and will to engage people in new conversations about Dreams, Small Acts, Gifts, and Invitations. They need to know how to help people make the radical transitions from shadow to new conversations.

It helps if they have many strong and diverse connections in the community; that they are willing


and able to introduce and connect people for new collaborations. It helps if they are aware of hidden tangible and intangible assets in the community. It helps if they model and inspire trustworthiness and innovation.

What are unnecessary for community leadership are political position and power, economic capital and wealth or the willingness and ability to control and manipulate people to their agendas. They don't need to be content experts with PhDs or to have broad travel portfolios.

How many leaders does it take to begin change in any community?

One. Change can start with one person’s Small Act.

Planning that Builds Community

In new conversations, planning is the process of describing the future we want to see and engaging in action today that allows us to realize however much of this future we can.

Planning is not substituting talk for action. It is not a postponement of Small Acts today in order to engage in bigger acts tomorrow. Planning is a promise to do what’s possible in the present. We look out 20 years to better see what’s possible and desirable in the present.


The only plans that have integrity are plans that invite people to engage their Gifts in Small Acts that realize their Dreams.

There is no integrity in plans we’re not taking action on in the present. We don’t need to pack large binders with plans for the future. Reality is that our sense of the future we want will continuously shift thanks to the continuous new learning that emerges from each Small Act and Invitation in the present.

As long as we aren’t constrained by commitments we’re not acting on we have the freedom and resources to learn about new opportunities, assets, and possibilities.

So what does planning look like for an uncertain future? It’s Dreaming and translating Dreams into acts that we can commit to in the present. At the end of the day, intellectually honest planning does not produce a binder of anything, it only commitments to entering Dream Space and doing Small Acts.

Smart planning is the process of making commitments that create more new opportunities rather than close off and decrease options.


Authentic Engagement

In many communities, people look to civic institutions and managers to build community even though many are not positioned and prepared to do so.

Civic institutions include schools and universities, government bureaus and agencies, regional and public planning commissions, community development organizations, churches and temples, and economic development organizations.


Many institutions only know how to engage their own isolated assets in fulfillment of their own Dreams. Many don’t dream at all, instead investing all of their gifts in fire-fighting the smoldering and sometimes raging symptoms of problems.

Many institutional managers have no experience in or knowledge of how to engage a community in new conversations. Their only public engagement with the community is standing in front of or over people, talking at people, making speeches and political pronouncements.

The good news is that some institutional managers and leaders are beginning to learn how to convene and host authentic engagement.

One of the ways civic institutions can build community is through authentically engaging the community during the events they convene.

An event invites authentic engagement when four conditions are designed into the process:

✦ Participants are invited to focus more on possibilities and strengths than problems and weaknesses

✦ Participants are invited to engage each other, conveners, and attending experts in dialogue


✦ Participants are clear about any decision makers and processes, and decision criteria and constraints

✦ Participants are given the time & resources to research, develop, and test new ideas

Given this set of criteria, authentic engagement cannot occur in a single event; only a series of conversations.

We talk about an event or process being one of authentically engaging when it engages the Gifts of the community - its assets, strengths, talents, relationships, and social capital. Conveners invite people to share in the shaping of their common future.

When people are authentically engaged, they are active participants who together think through possibilities. They are not passive listeners, unengaged consumers, uneducated voters, or the targets of control or conversion.

The opposite of an authentically engaging event is one that is unengaging. In these events, conveners are not transparent about who makes ultimate decisions or are unclear about the process and criteria for decision making.

Participants are unclear about the constraints within which their ideas and inputs must perform. As a result, participants are at risk of generating and


voicing ideas that are already pre-destined for failure, rejection, or an unknown fate.

In inauthentic, unengaging events, participants speak to select people, usually sitting at the front of the room, but do not engage them or each other in meaningful and generative dialogue.

Because the interactions are based on the shadow conversations, speech-making is often divisive and prevents real learning, discovery, curiosity, and collaboration. Worse is when only the people in front get to give speeches and the rest of the invited can only voice questions and grievances.

The process is often weakness and problem focused rather than asset and possibility based, making any new conversations unlikely. Ideas are voiced, but no ideas synergize with others to form more complex and compelling options to be considered. Experts are isolated in the front of the room rather than embedded into small group dialogue designed to co-create new options and possibilities.

One of the classic forms of inauthentic, unengaging community dialogue is inviting the community to be converted to an intractable set of conclusions pre-decided by conveners. This practice violates the sociological principle that people will authentically support what they help create.


In events that are authentically engaging, conveners and experts are participants, informing and inspiring group engagement around real questions and real work.

Multiple conversations allow for the natural and necessary research, development, and testing of ideas and alternatives. People's Gifts are engaged, not just their grievances voiced. Participants feel like adults sharing responsibility for a common future rather than like children delivering unfulfillable demands to parents.

When engagement is authentic, conveners are transparent about the “politics” of any decision owners, processes, criteria, and constraints. Constraints include sacred cows, goats, and bulls.

Sacred cows are things that we are committed to not changing or deciding.

Sacred goats are things we do not have the power to change or decide on. In these events, participants are clear on what's on and off the table and why. People are treated as adults capable of understanding any rationales and realities, rather than being treated as children who will be told things only on a patriarchal "need to know basis."

Sacred bulls are things we must change, things we’re committed to making different.


In authentic engagement, participants feel like they are co-owners in a common future they share together and with the conveners. Conveners only act in ways that build trustworthiness and design events that only increase the collective mutual trustworthiness in the community.

Community building happens at the speed and scope of trustworthiness on all levels. When people are treated as Gifts to be engaged rather than problems to be fixed, mutual trust builds naturally and accelerates the movement of new conversations to the kind of visible and palpable improvements in the community that no one needs to spend time measuring for reports.

The success of events that are authentically engaging is not on the number of ideas generated, grievances voiced, speeches given, or institutional policies and practices defended. Their success is measured in how many Dreams are expressed, Gifts engaged, Invitations made, and Small acts achieved.


Frequently Answered Questions

Is the model for grassroots or institutional efforts?

It's for both. The new conversations help people move from shadow to community building conversations, no matter what the scale and scope of their tangible and intangible assets and roles in the community.

It is just as important that those referred to as being “on the margins" feel as much of a sense of freedom and responsibility as the "who's who" people in Dreaming, engaging Gifts in Small Acts, and inviting people into the process.

These conversations are just as important at kitchen tables and coffee shops as they are in boardrooms and public committee rooms. In fact, these conversations have the power to bridge people across levels and sectors, connecting people across asset, power, cultural, and political boundaries.

How small should Small Acts be?

The size of any act in a community is directly related to the size of the Gifts and Dreams at the table. A Small Act for a public entity can be a multi-million dollar investment over 10 years. A Small Act for a group of volunteers can be the launch of a tool barter program in their neighborhood. Every Small


Act, however relative in size, has the possibility of adding value to the community.

A Small Act is something that can happen in days or weeks rather than months and years. Each naturally leads to the next Small Acts that together provoke meaningful long-term impacts in the community.

How does the model help us get to scale and speed?

Speed and scale in any Dream is a function of how fluently we transition through the new conversations and keep out of the shadow conversations.

Dreams move at the speed and scale of our Small Acts, and Small Acts move at the speed of our engaged Gifts and Invitations. The more Small Acts a community engages in, the faster growth the community realizes.

As architect Christopher Alexander suggests in A Pattern Language, "A town is a concrescence of a million acts." The more Gifts we engage and the more people we invite into Small Acts, the more speed and scale we realize on the way to realizing our Dreams.


The important issue is not to allow conversations about speed and scale to paralyze us and support the postponement of the possible slow and small.

What kind of community leadership does the model require?

The power of leadership in community is the power of the questions they uniquely bring to the table. Good leaders bring questions that inspire, engage, and empower.

The more people learn and practice the model, the less direction they require to move together in the direction of their Dreams. The model gives them the questions they need to move from problems to possibilities, from fragmentation to invitation, from victimhood to self-organization, from abstractions to meaningful actions.

When a small group needs any kind of asset, from expertise to funding, they use new conversations to make this happen. Not stuck in the shadow conversations, they are no longer self-constrained by postponing actionable steps for illusive permission from leaders and managers.

What's the role of ideas in the model?

Many communities have become good at generating more ideas than anyone has the resources or time commitment for. It's especially


easy for many of us to have ideas we leave to someone else’s care. In the worse cases, ideas go through debate, voting, and ultimately die quiet deaths on lists in planning documents and proposals.

When ideas emerge in new conversations, we're interested in those we are willing to take action on now. We're interested in ideas that engage and connect our talents and assets in Small Acts that reflect our Dreams.

We're interested in ideas into which we can invite other people to join us. We're more interested in learning from our ideas through action than in debating their potential while we postpone action on them. We practice the innovation principle that the power of an idea is in its ability to give shape to a new experiment.

How much funding does the model require?

When groups use the model, they realize that the question about engaging and inviting tangible and intangible assets we do have is a more actionable conversation than talk about by funding we don't have.

If we are committed to Small Acts that require more funding than we have available, it's an opportunity for Invitation conversations about who else we can invite into the conversation. Are there funders,


friends of funders, or grant writers and researchers in the community we can invite to the table? If so, Invitations are next steps in our process.

If people and leaders in communities have conversations with funders, they need to be in the context of the new conversations. Collaborative innovations need to replace competitive proposal processes because of their power to invite richer intersections of Gifts, inspired by more inclusive and compelling Dreams.

The key is that we don't get stuck in deficiency shadow conversations about assets and resources to which we lack access. An Intentional Model of new conversations moves us in the direction of Small Acts for which we have assets and resources. If we have to move smaller and slower, we'll get there more quickly than postponing even these actions for funding we don't have.

How do we get started?

New conversations start where you are. It can be over coffee, during a commute, in a planned meeting, over an instant or text message, in an accidental conversation.

Whoever shows up are the right people and whenever it starts is the right time. Each new conversation engages us in the next step toward building our community. Whether we have faith in


anything else, we can have faith in ourselves, each other, and this.

NextGen Energy Workers

Dream / Local energy employers have new talent to choose from every year

A college/university renewable energy program collaborates with a few local renewable energy firms to co-design curricula, advertising campaigns, internships, and jobs for the next 4 years of graduates.

Ingredients

* 2 renewable energy program faculty * 6-8 energy program students & graduating

students * 2 local renewable energy firm leaders

New Green Lease on Life

Dream / Local ex-offenders are trained for green-collar jobs

People who lead programs for ex-offenders collaborate with local green firms, such as construction recycling firms, to create new jobs and


workers. They invite local probation staff to get high-risk program members involved as well.

Ingredients

* 1 ex-offender program staff * 1 construction recycling firm * 1 probation officer * 1 local college training program expert

Tool Exchange

Dream / Everyone in a neighborhood has all the tools they need when they need them

Tool owners in a neighborhood get together and create a list of share-able tools and equipment. The list of owners, current users, next available dates are posted on a wiki (a collaboration website like Wikipedia) so everyone can see the status on all share-able options.

Ingredients

* 4-5 tool and equipment owners* a handful of available tools and equipment

options* 1 free wiki


Boarded Up Solar Houses

Dream / Every boarded up house is a local energy source

At a block party, people come together in complaints about how many houses are boarded up. They Dream of these houses one day bringing money into the neighborhood instead of being sources of fear and vandalism. Someone invites a pot luck of interested neighbors and students from a local green energy university program. Students help neighbors get grants to roof and side the houses with solar panels that create power for the neighborhood. Habitat For Humanity is engaged to help install the new panels.

Ingredients

* 5-6 interested neighbors * 2-3 university students in green studies * 1 internship program coordinator * a set of donated/funded solar panels * a land bank abandoned house * energy experts who can help with energy

conversion & sharing


A Thriving Built Community

Dream / There are no vacant or abandoned commercial or residential properties

Neighborhood block clubs and merchant associations "adopt" a single vacant or abandoned property to assist owners with volunteer expertise to advertise and network for new tenants and owners.

Ingredients

* 1 block club * 1 merchant association


* 1-2 vacant/abandoned properties & owners * 1 building/housing leader * 2-3 volunteer experts in marketing, fund-raising

Church Kitchen Incubators

Dream/ Local urban kitchen facilities that provide bulk discount preparations for anyone in the neighborhood

Local church volunteers invite hospital and clinic nutrition specialists to collaborate with local college culinary schools to use unused church kitchen space as a food incubator for gardening neighbors where they grow and buy bulk meats, vegetables, and fruits and do canning and preparations to take home. Participants pay half for fresher food and the rest of their investment goes to participating churches and schools.

Ingredients

* 2 nutrition specialists * 1 culinary school faculty * 1 church kitchen with unused space * 1 local food shopping trip * food prep & storage equipment and materials


Salsa Barter

Dream / Small gardeners grow their products

Local gardeners engage local graphic artists and marketing experts to design award winning labels for their salsa products. The gardeners, who also happen to be decent web designers trade web design services and a year's worth of great salsas for graphic and marketing services to take their products to local and national markets.

Ingredients

* 2 local gardeners* 1 graphic artist* 1 marketing expert* local salsa products

Pavement Garden Paradise

Dream / Every empty parking lot is a thriving neighborhood garden

Local gardeners team up to build thriving community gardens on top of several feet of wood chips and mulch in abandoned local parking lots

Ingredients

* 4 local gardeners


* 1 abandoned parking lot* truck load of wood chips and mulch* garden materials & supplies


Postscript

When people come together in community, people know each other, look out for each other, connect each other, barter with each other, and engage each other. People are conscious, caring, and committed to what’s more possible together than in isolation or competition.

Given the political, architectural, and social experiments in the past several generations, it is clear that community is not the natural outgrowth of rapid development of built environments, the accumulation of power by political parties, or even the practices of representational governance models.

Community builds, grows, and thrives when the right kinds of conversations bring out the best in people. The quality of any community will always reflect the quality of its conversations. We are now learning from experience that new kinds of communities emerge naturally and sustainably from new kinds of conversations. It is as profound as that.


Authors

George Nemeth

George Nemeth is an innovator and thought leader in online collaboration and community building. He brings to the table experience in website design, network architecture design, strategic technology sales and marketing, technology integration research, and technical support & consulting. With a BA from John Carroll University in Business Administration, George's work focuses on the uses of technology as a means of managing knowledge and collaboration in organizations.

George has to his credits the creation and promotion of online and offline communities and is a Chief Information Office for the innovative online newsletter, Cool Cleveland. He hosts and develops one of the premier blogs, BrewedFreshDaily.com, featuring a dynamic intersection of economic development, technology, and quality of life posts and links.

As a Microsoft Certified Professional, George has worked in information management systems with companies including Swagelok and NCS DataCom, and is fluent in XML, RSS, scripting languages, and a variety of data bases. George has also been an instructor at several area schools leading students in a self-directed exploration of graphic communication, focusing on the user of blogs,


wikis, and other traditional forms of print and electronic media.

Most recently, Nemeth joined the board of trustees for ArtsCollinwood, an organization in his neighborhood that believes a flourishing arts community enriches a neighborhood’s quality of life both economically and culturally. "Supporting a stimulating arts environment and encouraging continuing education in the arts where I live is one of the reasons we chose Collinwood", says George.

George is also serving organizations in the development of blogs and other collaborative and social media.


Jack Ricchiuto

For 30 years, Jack has worked with groups across over 24 industries in over 24 urban, rural, and virtual communities and markets. He works with groups from 5 to over 500 including organizational teams, project teams, community groups, task forces, governing boards and committees, and leadership teams. His work is about transformation.

Jack's industries and markets have included: Aerospace, Architecture, Automotive, Bio Tech, Communications, Consulting, Consumer Products, Commercial Products, Community Development, Design/Build Firms, Economic Development, Education, Sustainability, Finance, Government, Health Care, Industrial, Information Technology, Internet Startups, Leadership Development, Legal & Accounting, Manufacturing, Marketing, Non-Profit Services, Publishing/Media.

Jack's books include Collaborative Creativity (1997), Accidental Conversations (2002), Project Zen (2003), Appreciative Leadership (2005), Mountain Paths (2006), Conscious Becoming (2007).

Jack’s work with leaders and organizations focuses on issues including strategic planning, executive and life coaching, project management coaching, leadership development, organization development,


board effectiveness, innovation management, social network development and community and economic development.

Jack’s undergraduate degree is from John Carroll University (1974) and graduate degree from Goddard College, Vermont (1980). In his early training in his 20's, he was mentored by the pioneers in American, European, and Japanese models of personal growth and development. He continues teaching and curriculum design with undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctorate programs in colleges and universities including Kent State University, Vanderbilt University, and UC Berkeley.


Beyond the Book

If you want to order new or additional copies of Instructions from the Cook, and read more from the book’s website and blog, visit:

Book orders & more / www.IntentionalModel.com

Blog / www.RadicalTransitions.net

You can also invite George and Jack to provide speaking and workshops to your group or community by contacting them at:

[email protected] [email protected]

or 216.373.7475

Email George or Jack with new recipe ideas and success stories.

Thank you.


http://www.IntentionalModel.com

http://www.IntentionalModel.com

http://www.RadicalTransitions.net

http://www.RadicalTransitions.net





instructions from the cook

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