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Civic spirituality
When I was speaking at the LBJ Presidential Library last week, a woman rose from her chair to ask me if I had links on our Web site to various spiritual and religious thinkers. I had mentioned earlier in my talk that I believe America is in desperate need of a new kind of “civic spirituality.”
I responded by saying that we didn’t have links to such thinkers – and I didn’t think we would. I noted that such thinkers are important and that many Americans look to them for guidance. (See “Can religion bring us together?”)
My belief is that we need a civic spirituality in America. The two words placed together – almost an oxymoron these days – is the power and currency I’m looking for.
Civic spirituality calls us to belong to the civic realm; it asks us to see ourselves as belonging to something larger than ourselves; it would have us hold a belief in the innate goodness of people – even, maybe especially, as we see and experience evil and unfettered materialism and corruption around us.
The civic spirituality I have in mind – no, the civic spirituality that I can feel in my heart – would have us know of the progress we have made in our collective past, and thus provide us with a sense of possibility about our common future.
This civic spirituality would call on us to know, as the author Kathleen Norris has so eloquently written about, the “necessary other” – that we must hear and see and come to know that which is different from ourselves … that we purposefully test our thinking and our passions before locking into a fit of certitude.
The civic spirituality I am thinking about would cultivate our sense of humility – and remind us that humility is vital to any common experience.
It would engage us to live with a sense of grace, in which we are willing to leave room for the unimaginable or inexplicable to occur – and that we do not close ourselves off in our attempts to squeeze out ambiguity, uncertainty, and fear.
The civic spirituality I ask us to consider will require at least one more element: courage. But here I do not mean the modern-day courage of beating our breasts with bravado or of raising our voices to intimidate one another. No, while I may mean many things, let me suffice to say here that I am referring to the courage it takes to step forward and be seen and to engage.
My personal dream is to write a book about civic spirituality. It is the other half of the story of public innovation about which I wrote two weeks ago. We need both: public innovation and civic spirituality – for today, we are in short supply of both.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can create new pathways in public life and politics that offer authentic hope. I know that’s what many of you who read this blog are already doing.
So, I thank the woman who rose from her chair to ask me the question. -
Some responses on public innovation
Last week, I wrote about my sense of urgency for there to be more public innovation in society if we are to improve public life and politics. Today, I want respond to three comments from people who wrote me.
David Marsters from Vermont wrote in response to one of my blogs, that too many of us “worship relentlessly at the altar of efficiency.” I agree David. Our desire to prove just how efficient we are oftentimes distorts our very efforts at innovating. Take, for instance, how much time is required to generate real, meaningful change. The push for efficiency can lead us to set timetables and benchmarks that defy any notion of reality. When we’re not careful, our drive for results can produce nothing better than the peddling of more false hope in public life.
Still, those of us who seek to innovate must be prepared to talk about how we can make our efforts more effective and efficient. For me, at issue is how we envision change and whether we will have the gumption to step forward to set the right kinds of benchmarks and timetables – for we must always hold ourselves accountable. That leads me to say that part of the answer to the push for efficiency resides in a more robust notion of stewardship. All good stewards must be accountable; and those of us in the public innovation world must find ways to set benchmarks that reflect reality and what progress might look like – and then argue on behalf of those benchmarks.
“Zgirl” wrote the following to me: “I work as a community development strategist, specializing [in] civic and social development. I find that just getting folks to agree to meet to discuss a book is challenging at times.” Yes, I have experienced that, too. Now, the question is, “What’s the response?”
The danger in our attempt to “engage people” is that we lose sight of how change unfolds. Too often I’ve seen people undertake civic engagement initiatives that fail to produce results. My experience is that most communities lack the civic infrastructure, the civic norms, and the civic leaders to sustain large civic initiatives (and often we don’t think critically enough about the lack of capacity for smaller efforts, too).
I think we need to approach engagement efforts with the following questions. What’s the purpose of engaging people? What pathways are we creating for people to engage over time? How does our current work connect with what came before and what might follow? Where, then, must we begin our efforts? I am especially interested in the challenge of how we can build a culture of engagement that is embedded within a community and grows based on a web of relationships and organizations that can lead to real change.
Maybe the notion of taking a broad view of things is what Richard Puffer had in mind when he wrote to me last week. He said this “is why I think your discussion is so timely and why I hope others become involved. Public innovation, public renovation, and old fashioned community building has to become a priority if we are going to be moving up and not sliding back. We have to find ways to help people help make it happen!”
Indeed, we do, Richard. That’s why I’ve been writing about public innovation. After 20 years of doing this work, I believe we need to create new pathways for people. Those pathways will come only by us creating them anew. This will require (as I have said in other blogs) that we must move in two opposite directions simultaneously: We must be ruthlessly strategic in how we go about our work, and we must keep in our line of sight at all times what gives people authentic hope.
I believe our own words and deeds must actively reflect these principles if we are to tap people’s potential to make a difference and join together to build a common future. -
Public innovators: Drivers of change
What’s going to drive public innovation in public life and politics? People will. In the final analysis, we need public innovators to imagine a different path, to build different kinds of mechanisms, to create organizations that are catalytic, to create the conditions for a more robust public life and politics.
Recently, my colleagues and I looked back over nearly 20 years of Harwood Institute work, and one of the key insights we gained was that all of our successful work was fueled by a very particular kind of person.
These individuals combined, in different ways, a collection of characteristics. I’ll summarize these characteristics in three ways:- They are driven by their ideals
and aspirations – these were not magically
implanted in them or simply gleaned from a
book. These individuals came to us already
jazzed.
- They are pragmatic in their approach to
public life and politics. They do not allow
their ideals and aspirations to make them mushy
or overly sentimental. They are driven by a
deep desire to create change and make society
better.
- They understand risk and know how to calibrate it. They can figure out how much risk they can afford to take in any given situation, and they are constantly measuring where they stand.
I’ve come to believe that the cultivation of public innovators, and our ability to support them, is so important that The Harwood Institute created the Public Innovators Lab to help people develop their sensibilities and practices around public innovation and leadership. Moreover, we are launching this year our first Annual Public Innovators Summit to bring together under one roof people who have been innovating and who want to share ideas and lessons about pathways for making a difference; who want to wrestle with common challenges; and who want to build a network of ideas and support.
There are wonderful people across the country – including you – who are public innovators and maybe never even thought of themselves in that way. I want to find them and work with them. We need more public innovators in public life and politics.
Why? To address the challenges we know all too well. - They are driven by their ideals
and aspirations – these were not magically
implanted in them or simply gleaned from a
book. These individuals came to us already
jazzed.
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Creating organizations that innovate
Imagine you’re trying to create change in a community, and you need a civic-minded organization or group ready to innovate. Imagine, too, that each of the organizations you have in mind has a strategic plan; is guided by sophisticated benchmarks to measure impact; and their staffs have attended conferences on some of the latest management theories. Unfortunately, too often the gap between good management and public innovation is far too wide.
This week I’ve been writing about the need for public innovation in public life and politics. It’s needed so that people and communities can create more pathways to tap their own potential and join together to make a difference.
But not just any organization is ready to innovate. We need more of them ready to go.
Most organizations are guided by good intentions. But too many of our civic-minded organizations – whether they be community foundations, United Ways, newspapers and public broadcasting, art-based groups, local education funds, not to mention others – are trapped in old assumptions about their roles and old practices about how to see and engage with communities.
Sometimes their efforts can be summed up by the notion that they “act upon” communities rather than act as a “part of” community. They can see themselves almost as outside of the communities in which they work.
Existing organizations must become more catalytic if we are to innovate in public life and politics. After 20 years of working on this challenge, my experience is that organizations need to see themselves as spanning boundaries in communities; they need to work with others to incubate new ideas and then spin those ideas off once they are off-the-ground; they need to actively build connections and networks within their communities to lower obstacles to knowledge-sharing and true collaboration; they need to make engaging the community a part of their daily work – not just a special project from time to time; and they need to cultivate the community’s resources, capacity and political will for change.
I know this work isn’t easy. But I also know it’s possible. Why? Because I’ve done it with various groups including art-based organizations, community foundations, chambers of commerce, educational institutions, and even a regional transit authority. To innovate requires having a deep understanding of the community. It means being able to identify the true strategic levers for change. It takes having a keen sense of how one’s efforts will create new pathways for people and communities. And it takes being rigorous about how one’s efforts provide the opportunity for real change and hope – especially over time.
What’s more, public innovation requires us to calibrate our work. On the hand that work needs to take into account the current context of a community and challenge; on the other hand, the innovation needs to transcend that context to help us reach a new destination.
When I talk to many groups about this work – about public innovation – they tend to nod in agreement. And yet there is a point at which many people step back and decide that such innovation is not for them; or, even more so, that they need to focus on the bread and butter of their work in lieu of innovation.
But, I would submit that if we are to move community life forward, then public innovation needs to be at the core of at least some organizations in our communities. As I have said in the last two days, the prevailing system of public life and politics is calcified and rigid; and the new, emerging system that is being placed atop of the old one often serves to further fragment society. More business as usual won’t get us to where we need to go; nor will simply applying better management techniques, or unfolding new one-off initiatives that fail to change the existing dynamic of our chaotic public life.
Our goal must be to generate new ways of seeing and acting on both persistent and emerging challenges. The goal must be to create new pathways for people to engage, and these pathways must offer the possibility for change and authentic hope.
There are many ways for organizations to start down the new path I am suggesting. Bottom line: we need more civic-minded organizations to see themselves as homes of public innovation – and to innovate.