Possibility, Accountability, and Creating Lasting Change in Communities

I used to feel bad about going long periods without posting new words to share with others, but one thing I’ve realized lately is that I’ll always be moving in periods of deep thought and percolation to use and share with others when the time is right. Less urgency, more authenticity in the process that way.

TL;DR: I’ve been working on trusting myself more to share things when it makes sense to share them. And today, I wanted to share something with you from a book I’ve been reading for school.

Possibility and Accountability: You Can’t Have Just One

This semester, I’m in a class about “the symbiotic and reciprocal relationship between individual and community health & wellbeing,” and let me tell you, it’s blowing my brain apart in all great ways.

Community is such a tricky concept to pin down, which is why I’m so grateful we have a whole semester to try and do it.

I’ll probably talk more about this course and book as the semester goes on, but today I wanted to talk about Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging. Particularly, I want to talk about possibility and accountability, and how they feed into restorative community.

Block describes accountability as “the willingness to care for the whole” and restoration as the act of thinking about community as “a possibility, a declaration of the future that we choose to live into.”

When we think about what we might be able to create, these creations exist, according to Block, “at the intersection of possibility and accountability.”

If we have possibility with no accountability, we just have “wishful thinking.”

If we have accountability, but no possibility, it leads to “despair” and a lot of the same stuff we have now.

Having one of these, and not both, is a huge problem

These ideas all feed into what I wrote about before on habits. If we keep going down the same path, EVEN if we are taking accountability and saying we want to forge a better path someday, failing to think about other possibilities and alternatives for how we could change how we operate will only lead to despair. This is especially true for people who hold more power and agency and can open the door to new possibilities. Even if they are taking accountability and commiserating about the current state of things, doing that WITHOUT possibility will only lead to despair and no real change.

The opposite scenario is no better. I recently spoke with someone who was very confident that they had a solution for a problem that could be easily adopted nationwide. It was so simple, they told me, that there was no reason it couldn’t change the way everyone operates. The only barrier is that not enough people know about it. When I started to ask questions and probe deeper, basically asking questions about community change, adoption, and culture - other elements of accountability and caring for the whole - this person shot all those questions down. What I was asking was not important to them, and that’s because they were stuck in the thinking of possibility without accountability - wishful thinking.

If we want to create real and lasting change in our communities - our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our affinity groups - we need to have both accountability and possibility.

What Does That Look Like?

What does it look like to have both possibility and accountability working to restore community and create change? I’d love to hear some of your ideas, but here are some from Block’s book, as well as some from my personal experience:

• Being empowered to focus on sustainability as a priority and bring it into a work setting to examine and reimagine the ways the organization might want to operate.
• Block talks about bringing in “a new story as opposed to the received dominant story” to create shifts and changes.
• Reimagining how funding should be awarded at a university in partnership with community to have conversations about values and what caring for the whole would actually take, going out to get money for the things that are collectively identified.
• Understanding, as a leader of a business, that you might not have the answers for which benefits are most valuable to your workforce. Instead, you decide to have collective conversations about what your workforce values, combining accountability and possibility to build benefits options that deviate from the standard but care for the whole.

“The future of a community then depends on a choice between a retributive conversation (a problem to be solved) and a restorative conversation (a possibility to be lived into).” - Peter Block

Block puts it best when he says: “The future of a community then depends on a choice between a retributive conversation (a problem to be solved) and a restorative conversation (a possibility to be lived into).” I frequently see problem-oriented conversations on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. It’s much more unusual to see people talking about viable possibilities and taking responsibility for working on those possibilities in community with others.

I’ll leave you with one final quote: “…once we have declared a possibility, and done so with a sense of belonging and in the presence of others, that possibility has been brought into the room and thus into the institution, into the community.”

So, where do you start?

You start by having the conversations and identifying the possibilities. Instead of shooting them down as being unrealistic - out of the budget, too much time to implement, too unusual to pull off - cast those concerns aside. Just allow possibilities to exist in the presence of others, and see what happens from there.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice (maybe you still think I’m talking out of my a** and you want some proof), check out this great TEDx video by Nick Tilsen about Building Resilient Communities. He talks about how the ideas and vision that need to be created need to be “at least as big” as the problem that needs to be solved. What a beautiful, incredible way to think. And they didn’t just think that, they put it into action with new sustainable design.

I can't wait to see what we create together!

?? Sammi