Resourceful Conversations Principle 4: Committing

Creating hope and progress

We recently published our framing article on Resourceful Conversations – our five principles for curating more useful conversations on the things you are trying to make happen, so you get more creativity and progress, and less tension and conflict.

Principle 1 was Contracting – the importance of people clearly agreeing why there needs to be a conversation at all, and how they will tackle it. ?Principle 2 was Unpacking – clarifying what’s happening and how people feel about that.? Principle 3 was Grounding – focusing on what matters most.

?And now we’re exploring Principle 4: Committing.

?When we want to make something important happen, we need to engage and inspire people to create a future worth reaching for. ?There is always a sense of urgency, but also a lot of ambiguity about the details, with competing voices pushing different priorities, and different degrees of anxiety about the impact.? We find ourselves busy, juggling requests and demands on our time, losing focus on why we are doing this, and frequently not sure that all the activity is having the impact we need.

?To move out of the maelstrom and make headway we need to get clear on the future we hope or wish for that would make all the effort worthwhile.? Committing is about igniting that sense of hope as a guiding star, and ensuring we maintain progress towards it, without being overwhelmed or distracted.

?Committing means recognising that trying to do everything never works, and we need to choose each step carefully, and notice where it takes us.? We can then pick one thing we can do to move in a useful direction, and do it.? And then the next.? And then the next.

?This form of committing is not about creating some big clever plan and trying to bulldoze it through, come what may.? This is about adapting ourselves and the way we work with others to make genuine progress.

?Once again, this is about the questions we ask:?

?Amongst all the turmoil, what do we really hope for?? What version of the future would be worth the journey?? What’s one thing we can do now to make a tangible step in that direction?? And what will that take from us?

?When we’re busy dealing with ‘stuff’, heads down with effort, this is about looking up and remembering where we are heading.? If we want to make useful, new things happen, with more creativity and progress, and less tension and conflict, it’s crucial to keep our eyes on the collective prize, and generate tangible progress, step by step, adjusting our approach as things change.

?Without this commitment, the other four principles just don’t work.? That will become clearer in our article on Principle 5: Reflecting.? We often find people are so busy, trying to get or maintain momentum, that they feel they have to be constantly moving.? That there is no time to press pause, reflect, and ask “is this working?”

?Keep your eyes open for it – we’ll link to it in the comments here too.? And as always:

?Feel free to experiment and play – it’s how we learn and grow.

Let us know how you get on.

Let us know what questions you have too.

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Resourceful Conversations - the spiral model, it's principles and expressions - is a joint enterprise between, and copyright of, Kathryn Pope and Alan Arnett, 2024 onwards.