The enticing illusion of clarity in community
Or: Clarity in community is an ongoing, always temporary conversation
“We just need more clarity what this group is about”.
That’s how it usually starts.
A committee is formed. A series of strategy conversations are held. Lots of post-it notes are put up on physical or virtual walls. Long Google Docs are written. By the end everyone is pretty exhausted. But — with some luck — someone converges the different perspectives into a final proposal. The proposal is then shared with everyone. Very few people in the group actually read it or pay that much attention to it. After a few months, nobody remembers that we even have this presentation. And eight months later, someone says “hey, we just need more clarity what this group is about” and the cycle starts again (sometimes starting from scratch and ignoring the work from the past ). 🤪
I’m of course exaggerating. But only a bit. Communities are fascinated by, perhaps even addicted to, the notion of clarity. We just gotta figure out who we are and make a plan, and then everything else will fall into place. This is how we operate in the mechanistic 21st century paradigm of organizations. All we need is a good blueprint. And then we can execute according to plan.
But clarity for community is an illusion.
Community is a living, breathing, constantly evolving organism. It is defined by its web of relationships, rather than by a clear structure or central sense of direction. It’s emergent. And thereby clarity is in itself constantly in flux and flow.
Clarity is an ongoing, temporary conversation.
Regularly asking questions about purpose, vision, principles actually still matters. As long as we accept that the point of these conversations isn’t to find the ultimate solution, the roadmap. But rather that we see the conversations as valuable in of themselves. As we are having conversations, our collective ability to imagine a shared future evolves. Our conversations shape our collective consciousness. And our clarity is wherever our conversations are at.
Accepting this can relax the system. It is ok not to know. It is ok to have temporary answers. Because our answers will always be temporary. Our answers can always just be “good enough for now, safe enough to try”.
What do you think?
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Thank you
Thank you to my colleagues at the Community Weaving Project — Erin Dixon, Sita Magnuson, Michel Bachmann — for continuing to be in conversation about community and centering inquiry, not solution.
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