Development Practitioners and Social Process , livre ebook

Development Practitioners and Social Process
Development Practitioners and Social Process
Artists of the Invisible
Allan Kaplan
First published 2002 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Allan Kaplan 2002
The right of Allan Kaplan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 1018 3 ISBN 978 1 7837 1541 1 ePub ISBN 978 1 7837 1542 8 Mobi
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kaplan, Allan.
  Development practitioners and social process : artists of the invisible / Allan Kaplan.     p. cm.   ISBN 0–7453–1019–2 (hbk.) — ISBN 0–7453–1018–4 (pbk.)   1. Community development—Philosophy. 2. Social change. 3. Organizational change. 4. Community development personnel—Training of. I. Title.     HN49.C6 K376 2002     303.4—dc21
2001006015
 
 
 
 
 
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For Mario My teacher, this time round; and Brian O’Connell who lives the outer with such integrity and intuition .

Op geen oomblik is die mens iets wat vas en bepaald is nie, wat net in een koers kan loop nie; maar ‘n moontlikheid van nuwe en nog nooit gewese dinge. Ons moet glo aan die moontlikheid dat nuwe waardes, selfs in ons eie tyd, geskep kan word. Ons moet probeer om die verborge groeiplekke van die geestelike lewe raak te sien .

( At no time is a person something that is fixed and given, something that can move only in one direction; but a potential for the new, for that which has never been before. We must believe in the possibility that new values can be created, even in our own time. We must try to discover the hidden growth places of the spiritual life .)
N.P. Van Wyk Louw

It is insufficient to understand our time in merely political or economic terms. To understand what it means to be human obliges a growing awareness of the deepest designs of the soul .
James Hollis

Imagination is more important than knowledge .
Albert Einstein
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Social Process and the Practitioner: A Synopsis
Part I
Observation
   1
Beyond Reductionism
   2
Emergence
   3
Life’s Resources
   4
Intuition: Seeing Holistically
   5
Indications for Practice

Exercise – Drawing
   6
Revisiting the Whole

Exercise – Listening (1)
Part II
Understanding
   7
Freedom and Constraint

Exercise – Developing the Core
   8
Balancing Heaven and Earth

Exercise – Creative Thinking (1)
   9
The Creative Round

Exercise – Growth and Decay
10
On Becoming

Exercise – Reading Oneself
11
Dancing with Shadows

Exercise – Exploring Shadows
12
Paradoxes of Power

Exercise – Fingering Power
13
The Pattern of Reversal

Exercise – Making Culture Conscious
Part III
Change
14
The Narrative Thread

Exercise – Discovering Wonder
15
Stories from the Field

Exercise – Characterisation
16
Metamorphosis

Exercise – Turning Points
17
Guidance

Exercise – Listening (2)
18
Rites of Passage

Exercise – The Elements
19
Consolidating Change

Exercise – Working with Peers
Part IV
Practice
20
Discerning

Exercise – Creative Thinking (2)
21
Co-creating

Exercise – Questioning
22
Emptying

Exercise – Shifting the Pattern
23
Awakening
Notes and References
Index
Preface
I work within the development sector, within the realm of civil society. Within the non-governmental, non-profit world; within the world of the social. With people striving to transform a society, people working for social change. With what has also been termed the cultural sphere. This world is made up of other worlds as well: the political, the economic, the technological and the scientific. Yet such distinctions are absurd. These worlds are not separate; they interact and penetrate each other, each aspect affecting every other aspect. The social in turn runs through them all. Nevertheless, economics, politics and technology have come to dominate the social; in terms of values, in terms of guiding principles and in terms of methodologies. Our efforts to reduce the social in this way lie at the heart of the growing conflict and contradiction which characterise the world we are making. Sometimes this is driven home to me in a very visceral way.
A few months ago I was in Amsterdam, and came to that city’s central square, Die Dam. Usually thronging with tourists, it was now cordoned off; workers were swarming all over it. The entire surface of the square had been ripped up, work was taking place underground on a new Metro system, and clearly once this had taken place Die Dam was to be re-surfaced and returned to its famous originality. There was little room to manoeuvre, and the crowds were ever present on the periphery. This was a highly complex and technological operation, one which must have been carefully planned down to the last millimetre. I stood and watched for a long time, bemused, transfixed. This is how we think that change in the social sphere must be handled too, I thought; thoroughly controlled, bottom lines worked through, all contingencies thought of and accounted for, every last move planned, and the entire operation predictable and costed. It was this kind of operation which dictated our approach to social change.
The absurdity was particularly striking because I had just come from facilitating a workshop with an international development (or aid) organisation, and was still trying to figure out the meaning of what had gone right and what had gone wrong. The organisation had field offices in many countries of the south, and was facing the need for major organisational change. The previous week I had facilitated a very successful process with the directors of most of the field offices in Africa, and was asked to repeat the process with another group of directors from field offices on a different continent. The original workshop took place in Zimbabwe; the latter one in Holland. The success of the original workshop was well-matched by the intractability of the second. I had tried to repeat a process as one might repeat a building operation, and I should have known: the social will not allow itself to be so manipulated.
They were two entirely different groups. The first already had the makings of a team, they had taken the initiative for the workshop themselves, they had chosen and met with me and together we had tried to understand their situation and what was needed; and we had worked in gracious surroundings, under a wide sky, with time at our disposal. The group in Holland had never come together as a team, and I was a facilitator who had been foisted onto them by top management; they had never met me, never agreed to this process (let alone asked for it), and did not feel that they or the organisation needed it. And we worked in a tiny room within a large and impersonal conference venue, grey skies close overhead. In retrospect, I could see the kind of process which might have worked, and taken us through that stuck place; but I had fallen into a trap, been asked to repeat a process so I had repeated it. As if the participants were so many bricks. As if differences between the groups were not real; as if the groups had no independent lives of their own. As if there was no inherent development trajectory, or story, with which I should have worked, unique to each of the groups, despite that they came out of the same organisation.
Staring at the workers on Die Dam, I regretted my stupidity; I had looked the wrong way, been blind to that which was really moving within the group. But I realised too that the trap that I had fallen into was not at all unique; on the contrary, the lack of appreciation for the uniqueness of the social realm has caught us all in a similar trap. Because we understand so little of the uniqueness of the social realm, so little of how to work developmentally within it, we are creating a world of increasing stress and decreasing sustainability.
The problem lies very deep, in our fundamental approach to the world. The twentieth century has witnessed the rise to dominance of a particular way of thinking – that which concerns itself with the control and manipulation of matter. Because we have achieved so much success in our use of the material world which lies outside of ourselves, the way of thinking which supports such usage has come to be taken as the legitimate way of approaching the world. It has come to be taken as given. Yet simply because a particular way works with respect to certain phenomena does not mean that it is universal; it does not mean that all phenomena should be regarded in the same way.
The task which this book undertakes – the advancing of a particular sensibility and practice with respect to social development – lies not within the realm of the material, but within the realm of the social. Here, the kind of thinking which sets out to reduce complexity to simplified component parts in order to control those parts has not proved particularly beneficial, or even reasonable. Yet by and large we persist in attempting a technical, reductionist approach to resolving social situations. Whether we are development practitioners operating within the ‘aid industry’, managers and leaders of government departments or service bureaucracies or academic institutions, consultants to service, commercial or advocacy agencies, or simply participants in any of these endeavours, we are influenced by the dominant paradi