Building of true communities

The late M. Scott Peck and the FCE - Foundation for Community Encouragement (which has been resurrected!) have done some worthy thinking and experimentation along the lines of the nature of true community, and a formal facilitated 2-day process for getting a collection of people through the process of forming an actual community, in a very specific sense of that word.


I heartily recommend a read of a ten page document by Peck, chapter 3 from "A Different Drum", titled "The True Meaning of Community."   Even if you disagree with some of it, you will probably agree with much of it, and it forms a great basis for discussing the rest.


The Foundation for Community Encouragment describes itself on its website as follows:

We enable individuals, groups and organizations to identify and grapple with the issues that cause divisions between people. We encourage the members of the group to transcend the conflicts that may hamper progress toward accomplishing   the goals they are seeking to achieve.

In the twenty-five years since its inception, FCE has  actively built community between people from conflicting ethnic groups, religions and political beliefs in numerous national and international locations. From South Africa to Bosnia and beyond, FCE's Community Building workshops and Community Facilitation programs have helped individuals around the globe to experience learning and living the principles of community. Today, FCE continues to guide the world toward more effective communication and the possibility of peace.

The stages of community development which Peck describes in "A World Waiting to be Born" are described on this web page and I'll summarize that here as follows:

Stages of Community Building
Pseudocommunity
For many groups or organizations the most common initial stage, pseudocommunity, is the only one. It is a stage of pretense. The group pretends it already is a community, ... It is polite, inauthentic, boring, sterile, and unproductive.
Chaos
...the group members try to convert, heal, or fix each other or else argue for simplistic organizational norms. It is an irritable and irritating, thoughtless, rapid-fire, and often noisy win/lose type of process that gets nowhere.

Emptiness
...This is a stage of hard, hard work, a time when the members work to empty themselves of everything that stands between them and community. And that is a lot. Many of the things that must be relinquished or sacrificed with integrity are virtual human universals: prejudices, snap judgments, fixed expectations, the desire to convert, heal, or fix, the urge to win, the fear of looking like a fool, the need to control. Other things may be exquisitely personal: hidden griefs, hatreds, or terrors that must be confessed, made public, before the individual can be fully "present" to the group. It is a time of risk and courage, and while it often feels relieving, it also often feels like dying.

Community
At this point a member will speak of something particularly poignant and authentic. Instead of retreating from it, the group now sits in silence, absorbing it. Then a second member will quietly say something equally authentic. She may not even respond to the first member, but one does not get the feeling he has been ignored; rather, it feels as if the second member has gone up and laid herself on the altar alongside the first. The silence returns, and out of it, a third member will speak with eloquent appropriateness. Community has been born.

The shift into community is often quite sudden and dramatic. The change is palpable. A spirit of peace pervades the room. There is "more silence, yet more of worth gets said. It is like music. . ... now that it is a community it is ready to go to work-making decisions, planning, negotiating, and so on-often with phenomenal efficiency and effectiveness.” 
Excerpt from the book A World Waiting to be Born by Scott Peck (Bantam Books, New York, 1993)

 While Scott Peck offers a view that is sometimes scientific, and sometimes deeply mystical and Christian to this phenomenon,  and I share both those backgrounds,  I'd say that to me the change is akin to physical state changes such as the abrupt transition in resistance to flow of current as a material is cooled. 

Cooling a material reduces resistance to current flow, as there is less and less random disruption of the flow by heat, which manifests itself as random kinematic motion of atoms. As you keep lowering the temperature of a metal wire, say, at some point, often near "absolute zero", the resistance to current does not just lessen even more - it abruptly drops to zero.  The material has become a "super-conductor" and current flowing in it will not simply decay slowly -- it will not decay at all.  That isn't "magic" or "mysticism" -- it is a scientific property built into the foundations of the  physical laws of our universe. 

There are other similar physical processes that take effort to push up a type of hill, but that at some point suddenly cascade the rest of the way and latch into a self-sustaining different state.    The obvious example is fusion of matter -- where it takes huge pressure to force atoms, each of which is trying to sustain its own existence, to get crushed together so much that individual identity is suddenly abandoned and a collective identity as a new, higher-atomic-number stable "atom" is achieved.  There are all sorts of equations describing this in the field known as "quantum mechanics" but, having benefit of such courses, I'd say the metaphor of changing identity is decently close to give us reasonable insight into the concept.

Another similar catastrophic non-linear transition occurs when atoms of a ruby crystal are struck by light and forced into excited states.   Initially, these states are effectively unaware of and unmoved by each other, and what any given atom is doing might as well be done if it were on a desert island by itself.   But over time,  if radiated photons are kept trapped in this crystal between two mirrors, a sort of magical thing happens -- one that, if we hadn't proven it would seem most unlikely.    At one point the atoms all suddenly succeed in "entraining each other".   Instead of ten billion randomly radiating atoms,   we get one entity,  ten billion atoms in size,  radiating "coherent light".    The difference is that incoherent light may light a room but coherent light can cut through steel plate or light up a spot on the moon that's visible from Earth.      The "power" was always "in" the material, but a methodical process was required to bring about coherence in order to reveal it.

So,  what I see in Peck's description of the abrupt transition to "community",  especially since I've been through such a group transition once myself back in the 1960's,   seems to me and felt to me a similar sudden coherence,  latching, mutual-entraining state of thought that is, in a very real scientific, practical sense no longer contained WITHIN brains, but actually spans ACROSS brains.    In science as I understand it,  this is perfectly "scientific" and "possible" and doesn't require mystical invocations to justify or explain it.

Some literature search needs to be done and inserted right here regarding whether such collections of people in a common "community state" are, in fact,  off in zombie touchie-feelie land, or whether they are, in fact,  in an amazingly productive state with ability to focus on and resolve real world business problems.   From what I've glimpsed,  the latter is true, though I am unaware of any group that intentionally has commercialized this process as a part and parcel of improving the operation of corporations.

So, why not?

For one thing, there is a the deep-seated mistrust among business males of any kind of "touchy-feely" activity, as well as a large shared collective recollection of similar sounding activities they had ever explored once, and found to be fluff or ineffective, causing the entire area to be written off as irrelevant.

One problem is that the state takes two days, at best, to get to the first time.  Few businesses give their employees two days off to go to a retreat to do anything, let alone something that sounds so mystical. And even the "two day" timeframe is with people who WANT to do this on purpose, and who sign up for it voluntarily, and are led by a trained facilitator.   For anyone to do this with a group of executives who had been ordered to participate against their will would be, probably,  at best, unlikely.  And, there will undoubtedly be a number of fake and ill-trained facilitators around as well, since this is not a field that is regulated on a state level as a profession with a certification process.

Another problem is how,  once this state has ever been experienced,  to set a sort of GPS locator tag or group psychological bookmark that lets us get back to it without ANOTHER expensive two day process. 

So, it would be important to figure out how to do this on command,  to do a trick that someone like Anthony Robbins would describe as "state management."  He would undoubtedly focus on trying, once the state was achieved, to figure out exactly how it was tagged in our brains so that we could, at a later date,  reconstruct the state on command  and be back into it as if the group had never ended the meeting, disassembled, and left the room.    His books deal with techniques that many have found workable to, individually,  recapture certain success-helping states, so the ideas are somewhat applicable to forming a fast list of candidate ideas for doing this on a group level as well.

While these constructs may not be of much help, in the short run, in "Theory X" type organizations, they might be of a great deal of help in companies that embrace Theory Y type approaches to decision -making.   They might work better in that sense with not-for-profit companies with consensual management than with classically designed for-profit companies that explicitly reward and facilitate competitiveness into all internal behaviors.

It would seem then, if these were to work anywhere as facilitators of business success, that it would be in mission-inspired non-profits where the management and staff were all sufficiently committed to a common mission that they were willing to try to overcome competition's barriers to trusting each other, if it would help achieve the common mission.