Community Hokey Pokey
A Message from Milenko
Every time I pick up my luggage at the airport I need to fight the hoards of people crowding around the baggage carousel in the belief that it will expedite their departure. In fact, it slows everyone down.
The appropriate hokey pokey would be to “put your right foot back and then your left foot back,â€? creating open space and visibility. This would allow us all to pick up our luggage in a peaceful manner. The problem is that this kind of “community-minded” hokey pokey is counterintuitive for most people.
I see similar behavior at community meetings. We promote our agendas and, when pushed back by others with their own agendas, we simply make our point louder, prompting a corresponding volume increase in others. Trained by the squeaky wheel theory, we’re convinced that turning up the volume increases our chances of triumph.
In fact, just like airport luggage wrestlers, we contribute to the problem. In order to build vibrant, sustainable, livable communities, we all need to understand that problems affecting the entire community cannot be solved from the perspective of a singular view or interest.
We must conceive of a community as an integrated totality containing numerous perspectives, interests and agendas. Every person should attempt a Hokey Pokey and “put their right foot in� the center where the competing agendas intersect. Only in the neutrality of that position can the common good be discovered.
In both examples, the problem is that this counterproductive conduct is widely accepted, even expected. We see others stepping forward at the baggage carousel and we follow suit. We hear others shout, exhibiting their anger and frustration at community meetings and we counter with more of the same. People think that this is the only possible approach because it is all they know. After all, many elected officials practice such conduct.
I hope to see a shift in the way we conduct our community processes. And it would be a nice perk if baggage areas become more navigable in the process.
Through our work, we’ve seen time and again that when people are willing to step into the center and away from their singular agenda, even for just a moment, they are capable of great discoveries and joyful insights. They begin to realize that others are not necessarily enemies and that their differences of opinion help to clarify and improve their own views. It is in those moments that solutions with multiple victories are discovered, where two or more agendas can coexist and support each other.
I still stand by this paragraph that I wrote 20 years ago:
No group can solve its problems without the expertise and perspective of others. Artists need business-minded people to complement their creativity with economic savvy. Developers benefit from artists who create neighborhoods that have character and aesthetically unique identities. Planners profit from mothers’ input in designing neighborhoods that nurture children. To solve the problems of today’s multifaceted communities, we must bring together everyone’s ideas to construct a collective vision of the future.
At Pomegranate Center, we are committed to practicing and performing the Community Hokey Pokey in order to create projects with multiple victories that are good for the economy, environment and communities everywhere. Without this cooperation, our futures will be arbitrated not by our greatest values but by blind power, economic caprice and pure chance.