Building a shared language
The following is an excerpt from my dissertation The Ontology of Love: A Framework for Re-Indigenizing Community ©2015
Building collaborations requires the process of building shared language (shared understanding of the problem at hand and of the potential solutions that need to be implemented to resolve that problem as well as shared languaging practices) and a shared way of doing business; in other words, a shared culture. Shared cultures are built not only on agreement about how to perform. They are also built on a shared set of values that guide action and ongoing meaning sensing and making activities. The process of “sensemaking” as Jerry Calton and Steven Payne call it in “Paradox: Multistakeholder Learning Dialogue as a Pluralist Sensemaking Process Addressing Messy Problems,” is far from unidimensional. Like the paradox of collaboration’s relationship to performance, sensemaking presents another counterintuitive phenomenon, the perceived causal relationship between perception and reality.
Perception does not necessarily equal reality. In fact, perception is the beginning of a process that eventually leads to interpretation, and that serves to ascertain one understanding of reality that generally tends to reinforce our pre-existing belief systems. This is what Chris Argyris calls “the ladder of inference.” The ladder of inference describes the process of perceiving data that leads to its interpretation. In “The Executive Mind and Double Loop Learning,” Agyris presents a four-step model:
0 1. Perception of “directly observable data”
0 2. “Culturally understood meanings”
0 3. “Meanings imposed by our theories-in-use”
0 4. “Meanings imposed by the” observer (9)
Communities systems
This process can be interrupted. One can determine how one makes sense of one’s work and can invite others into that process as well. When one adheres to the idea that perception is reality, one partakes in a vicious cycle that serves to perpetuate horrific social realities. Changing those realities implies a drastic interruption of the individual and collective ways in which people make sense of their world. Leading a change strategy requires that people be willing to look at the way they make sense of their world. The clearest example I have to offer is the personal transformation I underwent in leading the street school. Although I identify as an indigenous Latina, my life’s reality only overlapped with most of the people I had the opportunity to know through that process in the fact that I was an immigrant and that I spent a great part of my adolescence in the region in which I was building that program. Other than that, my life could not have been more different from the lives of the young men I got to know.
I learned to speak, read, and write English is six months in a parochial school in New Orleans. I graduated seventh in my high school class. Although a low-performing district, the top tier in my graduating high school class went to places like Harvard, and Middlebury College, where I was given a full scholarship. While at Middlebury College, I was chosen as one of two students in my class to receive the college’s Charles A. Dana scholarship, a recognition of student talent and well-roundedness. I hung out on a regular basis with the academic dean, ran the Latin@ organization on campus, and exchanged an emotional hug from the college president as I graduated. I went to SUNY at Buffalo’s Department of American Studies and became an Alfonso A. Schomburg Fellow, and so on. Meeting Central American gang members who had grown up during the Central American civil wars, fought on both sides of the various conflicts, and hitchhiked their way across the border, I was struck by the depth of my ignorance. Engaging “them,” required an examination of the ways I made meaning. The first aspect of my value system that was of no use in my efforts was meritocracy, the deeply held belief that people get what they work for. This belief system was the underlying impetus for my nationally recognized youth work. Like Argyris, Calton and Payne explain, when it comes to sensemaking, or meaningmaking, or making sense of your world, facts and values are often a reflection of each other:
Messy systemic problems, ranging from global warming to the human and social impacts of potential technological innovations, such as the cloning of human embryos or use of stem cells to grow human spare parts, cannot be addressed effectively by sensemaking strategies that arbitrarily separate facts from values. Within such messy problems, facts are inextricably intertwined with values in a variety of community contexts wherein stakeholders argue over the meaning and significance of facts as framed by their different value perspectives. Plural identities and realities constructed within a web of stake- holder perceptions and interactions render the task of measuring and evaluating stakeholder management or corporate social performance problematic, at best... Assessing the multiple outcomes of network interactions requires inclusion of many voices and value perspectives within a pluralist process for engaging organizational or community cognition. (17)
This same principle applies to the needs of collaborations. Homogenous collaborations therefore, without mechanisms that guarantee what Calton and Payne call the “inclusion of many voices and value perspectives,” are simply mechanisms that reinforce pre-existing belief systems. In “Kurt Lewin’s Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom: Notes Toward a Model of Managed Learning,” Edgar Schein explains that a disturbance of the way we make sense of our world can be understood as a “disconfirmation,” that creates internal “survival anxiety,” for the observer, who then gets to the task of rejecting or accepting the information that caused the discomfort. Rejecting the information leads to no change, and accepting it leads to a shift in perspective, and therefore future perception. (61) However, accepting the disconfirming information requires the creation and experience of what Schein calls “psychological safety.” For example:
The true artistry of change management lies in the various kinds of tactics that change agents employ to create psychological safety. For example, working in groups, creating parallel systems that allow some relief from day-to-day work pressures, providing practice fields in which errors are embraced rather than feared, providing positive visions to encourage the learner, breaking the learning process into manageable steps, and providing on-line coaching and help all serve the function of reducing learning anxiety and thus creating genuine motivation to learn and change. (Ibid.)
It follows, therefore, that an aspect of the work of forming and maintaining collaborations requires the establishment of psychological safety among members as well as, in a collective sense, the very communities or networks of people the collaboration seeks to impact. Change produced by the creation of the experience of disconfirming information and the anxiety that type of disturbance creates entails a shift in language, understanding, and actions: profound change. Collaborations seeking to impact intractable recursive problems, when addressing the entirety of the system(s) that create them must attempt to create profound change. Otherwise, they are simply creating new iterations of the same problem, or addressing the symptoms, as Doggett explained earlier.
Building collaborations entails the bringing together of different people. In other words, there cannot be a collaboration of one. Although this may seem obvious, this very simple principle is very complex because we tend to gravitate toward what we know, to speak the languages we already know, to think what we already think, and to do what we already do. Although there can be many bodies in one room, it is possible that by adhering to particular established and reinforced patterns of being and doing, the group that is present in the room, in fact, displays similar language, ways of understanding the world we live in (mental models), and behaviors. Groups can act as one entity in the larger collective sense. In its most basic way, engaging others not like ourselves, should be a core effort when assembling collaborations in order to enhance learning, performance, and innovation.
The first step in the process of assembling a truly functioning collaboration is the development of its shared language. Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen proposes a discursive (language-based) approach to the development of collaborations in “Creating Value- Based Collaboration: Life Forms and Power in a Change Project.” He proposes that our very understanding of the nature of collaboration is constructed by understanding collaboration as the result of the creation, adoption, or assimilation in a particular way of languaging our experiences:
To be able to collaborate is to be able to participate in the language games [ways in which we assign language to our understanding of the world] according to the customs, practices, uses, institutions, norms, and standards of a particular organizational reality. Collaboration follows rules in organizations as well as in others social realities. These rules are, however, not precise and they can only be vaguely defined... Instead, language and collaboration are linked to a social practice, which follows rules that are largely tacit and taken-for-granted... (88-9)
Jørgensen calls for increased mindfulness about how collaborations can reify world views that can be dissonant with the realities they are trying to impact.
For example, in the case of my adherence to meritocracy, I began to build a school model that defined growth and leadership as the linear movement of a gang member’s learning from pre-GED classes, to GED classes, to GED certification, and then to college enrollment. I assumed that learning builds upon itself and that the growth that was worth tracking was the incremental approximation of the student’s learning to actual college enrollment. My model did not account for delays in the process as a result of major hurdles standing in the way of gang members’ college enrollment such as: addiction therefore recovery, homelessness therefore the need to find shelter, unemployment therefore participation in the legal economy, trauma therefore PTSD treatment, etc. Success was measured according to movement on the original education-focused scale and other “secondary outcomes”; like someone engaging recovery programs. I was forced into that model in large part by a supervisor that was completely focused on accessing federal youth employment funding. She, in turn, was pressed for that funding as a result of the non-profit sector’s dependence on grants and contracts. The government, and foundations, are subject to expectations from the legislature and stakeholders. Legislators and stakeholders are bound by the demands of the public and their Trustees, etc.
The premise of collaborations is that collective action can create collective impact. One area of collective change that is always being hotly debated in the media, in academic, and in political circles, is the role of language in the generation of change. Language can always change, and the powerful and hopeful aspect of this fact is that language then impacts the way we think, and therefore, the way we act. One can always change language, and begin from there in the ongoing work of changing everything that is engendered by it. Lawson states that collaboration can be understood as “a new way of talking” that “may be exclusive or inclusive.” (233)
Discipline-specific language is generally exclusive, meant primarily for members of the (fill in the blank) club. Oftentimes, collaborations do not embody a mindfulness about the use of language as they labor to be inclusive, or claim to already be so. A lack of mindfulness about the use of language, and clarity about how collaborations create the inclusive use of language, denotes a lack of sophistication and understanding about the relationship between language and power. David Grant and Robert J. Marshak, in “Toward a Discourse-Centered Understanding of Organizational Change,” speak to this issue as follows:
Change agents should realize that talk is also a form of action… so all conversations and communications can be used to create new premises and possibilities. This also means that they should pay attention to how prevailing narratives are reinforced in day-to-day conversation and dialogue throughout the organization... They would then need to seek to intentionally introduce new narratives to alter those conversations, possibly by changing the types of questions asked... (227)
The need to rethink the way we communicate has also been observed in academic settings by Deana D. Pennington in “Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration and Learning.” She elaborates as follows:
In academia, knowledge exchange has historically been written text or verbal presentations with accompanying figures and tables. These approaches have worked well for generations of scholars, who are largely interacting within disciplinary contexts with colleagues who have similar mental schemas. However, a colleague from another discipline lacking the relevant conceptual framework has limited ability to comprehend the material as presented... The degree to which comprehension is limited depends on the conceptual proximity of the material to the observer’s conceptual framework. Two physical scientists understand each other’s literature more readily than a physical and social scientist, or a life scientist and a computer scientist. Hence, time-honored approaches to knowledge exchange that work well within disciplines fall short in cross- disciplinary contexts. (13)
If this is the case within academic settings, it is left to us to experience and imagine how much more complex language practices are within interdisciplinary and inter-organizational settings! A lack of awareness about these complexities does not point to their absence. A lack of awareness simply points out the ways in which one mindlessly may be going about operating within one’s comfort zones without stepping out of them enough to be confronted by one’s own assumptions, predispositions, and prejudices. The bottom line is that complex recursive problems cannot be fixed from a standpoint that is inhabited within the realm of perception, interpretation, language, understanding, and action that creates the problem in the first place. This is why doctors cannot treat themselves, therapists cannot talk to themselves, and teachers cannot teach themselves. This is also why the West cannot change itself from within without respectful and meaningful relationship with Indigenous peoples. In the same manner, disciplines, institutions, and systems need to learn to see themselves from a vantage point that allows enough understanding of the whole system to pinpoint areas of improvement.
The power of collaboration lies less in what can be tangibly accomplished and more on the way in which change occurs at the linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral levels among individual partners, organizations, and entire systems. This power can only be tapped through the creation of learning strategies for the ongoing cognitive redefinition required to model the changes that collaborations seek to create in the larger world. In this manner, the internal conditions of collaborations reflect the external conditions they seek to create. Calton and Payne also echo this line of reasoning as follows:
Language becomes the medium of meaning construction; the use of language presupposes the existence and expression of many voices and many stories as ingredients from which a shared community meaning can be constructed. Language and narratives are taken, not as the objectification of an all-inclusive reality but rather as the means for representing and interpreting partial, locally situated realities. (17-8)
When reflecting on the relationship between language and power, I mean that language is the vehicle through which one exercises the power to include and/or exclude, to normalize certain ways of being over others, and to frame and therefore define both the conditions we seek to affect and the solutions we generate, and therefore our actions. Through this very complex set of interactions one defines membership, identity, hierarchical relationships, or no hierarchical relationships at all. In essence, one builds the social environments that frame change efforts and that subsequently appear in the very results of one’s actions. Jørgensen adds to this point in the following manner:
Inequalities, differences, dominance and control are inscribed in collaboration. In collaboration different language games struggle to define and construct organizational realities with some language games being stronger than others. Thus relations of power are inscribed in how language is used and how language games are played in organizational life. In every conversation a positioning takes place of arguments and viewpoints... These positions are fluid, dynamic and negotiable and they are embedded in everyday conversations and in the use of language. (90)
Nowhere in the United States social landscape is the relationship between language and power more pronounced than it is within the context of Latin@ communities as language learning regulation, textbook censoring, and the knowledge production of Latin@ scholars continues to be targeted, censored, and outlawed by state and federal governments. To conduct a collaboration seeking to significantly impact Latin@ educational outcomes requires this type of approach to collaborative practice. Given the prominent use of power to circumscribe, define, and control Latin@ ongoing participation in U.S. society, it stands to reason that Latin@ communities may be hypersensitive to issues of language and power.
In the essay “Integral Diversity Maturity: Toward a Post- conventional Understanding of Diversity Dynamics,” Toni Gregory and Michael Raffanti explain the concept of “diversity tension” as “the conflict, stress, and strain resulting from various dimensions of diversity interacting with one another.” (43) In Peter Senge’s The Dance of Change, Gregory states that diversity tension “operates like creative tension in learning organization work: as a signal that, somewhere, somehow, someone’s needs are not being met.” She adds, “If you respond to diversity tension with feelings of hopelessness, that tends to build on itself and eventually causes stagnation. If you respond to it with integrity, responsibility, and willingness to work through the tension, then you often get powerful breakthroughs.” (278)
These breakthroughs, can also be understood as what Schein calls cognitive redefinitions. In other words, change. In more words, learning. Gregory sees a clear relationship between organizational learning and diversity. “Unfortunately,” she bemoans, “the link between diversity and learning is all too rarely made. On one hand, people assume (wrongly) that it’s only appropriate to talk about diversity in terms of ethnicity and gender.” (277) Sundaramurthy also sees diversity as being intricately linked to learning. She describes diversity as fostering “a variety of perspectives to enrich decision making, whereas shared understandings garner mutual trust and enhanced interactions.” (410)
Diversity can precipitate inertia. Huxham and Vangen enumerate the ways in which diversity difference in interests, language, culture, professional and organizational behavior, power imbalances, management differences, and logistical challenges arising from the different ways in which we organize our personal and professional lives “induce” inertia. (773) In the same vein, Sundaramurthy enumerates the ways in which diversity strengthens collaboration development:
Governance structures and processes that simultaneously promote diversity and shared understandings are vital for learning and self-correction. On the one hand, building diverse skills and viewpoints within the board can enhance members’ decision-making and monitoring capabilities. One the other hand, developing shared understandings among executives and directors can encourage mutual trust and cooperative problem solving. (408-9)
To underscore Gregory’s point about how we respond to diversity tension, the choice is ours and the presence or absence of inertia, and the ongoing learning and stagnation of collaborations is a direct reflection of those choices. For collaborations seeking to increase the inclusion of excluded racial and ethnic groups, the modeling and embodiment of the management of diversity tension is necessary in order to model a different type of process for the institutions the collaborations seeks to engage. The same is true for any collaboration in any sector seeking to engage diverse collaborators.
Now that the relationship between diversity and learning has been established, it is important to further explore the need for building learning processes in collaborations. If a collaboration has no developed strategy to promote ongoing learning among its members, developing such a strategy is a pressing need that needs to be addressed because learning enables the creation of shared language, which in turn allows for the emergence of a collaboration’s distinct culture. Pennington understands the learning process in collaborations as constituting of three distinct aspects:
0 1. Cognition
0 2. Creativity
0 3. Motivation (9)
Pennington connects these three aspects to the learning experiences of individual members. Individual members then interact with each other and spur further learning throughout the entire collaboration. This set of interactions in turns propels the generation of outcomes (Ibid.) Members’ individual learning processes are inextricably linked to the overall collaboration’s performance.
Calton and Payne also echo and expand this observation when they state that “[i]n a pluralist world, the managerial impulse toward traditional forms of organizational control and unilateral cognition must make room for collective learning strategies better attuned to coping with the messy problems that enmesh stakeholder networks.” (11) Therefore, collaborations that learn must reflect a learning orientation in their management processes. As such, and as educators know this better than most, collaborations are learning processes, that need to be managed similarly to the manner in which good classrooms are managed. Leaders of collaborations, in the best of circumstances, therefore must model aspects of participatory teaching and learning. And again, a link is established between the types of conditions embodied within the life of organizations and the quality of impact, or changes, they will engender “out there.”
Therefore, collaborations need the ongoing supportive interventions of independent evaluators to track progress and give feedback on progress attained, as well as “systems thinkers” who can stimulate ongoing learning while helping collaborations fray the tension between inertia and performance, creativity and replication of existing patterns that engender recursive problems, and between diversity and homogeneity that will be experienced as an aspect of the development process. In her focus on the tension between the use of management methods that seek to control behavior within organizations and collaborative management methods, Sundaramurthy advocates the creation of “external interventions” to “provide purposeful shocks, potentially awakening firms to question their balance of control and collaboration and to remain weary of dysfunctional dynamics.” (409) If this is the case within singular organizational contexts, the need for the creation of external stimuli seeking to nurture and maintain a collaboration’s learning process is evident.
Building shared language precedes the generation of shared understanding in collaborations because language gives rise to modification in perception and interpretation. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela coined the term languaging to define the process of coordinating actions between organisms and of creating signs to represent those coordinated actions. (209-10) The generation of collaboration-specific language indicates the presence of collaborative behaviors, which then turn into the awareness of shared ways of seeing the world through language that is understood by members of the partnership. One clear example of this dynamic was the partnership I developed with local police.
Initially, as the partnership began, I was reticent about the need to engage that particular police department in my collaboration seeking to improve Latin@ students’ academic performance. Over time, the police chief and I discovered we were both proponents of systems thinking practices in order to analyze and generate creative solutions to intractable social issues like crime and school failure. We shared resources and attended trainings together in order to use the linguistic platform provided by that discipline in order to at least try to understand each other’s point of view. In time, we could speak, not only the language of systems thinking practice, but we could refer back to instances when we had arrived at a shared understanding of each other’s perspectives as to its application in the community setting we were both trying to impact.
Our awareness of the ways in which we shared language, and increasingly a shared viewpoint occurred later, as community members began to make note of our increasingly natural connection and passion for the work. Soon, we began to turn to each other for advice and to work out problems that went beyond those intractable problems we were working to address. We began to turn to each other for support, modeling, reassurance, and inspiration as creative and diversity tension set in. Soon after, we began to design work together and our collaborative practice was easily identifiable. Soon, the police chief sponsored anti-racist programming seeking to change the mindset of teachers and police officers in relation to racial and ethnic minorities in the region, and I began to co-write grants with the assistant chief and to work out budget numbers with the police department’s accountant. The police chief comfortably walked into the local Latin@ organizations and I stopped getting stopped by the local police on my way to and from work.
Among the many practices and exercises I use with community partnerships, the following are the most important ones in my efforts to create shared language and understanding:
0 1. The peacemaking circles process. Although there are many iterations of this Indigenous methodology for communication, conflict resolution, and participatory governance, the model I am most familiar with comes from the Tlingit people in the Yukon Territory via Harold Gatensby. The Tlingit community Harold lives in only adopted the vote as a mechanism for governance in 2005. Instead, they used the circles process. The peacemaking circles process has been thoroughly documented and described by Carolyn Boyes-Watson in her book Peacemaking Circles and Urban Youth, which chronicles the application of the circles process in my earlier work with gang-involved youth.
0 2. The three-legged stool. Initially introduced in The Fifth Discipline, the three-legged stool describes the organizational capacities needed to generate and sustain change processes. These capacities are inspiration, generative dialogue, and understanding of complexity underlying and driving complex systemic problems.
0 3. The ladder of inference. Explaining and then building exercises that create the type of disconformity that triggers change in one’s understanding of reality.
0 4. Leverage Points. Explaining and then helping groups identify those dynamics they can affect that can create multiple layers of change in community settings.
0 5. Root Cause Analysis. Explaining the multi-layered dynamics of chronic systemic problems like pervasive academic underperformance of Latin@ students, intersectional oppression, etc., and then showing groups how to discover the specific ways in which such complex problems arise in their communities.
0 6. Action planning. Explain how to build doable, realistic and effective organizational and inter-organizational work plans.
0 7. Evaluation. Explain how to evaluate performance while also us- ing evaluation as a drive for ongoing organizational learning and improvement efforts.
0 8. The use of mapping to illustrate complex problems.
0 9. Leadership coaching and development. Explain and model how to pay attention to leadership roles within collaboration efforts, how to build ongoing professional development opportunities for and with collaboration members, and how to leverage different leadership styles and capacities within collaborations.
1 0. Strategic relationship building. Take careful attention to the ongoing process of nurturing and tending to the needs of your collaboration members.
In “Interface Dynamics in Cause-Based Partnerships: An Exploration of Emergent Culture,” Barbara Parker and John W. Selsky share the following model illustrating the “reculturating interface” of emergent cultures (473):
Reculturating interface
Their model of dynamics in cause-based partnerships captures both the integrative movement (see Integrative Interface labeled a) of the process of building shared cooperation, language, and understanding in collaborations as well as the generative aspect that is enabled as a result of the collaborations’ emergent culture. It follows that upon arriving at a clearly defined sense of identity, a collaboration begins to impact its context (see the Reculturative Interface image b). It also stands to reason that as collaborative initiatives begin to generate their own life, that a process of separation or “spinning off” will ensue (Separation Interface label c), and that the need for the generation of an integrative interface will again be necessary in order to sustain the collaboration over time. Perhaps a fuller picture looks as follows:
My visual interpretation
Based on this model, collaborations are potentially hotbeds of social innovations that engage systems, communities, and individuals in the task of assessing their current reality, envisioning desired futures and sustaining the pressures experienced as a result of creative/diversity tension.
