A Charming Man

A Charming Man or Human and Equal?

Yesterday I wrote about the way in which I thought that placing link workers in community space might damage or weaken community systems. And, afterwards I thought maybe I’d been a little unfair.

After all, what am I? And what is it that I’m doing? 

I think what I really meant is that I see little practice that centres community life, or, convening that seeks to draw out the gifts, skills & capacities within the primary assets of people & place. And if I spot anything that looks like it, it’s usually deeply entrenched in the saviour model – there’s always someone with needs to help or to fix, or an organisation seeking to build empire / justify existence / win an award. 

My experience of working in the local community & hosting Conversations for Change training for thousands of professionals who work directly with people-is that most folk can’t help fixing, & listen mainly to respond. 

I don’t see any real attempts to invest in the kind of spaces & development opportunities that enable practice of the listening muscle. I suppose that’s why I was always really offended by the false narrative of the Wigan Deal, that a days training in ethnographic approaches is the silver bullet to a different way of working. I mean they organised Listening in Action sessions that you were mandated to attend but in my view they were really mechanisms for telling you what was happening, ticking consultation boxes, & testing the waters, working out where resistance might lie so strategies could be plotted & pirates identified. Occasionally they might pick up a nugget from the floor, only nuggets that were aligned to the grand plan.

And so we have this practice developed (and spreading) that’s more akin to listening to agree, listening to survive. A one man band listening style in support of career progression. And it’s distributed all across systems-because if you want to be commissioned, then you need to be like them.

At the moment there’s talk about a distributed leadership model which has listening to understand at its heart. The talk has been around for a couple of years and is still waiting for action. Those seats at the table are too comfy to give up by those who are warming their bottoms on them. 

But surely listening needs to be practiced by all to grow collectively in a distributed leadership model? Rooted in the systems? I mean you can’t practice it at a partnership meeting & then go home & lay down the rules (with the kind of kindness that really feels like coercive control). An image of a charming man comes to mind- you know who I mean, the bloke who everyone loves at the pub but rules the home with an iron fist? 

So yes, link workers can be part of community spaces if the institutions they are housed within in are willing to learn from community life & ways of doing things. We could all heal together, if the system stopped thinking it was the one in charge of healing & we saw each other as human & equal.