The Role of Dignity and Fields in Civic Engagement

Several years ago I had the privilege of facilitating a community water resource planning process for the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District in which more than 400 people participated for close to a year. As any well-meaning facilitator would do, I developed and built agreement on detailed agendas, specific desired outcomes, and ground rules for each meeting and guiding principles for the process as a whole. I also created a map of the process, so folks knew what they were working on in each phase.

With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that what I wanted to create was a process that intended to respect each person’s dignity and to generate fields in which people could bring their experience and wisdom to the interactions. Many times doing both was hard because the process engaged diverse stakeholders with conflicting views about water use in a historically polarized community (think timber wars).

Dignity. Derived from Latin dignitas, dignity means “worthy,” the right of every person to be valued and respected for their own sake and to be treated ethically. Four of the ground rules we followed directly supported people’s dignity: 

• Listen to understand, first; 

• Ask questions of genuine curiosity; 

• Encourage everyone to participate; and 

• Let people finish their thoughts (i.e., don’t interrupt).

  
  

Thanks to the experience and research of Dr. Donna Hicks, we now know how respecting people’s dignity is an essential element of resolving conflicts. This is a new way to conceive of ground rules: they help people respect one another’s dignity.

Fields. Working with Alan Briskin for the past seven years to write Space Is Not Empty: How Hidden Fields Are Shaping Your Life and Our World, I have a deeper appreciation of how everything I and the Water District did to design and lead the planning process created a field in which people felt safe to contribute and respectfully challenge others’ positions.  

Fields are the spaces in which we interact. They are filled with forces both visible and invisible that affect how we feel, think, and behave. Now I also include ground rules to create forces that support constructive interactions such as: 

• Speak from your own experience; 

• Allow space for difference;

• Each of us is responsible for the quality of our interactions (i.e. the social field*).

  
  

These ground rules are easy to put in a Power Point and post on a flip chart. They are much harder to follow since our visible habits can be just the opposite: Ask gotcha questions; Dismiss those whose opinions we don’t value; Interrupt when others disagree with us. Others that are less visible are: Assume the leader is responsible for the quality of the interaction; Advocate for your predetermined position; Discourage difference. 

How can the implicit or explicit Ground Rules (or norms) you follow in civic engagements or governmental planning processes respect or threaten people’s dignity and create fields for constructive or destructive interactions?

*For more information about a social field, read Chapter 7. Embedded and Embodied in Relational Fields in Space Is not Empty.