When we think of policies in this way, we move policy discussion from province of technocrats to the everyday realm of democratic citizens. Of course, in an IF project we’re not talking about telling the sort of detailed stories you might find in a novel or even a short story. We’re talking about providing a basic storyline for the public actions that might be taken by our society in dealing with an area of public concern. That’s what we have in mind with calling these “conceptual” policies—we’re focusing on the basic storyline, not nuanced plot details. Such a storyline might tell essentially who would do what—and why—letting us know the motivations for the actions and the thinking or values behind them.

Setting out a basic storyline like this can help to make clear the orientation our society might take toward an area of concern. A story presents for our consideration a way of being, a way of orienting ourselves to possibilities. If we think of describing policy possibilities in this way, we might find it easier to leap into the task of imagining them. And once they’ve been generated, we might also find it easier to share them with others, if we approach them as essentially different stories our society might tell.

To participate in a debate is to compete—to try to win an argument and defeat an opponent’s position. To participate in improvisation is to serve—to try to generate something new by sharing with others. Colbert talks about this in his recent Northwestern University commencement speech:

Now there are very few rules to improvisation, but one of the things that I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them. But the good news is that you’re in the scene too. So hopefully to them you’re the most important person, and they will serve you. No one is leading, you’re all following the follower, serving the servant. You cannot win improv.

And, I would add, you cannot “win” an Interactivity Foundation discussion. But if you participate as if your discussion partners are the most important persons in the room, you’ll pay more attention to the ideas they bring up and you’ll try to help flesh them out and develop them. And if everyone is serving each other like this, the result will be new ideas coming into the discussion, perhaps ideas that no one individual had fully foreseen.

Colbert says, “life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along.” Making things up may sound like something fake or childish, like you’re just playing. But play can be serious and the means of creation. It can mean making something new, generating something, bringing something to be that wasn’t there before. And that’s what we’re after in an Interactivity Foundation discussion. Like improv we’re interested in creating something new, rather than knocking something down, as in a debate.

So if you’re wondering about how to participate in, or even facilitate, an Interactivity Foundation discussion, think about how you can serve the others in the discussion. Think of each other as the most important persons in the room. By paying attention to each other, following and playing with each other in this way, you’ll be on the way to building something together, creating something new.

For the closing segment of Colbert’s speech (though the whole thing is worth watching), check here: Closing Segment of Colbert\’s Commencement Speech 2011

–Jeff Prudhomme

My answer was three-fold. First, the panelists get intellectual enjoyment from their discussions. Our discussion process focuses on the generation, exploration, and development of contrasting conceptual policy possibilities. This is a very creative process, and many panelists find it enjoyable. Second, the panelists often acquire a deeper and fuller understanding of the area of concern as well as a deeper and fuller knowledge of the possibilities for public policies pertaining to it. Third, the panelists perform a public service for their fellow citizens. Our reports are prepared by citizens for other interested citizens to discuss. They are doing staff-work for the public—just like the people on senate, congressional, and military staffs do staff work for our senators, congressman, and military leaders—and it helps to improve our democracy.

This is my perspective about what is in it for our panelists. But what is yours? I am especially interested to hear what former panelists have to say. (You do not have to identify yourself, we honor our confidentiality agreements).

Playing around with these different metaphors also can serve as a kind of imaginative warm-up for generative thinking. Often it’s hard for panelists to shift from thinking analytically in terms of exploring an area of policy concern to thinking generatively in terms of creating diverse policy responses to that area of concern. By engaging their imaginations in this way, panelists might find it easier to make connections and begin to construct policy possibilities that embody divergent visions of the policy area.

One way to get panelists moving in this direction is to have them generate a list of possible metaphors or analogies that express what an area of concern could represent or mean. In some cases this might work in regard to the whole topic or area of concern under discussion. For example, with the Genetics Technology project, panelists focused on generating metaphors for these technologies. With the project on the Future of the Family, the panelists generated different metaphors for “family” or what family might represent for society. With other topics, where the topic is more diffuse, it might work to focus on some key aspects of the policy area. For example, in the project on Civic Discourse (Helping America Talk), some of the metaphors focused on the phenomenon of discourse itself—exploring different visions of what the interchange of public discourse might mean. Other metaphors focused more on the content of that interchange, exploring, for example, different ways to think about what “information” or “knowledge” could mean (that is, the information that citizens might need to make informed democratic decisions).

One part of this exercise is for panelists to focus on generating a multiplicity of different metaphors. They can think of this as asking themselves, “What are different ways to convey what this topic represents?” or “What are different ways to picture the way this topic (or this reality) functions in our society?” It’s important for panelists not to get stuck on just one motif. Exploring different metaphors like this can help panelists avoid just thinking of one basic vision of the policy area (and what it represents) and then sketching out binary opposites in terms of policy approaches toward it.

Another part of this exercise is for panelists to explore how a given metaphor can lead to sketching out very different policy implications.  At first this may seem counter-intuitive. For example, with the Genetic Technology project, one of the most prominent metaphors was to think of these technologies as “playing God.” It seemed obvious, at first, to most panelists that the policy implication of this was to say that “playing God” is a bad thing to do—so the policy should be to prohibit or greatly restrict these technologies. Upon reflection, however, others pointed out that from another perspective people might feel called upon to be “god-like”—so “playing God” should be something we do. The policy implication of this would be to throw ourselves whole-heartedly into the development and use of these technologies. Similarly, in the Civic Discourse project, the metaphorics of “information as power” led to some policy notions of expanding participation in that power (universalize and expedite access to information, so the power is shared more equally in a democratic society)—and some policy notions that sought to consolidate or restrict that access to that power (restrict access to information to allow the government to govern more efficiently).  With every metaphor that comes up, panelists can almost always discover different ways to unfold the metaphor from the standpoint of different perspectives, perspectives they’ve likely uncovered in their earlier discussions.

To get panelists started, I’ve often found it helpful to bring up some metaphors from policy areas other than their own. This usually gets them moving. It gets them thinking about the big picture of what this area of concern (or some aspect of it) could mean. Once they get moving, the panelists can usually generate a lot of different metaphors, which in turn serve as a rich starting point for generating a diverse range of policy possibilities. If panelists try this out, they’ll likely find that playing around with these metaphors can give them a good start toward generating a number of contrasting policy approaches.

–Jeff Prudhomme

“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”  Admiral Josh Painter in Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for the Red October.

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.”  Artist, author, teacher Julia Cameron

It would be a gross understatement to say that IF’s patron and founder Jay Stern was fond of emphasizing the need to “keep things under control,” most especially when it came to administrative details.  And it can’t be denied that careful planning and tracking of assigned responsibilities and pending and completed tasks, activities, timetables, costs, etc. is a key—and perhaps the essential and defining—function of effective administration.

However, more broadly insisting on “control” in all aspects of life and work and especially for our creative and developmental efforts strikes me as a false (if understandable) and counterproductive conceit—the kind most often engaged in by those self-assured and invincible egos commonly found on Wall Street and more generally between the ages of 13 and middle age. It’s an all too well worn cliché that the success of any inventor, entrepreneur, artist or other creator depends hugely upon their willingness to try things at the edge of and beyond their control and by the unexpected, unanticipated, and most especially their (frequent and often complete) failures.  And at the risk of sounding entirely sententious, it is often only when are able to surrender to our inability to “control” everything that we become open to the opportunity for real growth and insight.

I think the same holds true for IF’s ongoing developmental work:  namely that while we should always strive to administer our work as effectively and efficiently as possible, we should also readily accept that we will fail to “control” every effort, experiment, or—most certainly—discussion.  It’s both inevitable and, I would argue, ultimately desirable that mistakes will be made, some discussions won’t go well, and some things will get out of “control.” Shit happens. The key is to be willing to consider its potential use as fertilizer…and to have a shovel ready.

I’m not sure whether or how this might be possible. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a Bob Edward’s interview of legendary music producer Quincy Jones (from Edward’s XM show on 11-20-2008; the quotations below are my rough transcription). In the interview Jones talks about his creative collaboration in producing Michael Jackson’s mega-hit Thriller album, the best selling album of all time. Jones says that at the time that he had no idea of how good the album or any of the songs might be:

“Who knew what was coming with Thriller? You can’t guess that, you just have to do the best you can. Try to get your own goose bumps.”

Jones tells how they worked down from 800 possible songs to 12. Eventually it was set that there would be 9 songs on the album. But how would these decisions be made? Could the selection process be generative and not just subtractive? For Jones, it was clear that it would not be a matter market research. That would lead them astray:

“I think when you start chasing demographics and focus groups and all that kind of stuff, you get in a lot of trouble.”

Instead, once they got down to 9 songs, Jones played what he calls a little trick, asking:

“Out of these 9, which do you think are the weakest—the 4 weakest? Irregardless. And after you make that decision, you go back in to try to make 4 more that were stronger than anything else on the album. That’s always worked for me really well, because you turn the album upside-down, when you take out the 4 weakest and try to make them the 4 strongest. And, um, that’s always been a good luck charm for me. And we tried it and it worked.”

As a result Thriller ended up adding 4 songs that went on to become top singles in their own right, “P.Y.T.,” “Human Nature,” “Lady in My Life,” and “Beat It,” and, of course the album went on to become the top-seller of all time.

Could something like this little trick work during the facilitation of IF Sanctuary Projects? Could it be a good luck charm for panelists, helping them to be bold in the ways they make choices to exclude some possibilities and augment others? Could it be a spur to the discovery of new and more powerful policy ideas that might make their work even better? A lot will depend on the situation. And as Jones says, we won’t know in advance. We’ll just have to do the best we can and try to get our own goose bumps.

–Jeff Prudhomme

Consider the description of the possibility from the Democratic Nation Building Report that we discussed last time: ‘This possibility would have us forgo all active efforts to build democratic nations abroad’. This description is typical of the descriptions of IF policy possibilities, and indeed of policy possibilities in general, in that it briefly describes what the possibility would do, but not the reasons why it would do it. If you had only this description to go on, then you would be at a loss as to how to evaluate it. You could say ‘salvation at last’ or ‘over my dead body’. But this is just a reaction, and not an evaluation. It may, no doubt, be based upon the concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests that you have pertaining to democratic nation building. But there are all sorts of reasons why someone might think we should not try to build democratic nations abroad. And the concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests that motivate this possibility may be very different from your own.

So what are the concerns that motivate this possibility? And what are the beliefs, values, goals, and interests that underlie it?

These are the questions that you have to ask yourself in order to understand the reasoning behind it. The question at this stage is not whether you like the possibility, or would be willing to support it. It is not whether you share the concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests that motivate it. It is not whether the possibility is consistent with the beliefs, values, goals, and interests that underlie it. And it is not even whether or to what extent it is likely to address the concerns that motivate it. We will get to all of that soon enough. The question at this stage is what those concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests actually are. But in order to understand what they actually are, you will have to understand the possibility on its own terms. And in order to do this, you will typically have to see the possibility—and, indeed, the world—through the eyes of someone who might propose it.

But here, we may once again be our own worst enemies, just as we are when we are trying to understand what a policy possibility says and does not say. For we are all almost inevitably over-burdened by the conceptual baggage of our own concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests when we try to understand a policy possibility on its own terms. And if we are not very, very careful about it, then we may all too easily end up understanding it on our own terms instead.

Thinking seriously about contrasting policy possibilities is not for sissies. This is because it can be very difficult to understand a possibility on its own terms. It is because most of us are so locked up in the prisons of our own minds—so certain about the truth of what we believe and the falsity of what we don’t—that we never even recognize the bars. But it is also because trying understanding a policy possibility on its own terms can also be very frightening. It may force us to question some of our deepest and most fundamental beliefs, values, goals, interests, and concerns. And it may, for many of us, even challenge our own self-identities and self-understandings of who we are.

All of this would be bad enough. But there is also the human condition.

We may feel that we have understood a policy possibility on its own terms when it begins to make sense in light of the beliefs, values, goals, interests, and concerns that motivate it. But human beings are inherently fallible and always subject to error. So it is always possible that, even when everything seems to make sense, we do not really understand the things that we think we understand.  The upshot is that even when we think that we have understood a policy possibility on its own terms, we may always come across something that makes us think that we haven’t. So we should always remain open to the possibility that we have not yet understood a possibility on its own terms and must rethink the whole thing all over again.

This is the human condition. And there is no way around it. One of the most difficult things in life is how to know whether we are ahead or behind—whether, in other words, we disagree with someone because we do not quite understand the reasoning behind his beliefs, or because we understand the reasoning behind them well enough and believe that they are false.

But this is where your imagination, creativity, and courage come in. In order to understand a policy possibility on its own terms, you will typically have to break out of your own mental prison far enough and long enough to think how someone who thinks very differently from you might think. This will require your creativity to find a way to explore the world with someone else’s eyes. It will require your imagination to see how the world might look to someone who has very different concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests than you do. And it may even require your courage to question your most fundamental beliefs, values, goals, interests, and concerns—and, very possibly, the courage to become a very different person than you currently are by doing so.

The Interactivity Foundation’s discussion process is intended to foster creativity in the generation of broad-thinking and contrasting policy possibilities for our society. This isn’t an easy thing to do. It’s often a struggle for panelists and facilitators alike to figure out how to move forward. The ideas, questions, and insights that come up don’t always seem to fit together. Nor do they always make perfect sense, even to the person who brings them up. They might be something a person is puzzling over in his or her mind. In such situations it’s easy to feel lost or nervous about how to proceed. What the White Stripes can help us remember is that this uncertainty, this tension, these obstacles, might be precisely the things that spur spontaneity and creativity in our discussions. It’s a sign that the discussion experience has its own life to it.

For facilitators, this means resisting the impulses to make things easy, the urge to minimize obstacles that panelists face as they’re grappling with complex questions. It means resisting the notion of having a preplanned setlist for how the discussion will flow. For panelists, this means recognizing the value of being puzzled. It can be a good sign when you can’t figure things out. When you feel stymied trying to figure out some aspect of our social life together, that’s a sign you’re working hard, you’re really engaging your creative thinking abilities. And if you’re working hard like that, it can mean that inspiration or breakthrough is near. In describing his creative process, Jack White says that sometimes it is just hard work, something you just have to do. The results aren’t always great. It’s not like every time, just by working at it that “the clouds are gonna part and the rays from heaven are gonna come down.” But, as he says, “inspiration and, you know, work ethic, they ride right next to each other.” As you struggle in the discussion process, remember, inspiration might be riding right there with you.

–Jeff Prudhomme

This is one of the reasons why IF does not ask its panelists to define their terms. Attempts to define our terms rarely if ever succeed. Other reasons include the recognition that we typically have several different definitions of each of our terms, especially if they name things that merit discussion; that definitions suggest a kind of finality and omniscience that we rarely have in real life; and that dictionary definitions are often outpaced by life and the burgeoning language that we use to describe it.

But the main problem is that definitions might stop thought. Definitions tend to lull people into a false sense of security and certainty. And this might stop people from wondering and exploring their understanding of what is, or what might be. We can learn much more about poetry if we keep wondering what it is and dreaming what it might be. And we can learn much more about privacy, property, science, depression, regulations, and other IF areas of concern than we ever could by defining them if we keep exploring and developing the contrasting policy possibilities that pertain to them.

Let me tell you what happened in a public discussion of IF’s Privacy & Privacy Rights report that I recently facilitated. The policy possibilities emanated from four different concepts of privacy: 1) privacy as liberty; 2) privacy as secrecy; 3) privacy as autonomy; and 4) privacy as property. One of the participants objected that each participant seemed to have his or her own definition of privacy and that we were thus talking past each other. We were not. All of these concepts of privacy are in the public arena, and our society and legal system operates with all of them. Ultimately, we live in a democratic society and we have to recognize such diversity and proceed with democratic policy decisions that are based on it.

I noticed during this discussion that when the participants read through the possibilities in the privacy report and started to discuss them, they seemed to let their minds grasp these different concepts of privacy. It was an exciting experience for me to watch some of them bring a new world into focus and suddenly make complete sense of it. It may be even more exciting to think through possible ways to act and speculate about what might ensue from the different possibilities that emanate from these different concepts. In this way, the lack of strict definitions allows us to better explore and understand other positions and possibilities.

Here, someone may argue that we need definitions to solve our problems—for otherwise we may talk past each other. But IF is not trying to solve any problems. It is trying to promote thoughtful exploration and development of contrasting policy possibilities.

But quite aside from that, we often limit our understanding of a problem by trying to define it—which in turn may aggravate the problem by making us unable to see its cause. Consider, for example, the 2005 London suicide bombings. The British Military Intelligence briefly scrutinized one of the terrorists prior to the attacks. But he did not fit their profile of a terrorist and thus was not kept under surveillance. It seems to me that having definitions can easily close our minds to real possibilities, and that not having them may often help us to keep an open mind and save us from problems that we ourselves may create or exacerbate by keeping our minds closed.

Are you still wondering how we can discuss something without defining our terms?

Just try it—just let your mind wander and wonder!

This is a large part of what poetry is all about.

Of course, you might then wonder how it’s possible to facilitate a project if you don’t know where it is going. How can you facilitate discussions on a complex topic if you  don’t know the answers to the big questions the group will be exploring? Is this like the blind leading the blind? Along these lines it might help to think about some recent comments made by the novelist Barbara Kingsolver about her approach to writing a novel (per my rough transcription):

I begin with a question or often kind of a complex of questions that seem enormously important to me and whose answers I really don’t know. And that way I can enjoy the process of writing my way to, not exactly to one answer, because, of course, a novel doesn’t deliver a single answer, but it should deliver you, the reader, some satisfaction on the terms that it has established. It should really lead you to answer these questions for yourself. (Barbara Kingsolver on the Diane Rehm Show)

Following Kingsolver’s lead, we might describe the Interactivity Foundation’s Discussion Projects as taking a “novel” approach. A Discussion Project begins much as Kingsolver says: we start with a complex of questions whose answers we don’t know. The project discussions move ahead by the panelists exploring these different questions and developing different possible ways to respond to them. Like the process of writing a novel, our Discussion Projects are intended to enable creative insights and open up new possibilities we may not have thought up before. And just like a novel, our projects don’t deliver a single answer.

There are some key differences, of course, between an Interactivity Foundation Discussion Project and writing a novel. Rather than describing one narrative or storyline, our project discussions essentially develop different possible “storylines,” or different possible ways to respond to an evolving complex of questions. (Maybe it’s more like writing a collection of short stories). And it’s important to keep in mind that our project panelists aren’t in the role of “readers,” or recipients of what’s produced in the project discussions. They are the authors of it. As the authors, the panelists are not seeking to reach satisfaction for themselves on the “answers” that are produced. They’re trying to spell out a range of possibilities, to tell a number of contrasting stories, so that others, in future citizen discussions, can find their way to their own answers. The ultimate product of a project, a Citizen Discussion Report, should help citizens develop their own thinking about the area of concern.

The analogy between an Interactivity Foundation Discussion Project and Barbara Kingsolver’s approach to writing a novel may not be a perfect one. But if you’re wondering how a Discussion Project could work if it doesn’t know in advance where it is going, you might do well to think of it more like writing a novel and less like engaging in research or taking a trip to a predetermined destination. You might do well to think about Barbara Kingsolver’s approach to starting with a complex of questions whose answers she doesn’t know.

–Jeff Prudhomme