Here’s the email I sent to leaders in Reno County on 12/3/12:
Funny story from a couple of old codgers here at the church: they were sitting in Daylight Donuts for a morning coffee and in walked a family with a little girl, who had a sucker in her mouth. One of these guys said to her, “Are you enjoying that lollipop, sweetie?” And she said without batting an eye, “It’s a sucker, stupid.” I’ve laughed about this story time and again, but all too often this is how our civil discourse is about issues we care about, isn’t it? We sincerely want to make a difference or make progress, only to be stopped in our tracks by the “It’s a sucker, stupid” people.
I, for one, have been helped by the competencies at this point. You see, what is exposed in my bristling at this statement is my lack of diagnosing the situation. I’ve begun to treat a problem as a technical one when it’s an adaptive one. Here’s another quote from Ed O’Malley in The Competencies For Civic Leadership, p.3: “Technical problems live in people’s heads and logic systems. They are susceptible to facts and authoritative expertise. Adaptive challenges live in people’s hearts and stomachs. They are about values, loyalties and beliefs. Progress on them requires the people with the problem to do the work, and the work involves refashioning those deeply held beliefs.” To relate it back to our situation, it’s the belief that a sucker isn’t a lollipop that caused the girl to rebuff those codgers. Might some of the resistance we face be due to the fact that we’re treating adaptive problems with technical solutions? We’re engaging brains and not hearts. So, get back to purpose. Dive deeper to find that common ground. And, see if this doesn’t help us make progress as a community.
