The Empowerment Manual

A Guide for Collaborative Groups

Starhawk Starhawk

• Éditeur: New Society Publishers
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781550924848
• Sujet: Betriebswirtschaft
• Sous-sujet: Organizational Behavior

A Transition Town group involved in preparations for peak oil and climate change; an intentional community, founded with the highest ideals; a nonprofit dedicated to social change—millions of such voluntary groups exist around the world. These collaborative organizations have the unique potential to harness their members' ideals, passions, skills, and knowledge—if they can succeed in getting along together.

The Empowerment Manual is a comprehensive manual for groups seeking to organize with shared power and bottom-up leadership to foster vision, trust, accountability, and responsibility. This desperately needed toolkit provides keys to:

• Understanding group dynamics
• Facilitating communication and collective decision-making
• Dealing effectively with difficult people.

Drawing on four decades of experience, Starhawk shows how collaborative groups can generate the cooperation, efficacy, and commitment critical to success. Her extensive exploration of group process is woven together with the story of RootBound—a fictional ecovillage mired in conflict—and rounded out with a series of real-life case studies. The included exercises and facilitator toolbox show how to establish the necessary structures, ground rules, and healthy norms. The Empowerment Manual is required reading for anyone who wants to help their group avoid disagreement and disillusionment and become a wellspring of creativity and innovation.

Starhawk is the author of eleven previous books including the award-winning Webs of Power. A highly influential voice for global justice and the environment, she is deeply committed to bringing the creative power of spirituality to political activism.

CHAPTER 1
A New Era of Empowerment

Cairo, Egypt, January 25, 2011. A chanting crowd marches into Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo to challenge the power of the dictator Mubarak, who has held power for decades. A few days before, a similar groundswell of popular outrage toppled the autocratic regime that ruled Tunisia. Inspired by that success, the Egyptian activists determine to stay in the square, violating long-standing prohibitions against protest. Days go by, and in spite of intimidation, arrests and attacks, they remain until finally Mubarak is forced to step down. Their success inspires similar uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen, Morocco and Libya, transforming in a few weeks the power structure of the Middle East.

At the same time, in the US, protestors flood the state Capitol of Wisconsin where governor Scott Walker is attempting to push through a law that would gut the power of unions. From the Mideast to the Midwest, ordinary people are taking action to challenge coercive power.

These uprisings are different in structure than revolutions of the past. No charismatic leaders take control. Organization exists within the mass, and groups at the center provide inspiration, direction and momentum, but there is no command structure to issue orders to the protestors, no head for the opposition to cut off, no leader to assassinate. As one commentator put it, “The swarm defeats the hierarchy.”

This way of organizing may seem to be very new, facilitated by all the tools of the Internet, from Facebook to Twitter. The Internet itself is a distributed network with no central control or center of command, and it favors similar structures.

But decentralized collaboration is actually very old, perhaps the oldest way that human beings have come together to pursue common goals. It harkens back to the clan, the council around the fire, the village elders meeting underneath the sacred tree. Long before kings, generals, armies that marched in formation and codified classes of nobles and peons, people came together more or less as equals to make the decisions that affected their lives.

Collaborative groups are everywhere. They might be a group of neighbors coming together to plan how their town can make a transition to a more energy efficient economy or a church group planning a bake sale. They could be a group of anarchist forest defenders organizing a tree sit or a group of friends planning a surprise birthday party for a workmate. Pagans planning a May Eve ritual, perma-culture students starting a community garden, a cohousing community deciding on its ground rules or a group of preschoolers playing Monster all operate without centralized structures of command and control.

When we set out to change the world, when we organize to bring about greater freedom, justice, peace and equality, we most often create such groups. Collaborative groups embody some of our most cherished values: equality, freedom and the value of each individual.

And they can be enormously effective. In the 1970s, the Second Wave of the feminist movement was carried forward by consciousness-raising groups, small circles that met each week to share stories and experiences. Out of those discussions arose the issues, actions and campaigns that drove the movement. Alcoholics Anonymous and all its offshoots provide the most effective treatment for alcoholism and other addictions. They are structured around groups of peers who offer each other support with no experts or authorities taking control.

And there are thousands of other examples, from grassroots relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina to the collaborative art event/festival of Burning Man that draws tens of thousands to the Nevada desert every September.

Today, networks, collaboration, decentralization and the wisdom of crowds are hot buzzwords. Co-created projects like open source software and Wikipedia have not only been enormously succcessful; they are being touted as the business models of the future. Many corporations are opening up to forms of co-creation — from the Learning Organization discussed by Margaret Wheatley to Japanese-influenced consensus models to the hundreds of thousands of volunteer organizations working for social change and environmental balance.

COLLABORATIVE GROUPS AND HIERARCHIES

As different as these groups and activities might seem, they have something in common. If you were to diagram their structure, your picture would look more like a circle than a pyramid or a traditional chain of command. These groups may include individuals who exhibit leadership, but they are not dependent on leaders. They may include bossy people, but they have no bosses, no one in control, no one who holds authority over the others. They are groups of peers, working together for common goals, collaborating and co-creating. Such groups are at the root of democracy, and participating in them can be a liberating, empowering, life-changing experience.

My first immersion in a culture of egalitarian collaboration came at an extended blockade of a nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon in central California in 1981. For nearly a month, we organized blockades of the power plant, did our share of the work to keep our encampment clean, fed and safe, got arrested, made decisions together in jail about how to respond to threats and hold solidarity and changed the course of energy policy in California for decades to come. When the blockade ended, I went back to graduate school in a feminist program in an alternative university. But I felt deeply uncomfortable. Sitting at a desk, listening to lectures and complying with assignments I’d had no hand in designing seemed constricting and irksome after three weeks of sitting in circles, participating in every decision that the group made, living immersed in a structure that affirmed my core worth and the value of my voice.

Hierarchies are appropriate and necessary for some endeavors. When the house is burning, we don’t want the fire department to sit down and decide in a long-drawn-out meeting who will go in and who will hold the hose. In families, adults must exercise control over children if they want their offspring to survive. In emergencies, and where true differences of skill, training and knowledge exist, command and control structures may be needed.

But hierarchies also have their drawbacks. In a hierarchy, power differentials expand, so that those who issue orders also receive the greatest status and rewards, and the bottom rungs are not pleasant places to be. The workers who do the nastiest jobs receive the lowest pay and wield the least power.

No one enjoys being a peon or a slave. Many of us submit to hierarchies for work, school or other ends because we often don’t have other options. To make a living, we need to work in situations where others have control over us. But when we do have a choice — in our leisure time, our volunteer efforts, our work to better the world — we gravitate to groups of peers. In a group where we have an equal voice, we feel a sense of ownership, pride and investment. We feel empowered: affirmed and supported in developing our own abilities, skills and talents, in pursuing our own goals and standing up for our own values.

Empowered people stand for something in their lives. They take action, sometimes even facing great danger, because they know that they have the right and the responsibility to act in service of what they believe and care for. A young woman faces the cameras in Tahrir Square, smiles and says, “Today we Egyptians have lost our fear.”

Empowerment comes from within — but the structures around us can evoke that inner strength and support it or deny and suppress it. Collaborative groups, when they are working well, create fertile ground where empowerment can flourish.

THE CHALLENGES OF COLLABORATION

Collaborative groups, however, face their own challenges, especially when they exist over time and strive for permanence and sustainability. It is a joy to be part of a team that works well together. But a team that spins its wheels in fruitless discussions or becomes a vicious battleground can be frustrating, enraging and deeply wounding.

Diana Leafe Christian, who studied successful ecovillages and intentional communities, found that “No matter how visionary and inspired the founders, only about one out of ten new communities actually get built. The other 90 per cent seemed to go nowhere, occasionally because of lack of money or not finding the right land, but mostly because of conflict. And usually, conflict accompanied by heartbreak. And sometimes, conflict, heartbreak and lawsuits.”¹

Diana describes a common pattern. A group of kind, compassionate idealistic people set out to form a community or change the world. For the first few months, everyone loves one another, high on that heady drug of working together toward important goals. And then a year later it has all dissolved into bitter fights and recriminations.

For there is one overriding problem with collaborative groups — they are groups of people, and people are damn difficult to get along with. Were it not for that fact, we would have already saved the world many times over. Instead, we’re left down here in the muck, struggling with the irritating, irresponsible, pig-headed, stubborn, annoying, judgmental, egotistical and petty people who are supposed to be our allies.

I’m writing this book to offer what I’ve learned in over four decades of organizing and working collaboratively. I believe that we can become far more skillful at co-creation. When we do, our inner empowerment will flourish, our relationships will thrive and we will become far more effective at all the important work our groups undertake.

How Collaborative Groups are Different

Collaborative is the term I’ve chosen to describe groups that are based on shared power and the inherent worth and value of each member. Brafman and Beckstrom, in The Starfish and the Spider, characterize what they call starfish groups as very amorphous and fluid. Because power and knowledge are distributed, individual units quickly respond to a multitude of internal and external forces — they are constantly spreading, growing, shrinking, mutating, dying off and reemerging. This quality makes them very flexible.² How do I define a collaborative group? It’s a group that has most if not all of the following characteristics:

• Structured as circles, webs or networks, not pyramids or trees

• Groups of peers, with a horizontal structure, working together to create something and to make decisions

• Groups without formal authority, no bosses that can hire or fire you. (In some hybrid groups, that authority might exist but be rarely and reluctantly imposed.)

• Businesses that run collectively or cooperatively

• Groups where the major reward may not be money, but something else — creative fulfillment, impact on the world, spiritual development, personal growth, or friendship

• Often formed around strong, altruistic values — from saving the world to sharing knowledge to religious observation or community celebration

• Groups of humans — which means that motives of gain, status and power do come into play, if not overtly, then covertly

• Groups that often have few or no overt rules, but many norms

• Often ephemeral, for better or worse

When we understand these differences, we can use them to our advantage. We can structure our groups to encourage the behaviors that foster cooperation, efficacy and friendship — and discourage those annoying traits that undermine our aims. There are thousands of books, courses and leadership seminars that will teach you how to manage a hierarchy. There’s much less support for co-creative groups. Throughout this book I have drawn on all the literature and research I can find, but the primary source is ultimately my own experience.

My academic background is modest — an MA from Antioch University West in psychology in 1982. But my experience of co-creative groups is broad and deep. For more than 40 years, I’ve been working and living in collaborative groups. In the early 1980s, I cofounded Reclaiming, a spiritual network of Goddess-centered Pagans who practice a co-creative tradition that values personal healing, deep spiritual practice and political action. I’ve lived collectively both in the 1960s and continuously since the early 1980s and worked collectively on hundreds of projects, including books and films. I’ve helped to organize political groups that work collaboratively, from small collectives to major mobilizations involving thousands of people. I’ve trained thousands of people in consensus decision-making and facilitated countless meetings. I’ve mediated conflicts for social change groups and presided over strategy meetings of protestors in jail. As a writer, organizer, activist and spiritual teacher, I’ve struggled many times with the contradictions of being a leader in groups that define themselves as leaderless.

I’ve had many wonderful, empowering and healing experiences in groups — and my fair share of painful disasters. Those disasters, my own mistakes and hard lessons are probably the most valuable experience I have to offer. Very few people have experience of how co-creative groups change over time. Many of the new experiments are still in their honeymoon phase. When an emergent group needs to undergo a...