Mutual transparency: the antidote to many don’ts
29 October 2010
Values and ideas about appropriate behaviour have become part of the organisational culture at the Community Development Resource Association. But living up to these standards is a constant challenge.
The Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) is a centre for organisational innovation and developmental practice. Formed at the height of South Africa’s anti-Apartheid struggle and rooted in progressive and humanist approaches to social justice and change, the association has worked with over 800 organisations and individuals throughout Southern Africa and beyond.
Our collaborators and clients range from small community-based initiatives to institutions with a global reach, including NGOs, membership organisations, networks, research institutes and governments. We work with initiatives that address urban and rural development, capacity building, community development, youth development, health, welfare, the environment, HIV/Aids, policy making and research, education, children’s rights, human rights and gender issues.
We share a set of values and ideas about appropriate behaviour that, we believe, make good capacity development (CD) facilitators. These values, which have evolved from our practice to become part of our organisational culture, include the following.
Listen. Everyone has a story; your job as a facilitator is to listen to them, and also to share your own. If that involves impossible timeframes, declare this and ask: what can we do about that? See what you come up with together.
Never stop listening. Listening is not information gathering. Check that what you think you have heard is indeed what was said, whether you are working with individuals, groups or even communities. CD is not an information sharing process, but it is about constructing a shared meaning.
Ask questions. Always ask: what next? Assume that what will follow is not obvious. You may have some ideas, but so too will the others. Together, these ideas will shape the next step. Until they come together, there is no obvious way forward – no method, no template, no prescription, no tool, no formula. All of these will become useful only later.
Don’t assume. You may not always have anything to offer, or the people you are meeting may not need your help. Before asking for anything, declare who you are – quietly, in a measured way. There is no hurry to get anywhere else – the point, for now, is to meet people not to have a meeting, and not to transfer any particular ‘thing’ or lesson.
In practice, it is often difficult to live up to these standards. The most common inappropriate behaviours we witness in others, and are guilty of ourselves, come from:
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cultural mismatches, e.g. being direct and task-driven in an indirect and relationship-driven culture (and vice versa);
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temperament mismatches, e.g. some people cannot appreciate perspectives or ways to proceed from people with different temperaments;
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mishandling power, e.g. manipulating people, or not using available power to enable others;
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second-guessing, e.g. adjusting your responses to fit what you assume other people want, in order to retain or gain an advantage; and
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being defensive, e.g. trying to save face, or protect authority, territory or fragile egos.
Transparency
One thing that can sometimes act as an antidote to some of these problems is transparency. Mutual transparency means revealing more about each other to each other – about ourselves as people, or about our cultures, circumstances or situations. It means revealing what we think, feel and want, and letting others know what is really happening on our side, possibly pre-empting strange behaviour. Of course, first we have to reveal this self-knowledge to ourselves, and then have the courage to reveal it to others.
But in many situations, and many cultures, building transparent relationships is hard. Indeed, we are probably talking about more than just behaviour; often the very purpose of an intervention is to reveal and connect more to the system itself. As this is where some of the real work lies, it is useful to share how a facilitator’s behaviour can bring about transparency.
In our profession, transparency comes most easily in confidential settings – in ‘containers of trust’. These are the one-on-one conversations where people look each other in the eye – whether during a formal interview or over a beer in a bar. Many effective professional development approaches begin with such conversations. They are started ostensibly to gather information or build a picture. But perhaps they play a more important role as the places where the foundations for trust and transparency are laid, and where the funny, inappropriate behaviours that usually emerge in more participatory processes are pre-empted.
It is an old theme in the CD sector that we are ‘over-workshopped’. Perhaps we need to invest more time in building key, intimate relationships before we stumble, unprepared, into yet more meetings.
