System Readiness: the greatest challenge to growing participation culture

Firstly, what is participation culture? In recent years, people have been getting together in local places and neighbourhoods to do more stuff together that they might have done apart before; shared batch cooking in communal kitchens, communal meals, sharing skills, repairing and upcycling, and so on.

The Participatory City Foundation built a system in the borough of Barking and Dagenham to test a way to help participation culture to grow more easily, which they named “the participatory city approach”, read more about that here.

I was reading through the “places to practise” report, and reflecting on how unique the phenomenon was of that “build it to test it” research and development exercise; millions of dollars invested in capital to fit out buildings as environments fit for growing participation culture with cooking spaces, workshops, ideation spaces, connection spaces, and so on. a team of about 20 working across the borough in a highly coordinated but flexible and resident-centred way to cocreate huge regular programmes of many and varied participation projects that 10,000 residents took part in.

It was really quite unique in the scale and coordination of civic and community innovation, and involved so many residents as co-builders and cocreators.

In Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland I have been modestly trying to find ways to grow participation culture within Auckland Council and more recently within the community sector in Auckland. I piloted the approach a couple of times with Council libraries and community hubs, one of which you can read about here. More recently, I have been working with community organisations and community based practitioners to grow participation culture, one example of which we documented here. But these experiments are much more modest in terms of scale and resource. And what I’m noticing is that while “participation platforms” which help grow participation culture are really effective at building social cohesion, broad-based citizen cocreation capacity, and a wide range of outcomes, in a holistic way, there’s a major barrier in the way: system readiness.

When I use the word system I mean in the systems thinking sense: a system being any combination of simple parts that make up a more complex whole. That could be a person, a group, an organisation, a city, a species, an ecosystem of many species. There are a few layers of system readiness to consider:

Practitioner Readiness

I’ve noticed that the people that do the work of holding a platform to grow participation culture need to be at a certain point in their developmental journey. If we use Kegan’s theory of adult development as a frame of reference, individuals at a self-transforming stage of development seem to do best in this work; being able to take on board many perspectives, see where other people are at developmentally and meet them there, support people to co-evolve and weave together ideas, and so on. The number of people that are at a self-transforming stage of development is thought to be low, so getting a number of these people all into one system is a challenge in itself

Organsational Readiness

An organisation that is at a self-transforming stage is likely to be thinking about meta-outcomes like social cohesion and growing citizen capacity, but many of our organisations today think mainly in terms of one specialised outcome area e.g. environmental sustainability, economic development, ethnic well being, and so on (a more “self-authored” mentality to use the Kegan’s framing). So holding a space for cocreation of participation culture is likely not to resonate for organisations that are in this “single outcome” way of thinking. Also, a lot of what organisations seem to do nowadays is delivery: someone is delivering something for or to a “target population” of “end users” or beneficiaries. Many of the organisational systems of today are set up to measure delivery of some kind. Holding a platform for cocreation of participation culture with community members requires a markedly different set of mechanisms, and requires different people (as described in practitioner readiness above), but the people in most organisations have been selected and hired optmised for delivery.

Community Readiness

Anecdotally we have noticed that there is a range of community readiness. This seems to apply at the locality level right down to the street level. Some local areas have less people that are ready or motivated to engage in cocreative participation culture; they’d rather just do things individualistically and consumeristically(no judgement! 🤣). At the street level we’ve noticed that there are some streets with higher existing trust and collaboration levels, and some with really low levels. It seems hard to grow participation culture in a community that basically doesn’t want to, but some communities seem to jump at the chance (often communities with large elements of cultures that have had long standing norms around more collective ways of doing things).

Funder/Governance Readiness

This is a form of readiness I’ve just started to think about recently; if our funders and decision makers are still thinking in terms of “single outcome” and delivery-centric ways of getting things done, and they are comfortable and habituated to that way of thinking, then they are unlikely to fund initiatives or platforms which are intent on growing participation culture. What I’ve noticed is that the idea doesn’t quite register, people might roll their eyes and say “we already do that”, or approach the proposition with a hyper skeptical/critical view.

So What?

This all paints a rather bleak view for those that are intent on growing participation culture, that have seen the benefits this way of working merits. What I’ve found to be a useful heuristic (rule of thumb) for this work is to look for the largest viable pockets of system readiness: where are the small emerging pockets of enough practitioners, working in organisation(s), with communities that are reasonably ready? We might call these “early adopter pockets of system readiness” where the conditions line up and they do exist, we just have to do a bit of looking.

Where do you see pockets?