A Community Finally Gets Unstuck

One of the greatest rewards of community living, I think, is the near-joyous feeling of moving forward towards the community’s goals. Finally finishing the guest rooms in the Common House. Finally finishing planting the landscaping. It's great!

And there’s probably nothing more demoralizing than getting so bogged down in meetings that we hardly ever do anything. We discuss things endlessly, but rarely take action. We feel defeated in advance. Meeting attendance drops to a trickle. Morale plummets.

Here's how one community, immobilized and dysfunctional for years, finally got itself unstuck.

A founding member, whom I'll call Dan, served as the kind of unofficial community wisdom keeper. Older than the other members, he focused primarily on spiritual matters. Quite often in meetings he had profound spiritual insights about community issues that showed issues in new and helpful ways. He was listened to and respected. He had high social capital.

A newer member, Sandy, started out with high hopes for community life. But over a few years she became demoralized, just as other members had. She gradually began to realize that Dan seemed to have a kind of numbing, drugging effect on the group.

While they made decisions sometimes, they never made one when he was in the room. And he was on almost every committee.

Sometimes in  meetings Dan said things that brought the meeting to a standstill. No one could respond to what he'd said, and for the rest of the meeting, the group limped along with little will or energy.

"Was Dan in the meeting?" someone would ask.

"Yes,” another would reply.

"Oh, so nothing got done, huh?" was the typical response.

But it was too subtle to put a finger on. How did Dan manage to paralyze all these normally active and intelligent people?

Finally Sandy began to see a pattern in Dan’s specific behaviors.

He wanted to group to spend an inordinate amount of time on the decision-making process, for example, instead of actually making a decision and carrying it out. He did this by explaining how communities should function. The others believed him. His words carried great weight because a respected wise elder founder said it. And the statement would have enough truth in it that no one could argue.

For example, Dan might say that not enough people were present at the meeting to make a decision.

“Since in consensus ‘everyone has a piece of the truth’,” he’d say, “we have to hear from everyone before we have enough wisdom to make a decision that's best for the whole community.”

Well, who could argue with that?

“We are not looking at a big enough picture,” he’d say, “or at a long-term-enough perspective. We need to look at this proposal not only in terms of itself, but also in relation to our mission and purpose, and what's best for the long-term good of the community over time.”

Well, heck, that certainly sounds true.

But, but . . . as Sandy and her friends finally began to wonder, when could they make a decision?

When did they have the power, the wisdom, to just say Yes to a proposal and just get on with it?

Did every decision have to be . . . perfect?

(“The perfect is the enemy of the good”  sure seems true to me . . . especially for people in community.)

About this time, the community met an experienced nonprofit management consultant. She said that only 10% of a group's time should be spent on decisions and 90% of their time on action.

Wow! Sandy thought, we're spending more like 90% of our time on decisions and only 10% on action. No wonder we're so stuck!

So Sandy and the others began to better understand  how Dan was exerting this paralyzing effect.

They began to think it was not because he was so spiritual and wise — which was his self-image and their option too — and which they’d bought into for years.

They began to suspect that, in fact Dan was emotionally and psychologically afraid — no, terrified — to take an action . . . any action, ever.

They suspected he was doing what unfortunately many of us do: projecting his personal emotional issues onto the broader canvas of the community.
In his subconscious, they suspected, the community was Dan.

Was he meeting his emotional needs for safety by keeping everyone so mired in discussion they could never take action? Egads! 

And so, they thought, he dispensed true-sounding community platitudes so the group wouldn't take action.  

And he got away with it because of his wise-elder persona. And because his statements about community contained so much truth.

But sooner or later, they realized, they had to get up enough escape velocity to break away from Planet Dan.

So finally the community held a meeting to give Dan feedback about how his actions affected the group. And . . . gulp! . . . to ask him to please step back from community involvement. It was hard! People were sad and scared. They didn't want to hurt Dan's feelings.  However, to his great credit Dan did step back. Though he didn't like it, of course.

And then, Sandy told me, the community finally, after years, began to move forward and start accomplishing its goals. They're getting things done. Morale is much higher.

I’m fascinated by this story because I think it illustrates an archetypal community pattern. I’ve heard variations of this situation in other communities too. But I’d never heard such a clear analysis of it before now. Has anything like this ever happened in your community?

Knowing about this pattern in community, and knowing that we can ask someone to step back from participation in community governance for this reason (and perhaps they will), seems like good and hopeful news to me.

     —Diana Leafe Christian