A word on intention and reality…

Some of us love lists. Some of us love to put a check-mark next to a task on a list. Some of us will even add a completed task that wasn’t on the list just to put a check-mark next to it. The satisfaction! Lists are also sometimes easier to translate and to visualize when we try to organize the moving of people and things.

It can be satisfactory to have a multilingual list with a column to be filled out by people volunteering to do a certain task. The idea is that any of the email recipients can then, on their own time, decide what they can or cannot do. This is better than trying to call a meeting where not everybody who is involved in the travel is able to attend even if it is a mixture of offline and online. So if we have a list on a shared folder on the Internet, then we can all have access and give our input. After this, a smaller group of people can see what remains to be completed and can try to find someone else or fill the void themselves. This would be a way to accommodate busy schedules, provide a method of communication that suits many (everyone who would be involved in that conversation happens to have a ‘smart phone’, computer and access to Internet―this is not something to be taken for granted so we do have computers and Internet access available at our organization). 

So is that how it works? No, not really. We keep on trying and hoping. The reality is that this method of doing―however accommodating and democratic it is―simply doesn’t always spur people to get engaged. The good old way of doing things: calling someone specifically and asking them what they can and cannot do―is the way it mostly works. This is time-consuming especially for the person(s) doing the calling who then have to update the ‘shared document’ for everyone to see. It isn’t just a matter of principle―transparency in the process―but also a way of communicating the “how something is done” to give people the possibility of joining (or not) but also to learn about being in and building a community. It’s circular education and engagement, and we never stop learning and engaging.