Stanley Deetz, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication and Director of Peace and Conflict Studies
University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado USA
Abstract: Our contemporary context is characterized by a rapid increase
in pluralism and interdependence and a shift in the sites where critical
decisions are made. To make economically, ecologically and socially
sustainable decisions together requires new models of decision making.
Stakeholder governance models offer conceptions of how diverse value
and interest inclusion in business decisions might be rethought in light
of these shifts. While these models have been fairly well developed,
the actual communication conceptions and practices in collaborations
often remain fairly invisible, under theorized, and the consequences
of specific models remain unclear. Several benefits accrue from opening
the "black box" of collaborative practices and discussing
the design of collaboration practice. Recent work on multiparty and
community collaborations in variety of contexts around the world show
that the communication process tend to follow "humanistic"
conceptions actualized in models of bargaining, deliberation and dialogue.
These traditional communication concepts and practices tend to support
customized solutions and some degree of commitment and compliance, but
generate less creativity than may be needed for the simultaneous accomplishment
of economically, ecologically and socially sustainability. Communication
conceptions and practices based in a politically attentive, relational
constructionism (PARC) theory provides collaborative models with greater
promise for more creative and satisfying decisions in especially high
conflict situations. A few core recommendations are offered.
I am very pleased to be able to be here today. I wish to thank the
organizing committee and hosts for an educational and exciting week
as I have traveled and met with students and companies. This talk was
written before I arrived. I would already like to add much to it. I
will begin my remarks today with a story. The story provides insights
into our contemporary situation and the need for particular conceptions
and practices of communication to respond to it well.
For several years I lived in the state of New Jersey in the US. This
was a lovely area with beautiful tress and rolling hills. Fitting to
the area I lived in a house with glass walls. The designed confused
the inside and outside and always felt connected to nature. Living there
was fantastic except for the problem with birds. Birds could see through
the house and thought they could fly through it. So occasionally you'd
be sitting there and "bang", a poor bird would hit the glass
fall to the ground. It was an awful feeling but to my relief, usually
the bird would shake it off and fly away.
One summer, however, a cardinal (a fairly aggressive North America
red bird) began living outside my bedroom window. Every morning when
the sun came up, the cardinal looked in my window, flew headlong into
it, "bang!" and would fall to the ground. It would then shake
it off, look around, and fly back up to the branch. "Bang!"
into the glass one more time. This would continue for almost a half
an hour most days.
So I'm lying there in bed, now wide awake, thinking. Mostly all I could
think about was how stupid and awful this cardinal was. I made up jokes
about the stupidity of birds. Mostly I was frustrated and blamed the
bird for my problem. Of course, I wanted it to stop and went to the
appropriate experts to figure out how to stop it. I learned that cardinals
are highly territorial. In the morning the sun reflected the cardinal's
imaging on the window; the cardinal thought it was another bird and
attacked it.
The next morning I began thinking about how much the cardinal's situation
looked like many human ones. Let's put ourselves into the cardinal's
position. From the cardinal's standpoint, it wakes up early in the morning,
goes to its branch, and finds another cardinal in its territory. So
the cardinal does what it feels it must-in fact it does as cardinals
have done for thousands of generations. It must drive this other bird
away. Despite the fact that crashing into the window hurts, when it
looks up from the ground it must feel moderately satisfied, after all
the other bird went away. The difficulty remains, however, for as soon
as the cardinal gets back up in the branch, the other bird returns.
From the cardinal's standpoint, the real difficulty in the situation
now is the tenacity of the other bird. Despite the cardinal's best efforts,
doing exactly what it's supposed to do, the other bird returns. Therefore,
the solution, from the cardinal's standpoint, is to do more of the same,
only harder. And guess what? From the cardinal's perspective, the strategy
works, the other bird goes away again. But, of course, the other bird
is highly tenacious and returns. The solution is to do more of the same
only harder still.
This for me becomes a model of many of our social difficulties today,
a set of activities that I will refer to as "window-bashing."
It's not that the cardinal is dumb-in fact, the cardinal is smart and
well trained. It's not that the cardinal lacks will-in fact, the cardinal
is filled with will and tenacity. The problem is a mismatch between
how the cardinal sees the situation, the known and required responses
to it, and the new situation the cardinal is in. And therefore the cardinal-like
many people in new situations, many companies I know, and even a few
nations-is endlessly condemned to the repetition, harder and longer,
of something which may temporarily seem to succeed but endlessly fails.
Mismatches between learned responses and new situations are everywhere
today. We may want to blame people for being unintelligent or even bad,
but they are usually good smart people responding appropriately with
systems that do not work in the new situation. Understanding the characteristics
of the new situation is essential.
I believe that companies and people throughout the world are in a fundamentally
different environment today-a brand new situation. Often the conceptions
and practices of communication, the structure and processes of governance
and decision making are smart and good, but build for another time and
place. For that reason, we need to figure out ways to respond in this
new situation that does not give us a kind of window-bashing response.
Do more of the same, harder and longer, with greater will and intelligence
will not help us much We need to rethink what is required within the
unique situation in which we now find ourselves.
Today I will talk for a while about "our" new situation and
challenges. I say "our" to reflect the general nature of many
of the transformations and the growing global interdependence. I hope
for you to reflect on the unique situation in Brazil and the ways these
forces relate to individuals, companies and governance processes here.
And, I hope to learn from you the unique situation and possible responses
that arise here. Many of us look to Brazil for a unique response that
provides a third way, one more fresh and creative than that of the east
or west. I will follow this by discussing some of our learned responses
that are limited in the ways that they help us, responses that can lead
to window-bashing. Finally, I will end by discussing new models and
practices of communication that can greatly aid the quality of governance
and decision making.
Our New Social, Economic and Ecological Context
Today, we are in an increasingly pluralistic and interdependent world.
The extent of this is in many ways new for human beings and challenges
the basic concepts and practices for communication and governance that
were developed in circumstance of relative separation and disconnectedness.
Pluralism in human communities itself is not new for us-we have always
been different, in different places and different times-but we have
always had mountains, rivers, oceans, and time to separated groups with
differences from each other.
Post-colonial societies like Brazil, New Zealand and Australia because
of sustained native populations and particular forms of immigration
have had longer experiences with pluralism. Questions of how much integration?
How much protection? How to deal with transformations, resistance, and
natural resource extraction? All of these are familiar, reoccurring
questions. For this reason we should not be surprised that some of the
most sensitive conceptions of collaborative decision making and interest
in governance issues would occur in these places.
All peoples of the world, however, are experiencing the pressures of
pluralism with varying pressures of cultural imperialism and homogenization
along side regionalization and ethnic protection and strife. The question
for all of us is how to make these tensions and differences productive
rather than destructive. In most cases our dominant conceptions of communication
have been better suited for reproduction and control than production
and collaboration. This limits the possibility of productive responses.
And, we are not only pluralistic; we are also increasingly interconnected
and interdependent. The continually growing economically interconnected
is visible and immediate with unprecedented international trade and
investment. And increasingly we are recognizing our cultural (with massive
cultural industries) and ecological interdependence. Today we are reminded
daily that we all live downstream from each other.
Brazil, again, has been early in this awareness, by containing at least
a third of the world's remaining oxygen producing rainforests, its development
and transformations have confronted pressures from others in the world
like few others. Creatures of the world could not survive if Brazil
pursued development in the same manner as China. But with global climate
change the costs to the world of US consumption lifestyles and Chinese
style develop is increasingly obvious. We need new communication and
governance systems to make good decisions in this pluralist and interdependent
world. We must replace old models to do this.
Most of the Western conceptions of communication and governance that
were contained in the US Declaration of Independence-concepts of expression,
natural rights of individuals, freedoms from-were fine for independent
shop owners and farmers with an open horizon of space and natural resources.
But the same ideas can lead to window-bashing in a pluralistic, interdependent
world. We await a suitable Declaration of Interdependence-with concepts
of collaboration, community rights, and freedoms in-order-to-articulated
within 21st rather than 18th century conceptions of communication and
governance. This is required, I believe, if we are to create businesses,
communities and a world that is economically, ecologically, and socially
sustainable.
As Ben Barber has argued, in the post colonial time we have done well
to build systems that at best kept us safely apart, we must now build
ones that enable us to be productive together. My guess is that the
celebrated America democratic theorist, Thomas Jefferson, would have
written differently if he had a factory hog farm up the road. We now
know that we all live down stream-what happens up the road, over the
mountain, across the se-matters. We must learn to talk and govern accordingly
in our own societies and across the planet. We cannot afford to bash-window
for long, we need to invent new processes.
Economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable, what a mouth
full. I believe, however, that we have the capacity to accomplish this
but new forms of communication and governance are necessary. Before
I turn to this, let me say at the outset, I do not believe that these
can be treated as three separate goals, each balanced and traded off
against the others. In the long run they are mutually supportive and
can only be achieved together. In order to achieve mutual sustainability,
a more full and diverse set of human interests and values have to be
inserted into decision making processes at a more meaningful place.
Allow me to talk first about the issue of "meaningful place"
and then turn to ways "more full and diverse human values and interests"
can be brought into decision processes.
To be meaningful, values and interests have to influence key decisions,
hence we always have to ask where these decisions are made. Decisions
are made lots of places. Traditionally in our homes, communities and
churches, we decide much about how we will live, how we will raise our
children and how we will spend our money. Our businesses made decisions
about what goods and services to produce and how work processes were
to be organized. And, public sector institutions, like governments,
legislatures and so forth, made decisions about public welfare, defense
and intercommunity relationships. Throughout history some struggle has
existed among these three sectors. Occasionally, for example, governments
have become deeply involved in business and decisions of the home and
community.
Increasingly today, on a world wide scale, what were once private (in
the home and community) and public (in the state) decisions are now
being made in economic institutions using economic logics. The size
and power of corporate forms, "free" trade agreements, the
shift to economically-based personal identities, more effective systems
of coordination and control, etc., have all favored and supported this
shift. This has been both good and bad. On the positive side, economic
institutions have sometimes been more peaceful, accepting of group differences,
and efficient than their community and public counter parts. But raw,
short-term economical logics without counter-balance have also been
disastrous for people and the environment. The traditional state democracies
struggle when the leading social decisions are made in non-democratic
sites and institutions. Because of this shift I am going to focus my
attention on the possibilities and difficulties of inclusion of social
and ecological values in economic sites and the decision processes there,
though many of the concepts and practices being developed there would
benefit community and government decision making.
Traditional Responses and Window-Bashing
Traditionally we have used three processes of getting social and ecological
values into business decisions. We have relied on managerial stewardship,
market and consumer choices, and governmental direction and regulation.
While each are of value, I wish to show that none of these alone or
in concert can provide adequate inclusion of social and ecological values
especially in ways that fosters economical sustainability.
Managerial good will and stewardship (often supported through hopes
of economic gain or diminished regulation) has traditionally been a
public trust or faith that powerful people are good people. Recently
this faith and trust has been shaken. Much of the discussion has focused
on the morality or ethical principles of corporate leaders and how these
become embedded in the culture and practices of organizations. Often
attention is directed to the character of these leaders and their qualities
as citizens of national, regional and world communities. Violations
of the public trust have often been treated as an outcome of individual
defects rather than governance and decisional structures, and as such,
the solutions have been oversight policies and standards rather than
better decision making processes.
But the problem is more structural and systemic than this. Upper-level
executives as a group have increasingly acted less like citizens and
have deployed a somewhat rawer economic logic with less consideration
of the consequences for the organization, other employees, and host
societies. The leaders have increasingly separated themselves and their
family from the world in which their decisions have consequences. Absent,
diffused and institutional stock ownership have further fostered a cruder
economic logic and diffused responsibility. Consequently, relying on
managerial goodwill and character seems, at this point, to be less than
helpful.
Second, governmental regulation and intervention in business decisions,
while important, can only be a part of the solution. Even though regulation
and incentives can influence system choices, most significant decisions
remain within business organizations themselves. Even if they wanted
to, government leaders can not micro-manage companies or even their
own agencies. Further, the effects of government enticements are uneven
at best and monitoring of compliance is in general underdeveloped. The
carbon tax in Europe, for example, has changed some businesses processes
but has not generated the research and investments necessary to produce
viable alternatives.
Governments often lack both the popular legitimacy and capacity to make
or require more proactive business choices. Governmental policy is largely
influenced by business leaders and lobbyists, and rarely do public agencies
have enough information soon enough to actively participate in business
processes and foster public accountability. Additionally, regulation
inevitably leads to a costly double bureaucracy-a public one to establish
guidelines and monitor compliance, and a private one that struggles
to find loopholes and avoid regulation. The application of endless bureaucratic
rules constantly runs counter to good situational judgments and common
sense.
With the rise of globalization, a larger set of potentially competing
values are introduced, yet, the ability for governmental powers to support
the inclusion of these diverse values is weak; and, further, international
trade agreements often outlaw social value representation. Thus value
inclusion dependent upon government intervention is limited and unpredictable
at best.
Finally, the prospect of the market and consumer choices leading to
more social and ecological value inclusion is not great either. The
concept is clear enough. Multiple value systems could be integrated
into business choices through strategic consumption. If publics were
not happy with managerial decisions, they could eventually vote with
their feet or their money. Unfortunately, in this formulation, social
and political relations are reduced to economic relations, democracy
is reduced to capitalism, citizens to consumers, and discussion to buying
and selling.
These transformations have costs. Translating values into the economic
code constrains people's capacity to make decisions together and reduces
human potential to choices already available in the system as controlled
by others. The marketplace does not work well as a way of representing
social values. The pervasiveness of marketing and advertising, the ability
to exclude and/or externalize social and environmental costs, the complexity
and length of decision chains, the difficulty of translating some values
into economic terms, and inequitable distribution of money all weaken
the ability of consumption to represent public values. And those who
endeavor to resist such forces often find counter-cultural movements
co-opted into market capitalism, in green-washing, for example.
As many have shown, markets were never intended to represent the public
well. The idea that market choices accomplish representation, and money
measures it, is a misleading fiction. Markets are value-laden rather
than neutral representation processes, but the values are rarely explored.
Collectively, stewardship, government regulation and markets offer weak
mechanisms for value inclusion and virtually no support for communication
processes that create win/win situations where multiple stakeholders
publics can successfully pursue their mutual interests. Perhaps more
importantly, they do not enable nor stimulate creative decisions whereby
corporate economic objectives and social and ecological good are synergetic
rather than competing interests. In many ways they are our contemporary
forms of window bashing-a good set of responses for another time and
place that appear to partially work if we just tried harder and longer.
Our new situation of pluralism and interdependence requires a different
response. Ultimately, the best hope rests in getting wider social values
into the decisional premises, processes and routines in business rather
than to trying to direct them from the outside. This draws our attention
to new forms of governance and communication.
New Forms of Governance
Varying types of inter-organizational arrangements, many of which are
referred to as partnerships, alliances, or multiple stakeholder groups,
are emerging in numerous contexts as a method of negotiating diverse
interests, goals, resources, and knowledge in decision and policy making
processes. Such organizational relationships do not rely primarily on
market or hierarchical forms of authority or control but rather on a
commitment to collectively realizing and negotiating innovative solutions
to complex social problems.
These arrangements are frequently conceptualized as a direct and purposive
response to the increase of problem complexity, institutional inter-dependence
and inter-connectivity, and the growing dissatisfaction with centralized
decision making in public and private organizations. Such configurations
consist of multi-organizational and other interested parties who convene
to solve problems, resolve conflicts, and/or create innovative courses
of action that cannot be effectively conceptualized or executed by single
organizations. Generically, we can refer to these emerging relations
as "stakeholder" governance models.
Direct stakeholder involvement and inter-organizational collaboration
has been connected to numerous beneficial effects for participating
organizations and for wider communities. These governance arrangements
are linked to higher quality decisions, knowledge creation, the development
of social capital, innovative and creative problem solving, economical
resource sharing, and embracing diverse populations and perspectives.
For some time we have known that stakeholder governance models offer
potential to provide social and economic benefits to broader populations
while increasing the viability of existing organizations.
While initially stakeholder models were developed from the standpoint
of the organization and the interest was primarily in strategic management
of constituent groups, the work of individuals like Reinhard Steurer
have provide a robust, comprehensive, multi-perspectivial development
of the model. With its long term interest in sustainable development,
Brazil has been a leader in developing concrete, community-centered
programs of stakeholder involvement in decision making. "Faces
of Brazil" (Caras do Brasil) especially has been looked to as a
positive model for programs of stakeholder inclusion. I am less sure
of your own discussions and assessments of these programs here in Brazil,
but allow me to develop a general framework for goal-based assessment.
The value of collaborative governance depends on the need demonstrated
across private and public organizations for high degrees of creativity,
commitment, compliance and customization. High degrees of decentralized,
diverse participation is the only way to reliably produce each and especially
all at once. Allow me to sketch each goal.
Creativity. Innovation and creativity are well known to be central
to the value of high end products core to developed nations' competitiveness.
But they are also central for innovative production and closer to life
transformations. Different types of conflict and contestation are likely
to increase in and between most societies especially with greater global
contact, continued immigration, the ecological consequences of global
warming, water scarcity, population growth, and greater parity in world
economies. Tremendous creativity is required.
Business decisions today lack important creativity for many reasons.
Much of the time and resource allocation is directed to managing constituent
groups rather than including them. Decisions are often based on hidden
values and decisional routines that have been institutionalized by management
groups. The dominance of economic logics preclude the presence of other
logics that would force more creative responses. (Imagine metaphorically
the difference between a person who know he or she need oxygen to live
and one who lives for oxygen.) We know distributed expertise and the
presence of different interests is necessary for creativity. We would
not creatively solve a water problem with a chemist alone, we need at
least a physicist, biologist and a sociologist there, too. Yet, critical
business decisions lack the presence of the important alternative interests
that generate the creativity necessary to be economically, ecologically
and socially sustainable at once.
Much of the creativity of the future will not be toward new products
as much as making existing technologies and practices affordable and
usable. Members at the point of the business or community activity are
often in a better position to innovate and improve processes. This requires
different groups in the decision making process. Stakeholder models
try to assure this inclusion.
Stakeholder Commitment. Much discussion has been given to increasing
employee commitment in the workplace. With the increase in the centrality
of social and intellectual capital, most companies know that their most
important assets go out the door at night. Getting them to come back
is important. But the value of commitment is broader than this. Keeping
customers is often far less expensive than getting them. Holding industries
is less expensive than getting new ones, and so forth. Commitment is
increasingly dependent on being part of decisions. Decisional involvement
correlates positively with different dimensions of commitment impacting
on productivity, recruitment and retention, for example.
Compliance. Following rules and compliance to standards is increasingly
difficult in contemporary organizations and communities. Voluntary compliance
based in legitimacy of authorities and ordering principles declines
with pluralism and the decline of perceived legitimacy of dominant groups
rules and norms. Surveillance often gets compliance where legitimacy
is reduced, but surveillance is difficult with professionalized and
localized dispersed work. And, increased surveillance often further
reduces legitimacy and evokes numerous forms of resistance. Given the
cost of control and/or surveillance, especially in knowledge-based and
service organizations, coordination through shared values and personal
commitments is often more effective than supervision. Participation
increases legitimacy and promotes coordination.
Customization. Finally, higher valued products often result
from customization. Localization, globalization and acceptance of difference,
however, make product and service customization more than just a high-end
issue. Local customs and tastes make mass produced items and uniform
services differentiated on the bases of price less interesting than
items differentiated on the basis of relevance and fit. Customization
requires diverse group and value inclusion.
Concepts and Practices of Communication in Stakeholder
Governance
Despite the potential values, stakeholder collaboration in decision
making remains less developed and sometimes less valued than we might
expect. Limited stakeholder inclusion, strategic management of stakeholders
and/or co-optation of stakeholder involvement by managerial groups often
limit the effectiveness of these programs. Serious questions of whose
interest and values should be included and where remain.
An equally serious, often hidden, problem in the practice of stakeholder
governance has been the lack of attention to models of communication
used in the inclusion and decision processes. The-what might appear
to be benign-communication conceptions and practices have tremendous
impact on the success and viability of stakeholder governance programs.
The form and practices of participation, not just its existence, matter.
Communication is an integral part of any form of participation. Having
a right and place to say something and having a process to positively
impact decisions are often very different.
Special communication conceptions and practices are necessary for stakeholder
involvement to produce the innovations and creativity necessary for
broader value inclusion with social and economic benefits. These required
conceptions and practices that differ greatly from more standard corporate
communication models, and also from widely shared conceptions of deliberation
and democratic expression used in the public sphere. Stakeholder involvement
has little positive effect as long as it is tied to these conceptions
and practices. At current time, costs of participation may exceed the
costs of control because the full benefits are not being realized with
weak models and practices of communication.
Often we know little about the actually processes of interaction in
collaboration. When we look at reports of collaborations, even one I
have surveyed from Brazil, most of the attention is given to who is
involved and who they represent. And, then, we learn some regarding
the positions they took. The processes of talk and invention remain
in a kind of "black box." Process consultants seem to have
a fairly clear idea of how to proceed but little of that is revealed
to the outside. When process is discussed, rarely does it seem theoretically
informed, rather the usually brief discussions seem to evoke a commonsense
notion that communication is a simple process and we all know what good
communication is.
Several groups I have been working with have been trying to open the
"black box" and develop potentially better practices based
in more contemporary communication theories. For example, one of the
central and most extensive uses of stakeholder collaborations has been
in public land use. In the United State most of these have used public
hearing and public input models. These have tended to provide little
benefit. Australia and New Zealand have been much more successful in
the decision making around the mineral extraction processes using models
that focus less on expression of positions and more on making collaborative
decisions.
One reason why we believe the US process tends to fail is that people
carry into interaction powerful native theories of communication that
are accepted as obvious and unproblematic. This leads to a belief in
a kind of "instant" democracy, a "field of dreams"
where if you bring the right people together good things will happen.
Despite the reoccurrence of failures in meetings, especially public
meetings, the problem is not seen as arising from weak or flawed communication
concepts and processes, but the need for more commitment, trust and
meetings. Window-bashing at its best.
In most cases the native models depend on representation and "having
as say." Having a say is a necessary but not sufficient condition
to meet the hoped for outcomes of stakeholder collaboration. Sufficiency
requires additionally "voice" and an inventive decisional
process. The lack of voice even with appropriate forums results from
constrained decisional contexts, inadequate or distorted information,
socialization and colonization activities, and the solicitation of "consent"
where stakeholders "choose" to suppress their own needs and
internal value conflicts.
But the programs in the US are not alone in this. Most programs we
have looked at around the world including a few in Brazil tend to see
communication as about the expression of existing thoughts, feeling
and positions rather than as a process by which these are formed. In
most respects these look far more like 18th century humanistic conceptions
of communication than 21st century pluralistic conceptions. Meaning
is seen as person-centered and psychological, and information as existing
in the world with little attention to the interaction production of
each. Thus little attention is given to the process of meaning and information
production nor is attention given to developing processes of interaction
where new development and invention occur.
Accordingly a second reason for the difficulties rests in the concept
of representation. The lists of individuals involved seems to be more
based on concepts of rights and legitimacy than on distributed expertise
or desire for creativity. In fact in most cases representation fosters
an allegiance to fixed positions of external groups which hampers creativity
in the process and creates a group far too large to build productive
answers.
And, finally, following from this, differences are adjudicated and
decisions reached principally from bargaining, deliberation or dialogue.
Bargaining has principally focused on tradeoffs and compromises, thus
economic sustainability has been bargained against social and ecological
sustainability. Deliberation fosters adversarial talk with the hope
that the force of the better argument and shared information will lead
to quality decisions. This tends not to work in pluralistic contexts
and either bargaining or deferral to organization leaders becomes the
eventual decision process. Dialogue, which aims primarily at expressing
and listening to differences, tends to meet a similar fate.
The legitimacy of these processes appears to be based more on input
conditions than the quality of the decisions. Usually these processes
increase commitment and compliance to decisions, and, in the cases of
local involvement, the customization of the decision. But they lack
the creativity necessary for jointly achieved economic, social and ecological
sustainability and maximum responsiveness to stakeholder interests.
If the creativity we hope for from collaborative models occurs at all
it comes from outside decisions based on the input rather than from
the process. Often this reduces skill learning in communities, social
capital formation, and the range of potential interests that could be
fulfilled.
Toward a New Model
Overcoming these problems requires a collaborative constitutive view
of communication based in conflict rather than in person-centered and
consensus oriented models of communication. We refer to this as concepts
and practices of communication grounded in a "politically attentive,
relational constructionism"-the PARC model. Collaborative interactions
in this model opens challenges to existing positions, enables that which
has been assumed as fixed to be reformed in light of open differences,
and provides a collaborative rather than adversarial approach to adjudication
of differences.
The development of these concepts and practices is critical to our
contemporary situation. Currently not only are community and organizational
leaders hesitant to include stakeholders in crucial decisions by disclosing
information, sharing power or granting autonomy, they lack the concepts
and skills necessary to do so even if they liked. Clearly most leaders
lack the critical skills of communication necessary for coordinating
divergent interests, let alone the ability to facilitate interaction
that can lead to creative mutually satisfying outcomes. This certainly
impacts on their perceptions of the cost of participation, how those
costs compare to control costs, the likelihood of economic viability,
and so forth. Corporate communication and public relations officers
may be the only ones who can take the lead in developing beneficial
practices, though even they may be so committed to more narrow strategic
communication that their support is limited.
The PARC model focuses on decisional reciprocity and describes the
minimal conditions for this in stakeholder involvement in decision making
discussions. Most of these are familiar and not unlike what is done
in existing programs. At the minimum we might expect reciprocity of
opportunity for expression; some equality in expression skills; the
setting aside of authority relations, organizational positions and other
external sources of power; the open investigations of stakeholder positions
and "wants" to more freely ascertain their interests; open
sharing of information and transparency of decision processes; and the
opening of fact and knowledge claims to redeterminization based on contestation
of modes of knowledge and information creation. Such concepts have also
been developed by, for example, John Forester for public planning processes
and Richard Varey for constituent involvement in community based decisions.
But the PARC model suggests several additional conceptions and practices.
First, programs that focus on stakeholders jointly making decisions
are of much greater value than those that simply give stakeholders a
"say." Actually making the decision leads to more creativity
and responsibility than expression and recommending to someone else.
Second, involvement in collaboration based on the diversity of interests
of those at the table and discussion process that encourage emergent
solutions are of greater value than those whose members represent external
groups and are committed to maintaining positions held by those not
at the table. Thus we do not ask who should be there but what differences
need to be present to dislodge commitment to existing positions and
give the greatest chance for creativity?
We use a concept of requisite diversity, increased complexity of the
problem requires increased diversity. Requisite diversity cuts across
the arenas of living. For example, distributed knowledge and different
forms of knowing are essential. Many companies and medical clinics have
turned to teams knowing that good decisions require multiple forms of
expertise and that decisions reached in team meetings can better meet
complex needs. The question is not whether one or hundreds share the
position but rather what is the difference that might make a difference.
The legitimacy of a decision in this case does not rest on representation,
that all had their say, but on reciprocity, all differences contributed
to the possibility of an emergent solution. The quality of the emergent
decision in terms of its ability to meet human needs is of key interest.
Third, focusing on outcomes and interests in the interaction is of
greater value than focusing on problems and wants and bargaining over
preferred solutions. This is especially the case when problems are defined
by stakeholders as the absence of their preferred solutions. The core
question is to what end do people want the things they say they want.
People's wants are often different from the things that meet their interests.
The constructed want in hiding the interest often creates a competitive
limited situation where it need not exist. Collaborative talk helps
us focus on interests and helps free stakeholders from the often constraints
of their wants. In the process, mutually satisfying different interests
become a collective possibility. Working with the difference between
positions and interests is core to most creative problem solving processes
that turns apparently competitive limited resource conflicts into win/win
decisions.
In Sum
PARC offers an enriched theory of communication. Such a theory focuses
on understanding the cultural politics of experience and processes of
domination in interaction, has a strong conception of "other"
and "otherness," and is grounded in conflict theories. Such
a theory shows how difference or "distantiation" enables exploring
of alternatives and producing creative decisions. Such a theory works
against native views focused on similarity, consensus and finding common
ground in showing how requisite diversity and contestation coupled with
the ability to invent creative options can sustain mutual commitment
and mutual accomplishment of interests, thus including diverse social
values.
Stakeholder governance, with appropriate collaborative communication
practices, can generate more creativity impacting on development, greater
efficiency and effectiveness in personal and organizational goal accomplishment,
higher levels of mutual commitment, and greater customization of services
and choices. Interaction modeled on collaboration grounded on the embracing
of difference has great potential. Clearly, a reformed "stakeholder"
conception can be enhanced by the application of a conflict-based communication
theory for the sake of greater responsibility and more effective decision
making. Greater sustainability, social responsibility, and positive
development can be made possible by the inclusion of multiple social
values into the decisional premises, processes and routines and the
development of communication processes that use the situations of conflict
and difference to generate creative win-win responses.
Stanley Deetz (Stan)