October 17th, 2012
After six months of meetings and phone calls throughout this first phase of the Delta Dialogues, how much shared understanding is there?
The late September Dialogues meeting offered a test of just that question, in the form of an extended exercise.
When participants in the Delta Dialogues arrived at the Delta Conservancy’s offices in West Sacramento, eight easels were standing around the room, with big blank sheets of paper on each. Soon, representatives of eight different interests — fish and recreation, water users, agriculture, Delta levees, state/federal water agencies, state/federal regulatory agencies, NGOs/environmental, and local government — were asked to pick a board and make two lists. First, name your top three needs in a plan for the Delta that includes conveyance. Second, name your three biggest concerns.
After they’d done this, the different interests were asked to look at each other’s boards. Then, they affixed stickers of different colors to the needs and concerns of others. A green dot was placed next to concerns or needs that they had predicted. A red dot showed that they hadn’t expected that interest to have that need or concern. A blue dot conveyed a lack of understanding.
As each interest read and discussed and posted stickers next to the needs and concerns of others, the room filled with the smiles of expectations met — and some pleasant surprises. They understood each other in most cases. And, when the expressed concerns and needs of others were different than they expected, the surprise lay in the fact that there was so much agreement.
“It was refreshing,” said Contra Costa County Supervisor Mary Piepho, once the exercise was over. “Others are thinking the way I’m thinking.”
“We found out that we may have said things differently,” said Dick Pool, representing the commercial and recreational fishing industries, “but we were saying the same thing.”
After that, John Cain of American Rivers deadpanned: “I was thinking the same thing.”
The most surprising need, expressed by state and federal water agencies, was their need for the least disruptive solutions in the Delta that enhance the Delta “as a place” with a strong economic, agriculture, recreation and other things. The stakeholders present also were surprised by water users’ expressed need that a conveyance system be compatible with existing activities and ecosystem functions, including fishing and farming.
Surveying the room, facilitator Kristin Cobble whispered to her colleagues, Eugene Kim and Jeff Conklin, “We have a lot of shared understanding here.”
The demonstration of shared understanding and the detailed discussion that began during the exercise and continued through the meeting left some participants saying it was the strongest meeting so far. Several indicated that they wanted to move into more detailed conversations around what one called “shared solutions.”
In the afternoon, the discussion jumped between specifics and broader conversation about how to move forward with the conversation in the most productive way. Conklin drafted a jagged line on a graph — “like a seismograph,” he noted — to explain the chaotic, difficult sorts of conversation that go into the weeds, but are in fact the way that human beings talk when they learn and address wicked problems.
Such a jagged line is different than the traditional problem-solving process of gathering and analyzing data and focusing on a problem for a long time before formulating a solution. That may sound good or simple, but problem-solving doesn’t work like that, Conklin said. What really should happen in efforts to address complex problems is that participants go back and forth between the problem and potential solutions over and over again in a process that, if mapped, looks like the jagged line.
Some participants said they thought the group got along well enough that they could take the jagged path by addressing more difficult issues and even courting disagreement.
The September meeting also included a new addition to the dialogues: Tom Zuckerman. A Delta landowner who has had a variety of different roles, Zuckerman had been identified as a leader in the Delta in one of the monthly phone calls that have been part of the process. He said he had “been through lots of processes. I’m getting old with a limited amount of energy and time.” He said he wanted to “watch and listen” to the meeting before signing on.
The final meeting of this first phase of the Dialogues is scheduled for October 26.
September 17th, 2012
The first phase of the Delta Dialogues consists of five calls and seven monthly in-person meetings, the last of which is scheduled for October 26.
What will come next?
It’s unclear. But participants in the Dialogues have begun discussing a second phase of the process. The desire to go forward was expressed forcefully near the end of the August 24 meeting, when participants said they needed more time to build the shared understanding that is the goal of the dialogues.
It also was the topic of a call among participants the afternoon of August 31. Among the suggestions for Phase 2 were more field trips to important parts of the Delta, so participants can see the places and issues they’re talking about; community workshops that “export” the Dialogues outside the participants; and longer in-person meetings, perhaps even meetings that went beyond just one day.
Participants and facilitators are already working on plans for Phase 2, and are preparing to apply for funding. They seem to be casting a wide net. One of the Dialogues’ facilitators, Eugene Eric Kim of Groupaya, even asked your storyteller’s opinion about Phase 2 on a late-night phone call.
My own answer: Mostly more building along the same lines of dialogue we’ve seen so far. But there are three new things I’d like to see in a Phase 2 of the process.
- The first is the presence of some of the researchers and scientists who study the Delta. But I don’t want them there just to study the Dialogues. As we’ve seen throughout the Dialogues, researchers and scientists from places like the Public Policy Institute of California have played a big role in shaping perception of the Delta. And there has been real concern expressed in the process about whether research on the Delta is up to date or whether it is a contributor to misunderstanding in the dialogues. In an important way, the scientific community working in the Delta is a Delta stakeholder. I’d like to see them present and part of the conversation.
- The second is that I’d like to see if the Dialogues could find a way to permit journalists other than just me to observe the process, while protecting the ability of participants to speaker freely.
- The third is that I’d like to see more detailed discussion of specific solutions to the problem. This is not to say that the Dialogues will produce solutions. But as Dialogues’ facilitator Jeff Conklin explains in his book Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, the act of searching for a solution is how human beings come to shared understanding of problems. So let’s see stakeholders get into the weeds: How should habitat be restored in the Delta in a way that meets the needs of the various Delta stakeholders? What’s the best path forward to levee protection? How can the needs of water users be met without hurting farmers and fish?
My thoughts, of course, are only suggestions. But as the plans are being put together, now is a good time to offer your ideas if you have them — by contacting participants and facilitators, or by offering them directly on this site.
September 12th, 2012
In the fifth in-person session of the Delta Dialogues, participants took bites of fruit, took stock of the Dialogues themselves, and took control of the process, outlining goals for future conversations.
After a morning site visit to North Delta farms, where pears were inspected and grapes sampled, the participants spent much of the afternoon of August 24 reviewing their work to date, including a detailed review of a “model map” — a compilation and distillation of the Dialogue Maps that have charted the Dialogues to date.
The conversation in Clarksburg was friendly and blunt, and participants seemed more assertive than they had in previous sessions. The participants changed the direction of the meeting at a couple points, and articulated critical questions for future Dialogues, suggesting the Dialogues continue past their scheduled conclusion in late October.
The conversation was enriched by what facilitators called the best mix of stakeholder participation to date, with representation from agriculture, fisheries, stage and federal agencies, local government, environmental groups, and recreation.
The afternoon talk also was well framed by the morning tour, which included frank exchanges between North Delta farmers and Dialogues participants, some of whom have been involved in litigation against each other. (At one point, Doug Hemly, the president of Greene & Hemly, as he gave the tour, asked for a show of hands of people involved in litigation against him.) The farmers, as they showed off pears, apples, grapes, and packing houses, complained about the uncertainty created by the current state of the Delta and the plans for it, including the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP). They also expressed fears that they would feel most of the impacts of water conveyance while benefits of the changes would be elsewhere. In response, some participants suggested that the farmers’ fears were overblown and that they could benefit. People on both sides of the discussion said they appreciated seeing “Ground Zero” — North Delta sites where a water conveyance system could be built.
Throughout the day, the participants’ strong sense of ownership of the Dialogues process was clear. But so were strong divisions among the group over various issues, most notably the BDCP.
In-Delta interests criticized the BDCP and previous Delta efforts for not including them and their ideas in the development of plans. Other participants disputed that, saying that the in-Delta interests had not responded to invitations to join the BDCP process and that the ideas of such interests were not always relevant or useful.
The argument continued from there. In-Delta interests responded that the outcome of the BDCP, from their viewpoint, was pre-determined — to build tunnels for water conveyance — and so participation in the BDCP would have required agreeing to a conclusion with which they could not agree. Other stakeholders, in turn, said that such views were mistaken, and that environmental reviews, lawsuits and the BDCP process offered plenty of opportunities to change the process and the outcome — if in-Delta interests could be successfully engaged.
The multiple exchanges on the BDCP and water conveyance did not get deeply into details. Leo Winternitz of The Nature Conservancy pointed this out, and argued that the Dialogues, with their stated goal of shared understanding, provided an opportunity to flesh out details and define terms.
He outlined three questions the Dialogues could answer:
- What would constitute being “at the table” for in-Delta interests?
- Once “being at the table” was defined,” how could in-Delta interests be brought to the table?
- If those first two questions could be answered, how could the dialogues “export” those answers to other stakeholders and to the public so that it could shape future work on Delta questions?
To push things forward, participants discussed taking a particular issue — habitat was raised — and trying to dig deeply into that as part of a path to shared understanding. Several participants also indicated the current process, which is scheduled to conclude in late October, does not offer enough time to do this. The possibility of a second phase of the Dialogues, to follow shortly after the current process, was discussed briefly at the meeting, and at more length in an August 31 call.
“I’d say we made good progress today, but we also hit some pretty good barriers,” said Dick Pool, representing commercial and recreational fishing, at the meeting’s conclusion. “And I’d say we’re going to need a continuation of the process.”
NOTE: The writer of this post was absent from the August dialogues, and based this account on video and audio recordings of the meeting and tour, and on conversations with participants.
August 6th, 2012
The Delta Dialogues took a hard turn into a big, newsy controversy in July, with a day-long gathering devoted to discussion of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) and how its recent announcement should affect the future of the Dialogues.
The turn came at the fourth monthly session of the dialogues, at the Westlands Water District offices on the Capitol Mall in Sacramento that came two days after the BDCP press conference hosted by the state and federal governments. The turn was intentional, with facilitators of the Dialogues framing the session around the BDCP as a way of pushing the Dialogues more deeply into specifics. “We want to go into the fire,” Kristin Cobble, one of the facilitators with Groupaya, told the group early in the day. “We want to go where the lightning rod is provoking us.”
And so they did, for more than five hours, a session that produced some of the most difficult and enlightening conversations of the Dialogues. The tone remained civil, but the exchanges were frank and the differences seemed stark for the first time in a process that has emphasized what the participants have in common.
Participants from the environmental community and water users acknowledged that they supported the BDCP process, while others were more critical, with some questioning whether it was designed to arrive at a predetermined conclusion: The building of a conveyance to bring water from north to south via tunnels. Mary Piepho, a Contra Costa County supervisor, said the BDCP was “not a balanced, thorough proposal. Not comprehensive enough. It doesn’t include local government at the table or water storage components. It lacks a thorough cost benefit analysis and only one project alternative is being analyzed.”
State agency officials are part of the Dialogues, but none attended this meeting. Some participants raised questions about that absence, but no explanation for their absence was discussed.
Despite different opinions about the BDCP, some key points of agreement emerged. Participants agreed that there were deep fears about the BDCP process, and that those fears remained a huge obstacle to making progress in the Delta. (The room was divided on whether those fears were based on real risks or were more a byproduct of mistrust based on previous broken promises about Delta policies.) Participants agreed that the status quo was unacceptable, and that they were willing to make concessions in the name of progress.
One strong criticism of the BDCP also emerged, both from those sympathetic to the plan and those critical of it — that the BDCP process had not been sufficiently inclusive of “in-Delta” constituencies, particularly local governments and farmers. As a result, the recommendations were not as complete as participants would have liked.
Jim Fiedler of the Santa Clara Water District said the problem stemmed from the BDCP’s focus on its “co-equal goals” — ecosystem restoration and water supply — to the exclusion of the people in the Delta. Leo Winternitz of The Nature Conservancy said he had felt “elation” from the BDCP’s commitment to restoring the Delta environment, but “disappointment” because “there was no strong similar commitment to protecting the Delta quality of life.”
The conversation felt disjointed at times. During the middle of the day, facilitators attempted to use the BDCP conversation to leap into a more difficult, specific conversation that would look at the details involved in creating a new method of governance for the Delta. This push occasioned puzzled looks from participants, and facilitators retreated.
The conversation also seemed to miss North Delta farmer Russell van Loben Sels, who was ill. He sent along an email that was critical of BDCP and that was discussed for nearly half an hour. His name was mentioned more times than that any other participant, despite his absence.
In the afternoon, the conversation turned to determining how the Dialogues should go forward in light of BDCP. Should the Dialogues focus on misinformation and areas of disagreement about the facts of the Delta? Or should the focus be on how in-Delta interests don’t have trust in BDCP and other processes, and what would make them trust?
Through the discussion, it became clear that the questions were related. And, in a curious way, one area of agreement emerged: A shared feeling of mistrust. Multiple participants recalled broken promises related to the Delta. Given that history, participants said, as the meeting concluded, that they valued the opportunity the Dialogues provide for open conversation, even over controversial subjects.
In an email chain that followed up the meeting, participants said they would like to keep the momentum and have more follow-up conversations before the next regularly scheduled Dialogue gathering (August 24).
June 26th, 2012
The first two Delta Dialogues meetings, in April and in May, set the table for a detailed conversation about the Delta’s future.
At the third meeting, on June 15, the steak was finally served. Literally.
Over three intense hours on the wood-paneled second floor of Peter’s Steak House in Isleton, participants chewed over a host of complicated issues, with a particular focus on levees and habitat restoration.
This launch into specifics felt like the end of the beginning for the dialogues. And the session ended with the group outlining a plan for detailed, follow-up work on key issues — alleviating misinformation, levee protection, complications of habitat restoration, trust building, and governance — at an extended, day-long Dialogue meeting on July 27.
“This is the most positive conversation I get to enjoy,” said Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District. “So much of what we communicate about relative to the Delta is conflict-based, but here we are so constructive, so common in our interests. Sure we disagree, but no one is disagreeable.”
The conversation was framed by a two-hour tour of Bouldin Island levees led by Gilbert Cosio of MBK Engineers. Cosio showed the group four different spots on a levee that is in the process of being strengthened.
The tour, on a windy day, illustrated the complicated nature of levee design, the variety of conditions of the levees, and the delicacy of levee repair. Cosio made two points that seemed to resonate with those on the tour and that were referred to several times during the subsequent afternoon meeting.
First, he noted how slow, careful, and deliberate one must be in rebuilding a levee. Levees move (in one Stockton project, the peat in a levee moved three feet overnight and 13 feet in the course of the project, he said), and changes in levees, even improvements, can be dangerous in the short-term to the levee. In the Delta, everything has ripple effects.
Second, he recounted the history of levees and, in particular, promises that were made 50 years ago that the State Water Project would include the rebuilding of the Delta’s levees. It didn’t happen.
“The way the Delta people see it, they never got what they were promised,” said Cosio.
Russell van Loben Sels, a Dialogues participant and North Delta Farmer who was on the tour, nodded and added: “There are a lot of things in the Delta that have not happened the way they were supposed to.”
Those two, related ideas — that the Delta is more complicated and interrelated than generally thought, and that today’s Delta efforts are undermined by the broken promises of the past — served to propel the Dialogue discussion that afternoon.
That session started with follow-up discussion about the tour and levee issues. Cosio said that many recent reports on levee failure were based on old knowledge and failed to account for hundreds of millions of dollars of levee work since 2005. The conversation soon pivoted from levees to habitat restoration, as participants noted that, as in levees, habitat restoration must be done with the recognition that a small change in one part of the Delta can affect people elsewhere. This part of the conversation brought the sharpest exchange of the dialogues so far — between Brett Baker, a fish biologist and farmer whose family has lived in the Delta for six generations, and Carl Wilcox of the California Department of Fish and Game.
Wilcox made the point that levees are crucial for protecting habitat, as well as agriculture. He mentioned the habitat restoration at Liberty Island as a potential model for how to do this in the Delta.
Baker objected, arguing that the example of one island shouldn’t be extrapolated to the rest of the system. After some back and forth, Leo Winternitz of The Nature Conservancy broke in to say there was common ground between them: that the habitat questions were complex, that there’s been very little habitat restoration, and that there needed to be more dialogue before any progress could be made on the issue. Van Loben Sels then made a similar point. The exchange served to propel the conversation forward, as participants talked about specific areas and questions that were misunderstood and needed more dialogue.
At one point, the participants gathered around a Dialogue Map, blown up and posted on the wall, that listed all the visions of the Delta’s future — specifically in 2040 — that participants had offered at the previous May meeting. Participants were given small green and red stickers, in the shape of dots. They were asked to put their green dots near visions they agreed with and red dots near those with which they had trouble.
Several said they found it hard to place the red dots. Participants ended up putting red dots mostly near visions that they thought were less than pragmatic. (“No net loss of agricultural land” drew a red dot because the idea that there could be “no net loss of anything” seemed unrealistic. Notions that the Delta should be able to manage itself also drew red dots, because of a consensus that the Delta’s complex systems require management). Green dots were placed by several participants near calls for better infrastructure, more integrated planning in the Delta, strong agricultural presence, and the idea of a X-prize style competition for ideas that improve the Delta.
The latter part of the discussion exposed a potential tension between big and small visions of Delta change that could surface in future discussions.
The participants tended to agree that doing even a small thing in the Delta has impact on many other parts of the Delta, forcing discussions and planning to be broader and bigger. But the participants also agreed that attempting to do many things at once creates logjams and runs up against the lack of trust that is the product of historic broken promises in the Delta.
How will the participants reconcile the need to be broad and inclusive, while also being small and targeted?
Stay tuned.
May 31st, 2012
What was the agenda of last Friday’s session of the Delta Dialogues?
Time travel. The destination was the future. The transport machine was built from imagination and optimism.
“Imagine that it’s May 25, 2040,” a facilitator of the Dialogues asked. “Imagine where you might be. Imagine that you and the people in this room and the people outside the room somehow manage to do the impossible, make decisions, and create a healthy, thriving Delta.”
With that, the dozen Dialogues participants in attendance — representing agriculture, local government, water contractors, state agencies, federal government, urban water users, and the environmental community — were asked this question: What does a healthy, thriving Delta look like in 2040?
By framing the conversation this way, facilitators said they wanted to put the dialogues on a stronger path to the kind of shared understanding that is so difficult in today’s Delta. As Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District said during the meeting, “One of the challenges we have here is we have so much knowledge about the delta, so much data, but so little common understanding.”
But might there be common understanding if the conversation took place in the future?
Participants first jotted down their visions of the 2040 Delta. Then they shared them with a fellow participant, then with the entire body. Participants spoke in the present tense, as though they were in 2040.
The emphasis of each participant’s vision varied, from the water levels to the amount of recreation use. But what emerged — during a sharing of visions that was noted in real time on a screen via a tool called Dialogue Mapping — were remarkably similar visions of the future. (There also was a strongly shared gratitude that all the participants were still alive in 2040).
The biggest common thread in these visions of the future was a Delta of great variety. Leo Winternitz of The Nature Conservancy imagined having just finished a 12-mile bike ride after some time water skiing, in a Delta with agriculture, wetlands, native vegetation, fruit stands with local produce, and great fishing.
Participants also offered similar visions around improved water quality, the strong presence of agriculture, and smarter Delta governance that would be at once more coherent and centralized (everything from state management to United Nations management was suggested) and also more fluid and adaptable to changing conditions.
The visions also shared a strong sentiment that science, technology, and data would drive decisions and allow stakeholders in the Delta to be smarter and more efficient in fulfilling needs.
There were more specific differences over issues such as dredging (some participants thought it would be a thing of the past by 2040, while others saw it as part of the future) and on questions of diverting water. Late in the session, facilitators asked participants to imagine what actions taken between the years 2012 and 2017 would lead to their 2040 visions. The conversation didn’t get very far before time ran out. Facilitators closed the meeting by asking participants to keep pondering these questions and to write in their journals — provided as part of the Dialogues — as thoughts occur.
After three previous meetings that set up the Dialogues, May’s session felt like a step forward into specific issues and content. One facilitator said that while previous meetings had involved “making the stew” and “creating the container” for the dialogues, this session would see the start of the cooking.
Participants expressed a mix of emotions during the session. Many noted the quality of the conversation, but others worried about its prospects and about the particulars of the session. John Cain, conservation director at American Rivers, said he would like to see more people who live in the Delta: “I’m disappointed more local stakeholders aren’t present.” Other participants, in response, noted that three participants had been unexpectedly unable to attend, two because of deaths of close ones or colleagues.
Most of the participants in the May session came early to tour the McCormack-Williamson tract in two big white vans. Winternitz of the Nature Conservancy, which owns the island, explained the group’s plans to restore the original marshland.
Bruce Blodgett, executive director of the San Joaquin County Farm Bureau, pressed Winternitz repeatedly on whether the Nature Conservancy had considered the full economic impact that restoration — by taking productive farmland out of service — would have on people who work the fields, service the farms, sell insurance to farms, and depend on county tax revenues, which would be impacted by the change. The friendly, spirited exchange between the two men continued throughout the tour, and seemed to shape the broad conversation in the formal session.
At lunch after the tour but before the meeting, participants marveled at the size, peacefulness, and cleanliness of the Delta. Participants praised every aspect of the tour (save the driving of the Delta Conservancy’s Campbell Ingram, who piloted one of the two vans), and resolved to have more tours before future meetings.
The next Dialogue was set for June 15.
May 23rd, 2012
A big part of my job as a journalist and think tank fellow is to talk about why California’s budget and governing systems don’t work. So about 50 times a year, I explain to audiences around the state how we got into our current mess, and I outline all the policy options for fixing our system.
Each time, someone inevitably stands up and asks, “So I accept your explanation and love all the different ideas for fixing things, but how can you ever possibly get enough people and interest groups in California to come together and agree on any fix?”
And my only reply is: “I have no idea how you do that.”
Mine is an honest answer. And also an unsatisfying one. Which is why I agreed to serve as storyteller for the Delta Dialogues. I want to know how we might progress in getting California out of its crisis.
This is a personal and professional concern. This is my home state. I’m fourth generation Californian and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. I’ve spent the past 12 years as a reporter and editor here, first for the LA Times, then with the think tank New America, and most recently with a fast-growing magazine called Zócalo. I’ve written two books. Virtually all of my work has involved explaining why California’s politics and government don’t work.
Despite all of this, I’m a strange choice for a storytelling role in a Delta-based project. I live in Southern California, hundreds of miles from the Delta (though I do appreciate the water we receive). I don’t farm or fish or design waterworks (though in the past, members of my extended family have done those things). And, for all my writing and research on California issues, I’ve always avoided the subject of water.
It seemed way too complicated. It was a wicked problem, and I was already consumed by different California wicked problems: our broken budget process and our giant mess of a constitution.
But over the past two years, my outlook and my work has changed. I’ve been trying hard to move beyond describing the budget and governance crisis and to spend time thinking about how we Californians could come together and fix it.
In my search for solutions, I’ve been intrigued by efforts around the world to create deliberative processes with small groups of citizens to resolve very complicated problems. The exact methods vary, as do the specific problems and the locations. (I’ve encountered these processes in Australia, British Columbia, Brussels, Brazil, and Texas.) But in each place, the goal was to bring together stakeholders faced with big, complicated problems, and find some way to understand, cooperate, and compromise.
Of course, reading about such efforts is one thing. Seeing one in person is another thing entirely. And so when I was offered the opportunity to observe a deliberative process like the Delta Dialogues, I couldn’t refuse.
I don’t know if the Delta Dialogues will be a success. I know from my reading that many deliberative processes fail. And I’m very cynical (journalism does that to you) about the ability of people to come together and make progress. But if the Delta Dialogues create a shared understanding of how to address the Delta’s challenges, I’d like to be there to see for myself how the breakthrough happened.
Because if the stakeholders of the Delta succeed in these dialogues, their example could offer lessons for how we might solve all sorts of California problems.
May 11th, 2012
“This feels like one of those 12-step support groups,” said the engineer. “My name is Gilbert Cosio, and I’m addicted to the Delta.”
Cosio, a principal of MBK Engineers, which works for reclamation districts to maintain levees in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, was joking. But his good humor and passion for the Delta were characteristic of the Delta Dialogues kickoff, a new process for Delta stakeholders.
Over three hours at the West Sacramento Community Center on a recent Friday afternoon, 14 Delta stakeholders — representing agriculture, two state agencies, the salmon industry, tourism, county government, flood management, environmental, and the Delta Conservancy, which has convened the process — gathered to outline goals for the process and set ground rules. They also shared some personal stories of the Delta and pointed out their favorite places in the region on a map.
Delta Dialogues
The Dialogues represent a departure from previous efforts to convene Delta stakeholders over the Delta. Instead of formal meetings or specific planning processes, the Dialogues have the broad goal of “developing shared understanding of the future of the Delta,” using Dialogue Mapping, a process that captured the conversation and consensus of the group (on a screen that all participants could see) during the meeting.
Such an understanding could make it easier to address the Delta’s complex challenges, by informing and influencing existing planning processes, and catalyze more meetings between stakeholders.
The Delta Conservancy is seeking to continue the Dialogues — which followed up two preliminary meetings along similar lines in January and February — over six monthly meetings on the third or fourth Fridays of each month for the next six months. Five phone calls are also scheduled.
At this initial gathering, facilitators and participants talked about the challenges of the Delta as a “wicked problem” — a term for problems so complex they cannot be understood at any level of completeness or rigor. There are no “correct” solutions to wicked problems, because there is no way of knowing what’s correct. Wicked problems are moving targets, where any attempt at solving them results in completely new formulations of the problem.
Participants said they were eager to participate in a process that would lead to shared understanding. But some also spoke of “baggage” from previous efforts to bring Delta stakeholders together, and expressed urgency that these meetings would lead to real progress on Delta issues.
Developing Shared Understanding
Several participants also said they hoped that the Dialogues would clear up mistakes and misconceptions in private and public understandings of the Delta. Russell van Loben Sels, a lifelong Delta resident who farms 2,500 acres, said that a document outlining the Dialogues contained a misrepresentation of a consensus in the Delta where there is none.
That document reads: “Most of the Delta is below sea level, protected by a deteriorating series of levees. When (not if) these levees fail, thousands of lives may be lost, and millions of livelihoods will be destroyed. This is the extent to which stakeholders in the Delta seem to agree.”
The discussion made plain that there was no such consensus. Some participants argued that improvements and changes to levees in recent decades made the picture of levee safety far more complicated and uncertain than is often portrayed. Others said it was important not to dilute the risk of levee failure.
Participants said one way to gain a greater, shared understanding on this and other issues would be to hold the meetings in different parts of the Delta, where gatherings could be combined with firsthand observation. Cosio, the engineer, offered to arrange for a visit to a levee for the group, and other participants said they could arrange meetings at various Delta locations.
Ground Rules for Participation
The group spent much of the session wrestling with the ground rules and trying to reconcile conflicting goals within the process. Among these discussions:
- Participants wanted more interests and expertise represented in the room, and resolved to invite more people to meetings. (One specific suggestion: a scientist should be in the room for certain questions). But participants also wanted to keep the group small enough to make the conversation manageable.
- Some participants said it was important for the work being done in the Dialogues – and any progress made – to be known by other stakeholders and the public. But the group also resolved to make sure that the meetings were a “safe space” where people could speak freely.
In response, ground rules were outlined that would allow participants to declare certain comments “off record” and to approve direct quotations that appear in accounts of the meetings, including this one.
Eleven of the 14 participants indicated a willingness to be identified by face and by name on this web site as participating in the process. The three others — representing two state agencies and one federal agency — indicated they would have to clear such participation with supervisors.
The exact date and location of the next meeting were not formally set, but May 25, 2012 appeared to be the most likely date.
After six months of meetings and phone calls throughout this first phase of the Delta Dialogues, how much shared understanding is there?
“It was refreshing,” said Contra Costa County Supervisor Mary Piepho, once the exercise was over. “Others are thinking the way I’m thinking.”
In the afternoon, the discussion jumped between specifics and broader conversation about how to move forward with the conversation in the most productive way. Conklin drafted a jagged line on a graph — “like a seismograph,” he noted — to explain the chaotic, difficult sorts of conversation that go into the weeds, but are in fact the way that human beings talk when they learn and address wicked problems.
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