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.
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).
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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