This Wednesday I went to a lecture, Urban Acupuncture, by Jaime Lerner - the architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil (hosted by some cool peeps).
The lecture was actually a little slow, but there were a few really good points he made, some of which I think are real challenges in US culture.
Someone asked - How do you win people over to your ideas? The first thing he said in response... "Listening." Second was good demonstrations of the ideas.
Someone asked - What about community participation? He said you have to start with a proposal, start with an idea. It can change, it can get better with feedback, but you can't wait to start until you have all the answers. You have to start.
We don't have a culture of listening (perhaps not even as much as we could in the design professions and certainly not in government) nor do we have a culture that allows for mistakes. These two things, however, seem essential for positive growth. Without listening, it's often not possible to find out the perceived problem, the actual problem or solutions to the problem not known to us. Perhaps more importantly, without listening it's not possible to have real communication and develop real relationships. This is what community and progress depend on. Sometimes projects or ideas may fail, but if you have communication and relationship you are in the position to try again. And this is why people are afraid to start, why we don't have community participation and why people are afraid to fail. We don't listen, don't arrive at real relationship and thus have no room for error. If we fail, there is no structure of communication to fall back on, nor ability to learn from the mistake and try again better.
So I'm going to try and listen more, and just start with an idea when I'm stuck at the starting gates.
An unexpected bonus at the lecture was a free (and then signed) copy of his book!