Naming, Framing and Deciding

Naming, Framing and Deciding

November 2008

I was recently re visiting some resources I had collected while in the US and came across Public Administrators and Citizens: What Should the Relationship Be?, a Kettering Foundation Report (January 2007, Revised, Working Draft).

I found one article, The Practices Used in Public Work, had some useful ideas in relation to the organisational aspect of community wide study circle programs

Kettering discusses the essential and interlinked ‘six practices’ to generate civic energy and political will.

These are:

• Giving names to problems • Framing issues to lay out choices for dealing with them • Make collective decisions • Committing resources • Acting • Learning from action

The first three are considered crucial and are briefly discussed here, because they provide a foundation for the other three.

Giving names to problems

People describe problems that need attention in everyday conversations all the time. At work, over dinner, at the pub, conversations around ordinary questions: What’s on your mind? Why do you care? How are you going to be affected? When people reply to these questions, they are exploring their own values.

Identifying the problem is naming it, and these names capture people’s experiences and the concerns that grow out of those experiences. Naming a problem is therefore the first step towards becoming engaged.

Who gets to name these problems and the terms used to describe them are very important because it shapes everything that follows.

Naming a problem also captures intangibles. Crime can be described in statistical terms, yet people value safety or being secure from danger. And safety can’t be quantified. These intangibles are deeply important to everyone. We all want to be free from danger, secure, free to pursue our own interests and treated fairly by others. These are collective motivations.For example, the collective needs of a community facing corruption in high places and crime on the street may be to live in a place that makes them proud. Pride is an intangible aspiration.

Public names encourage people to own their problems, and owning problems is a potent source of political energy. These names can prompt people to realise that they already know something about these problems. They know how problems affect what they consider valuable. This insight, that people can draw valid knowledge from collective experience, is self-empowering.

Public naming helps people recognise what is really at stake in an issue. And when that happens, people are more likely to join forces. Naming problems in public terms can set off a chain reaction leading to collective decision making and action.

Framing issues to lay out choices for dealing with them

“If you are that concerned, what do you think should be done?” starts the process of creating a framework. People usually talk about both their concerns (often intangible) and the actions they favour. Typically, the concerns are implicit in the suggestions for action.

For instance, in a poor suburb hit hard by crime, most people would probably be concerned about their physical safety. Some might want more police on the streets; others might favour a Neighbourhood Watch. Even though each of these actions are different, they all centre around one basic concern—safety. In that sense, they are all part of one option, which might be paraphrased as ‘protection through greater surveillance’. An option is made up of actions that have the same purpose.

Sometimes an issue is framed around a single plan of action to the exclusion of all others. That kind of framework tells people to take it or leave it. Another common framework pits two possible solutions against each other and encourages a debate. Neither of these frameworks promotes collective decision making

As people become comfortable with the description or name of a problem, they raise more questions: What do you think we should do about the problem? What have others done? People begin to develop options and think about the advantages and disadvantages. The consequences of all the options also begin to emerge. If we do “x,” then we can’t do “y.” If we did “x”, what do you think would happen? Would it be fair? Would we be better off? Is there a downside? If there is, should we change our minds about what should be done?

This is then the framework for tackling the problem. For those familiar with Discussion Guides used in community wide study circle programs, frameworks are often provided.

Framing presents options for acting, but also brings out the tensions among various options.

Decision making is better served when people create frameworks that capture the major intangibles that were identified in the naming.

Make collective decisions

Once the options are arrived at, then a decision has to be made. And that can be done in any number of ways—by voting, by negotiating a consensus, or by public deliberation. One aspect of community wide study circle programs which tends to set them apart to other traditional approaches to decision making is the time and space allowed for this thorough deliberation.

The Discussion Guides used in community wide study circle programs helps each circle make these decisions by the final session. Study circle participants know they need to have some decisions at the end to take to the collective Action Forum where all groups can share.

If important decisions need to be made then public deliberation helps people weigh up the possible consequences of a decision against what is deeply important to them. Public deliberation may sound a bit strange, but we do it all the time, deliberation takes place as people talk to one another about problems. Public deliberation is not a special technique; it is part of our history, even though it may not be as common as it once was.

Deliberation also doesn’t require any special skill; it is a natural act. People deliberate on personal matters all the time with family and friends. And people are attracted to deliberative decision making because their experiences and concerns count.

About the only difficulty with explaining deliberation to people is when it is over explained.

A common concern about public deliberation has been that the public may have little expertise on an issue; however deliberation creates the motivation to become informed.

More importantly however that expert information isn’t what informs the decisions we have to make on what should be done. Questions of what should be are moral questions, and there are no experts on such matters. There is more than

one kind of knowledge. Knowing which answer is best for a community requires a knowledge that can’t be found in books alone because the questions aren’t just about facts.

People have to determine what the facts mean to them.

Decisions are ultimately about what should be. People have to create the knowledge themselves. Knowledge is formed in deliberation to determine whether there is a consistency between proposed actions and what is valuable to people.

A more accurate term for this sort of public knowledge would be “practical wisdom,” or sound judgment, which people create when they reason together. Deliberation, the ancient Greeks explained, is “the talk we use to teach ourselves before we act.”

Providing factual information is no substitute for the kind of talking people must do in order to teach themselves.

Mark Brophy