The Role of Appreciation in Community Development

The Bravo cable television network--originally created to broadcast cultural programs to that small segment of the television audience that enjoys ballet, opera, live theater, and art--learned quickly that small niche markets are not the stuff of cable success; the network quickly evolved into a more popular form of entertainment to find its path to fame: showing rich, self-consumed people snipe at everyone around them. And find it they did.

One recent Saturday, while I sat at the kitchen table most of the day trying to edit a particularly frustrating document, the TV was stuck on Bravo, with family members coming in and out of the adjacent living room to watch one show or another. My background music for four hours was the endless chatter from The Real Housewives of Washington, D.C. followed by the Real Housewives of Atlanta, two episodes of Flipped Out and two of The Rachel Zoe Project.

I recounted the interactions I had half-heard over the time period. Most involved at least one person who was having an emotional breakdown over another person's (a) fashion choices, (b) attitude, or (c) existence. I realized that the conversations I had overheard throughout the past four hours was ongoing, endless conflict, usually about incredibly trivial and unimportant matters.

Perhaps I had just caught a particularly nasty four hour stretch of Bravo programming. I decided to watch at least one episode of as many of the Bravo shows as I could stomach to check my hypothesis. To be fair, there are other shows on the network, including an endless parade of artistic competition shows, where chefs, artists, designers, or hairstylists try to out-talent one another. But even these programs are filled with jealousy, petty arguments, and self-absorption. Suffice it to say that for at least some segment of our culture, vicarious narcissism and negativity holds sway.

There's a bigger problem for most communities than a few self-absorbed individuals who love to establish their authority by putting others down. My sour reaction to a day of Bravo programming had more to do with the overall frame of reference seen in each of the shows. There was always something wrong, and the "real" people in each reality show saw themselves as valiant soldiers who fought through the muck and mire to overcome the banality or incompetence or unfabulousness of the poor wrecks around them.

Unfortunately, I see the same frame often in community prevention. I wish I had a nickel for every time I saw a community prevention specialist slam the community in which he or she lives and attempt to "fix" all of its problems by proclaiming them loudly. Many of those "problems" are actually people who disagree with a philosophy or approach, or who may just have lost their way. Kenneth Burke called it the "tragic frame" where we construct a world of "victims and villains," moral wrongs that can only be righted through some form of mortification.

In my experience, though, the tragic frame has never proven effective in improving communities or building effective partnerships. Finding fault with others who share your community (artistic or otherwise) seems to only yield division. It's difficult to find synchronicity or synergy (much less consensus or collaboration) if everyone is trying to establish superiority by punishing the weaknesses of everyone else.

One of my favorite organizational philosophies is appreciative inquiry, where a community or organization focuses on its existing potential to create an improved environment. This is much more than a group of people thinking good thoughts about each other. This is about a community focusing on the very best aspects of itself in order to see the path toward even more success. Funny how hard it is to0 find a solution when you're so deeply focused on the problem.

In A Positive Revolution in Change: Appreciative Inquiry, authors David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney write, "In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, and design."

In community-based prevention work, this means--at least for me--that rather than focusing on the villains who make and sell dangerous substances, promote or exploit unsafe practices, or create barriers to change, we focus on the many parts of the community that operate in ways that are safe, productive, and enjoyable, identifying what enables these practices and finding ways to extend that environment. It means focusing on the normative majority, which is often much more aligned with the outcomes of prevention than the small percentage who seem to own culture. Most importantly, though, it means appreciating a perspective that is different than your own, and finding value in that different perspective long enough to see how it might be joined with your own.

It's difficult to bridge perspectives with any segment of the community if I see nothing but the worst in that perspective. Perhaps it is greed that motivates the bar owner to sell alcohol to obviously intoxicated patrons, but usually, there are other reasons, including a lack of skill in refusing a sale or a mistaken belief that refusing sale always results in a customer who never will return, which, if done often enough, might just pull the plug on all revenue. Appreciating the perspective is the only way we can start a dialogue that leads to an improved environment that we both can live within.

Alright, it even means finding the positive aspects of Bravo network, since the rest of the family seems rather enamored by it, and it's bound to be on in my home for some time to come. I'll start here: the stuff they make on Top Chef sure looks delicious. And I certainly do appreciate the talent of many of the competitors in each of the shows. If only they could let everyone around them be as brilliant as they are, recognizing that there's enough unlimited brilliance for everyone. Now, that would be fabulous.