Durell Coleman’s Transformative Session at the 2024 Facilitation Lab Summit
Durell Coleman followed up our first session at the 2024 Facilitation Lab Summit with his dynamic workshop, “Building Consensus Amongst Multiple Stakeholders: Current State/End State.” This session focused on building consensus among stakeholders with diverse perspectives, a timely theme that resonated deeply with attendees from various sectors. Durell, known for his innovative approach to human-centered design, engaged participants in a series of activities designed to illustrate the power of collaboration in a fragmented world.
The workshop kicked off with an invigorating activity dubbed “Enemy Defender.” Participants scrambled around the room, assuming the roles of electrons in a chaotic dance of movement. This exercise was not just about physical activity but served as a metaphor for navigating the unpredictable nature of human interactions. As Durell guided everyone through this imaginative scenario, he laid the groundwork for a deeper exploration of consensus-building in complex environments.
Durell’s talk delved into the essence of effective facilitation, emphasizing the need for empathy and inclusivity. He drew on his extensive background in design thinking to discuss how these methodologies can be applied to real-world challenges. Durell highlighted the transformative potential of inclusive dialogue by sharing examples from his work, such as initiatives to combat multi-generational poverty and enhance community engagement through strategic design.
One of the key highlights was the group activity centered around defining “current states” and “end states” for specific societal challenges. Participants were grouped by persona—ranging from district attorneys to community leaders—to debate and define the desired outcomes of social interventions. This exercise illuminated the diverse viewpoints within any community and underscored the importance of every voice in the conversation about change.
Feedback from the audience was overwhelmingly positive, with many highlighting the practical applications of the lessons learned in their professional lives. The workshop’s interactive format kept participants engaged and fostered a sense of community among them.
In his concluding remarks, Durell reflected on the broader implications of the day’s activities. He reiterated the powerful quote from John F. Kennedy, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” and challenged participants to consider how they might act as catalysts for such a tide in their own spheres of influence.
Durell Coleman’s session at the Facilitation Lab Summit was more than just a workshop; it was a call to action for all attendees to think critically about their roles as facilitators in their communities and organizations. His engaging delivery and thought-provoking content set a high bar for the rest of the event, leaving participants inspired and equipped to bring about meaningful change.
Watch the full video below:
Transcript
Durell Coleman:
Hello. Hi everyone. Well, it’s great to be here and good to see all of you. I’m really looking forward to getting to know all of you better, and I’m excited for the next 90 minutes that we get with each other. Can you all hear me okay? Wonderful. Love it. The title of my talk is Lifting All Boats. As you know, this is really about how to build consensus amongst stakeholders with different perspectives. How do you bring people together in a world of difference?
But before we dive into that, I want to dive into an activity that I really love to start with, which in my background we call a Stoke. What I would love for everyone to do is to push, stand up if you can, and push your chairs in, move your bags in. We’re going to be moving through this space. We are going to need trip-free lanes. What I want you to do right now is I want you to begin moving around the room in a sort of unpredictable pattern. We’re a little bit constrained because we’ve got the tables, but I want you to imagine right now that you are an electron. You move randomly in your electron cloud.
Why don’t we just begin doing that? Everyone scramble. Go. All right, so you’re moving as if you’re an electron, but you’re actually, you’re a human being. I want you to find someone out of the corner of your eye, but I don’t want you to let that person know that you found them. Find a new person. Keep going, keep moving. Don’t let them know. Don’t let them know you found them. Keep moving. You see them out of the corner of your eye. They don’t know that you found them, but you’re watching them. As you go everywhere in this room, you keep your eye on that person. Keep moving. Keep moving. See if we can pick up the pace just slightly.
Okay, yeah. This is our New York pace now. I like it. All right. The reality for you is that the person you found out of the corner of your eye is actually your deepest, most mortal enemy, and you want to keep your eye on this enemy. Keep on moving, please. Yeah, keep your eye on that enemy. As you walk around, notice where they go, notice how they move. And now I want you to do a challenging task. Your enemy doesn’t know that you’ve chosen them, that you’ve found them. I want you to find another person out of the corner of your other eye, and I want you to keep your eye on that person. Go ahead and find someone. And again, don’t let them know that you found them. So you have your eye on your enemy and you got to find someone else too.
The person you’ve just found is your guardian angel. They are your hero. Your job is to keep your hero between you and your enemy. Go. Our patterns become a little bit less unpredictable. And scene. All right, stop. Freeze. Everyone, please point to your enemy. Some people are… Okay, and please point to your hero. Is anyone standing right next to their enemy? I got a few people. You’re standing right next to your enemy. Raise your hand if you’ve managed to keep yourself away from your enemy by keeping the hero in between. Raise your hand if your enemy is in close striking proximity to you. All right. All right.
That activity, we call it Enemy Defender. It’s just a fun activity. It’s a Stoke activity, and it really feeds into the mindsets of human-centered design, design thinking as a methodology, but also I think creative problem solving. We are here as facilitators to help encourage and guide people through processes of creative problem solving. As I believe with most activities, they’re not complete unless you do sort of a debrief on it. My question for you is how does that activity, we just did relate to the state of our world right now?
Audience:
The unpredictability around you and how you navigate through that.
Durell Coleman:
Yeah, great.
Audience:
Irrational.
Durell Coleman:
It’s irrational?
Audience:
Yeah.
Just the very framing of enemies and non allies, I guess.
Durell Coleman:
Yeah, great. So the framing itself is tied to the way that our world works.
Audience:
So of course, my enemy didn’t know that they were my enemy and I ended up being her hero.
Durell Coleman:
Oh, wow.
Audience:
I feel like there’s a message in there somewhere.
Durell Coleman:
I feel like there’s a deep message. What do you think the message might be?
Audience:
I mean, you just don’t know how others are perceiving your actions and how their intent perhaps, like what’s behind it. It’s all through your own filter.
Durell Coleman:
Right. Right. Wonderful. We’ll give you… Oh, [inaudible 00:05:30].
Audience:
It’s really superficial. It’s very superficial.
Durell Coleman:
Yeah.
Audience:
I was going to say having to be reactive more than proactive, and a lack of control.
Durell Coleman:
Tell me more about that.
Audience:
I can’t predict where my enemy or my hero are going, so I’m just having to react to where they’re moving and it’s not always in the right space, and it’s not always within my control to produce the result I want.
Durell Coleman:
Yeah, great. There’s a variability here, and we can’t do it all by ourselves.
Audience:
I actually did not like how much attention I was paying to the enemy, and I wonder how that plays out and how much emotional energy I’m actually expending in those negative relationships.
Durell Coleman:
Yeah, yeah. We might focus in on our enemies. Yes.
Audience:
I felt like before you asked us to find an enemy or a hero, there was a flow in the room and then it felt when the divisiveness started, there was a repelling energy with everyone around me. Everyone sort of was just repelling from each other.
Durell Coleman:
This level of having an enemy and then choosing who your defender is or whatever the thing is that’s supposed to save you from it, created this sort of… We had this silo here that jockeyed back and forth, definitely a lot less free-form, free-flowing movement, a lot of intentional positioning. Maybe there’s some abstract elements of that that relate to how we relate to one another when we’ve decided that you’re my enemy and this is my hero and this is my ally, and that’s the bad guy and that’s the good guy, and all of those things. Thank you all for that.
I’m going to ask you in a moment to return to your seats, sort of. What we are going to need to do is form tables of five. I’m going to ask you if you’re at a table with more than five, please find a few people at that table who are willing to get up and go join a new table. There are some free tables that no one’s been at just yet. If you are at a table with less than five, then invite somebody to come join you. Thank y’all.
All right everyone, thank you so much for engaging in that Stoke activity. I want you to keep some of those mindsets in your mind as we move through the rest of this activity today. We’ve got some fun activities here, but also I took the conversation into a more serious direction in some ways. Some of our conversation today is going to move into that direction. The title of this talk is Lifting All Boats. There is a commonly known quote, which is that “A rising tide lifts all boats.” As I was thinking about the origin of that statement, it was made popular by John F. Kennedy, and he was fundamentally talking about how policies that improve outcomes for a group of people in Michigan or Alabama actually are things that can help all of us. There are things that can benefit the state as a whole. It can benefit the nation as a whole.
What I thought was really interesting though as I thought about this was that a rising tide only lifts all the boats that are in the water, all the boats that are close to the water, all the boats that are included in that economic system using John F. Kennedy’s example. I actually think that we are in a world where we are not always including all boats in the water. We are not always making sure that that rising tide touches everyone. I want to talk today a little bit more about how we can go about moving through this world, facilitating conversations that include everyone, that bring everyone along so that everyone is truly lifted to the place that they need to go.
As I thought about this talk and this session that we’re going to have, I will be honest with you that I was in a state of deep reflection about our world. I look around us and I feel in many ways that we are facing a crisis of leadership. I look around at inflaming war in the Middle East, I see the fall of DEI, I see conflict about what’s happening out at the southern border in the United States. I see just the discourse and the division between political parties here in this country that we are in right now. I’m a believer that we can exist within a world of difference and sameness at the same time, but we have somehow inflamed difference to the point where we are on the verge or we are in the midst of war and conflict and strife all the time.
And so as I’ve looked at these conflicts around the world, I wonder, where are the leaders who can de-escalate these conflicts to design solutions that benefit everyone involved, that benefit as many people as possible? Today, my hope is that we can go through an exercise that we use at my firm to do that type of work. I can introduce it to all of you and then we can have a dialogue about how that might apply to the world that we’re in, how that might apply to the facilitation work that you all do going forward, and any other thing that comes up along the way.
I want to tell you a little bit about who I am and what my company does. My name is Durell Coleman. I’m the Founder and CEO of a company called DC Design. DC Design, our mission is to eliminate multi-generational poverty and uplift black, brown and low-income communities. We really look at the opportunity to help the country as a whole rise as something that we can engage in if we really focus on the areas that have not received the level of support that they need. We want to go in and we want to work with organizations as we do to help them address the root causes of multi-generational poverty.
We partner with social sector organizations, governments, foundations, and nonprofits to do a number of things, but primarily to help them succeed at their missions, to help those who are trying to fulfill their purpose and potential in life, but who are often challenged by the structures around them. Some examples of our past work, I want to give you four quick examples just so you understand how we apply this. The first is around housing. We worked with the City of Newburg to help them recognize that their process of code enforcement, which is the process of condemning buildings, was making 12 families homeless every single month.
They didn’t know this because often we think about the actions that have to be taken. You can’t have people living in condemnable buildings, the floor is falling in, the roof is falling in, there’s no hot water, the windows are broken, there are children living in these locations, it’s unsafe. But often, we don’t consider who’s most impacted by the actions we might be taking. This unknown was something that was unearthed through the course of our work together, and then we help them come up with a plan for how to repair and restore low income housing as well as secure $776,000 from a state-led grant. That grant came in the form of payments from those who had paid for the housing crisis back in 2008 to be able to address this problem.
Another example was working with the City of Newburg, New York, I’m sorry, not Newburg, the City of New Haven Connecticut to help them decide how to spend $53 million of the American Rescue Plan funds. Really the goal here was really around saying how do we invest these funds in a way that benefits our community, that uplifts those who are at the lowest socioeconomic conditions in our community? How do we help close the racial wealth gap by making sure that as we distribute these funds across the entire town and everyone benefits, that we also make sure that we benefit those who haven’t always benefited from previous measures.
One of the things that we learned was that in the City of New Haven, 41% of high school graduates don’t go to college after leaving high school, but there’s no viable business that can support that many non-post-secondary educated folks in town. So you have a lot of joblessness, you have a lot of low employment, and there’s a number of other social challenges that come when you have joblessness and low employment. One of the strategies we helped them develop was the creation of systemic pathways for vocational and trade-based jobs. How do you really set up the systems to help people become those vocations, the plumber, the construction worker, the other jobs that are desperately needed in New Haven and which are very hard to find right now, but that there’s no pathway for? We help them think through that and design the basics of that system.
Last two examples I’ll give. One is the Milwaukee Boss platform really focused on wealth creation. We worked with a number of CDFIs in Milwaukee. These are credit unions who are focused on increasing the flow of capital to under-invested business owners. One of the things that they really wanted to do was increase funding overall. When we went and talked with the entrepreneurs, we learned that their primary challenge was figuring out how to incorporate their business. It was figuring out how to get into a brick and mortar, how to shift from selling their shirts out of the back of their truck to a more established form of business.
The quote that I think really stuck out to me was, “I don’t want more debt bondage, but I need someone who can walk with me to help me on my journey. I don’t know where to find the resources I need. I don’t have an example of a positive role model who’s done this before.” And so in response to that, we created the Milwaukee Boss platform, the one-stop shop for Milwaukee’s entrepreneurs of color to find the resources needed to build, operate, scale, or sustain their business. It is a place where those who have the service, who have the specific course that is able to help you figure out how to incorporate your business or how to get the loan that you need or how to move into a brick and mortar can put their services and then the entrepreneurs themselves can actually go and use this platform to find those as well.
The last example, which is going to be relevant because we are going to do an activity today that engages with this topic was around criminal justice reform in Santa Clara County, California, really focused on helping figure out how can this county not build another jail but instead reduce the number of people that they have incarcerated? We worked with leaders across the criminal justice system to understand what their needs were and help develop a strategic plan which they’ve been implementing for the last five years to success.
I wanted to give you these examples mostly to say these are the types of challenges that the work that we’re going to go through today, the session we’re going to go through today is useful for. I think we are in a state of conflict frequently around challenges like this, things related to the human needs of different individuals where we’re trying to prioritize what does this person need, what does this person need? What does that group need versus this other group over here? I believe that we can actually create systems that serve everyone.
What is our agenda today? We did a Stoke activity. Thank you all for that again. I talked a little bit about the state of our world and I didn’t mention you as the solution as fully as I wanted to, but implicit in the statements I made before was the idea that I believe facilitators are what is needed to address a lot of these challenges, people who can wade into these challenging conversations and help guide us to a narrative and an outcome that really speaks to the inner voices that everyone has and it enables those people to come to the table to find positive solutions.
Did a little introduction. We talked about what is design thinking, and then we’re going to dive into an activity together on current states and end states. We’re going to move through a scenario and a prompt, and then you’re going to get a chance at your tables to really use this process itself. Okay, so what is design thinking? I’m in a room full of facilitators. I imagine there’s a lot of people who are like, “Of course we know what design thinking is. We’ve got this,” but maybe there’s someone in here who is also like, “I don’t know what design thinking is.” So can someone throw out a definition for design thinking for me? A tangible visualization.
Audience:
Yeah, that’s all.
Durell Coleman:
Wonderful.
Audience:
That was my guess.
Durell Coleman:
Yes. Yeah.
Audience:
It’s a way to collaborate and solve complex problems.
Durell Coleman:
Great.
Audience:
Designing, beginning with understanding the end user.
Durell Coleman:
Wonderful. These are all fantastic, fantastic definitions, everyone. Those are all true and there’s a lot of ways that you can define this process. I define design thinking as a way to solve complex human problems that have many possible solutions. It’s a human-centered approach that utilizes empathy and experimentation, understanding a user correctly from an issue and creating an innovative solution. The way I think about it is we use design thinking when we are trying to solve certain problems and not others. If we want to figure out how long it takes for a spaceship to get from here to the moon, that’s not a design thinking problem. That’s a math problem and a physics problem.
If we want to figure out how to design the conditions for the astronauts on board, where should the bathroom be? What’s going to be the easiest flow of work for them while they do what they need to do? Where should they sleep? How should they sleep that’s going to make it comfortable for them? Those are design thinking problems. As we think about that, we recognize there’s not one way to lay out a spaceship. There’s not one way to design that solution, but what we do need to consider are the specific individual human needs of the people who are going to be on board. We might even need to consider the range of different professions and roles that those astronauts are playing while they’re on board in order to truly design something that’s accommodating of that group of people.
I think the more stakeholders you start talking to, the more complex this gets. But that approach is a little bit more of what we’re going to be doing today. We’re going to be thinking about how we can consider the needs of multiple stakeholders at the same time. At the same time.
This is a version of that process. If you’ve seen this before, you’ve probably seen it laid out in hexagons. It may have been five hexagons in a sort of pattern. We like to put it in this circle here, but the main pieces are empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Iteration is an implicit element within this, which means that you constantly cycle through it. Empathy is about understanding the people that you want to design for, and we’re going to be using some of that today. Define is about defining clearly what the problems are that you want to address. What are the problems that those people have? What are their needs?
Ideate is about coming up with as many ideas as possible for how to address the challenges that you’ve defined. Prototype, it’s about building something tangible and real. Testing is about figuring out is the thing I built, does that work or does it fall apart? If it doesn’t work, I get to iterate and I get to go back to any of the previous phases to figure out what to do next. I give you this again as a background framing. We’re going to move beyond this design thinking frame into application current state and end state.
One of the things that I learned when I left the design school and I went to try to apply this to really complex issues is that there were some additional elements that needed be brought into it in order for it to work in an equitable way and in a way that really addressed the needs of everyone that we were working with. Current state and end state is one of those developments, so I place it as a natural follow-on from this. I want to give you an overview real quick and we’re going to move from the section where I talk to you a whole bunch into the section where you talk to each other a whole bunch very soon.
This is the overview of current state and end state. This process answers a question, how do we set goals in a way that helps the world transition from its current state of existence to its desired end state? We know that we live in a world full of challenges and I imagine if I just went around the room, we could all list off a number of challenges that we’re facing. But we also know that we have visions maybe as individuals or as groups of what we want the world to look like. What do we want it to feel like? If you’re familiar with the design thinking framework of a “how might we” statement, it’s useful because it gets a lot of people on the same page asking, how might we solve this problem? How might we approach this? But it doesn’t create consensus amongst people.
It gets a lot of ideas flowing, but it doesn’t build a common narrative of what we’re aiming for in the end. The purpose of current state end state is to do that, is to build consensus amongst a number of different people in order to get them on the same page about what world we’re trying to build. Defining these statements, current state is a statement written in the present tense that describes the current situation including its challenges and is juxtaposed with the end state, defining the status quo.
Here’s an example from work we did in Cincinnati focused on black infant mortality or infant mortality as a whole. Infant mortality as an issue affects women all across the board, affects families across the board, but statistically it affects black women and families at twice the rate of the rest of other groups. So twice the national average, about 10% compared to 5%. In Hamilton County with a predominantly black population, that is the framing for this statement. Black babies are dying because mothers and their families are disproportionately affected by systems steeped in racism.
A lack of equitable access to information and care is producing negative health outcomes for black mothers, fathers, infants, and communities. This statement is one that we worked on in collaboration with a powerful organization called Cradle Cincinnati that has already reduced the infant mortality rate by 42%, and was working with us to figure out what to do for the next five years. How do we go further into that? Where can we go deeper? The end state is a statement written in the present tense that describes the status quo. It describes the status quo and the hypothetical reality that you want to create. This is your goal.
If we look at our end state for this statement, whereas the current state describes what’s happening right now, there’s a lack of equitable access to information and care, which is producing negative outcomes for these groups, black mothers, fathers, infants, and communities. The end state which was developed by this community, was every black pregnant woman feels joy and safe because they honestly expect that the people they will encounter will echo that in their performance and interactions, and that they will honor and protect them. Black women are not worried about resources, access, quality care support for child-rearing. Black trauma is no longer a topic because it does not exist. And ultimately, black babies live to their first birthday. That is the goal with this end state here.
I see some snaps from folks in the audience, which I appreciate. This is an example of a current state end state. I want to give you one more example of a current state and end state as well and we can circle back to any of these examples. The main point here is that this reality does not exist right now. It is not true in almost any place in our nation, unfortunately. And so it’s something worth continuing to work toward. Once it’s true, we will know we have arrived at the place that we want to be. We will know that we have produced the outcome we want to produce.
As a second example using the military families work that this conference is here to support, I developed a current state and an end state that is not complete, but is an idea of how it could function. The current state, finding connections for military family members in locations, that lack of military installation is difficult to do, resulting in a lack of child care, employment, emotional, social and emotional support for military family members. Statement about the current state. That is the challenge that we learned about in many ways. We know that the micro-credentialing process is meant to address part of that.
It’s a solution to some of the challenges faced here, but it’s not the entire solution, because we can recognize there’s a number of things in this current state, a number of challenges in this current state that still would need to be addressed for military families to have what they ultimately need. And as an end state for that, military family members have the resources and support needed to thrive. They actively receive family support, employment, educational, social and emotional support from their surrounding community. They feel valued and cared for when moving to new locations.
In some ways, a flip side of our current state, but in other ways, there’s other things we want to add in there to characterize how the end state we’re trying to build feels. Is this making sense to everyone? Yeah. Awesome. I love it. Great. The point with these examples is that the end state can be written about anyone. There’s a lot of turmoil right now about terms in this country, about which groups we’re talking about and which groups we’re not talking about. I think there are a lot of groups… Actually, I think everyone should be included in our vision for the future. At times, we have to focus in on one group. We focus in on another group. So in the previous example it was black mothers. In this example, it’s military families, but we can also build statements that include everyone in them. We’re going to work on moving more toward that again today.
On your tables, there are a set of personas. Yes, they have orange banner at the top of them. What I want you to do is I want you to pick one at random. I want you to just pass them around to folks at your table and I’m going to walk you through very briefly what they are. Don’t get overly choosy with them, just kind of randomly distribute them to people. There’s a number of personas here, and the reason I didn’t have you read through each one is I kind of want your identities to be known, but I want your values and your belief systems to be held by you. So you’ve got your persona. You can say what your role is, but I want you to kind of protect a little bit the information that you have in front of you.
We have six personas. We have our district attorney, an incarcerated person, the leader of a community-based organization, a public defender, a leader of the local church and a sheriff. Now your table, as I see people are exchanging, they’re like, “I don’t want to be this person. I want to be this person.” Your table only has five people at it, so someone’s not going to be in your conversation, and that’s okay. I don’t want you to optimize too much for that. I want us to discuss that at a later point. Each of you should now have a persona in hand. There’s also on your table a prompt. I will read the prompt to you up here on the screen. You have it on your table so that you can return to what our activity’s ultimately going to be about throughout today as well.
The prompt here is this. The United States incarcerates 25% of the world’s incarcerated population. This is a true fact in case you didn’t know that. Of all the people in the world, 25% of them are incarcerated in America. Due to a new law, many people who are incarcerated at the state level are being sent back home to the county jail. Your local jail does not have the capacity to incarcerate these additional individuals. Your jail is not big enough. It doesn’t have enough space for everyone who’s coming. Your town has decided to try to reduce the number of people in your jail rather than building another one. But you have to decide what must change to make that happen.
The personas that you have are all local personalities. They’re all local individuals and they’re pulled from real examples based on real people that we’ve encountered throughout the course of our work. We did a similar project to this in Santa Clara County as I mentioned before, but we’ve also done other work in criminal justice overall. Each of these personas has a different perspective about what has to change, what’s important, what matters to me, why do we have so many folks incarcerated in the first place? Those are some of the conversations that I want you all to have at your table.
Your persona, your paper in front of you, gives you some details about the perspective I want you to embody. I think that the activity that we just did before where we learned a little bit about inner voices is something that we can think about as we engage this work. What are the inner voices of the persona that you have in front of you? What are they thinking about? What are they aiming for? What are they trying to accomplish in their own lives as well? What I want to do is I want to give you a moment to read over that and then we’ll have a moment where we center on those personas and then we’re going to move into the activity itself. Everyone take a moment to read through in depth the persona in front of you before we move into the next activity. You’re going to want to grab some Post-It notes as well, and a Sharpie from your table.
Here’s what we’re going to do. Current state, define the current state so that you can eventually define the end state. You’re going to have a chance to do this in your groups, but you are going to start by really sinking in to our persona. I want everyone to close their eyes for a second, and I want you to think about your persona and I want you to imagine embodying them, thinking about their experiences. Think if you can recall having a conversation ever with someone who is that persona, think about what some of the inner challenges that you might be facing having lived your life as that person. We’re going to dive in. Thank you all.
There will be places here where you find yourself reaching, you find yourself adding things, making up things, you’re not completely sure. My request is you try to stay as authentic as possible to what you think someone might be thinking or feeling. But recognize also that in this role play, we can’t be perfect embodiments of anyone else and we’re not trying to. We want to be honorable and be respectful of those roles so that we can represent them as authentically as we think we can now. We can reflect on where there are gaps in our knowledge and understanding later.
All right, so first activity. Spend the next three minutes thinking from the perspective of your persona and writing on Post-It notes some of the existing problems that you see leading to your county’s high jail population. Given what it says there on that sheet, some of those answers are written already on the sheet itself. You can write those out on Post-It notes. Others might be things that come to mind for you, and I’m sure you have thoughts on this already. Try to add those to Post-It notes as well, again from the perspective that you might be embodying. Okay, go.
I see some of you’re still writing, which I love. You’re still generating ideas, perspectives, content. Some of you have finished. That’s perfectly okay. What you’re going to do now is you’re going to enter into conversation. As a group, I want you to spend 15 minutes sharing your individual perspectives with one another and building on each other’s thoughts to come up with one current state. You should start by essentially sharing what your perspectives are. Go around your group and share a little bit more about these causes. What is it that’s driving your current jail population being so high? What are the challenges that are being faced in the current system? Listen to your fellow table mates as you think through this and take note of any areas of overlap or commonality and perspective that you’re hearing.
Okay, about 15 minutes, I’m going to circle around as well and sort of just see how those conversations are going. All right, ready? Go. If you haven’t yet, go ahead and start thinking about how you want to craft a current state. How can you describe it? Know that the current state can be four sentences, it can be five sentences. It’s okay to have more than one or two within that. Begin to write that statement. Think about how you can bring in these different perspectives you’ve heard at the table. All right, I’m going to call attention and we’re going to hear some current states from folks before we move on.
Give me one word to describe that activity. I would love to hear from some different tables.
Audience:
It’s difficult.
Durell Coleman:
Difficult. Give me a few other words. We got difficult.
Audience:
Real.
Durell Coleman:
Real. Others?
Audience:
Emotional.
Durell Coleman:
Emotional.
Audience:
Hard to stay in the persona sometimes.
Durell Coleman:
Hard to stay in the persona. That is a challenge for sure. The point being that we are different people and we’ll have different perspectives.
We heard a number of current states difference, but with overlapping elements to them pulled from these personas. I also heard that it was difficult at times to find the commonality. Well, we’re going to ramp that up just a little bit more as we talk about the end state now. Our end state, we want to remember that this is the outcome we’re trying to achieve. What I want you to do is spend three minutes really quickly, again, thinking about from your perspective, what is the world that you want to live in that your persona wants to live in? What does that look like? How would you describe that if things were solved?
Example, jail is a last resort form of criminal punishment. Someone might say that. There’s probably a few different statements that someone would discuss, that someone would put down from their perspective. I want you to spend three minutes writing those down. Think about your current state as well. Some of them will be counters to the current state, some of them might not be. They might just be different ideas. Okay, three minutes. Go. Think personally, what does this persona care about? What do they want to protect?
All right, I know you’re still writing a little bit on that, which is okay. You can bring it in through discussion as well. Now you’re all experts at this. We’re going to go back to our group conversation and share a little bit more about what we think the reality we’re trying to create in our town is. Realize that you are all bonded together. You live in the same community. Go ahead and craft that vision. Really aim toward creating that one to four sentence end state as you move forward. Go.
If you shared, work toward writing one end statement now. Write one end state. You have five minutes as a group to come up with and agree on that statement. If you have done that already, then awesome. If not, try to get something succinct. Three to four sentences max. We’re almost there. We are moving into the final phase of our activity, and so I would love to hear some end states from folks. Which table would be excited to share their end state? Okay, we got volunteers right here in the back.
Audience:
Yes. So our end state is a safe and thriving community where we prioritize the needs of the least resourced as in that way we built the equity to offer liberty and justice for all by giving support to the people that were incarnated through better legal representation, having more flexible options for legal enforcement than only reincarnation or for adequate housing and job support so that they feel more valued and can contribute again to that community.
Durell Coleman:
All right, thank you.
Audience:
Foster a sense of community where individuals feel safe and supported while implementing robust programs aimed at both assisting individuals post-incarceration and preventing incarceration altogether.
Durell Coleman:
Powerful. Great. Great job. In those statements, something I’m hearing, I’m hearing these elements of what a solution would need to entail. It doesn’t say exactly what the solution is, but what I’m hearing is there’s a focus for some on post-incarceration and release. This was not a conversation you all had with each other before coming in this room, but I’m hearing this idea around maybe we should create ways for people to exit jail appropriately and be able to live. Then I’m also hearing things around reducing the inputs, the entry, which is actually called no entry as well. It’s a very descriptive name. There’s another table.
Audience:
Our community sees the end state. Our community sees the incarcerated as valued members of the community and not as a threat. Our community believes rehabilitation is a human right and that we’ve all failed and deserve a path to re-enter society. Our community has created an effective and holistic rehabilitation system free from inequalities that starts during incarceration, rooted in the community, includes child care, mental health, career, substance treatment, funding, housing, legal and spiritual support.
Durell Coleman:
Wow. All right. Snaps around the room. Let’s get one more table. Yes?
Audience:
We choose and work to welcome each person back into our community with honor and dignity. We understand the systemic nature of this problem and allocate funds and resources more strategically to provide housing and transition support. Law enforcement options are a combination of proven alternatives with incarceration as only one in the last resort. We believe the strength of our community is shown by the strength of our network solving this challenge.
Durell Coleman:
All right, thank you. Let’s talk. I want to talk realism real quick, and then I want to talk your thoughts, your reflections on the activity that we just had. In your statement, it was interesting because I heard incarceration as only one of the solutions. I’m curious which persona pushed for that piece of it? The DA. Okay, that’s powerful. We often find people have their biases in certain directions. I thought you actually were going to say the sheriff as one of the possibilities for who that is as well, but the DA, that also tracks in a lot of ways.
What I have found having grown up here in Texas, the conservative bastion of America, having lived for 12 years in the Bay Area, California, the liberal bastion of America, having great people in my life from both those places, I have yet to meet people, when you meet them one-to-one… I don’t know if I have yet to meet people, but I have not met very many people, I should say. .001 maybe percent of people who don’t actually want good outcomes for other people, who don’t want other people to succeed and thrive if possible. I find that often we characterize the sheriff or the DA or these certain people in ways that removes their point.
I’ll give you the story is I was in a room with a community leader who said “People with mental illness shouldn’t be incarcerated.” Then I had a sheriff say, “My job is to maintain public safety.” But the reality was, when we broke the conversation down, they were just talking about their individual roles and their beliefs. They weren’t actually disagreeing with each other. The sheriff wasn’t saying, “Yeah, we should lock up way more people with mental illness.” He was saying, “I don’t have alternatives to incarceration.” And so I think the job of a facilitator, and in using an activity like this, is to get past some of the preconceived stereotypes about people to understand where we can actually agree.
Where do we have a commonality? I have these conversations frequently with people with varying political views, and we often find in those tabletop conversations, points of commonality, points of commonality, points of commonality. Differences remain, but there are things we could agree on that could actually help reduce some of the tension that I see elsewhere. I want to hear any final reflections from all of you before we close here. What are folks’ thoughts? Yes. Oh, here comes your mic.
Audience:
I have no personal experience with any of this, and so all my ideas just come straight from things that I read or other opinions on the matter, and I found that a little bit disturbing.
Durell Coleman:
Reflecting on your own personal-
Audience:
Just putting things down on paper that I am thinking could be the problem, even from the personal of a fictional reverend, because I don’t know. I have not had any personal experience with this topic.
Durell Coleman:
Yeah, I think it’s a really powerful point. There’s a discomfort in an activity like this if we don’t feel like we have a personal basis to speak through this. It was interesting though. I walked around to certain tables and I heard so many words that I have heard in other rooms before as you embodied these characteristics. I heard from over here this element around not knowing what to do when I’m released, not knowing where to go, not knowing who to talk to and where to get resources.
I heard a bunch of things about reentry solutions that I’ve heard in rooms with other people, and you might’ve just been playing off the personas, but there’s things in these end states, I did not put in these personas that you all pulled together. There’s two things to this. I think one side of it is it’s uncomfortable and can be challenging to engage in. I appreciate you for stepping into that. I think the other is any space that is really tense like this where we don’t have those personal relationships or that personal empathy, those are opportunities to go meet people, talk to people, learn from people directly to see what are their perspectives.
It’s not like it’s necessarily your job to go do that all the time, but if you have the chance to bridge some of those gaps going forward, then that’s an opportunity that you can take up as well.
Audience:
I am considering bias here and I’m considering from a facilitation standpoint how I hold that bias, because as our work was unfolding here, I’m making the assumption, check me table mates, that we are pretty biased towards what we consider the beneficial outcome is here, the end state. As I consider my bias as a facilitator, it seems this might be one place where I can leverage whether it’s optimism or intention in the room to support finding common ground. That that’s where I would lean in as a facilitator.
Durell Coleman:
Right. I think yes to that. Our biases do come into this and I think that’s a safer place to lean in. Did anyone at their table not have a sheriff as a persona? Any tables not have a sheriff? Anyone not have an incarcerated person at their table? Those biases are also extra prevalent when we don’t have all of the right stakeholders in the room. There’s an activity we do before this called Stakeholder Mapping where we figure out who are the right people to make sure that we have a rounded perspective. We also think about who are the people with veto power. People who, if they’re not included and they learn about this six months from now, all that work was worthless. The sheriff is one of those people actually, generally. They have the power to raise enough political pressure against what you’re doing to cancel it.
And so anyway, that’s a really important point. I think leaning into points of commonality is helpful. One move we also make is to take the end state, even if we didn’t develop it directly with people, and take it to all of those stakeholders to get their buy-in and help them shape it. In this work that we did before, we took the end states to the Department of Corrections. They made one change, which was to add a line to alternatives to incarceration that said, while maintaining public safety. And that was it. But that was enough to get the buy-in from the entire Department of Corrections for the entire plan moving forward.
This process works really well if you can enter into a frame of collaboration. It’s not always a frame people want to enter into. It is a frame that leaders can put people into. If you have a certain amount of power, for example, you can say, “Look, we’re going to do this differently,” because you have the power in that system to call for collaborative solutions. But to your point, how do you elevate the voices of folks who are often left out? I think as a facilitator, it’s your job to think about and understand who those people are.
When we did this work before, we originally started with 27 leaders in criminal justice, and it was the sheriff, the DA, the public defender, all of these different people. These are, like I said, based on real folks. At the end of that exercise, when they had talked about what’s gone well and what still needs to happen, I asked them this question. I said, “Who’s not in this room? Whose perspective is missing from your answers?” And it was a move toward exactly what you’re talking about. The answer they said was, “Well, we actually don’t have incarcerated people here.”
So had one of your tables not had that perspective, I would’ve been asking you who’s missing? I’ll come back to the sheriff in one second as my final closing comment. Basically, it’s a way. I think it’s important for you to hold those voices in mind. If you forget them, you likely will not have good solutions. You likely will not have something that actually works, and that’s foundational to human-centered design.
I think my closing questions or things for you to ponder, throw out a quick answer. What’s the difference between this activity and running it as a facilitator? Running this activity. You were at your tables, you are all facilitators, versus you stepping into a space where you’re facilitating another group through this. And they’re not playing personas. They are those people. Separate question, where do you think this approach could be useful?
Audience:
Wherever divergent perspectives exist.
Durell Coleman:
Wherever divergent perspectives exist. Awesome. I guess I want to close it, just bringing it back around to Leah’s point earlier, which is if we want to make peace, we have to look at the source of our wars. I think this is an activity that helps us move past some of the reflexive or reactive reactions that we have that create those wars, create those tensions, keep people from getting the resources they need to actually bring them to the same page.
All right, so hopefully this was helpful for everyone. Thank you so much.
