Will that be the whole cake, or just a slice?
by Dave Hasbury

Every time that we find a new concept we send ourselves off into conversations that run the risk of leaving us all confused. Confusion is a natural part of change, but how many times have we gone to meetings about "inclusion", "self-determination", "person centered planning", community capacity building", "social capital", "least restrictive environment" etc., only to leave with a massive headache and not a clue about what we just talked about?

I love working with People First because of the honesty they bring to these meetings. The flow will be stopped when one of the members raises their hand to ask the brilliant question, "What does that mean?", or speak the straightforward truth that most of us are feeling but are afraid to say, "I don't know what you are talking about". And of course there is the loud statement made when someone falls asleep during the conversation, or sits with a glazed look pasted across their face, and I know at that moment that the conversation ship has just left the harbour and some of us are still standing behind on the dock.

It is not likely that we are going to stop the use of concept language. This language is a part of the change process. In fact the big concept language is really helpful if it leads us to have meaningful conversations about our understanding of it. But do we really need to stay in a confusion loop? If we are actually going to be able to do anything about the concepts we are talking about, we are going to need to find ways to understand each other so that more people can get on board to make the changes real. If we are actually going to be able to do anything about "inclusion", we are going to have to find ways to talk with one another that include us by allowing us all to understand what we are talking about.

Graphic planning tools like MAP and PATH help us find ways that we can see what we are talking about, so that we can do something about it together. The more people that can see the same thing, the greater the possibility we will have in creating the visions that we see.

Within all of the big concepts like "inclusion" and "community", there are so many other concepts like "choice", "safety", "friendship", "participation", and so many more. Even when we use these words that are more familiar to us, we run the risk of passing them around in the conversation without exchanging any real understanding. At the end we have this vague notion that we were near a conversation about something familiar, but not close enough to know what was being said.

At a recent workshop on using graphics, I asked the group to put out some concepts that they would like to find ways of graphically representing. One woman said, "What about comfort?". So I asked her, "What would comfort look like to you?". She said immediately, "I don't know". I tried to get her to think about that, but she was clear about the fact that she really didn't know how to represent it.

So I asked the rest of the group to provide images that would represent comfort to them, in the hopes that she would be able to identify with one of them and we would have a better understanding of what she meant. One person said, "Comfort is two people hugging", another said, "Comfort is a big chair in front of a roaring fire", yet another, "Comfort is snuggled up in my bed". But the woman who brought forward the idea of comfort said, "No, no, no. None of these images are comfort to me. I know what it is now. Comfort is chocolate cake."

And we all paused for a moment as we let that image sink in for us. You could hear the "Aahhh, I get it now", spread throughout the room and see the heads nodding in affirmation. Now we better understood what she meant. Some of us could actually see the cake and feel what that would be like if it were us in the picture.

And then I asked, "Will that be the whole cake, or just a slice?"

"Just a slice.", she said, with a glow of satisfaction.

When we are led around by big concepts, we are often so confused that we simply keep doing the same things and try to fit them in the new language that is being passed around. We just can't see what these big ideas mean, so we keep the old pictures in our heads. And we don't hear any better than we did before.

People with disabilities and their families have some pretty clear ideas about what would feel good in their lives, about what is important, and in fact what could benefit us all. If we could spend more time with each other understanding what we see and feel, exploring what it would look like, we might find that more often than not we are on the same side. Once we are there, then we can do what it takes to make it happen.