Alliance Online - September 2007

Interview with Peggy Dulany
Changing hearts as well as minds

Peggy Dulany founded the Synergos Institute 20 years ago. Her aim was to help overcome poverty; her approach was to form partnerships that included those affected by the problem to be solved. Twenty years later, how much has been achieved, Caroline Hartnell asked her. And what is likely to change over the next 10-20 years? One of the things Peggy Dulany thinks will happen is that Synergos will bring more business and entrepreneurial approaches both into partnership formation and into ways of solving problems – which will involve deep transformation of individuals and organizations.

Can you tell me about your motives in founding the Synergos Institute?

There were two reasons. One was that I had been working with the New York City Partnership, a type of partnership that was fairly common in the UK and the US in those days but not so much in the southern hemisphere. It sought to address education, youth employment, housing and public safety issues, working together with government, labour, non-profits and business. It occurred to me that partnership could be a useful strategy for addressing problems in the South too, particularly those related to poverty. The other reason was that the partnerships I knew about generally didn’t include those who were affected by the problems being addressed, so the idea was to start something that would promote not just partnerships but inclusive, participatory partnerships.

Are those two things common threads through all of Synergos’s work over the 20 years?

Yes, although we found initially that the climate for partnerships in the southern hemisphere was not right and so for a number of years we worked to strengthen the capacity of society to engage in partnership rather than building partnerships directly.

How much of what you wanted to achieve do you feel has been achieved?

What I would really like to achieve is an end to poverty, and obviously that hasn’t happened. But in my view, in order to reduce poverty you need several things to happen. One is for all the stakeholders to be involved, and I think that in many countries now, certainly largely in the ones we work in, there is more of an acceptance of the notion of working in partnership, and to some degree more of an acceptance of an inclusive, participatory approach. I think there is also much more data available, some of which we’ve collected, and some of which others have, about how partnerships can work. So in a way the groundwork has been done, the climate is better, there are more partnerships, and more people want to work in partnerships, but there’s a long way to go in terms of significantly reducing poverty.

What are you most proud of in Synergos 20 years on?

It’s difficult to choose just one thing! Having played a role – and we certainly didn’t do all of this ourselves – in shifting the paradigm so that partnerships and participation have become almost the norm in the way to approach problems would certainly be one. But I’m so proud of the partners that we’ve worked with over the years. They’re extraordinary people, they’ve created amazing organizations and achieved remarkable results, in which we’ve had some role, so I would definitely give them the lion’s share of the credit.

Have things really changed since 20 years ago when you say the climate for partnerships wasn’t the norm?

Yes! To give a very graphic example, in Brazil we were trying to promote a partnership approach to dealing with children living in poverty without access to basic children’s rights. We were able to get a major private bank to host a reception for activists working in this field, which they did in a nightclub in a fashionable part of town which those activists didn’t frequent. I remember with horror that there was a group of society ladies invited by the private bank, all in their finery, on one side of the room, and the activists, who were wearing their normal clothes, or maybe slightly fancier than their normal clothes, clustered on the other side. And other than the woman who was starting the Brazilian initiative and myself, no one was crossing the room. It was such a symbol of the lack of communication and the lack of ability to reach out across divides that existed in Brazil in those years.

And now it’s completely different?

Yes, it’s quite amazing, and particularly in Brazil and a few other countries.

What are you most disappointed by?

The time it all takes. Each time, it’s taken a very long time to figure out what the next step should be, but that’s because these are incredibly complex issues. So I’m sorry that we couldn’t have come to a clearer picture of what was needed next or that it’s taken a long time for people to be more ready to work with each other in an inclusive way. But unfortunately, I think social change happens slowly.

What will change at Synergos in the next 20 years?

I don’t know whether I’m speaking 10 or 20 years on, but one of the things that I think will happen is that we will bring more business and entrepreneurial approaches both into partnership formation and into ways of solving problems. I think that, by and large, civil society has not sufficiently availed itself of the cutting edge organizational strategies for change that the private sector has been using for some time.

I also think that civil society tends to look at money as something distasteful rather than as something that could be a means to an end. I think the climate is now right for social entrepreneurs as well as business entrepreneurs to do the difficult work it takes to learn to speak the ‘language’ of the other. I’m hopeful that there will be better and more respectful civil society-business alliances that will lead to more sustainable change.

At the same time, I think business, and governments for that matter, still have a lot to learn about the knowledge, wisdom and resourcefulness of communities that are poor or marginalized. Everyone has something to contribute to addressing the most critical issues we face and everyone stands to gain if we can identify more effective ways to connect people, build trust, and support meaningful collaboration.

I think Synergos will be drawing on its own experience over the last 20 years of learning how to do this and how to make better use of new technologies to help connect people and ideas in the global community more easily.

And is this going to come about through use of the U-process?

I think the U-process is a very good articulation of what it takes to create the depth of transformation that is needed. But let me address it a little bit more broadly than just the U-process. In my view the kind of shift that we’re looking for is not a technical shift, it’s an internal transformation of individuals and then groups and then society in recognition that we’re all in this together and that we need to work together; it’s not just a head recognition, it’s a heart recognition as well.

In other words, I think that the people who come together to address these problems need to be willing to address their own role in causing and resolving them, which is a deeper commitment than simply saying ‘I’ll put $5,000 into this’. I think the U-process is an excellent method for getting people to look at the external realities and then retreat into themselves to figure out what their real purpose in being involved is. Once the group has come out the other side, they will be empowered to work together to find creative solutions.

So is the U-process a technical method to produce this deep transformation?

Yes it is. There are others using methods that have similar elements, so I don’t want to say that the U-process is the only way to do this. We’re using this and other approaches as well and are continually looking at what processes are working so that what we’re sharing with people and adapting to local reality will be the most effective approaches for them. Ultimately, it’s people working to change a system who need to determine the best and most culturally appropriate way to open themselves up to their highest purpose, tap their own creativity, and join with others in making systemic and sustainable change happen.

Could you give a brief description of the general approach of the U process?

In the first part of the U, you study, in a group, whatever the problem is that you’re all engaging with, both looking at successful initiatives and identifying the stakeholders who are going to be part of the solution. So the group gets to know each other by analysing the reality together. Next, at the bottom of the U, is what they call presencing: the members of the group go into the wilderness and spend three days, each of them alone, reflecting not so much on the problem at hand as on their purpose and what they want to contribute in life. And when they come back together they share what they came up with, which creates a further powerful bond among the group and leads to what Joseph Jaworski calls a single intelligence.

This allows them to brainstorm in highly creative ways using the best of the knowledge and skills of each one to come up with new solutions. Finally, they take the results back to their corporation or community group or government agency, each of them acting as salespeople to get the sponsors on board to support this jointly agreed to initiative.

It’s quite a demanding process by the sound of it. Will all Synergos’s partners, or at least some members of each group, have been through this process?

It is demanding because, for example, in the case of India, it was an eight-week commitment – and it’s very hard for some people to give up eight weeks and it’s a huge commitment on the part of the organization to which they belong.

The U-process is a really good example of what it takes to make partnerships work, but it’s not the only approach. In Canada we are using a slightly different approach. And even where we are using the U process, it will be different in different places.

You’ve written a paper, ‘What’s missing? A personal reflection on Synergos’ twenty years’. What conclusions did you come to? What is missing?

The paper is about the discovery of what was missing in each phase of Synergos development and our perception of what was needed to successfully reduce poverty. So in the first phase the recognition was of the lack of collaboration across groups, and particularly the lack of participation of those usually left out of the problem-solving process.

The second recognition was that in many places civil society was quite weak, so we needed to strengthen intermediary civil society organizations so that they could bring other voices from civil society into the dialogue in an equal way. So, for example, we spent 15 years strengthening community development foundations.

The third element we recognized was missing was what we came to call bridging leadership. People who gravitate both towards partnership and towards community foundations tend to adopt an inclusive style of leadership, or bridging leadership. This was not described in the literature, so we began looking at it, documenting it through case studies, then, through some of our partners, actually teaching it.

The final missing piece was the recognition that the change that is required is deeper than a technical change and we need methods such as the U-process to transform people both individually and as a group in order to achieve the depth and sustainability that we’re looking for.

And that’s the missing piece that you’re working on now?

Yes.

On this question of bridging, Avila Kilmurray has stressed the need for shoring up the weak end of the bridge. What role has Synergos played in that? Do you see things like your work on strengthening community foundations as part of it?

Yes I do. And, in a sense we’ve been building partnerships by aligning ourselves, not exclusively but strongly, with the weaker groups, which gives them greater confidence and helps create a space at the table for them.

How much do you think community foundations are really representing the weaker end?

First of all, I should stress that I’m referring only to the southern hemisphere, because that’s where we generally work, so there isn’t really an issue about whether they are there more for the community or for donors. In the early years, in order to introduce the concept of community foundations to the South, we brought people interested in starting a foundation to visit US community foundations. We tried to seek out those that were more inclusive of the community, because we could see that that would be more relevant to southern foundations. Community foundations in the South don’t have much money so they have to work more through their linking capacity, the information they are able to make available, and so on. If they were only viewing themselves as grantmaking foundations, they wouldn’t have gone so far.

In fact, we tend to say community development foundations these days in order to make the distinction between those with an emphasis on empowering the community and responding to their needs – which are the ones we tend to work with – and those that are mainly a vehicle for donors.

Do you want to say anything about the new work you’re doing now, particularly in India?

The first comment I’d like to make – and this is the case for all deep partnership work – is that it is time-consuming and difficult and it really does involve a shift in trust. The hardest thing, and what took the most time, was engaging the kinds of people who are willing to set aside their preconceptions about other sectors, other organizations and other individuals and set about working together in an open-minded and open-hearted way. I feel like we did succeed in that by and large and that now there is a basis on which the planning and the implementation can move forward without the constant confrontations that characterized the early stages.

I should say that India has not had a lot of experience in partnerships, so it was even more challenging than working in, say, the Philippines or Brazil or South Africa where almost a culture of partnerships has developed.

Also I guess there were some very deep structural problems – caste as well as class and wealth – to overcome in India?

There still are, and some of those, particularly in rural communities, will take years to address. It will not be Synergos doing that work, but the Bhavishya Alliance, the Indian organization that has been formed to take this forward, which will continue to work with local and state groups, government and civil society and corporations, to figure out the best way of making that shift.

People talk about, for instance, donors and grantees being partners, but really the power relationships stay the same. Do you see what you’re doing as an attempt to put a reality into the concept of an equal partnership?

Yes, when we talk about inclusive partnerships, that is very much our aim, and it’s not just between donors and grantees. Among business, government and civil society, most often civil society is the weakest, though in some cases government is pretty weak. So there’s definitely an emphasis on power balancing.

In the context of trying to address a particular problem, it’s important that people come to the recognition that unless they work together, with each person having an equal voice, the result is not going to be sustainable.

We’ve just done an Alliance special feature on climate change. Do you see that as an issue where people have to realize that we’re all in it together and everyone has to be part of the solution?

To me in the US, it’s felt like we have reached a tipping point in the last year, which has been gratifying and fascinating to see, given how resistant our government has been to cooperating and setting standards. But now local and state governments, organizations and businesses are recognizing and acting on the knowledge that unless each of us does our part, we are not going to be able to shift the paradigm in the way that is needed to head off this disaster.

I think it’s also important for everyone to understand that, as is often the case, it is the poorest among us who are most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. There’s also an opportunity to plan for a transformed global economy in a way that will create greater opportunities for those who struggle to secure their basic human needs and rights.

Peggy Dulany is founder and Chair of the Synergos Institute. Email pdulany@synergos.org

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