The Process-Product Dichotomy

To sit down on front of a blank piece of paper – or a blank MS Word document – and begin to write, is hard, no matter how good you are at it. It’s a lonely business, and the potential for procrastination is infinite.

The professional athlete has the benefit of the starter’s gun – BANG! – and everybody’s off and may the best one win. The professional problem solver/process consultant/social worker has it easy: you walk into the room where the problem is, and you’re already working before you’ve even sat down. The politician/preacher/speechmaker likewise stands up before his or her audience and in that adrenalin charged moment of performance, it all comes surging out.

Not so the poor writer. While the rest of the working world is careering away according to the procedures and requirements of their job descriptions, the writer is still sitting in front of his blank page or screen... waiting on the muse.

But hold on here – I’m already on my fifth paragraph! I’m writing, not about the subject I sat down to write about, but about writing. Nevertheless, it’s a great place to start: quite appropriate given the injunction that “development is creativity”.

I’m a writer these days – I haven’t always been one – and a big part of the reason why I can say this is because of something that happened at the 2005 CDRA Biennial.

My invitation to the first Biennial came as a complete surprise. Although I had produced publications for NGOs and CBOs and FBOs and all those other Ous for years, I had never before participated as a delegate in something like this. And my involvement in it deepened in an equally unexpected way. During the first day, as I was sketching some thoughts and impressions in my notepad, as I am wont to do, I was yanked out of my private doodler’s world by one of those insightful CDRA people and positioned in front of the plenary with a flip chart in front of me and a koki pen in my hand. It was my first experience of performance cartooning and I must say I enjoyed it.

But what I enjoyed even more was the positive feedback. People loved my doodles, and they said so. I had never before been among a group of people who understood so completely the benefits and necessity of positive feedback. Looking at them in their casual clothes, with their beards and their wrinkles and their hairstyles and their paunches and their sandals and their untuckinable afro shirts, there was no way of knowing at first sight what a special group of people this was. Until you heard them applaud.

And so, when I was invited back to the second Biennial practice conference at McGregor, not just as a delegate, but as a creative facilitator, I was deeply honoured. In the interim, partially as a result of the sense of community I felt at the first Biennial, something profound had taken hold of my life. I had decided to leave my job as co-owner and director of a publishing agency in Durban – a job I’d held for more than 19 years – to pursue my dream. Ever since I was a little boy reading adventure stories under the bedcovers by torchlight while my brothers grunted and snored the night away, I had secretly dreamed about being a writer. But I never had the courage to admit that I had it in me. Not until the first CDRA Biennial, when I realised that here, amongst this community of like-minded people, I did have something meaningful to say.

I had also begun reading some of the authors whose names were bandied about at the Biennial: David Korten, Amartya Sen, Fritjoff Capra. And I realised that the CDRA Biennial community is actually not that unique: there are millions of people like us around the world. David Korten calls us the community of Cultural Creatives.

There is another secret weapon that I have to own up to at this point of my story – my wife, Catherine Collingwood. She is the one who first awakened me to the existence of this huge global community of culturally active, ethically motivated, ecologically sensitive people – and to the idea that we can be – already are – members of this community. And what I heard and felt at the first Biennial confirmed what I already believed: that it is dangerously late in the game; that our civilisation is deeply threatened; and that there’s nobody else to sort it out but us.

It’s pointless waiting for saviours. We have to rely on ourselves. But in order to do this, we have to identify ourselves, describe ourselves, get a grip on who we are. Are we the N.G. Ous, the C.B. Ous, or the F.B. Ous? Are we civil society? Are we the development sector? Or are we something else?

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this naming business occupied quite a bit of discussion time at both Biennials.

One of the driving ideas behind the second CDRA Biennial was that it should give rise to a ‘product’ that might be the beginning of a ‘Biography of the Development Sector’.  Several interventions towards this end were undertaken during the three-day process. In the first of these, participants were asked to contribute to the development of a ‘Time-Line’ of the development sector. In other exercises participants were required to originate stories and creations that would contribute to the building of a biography of the sector.

No sooner were these ‘product-related’ requirements encountered by the participants than murmurs of discontent began to make themselves heard. Participants were quick to register the apparent contradiction between the process of creative exploration in which they were involved, and the organisers’ desire for a finished product at the end. In particular, the Time-Line was seen as a linear, compartmentalised model that was incapable of adequately containing the multifaceted and ultimately ineffable character of what, for want of a better phrase, was being called ‘the development sector’. Definitional problems around the meanings of our key terms –  ‘development’, ‘sector’ and ‘biography’ – immediately became evident.

The Biennial week was perhaps not the right place to tackle semantic issues such as these. But these issues are nevertheless crucial to the reflexive process of authoring which the Biennials aim to stimulate. The group of people drawn together for the second Biennial, many of whom had also attended the first event, expressed a common desire to understand what exactly it is that they are doing and to develop terminology through which they can describe and evaluate the developmental process as a whole, and their own contributions to it.

It is instructive to look at CDRA’s own response to these semantic issues. In positioning itself as a Centre for Developmental Practice, CDRA has opted for the word “developmental” rather than “development”. The “al” on the end of “development” introduces the word “mental”, and while to the waggish this might suggest that those who choose to do this work must be mad, a more serious purpose may be to draw attention to the intellectual and philosophical dimensions of the kind of work CDRA does. CDRA has also chosen, in its name, to emphasise “practice” rather than theory, and to see itself as a “centre” around which a variety of other partners, players and participants are gathered.

It emerged quite clearly from the second Biennial that there can be no single story or ‘biography’ of ‘the developmental sector’. Instead, there is a plethora of interlacing stories that co-influence each other. Some of these stories are personal anecdotes, others are major pieces of developmental thinking. This Biennial ‘multimedia product’ is an attempt to create a container, or a vehicle, capable of holding at least some of these stories and giving them collective expression in the form of a product.

3. NO BIOGRAPHY WITHOUT BIOLOGY!

browsing through the timeline

It may be that the ambitious plan to produce a ‘biography’ of the development sector was inherently doomed. The development sector is not a person, after all, and to speak of writing a biography about it is to fall into the trap of anthropomorphic thinking. Not only is it not a person, it is not even a ‘sector’ in the true sense of the word. By definition, a sector should be a distinct piece of something bigger – of the economy, of the body politic, of society as a whole. But development is not a piece of anything: it is a set of processes common to all things that live, grow and die, and its processes underlie all things.  If it can be conceptualised as one thing, we might think of it as an activity, or, as James Taylor has put it, as an impulse. To write the biography of an impulse is a non-starter, but that doesn’t mean we should not try to describe it.

This activity of describing is in itself developmental. During the Biennial and subsequently, during the process of producing this product, these ideas have been with us every step of the way. We may have failed to compartmentalise, define, date, periodise and organise the data that came out of the Biennial into a single biographical narrative, but we have not failed to come up with stories.

Many stories were told at the Biennial, and we have captured some of them here. We have also captured conversations, images, impulses, fragments, which, taken together, constitute a different kind of story. It is a record of an event, but more than this, it is a rumination – it asks more questions than it answers. We have abandoned the idea of the biography – for now – until we are better able to conceptualise exactly it is that we are called upon to do. We are still in process, and offer the process to you in the form of this product. The process has become the product, and the product, as unfinished as it is, is still in process. 

A central metaphor that emerged from the Biennial is the network. Alongside the traditional sense of a network as a communications web, we see it as a fishing net, thrown as far and wide as possible to collect as many stories and inputs as we can, and also as an ongoing act of work: to bring these inputs together, hold them, extend them and transform them into a product that people can use and benefit from.

One of our more ambitious plans was to upload the material generated during and after them the Biennials onto a special site on the World Wide Web, to be called the Biennial Forum. Here, an ongoing rendezvous and resource could, we hoped, be established where we could share these and other ideas with members of our worldwide community. But we are not there yet, and this plan has been abandoned, for now.

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