“Where’s the Talking Piece?”: Recognising the Outcomes Your KPI’s Can’t See

By Dee Brooks

It was meant to be a party.

After a winter break, the Woodlea community group was coming back together for food, reconnection and some gentle reflection on what had already happened and what might come next. We had advertised the evening with a simple invitation. Why have a meeting when you can have a party?.

Image: Circle practice at an earlier Woodlea gathering. Over time, the circle became more than a facilitated activity; it became part of how the group chose to be together.

There were five posters around the room, each offering a different question or reflection. There were sticky notes, markers and plenty of food. The plan was deliberately loose. People could eat, catch up, wander around the room and add their thoughts to the posters as they went.

“Just grab something to eat,” I told everyone. “Wander around and write on the posters whenever you feel like it.”

They looked at me.

“What? Do we circle the chairs?”

“No,” I said. “You don’t need to. It’s a party.”

So, naturally, they circled the chairs anyway.

Recognising that I had already lost control of my own non-process, I surrendered. “Okay then, let’s do a check-in. Who wants to go first?”

There was another pause.

“Where’s the centrepiece?”

“And where’s the talking piece?”

Both were, of course, in my facilitation bag. They are always in my facilitation bag. Out they came, into the centre of the circle they went, and we began exactly as the group wanted: sitting together, checking in one by one and listening while the talking piece made its way around.

And they teased me about it. Nicely, but thoroughly.

Lee and I had introduced this group to circle practice during our time together. We had used a centrepiece to create a shared focal point and a talking piece to slow the conversation down, make space for each person and demonstrate that every voice mattered. Over time, the practice had become familiar to them.

What I had not fully realised until that moment was that it had also become important to them. The circle was no longer something the facilitators brought into the room. It had become something the community expected, valued and confidently claimed as part of its own way of being together.

Image: Once the circle and check-in were complete, people ate, talked and added their thoughts to five questions around the room.

When the practice becomes theirs

We often talk about community capacity building as though it will eventually arrive as a large, visible and easily measured achievement. We look for completed projects, new committees, community events, gardens, programs or neatly documented action plans. These things can matter, but they are not the whole story. They are often the visible expression of changes that have been developing quietly for a long time underneath.

Sometimes capacity building looks like people rearranging the furniture after the facilitator tells them not to bother. Sometimes community leadership appears when a group says, “No, this is how we want to begin.” Sometimes the outcome is held inside a familiar ritual: a circle of chairs, a few meaningful objects placed in the centre and a talking piece passed from hand to hand.

This group did not wait for us to deliver the process. They remembered what worked for them and asked for it. They knew what helped them feel comfortable, connected and ready to participate. They had enough confidence to disagree with the facilitator, shape the gathering themselves and tease me while they did it.

That is an important distinction. It was not dependence on a facilitator or compliance with something they had been taught. It was a group recognising the value of a shared practice and choosing it for themselves. The process had moved from something introduced by practitioners to something owned by the people in the room.

Why does community development take time?

For community development practitioners and the people who manage, fund or commission their work, this small moment points to a much bigger question: why can meaningful community development appear to take so long?

Organisations reasonably need accountability. Resources matter, commitments should be honoured and community development should never become an excuse for endless conversation without movement. Managers need to understand what is happening, what is changing and whether an investment is producing meaningful outcomes.

The difficulty arises when the measures used to demonstrate progress are too narrow for the work itself. Attendance numbers, activities delivered, meetings held, plans completed and projects launched can all tell us something, but they cannot tell us everything. If we only count visible activity, community development can appear frustratingly slow. If we also pay attention to trust, relationships, confidence, shared practices and people’s willingness to act without waiting for professional permission, a different picture begins to emerge.

Image: When people reflected on what had happened since they were last together, the answers revealed volunteering, advocacy, new connections and community-led activity

The time spent building relationships is not a delay before the real work begins. It is part of the work. People need opportunities to get to know one another, experience being listened to, discover what they have in common and learn how to navigate their differences. They need repeated experiences of participating, contributing and seeing that their contribution matters. Gradually, a collection of people attending an activity can become a group with its own identity, relationships and ways of working together.

These changes are real, but they do not always announce themselves according to a project schedule. Often, we only recognise how much has shifted when something unexpected happens, such as a community group confidently overriding the facilitator and putting the chairs back into a circle.

Why does community development take time?

Community development operates within organisations that are often built around speed, efficiency and visible outputs. A worker can organise an event quickly. They can book the venue, create the flyer, invite participants, arrange the catering, prepare the agenda and lead every activity. The event might be polished, well attended and easy to report against.

Yet important questions remain. Who shaped it? Who feels it belongs to them? Who decides what happens next? What relationships were strengthened through the process? What would remain if the worker stepped away?

The quickest way to produce an event may be for the professional to organise it. The quickest way to complete a plan may be for the professional to write it. The quickest way to secure agreement may be to narrow the choices or avoid the more complicated conversations. These approaches can produce strong-looking outputs, but they may also leave the worker carrying the process long after the community was meant to have taken ownership of it.

This is why a focus on speed can sometimes take community development in the wrong direction. Under pressure to demonstrate progress, practitioners can be pushed to take greater control precisely when their role should be creating the conditions for local people to take it. More may be delivered, but less may be owned.

A full room is not necessarily a connected community

A completed action plan does not necessarily mean that people feel responsible for carrying it forward. A successful event may generate energy without building local leadership. In some cases, the more efficiently professionals do everything for people, the harder it becomes to see that very little local confidence or ownership has actually grown.

Community-led work often looks less impressive from a distance because it can be slower, messier and harder to predict. People need time to decide what matters to them, test ideas, change direction and discover what they are genuinely willing to contribute. Trust develops through experience. Belonging grows through repeated moments of welcome and recognition. Ownership emerges when people are given real opportunities to influence what happens, rather than simply being invited to participate in something already designed for them.

This does not mean that attendance, events, projects or plans are unimportant. They can all be valuable. The question is whether they are being treated as the final outcome or as part of a deeper process through which people build relationships, recognise their own assets and develop the confidence to act together.

A room full of people can tell us that an invitation worked. A connected community shows us something more: people know one another, notice who is missing, welcome newcomers, exchange help, contribute their strengths and take some responsibility for what happens next. That kind of connection cannot be assumed from the number of chairs occupied. It has to be cultivated, experienced and recognised over time.

Supporting the conditions for community ownership

This creates a genuine challenge for managers. They are responsible for ensuring that work progresses, resources are used well and practitioners remain accountable. At the same time, they need to recognise that the central purpose of community development is not simply to deliver more activity. It is to strengthen the relationships, confidence and collective capacity that allow people to shape and act on what matters to them.

Good community development practitioners are constantly working with this tension. They are noticing who is absent, making room for quieter voices, connecting people who may have something to offer one another, working with different levels of confidence and creating opportunities for local ideas to emerge. They are also judging when to offer structure, when to step forward and when to move out of the way.

Much of that work is difficult to capture in a conventional project update because it happens between the obvious activities. It can be found in the person who speaks for the first time, the relationship that continues outside the meeting, the resident who begins welcoming newcomers or the group that starts making decisions without looking to the professional for approval.

These are not soft alternatives to “real” outcomes. They are often the foundations that make sustained community action possible. Without them, projects can remain dependent on the energy, funding and presence of the organisation. With them, communities become increasingly able to carry practices, relationships and initiatives themselves.

Image: Community capacity begins with recognising what is already present: practical skills, creativity, kindness, connections and a willingness to support others

The role of management, then, is not to abandon targets, timeframes or reporting. It is to make sure they are aligned with the actual purpose of the work. Managers can support strong accountability by asking not only what has been delivered, but what is changing in the relationships and capabilities of the people involved.

They might ask: Who is participating now who did not participate before? Who has formed a new connection? Whose gifts, knowledge or local networks are becoming visible? Who is beginning to initiate something without waiting for the organisation? Who feels confident enough to disagree, suggest another way or change the plan? What practices are people beginning to carry themselves? What would continue if the community development worker were no longer in the room?

These questions do not reduce accountability. They make it more meaningful. They help us distinguish between activity that is delivered to a community and capacity that is developed with and held by a community.

Image: The Woodlea community gathering: not simply a room full of people, but people developing relationships, shared practices and their own ways of working together

Learning to see what has been built

For the practitioners who spend months or years protecting the time required for this work, moments like the one at Woodlea can carry enormous emotional weight. Community development workers often know that something important is growing before they can easily demonstrate it. They see the subtle changes in how people enter a room, relate to one another, contribute ideas and take responsibility, even when those changes do not fit neatly into a monthly report.

That evening, the community made those changes visible.

We arrived thinking that because it was party night, we would skip the circle and move straight into food, conversation and activities. The group put the chairs back. We suggested they did not need a formal check-in, and they asked for the centrepiece and talking piece. We tried to remove the structure, and they chose to reclaim it.

What happened was more than participation in something we had organised. The group confidently shaped how it wanted to come together. A practice that had once been offered by facilitators had become part of the community’s own culture. The people in the room knew what helped them connect, and they felt able to ask for it.

This is what community ownership can look like before it becomes a large project or a line in an outcomes report. It is the gradual movement from attending to contributing, from contributing to shaping and from shaping to carrying something together. It is a community becoming more confident in its own ways of meeting, deciding and acting.

When community development appears to be taking a long time, we may need to look more closely before concluding that progress is slow. The outcome may not be waiting at the end of the project. It may already be present in the relationships people have built, the practices they have claimed and the confidence with which they begin rearranging the chairs.