In many communities and organisations, a familiar group tends to dominate the narrative. They are the well-meaning professionals, commentators or cynical observers who look at a neighbourhood or a struggling team and collectively shake their heads. They can tell you exactly what is broken, who is to blame and why things are getting worse. They form what can be called the “isn’t it awful?” brigade.

While their observations are often wrapped in the language of concern, their constant focus on despair achieves nothing but paralysis. To build a self-determining community, we have to stop listening to the chorus of deficit counters and start doing the active work of tracking local talent.

The professionalised deficit chorus

The danger of the “isn’t it awful?” brigade is that they often carry the authority of credentials. In the town of Coalville, England, outside professionals arrived and boldly announced that there was no real community left and that the area completely lacked creative people. This is a classic institutional reflex: if an outside expert cannot see an asset on their spreadsheet, they assume it does not exist.

When we allow these external declarations to go unchallenged, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we are told often enough that our workplace has a toxic culture or that our neighbourhood has no civic spirit, we stop trying to connect. The brigade creates a heavy cloud of collective helplessness, convincing everyone that nothing can change until some massive external intervention occurs.

The Coalville revolt

The residents of Coalville did not accept the bleak portrait painted of their town. Instead of agreeing with the professionalised deficit chorus, they staged a quiet, brilliant revolt. They decided to prove that the town was overflowing with capacity.

Local residents began walking the streets to interview their neighbours. They drew literal speech bubbles over people, visually capturing and displaying the gifts, skills and passions that ordinary residents carried but had never been asked to share. This simple act of street-level listening completely flipped the narrative. It led directly to the creation of Coalville C.A.N. (Capacity Assets Networks), a community-led structure built entirely on local ownership and internal wealth. They proved that the community was not empty; it was simply unmapped.

The cost of joining the chorus

Every time we participate in collective hand-wringing about how bad things are, we are not simply venting. We are actively volunteering for the “isn’t it awful?” brigade and contributing to the fog of helplessness that prevents genuine action. In organisations, this looks like the persistent cynicism in team meetings where every proposal is met with a list of reasons why it will not work. In neighbourhoods, it is the habit of gathering to compare complaints about local services rather than to discover what residents can create together.

The hidden cost of this chorus is that it depletes the very citizens who might otherwise be motivated to act. Sustained deficit-talking drains energy, erodes trust and makes the act of stepping forward feel naive or futile. Active citizenship requires us to recognise when we have slipped into the chorus and make a deliberate choice to defect from it.

Citizenship as tracking talent

Every time we join in with collective hand-wringing, we are choosing spectatorship over participation. Active citizenship requires a different discipline entirely.

Instead of tracking problems, our role is to become talent scouts for our streets and our teams. We need to look at the people around us, especially those who have been marginalised or labelled as clients, and ask what they carry. When we replace the shopping list of complaints with a visible map of local capabilities, the brigade loses its power and the community begins to recognise its own strength. The shift from deficit counter to asset mapper is one of the most fundamental acts of citizenship we can make.

Questions for reflection

Who are the members of the “isn’t it awful?” brigade in your sphere: those who consistently map the problem zones instead of tracking the talent?

If you were to draw a speech bubble over your closest colleague or neighbour right now, what hidden capability would you write inside it?

What is one practical way you can interrupt a conversation this week when it turns into a competitive session of collective hand-wringing?

Think of a person in your network who is usually viewed as a problem to be solved. What would happen if you explicitly asked them to share their primary skill or passion?

Inspired by: Russell, C. and McKnight, J. (2022) The connected community: discovering the health, wealth, and power of neighborhoods. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.