I’m gearing up for a new season of “strategic planning” projects with a new sense of what the process might mean when we’re being intellectually honest with ourselves about the future.
The truth about the future is that it’s uncertain. It’s uncertain because our knowledge is alway imperfect, because we’re taking actions that will always have non-linear ripples of consequences, and people we will never meet will take actions that will impact us in non-linear ways.
When I wrote “Project Zen” a few years ago, I defined planning as preparation. But how do we become prepared for an uncertain future? Here are a few questions that help.
What matters to us?
What potential future changes could occur that we wouldn’t cause?
What potential future changes could occur that our actions could cause?
What is the percentage of un/certainty for each?
Who might have more certainty or certainty before we would?
What do we want to invest in being prepared for?
So what does planning look like for an uncertain future? It’s dreaming and translating dreams into small acts that we can commit to in the present. These questions help enrich the conversation. At the end of the day, intellectually honest planning does not produce a binder of anything. Only commitments to dreams and small acts.
Jack writes on his blog regarding Instructions from The Cook:
The start of AA was a small act realizing a big dream. Two men started by helping two other men toward recovery and today million of lives are transformed by the community they built. If you have examples you know of or have been a part of, send them to us. The book, that will be titled “Instructions From The Cook: Recipes for Building Community” will feature descriptions, implications, and applications of a community building model around these recipes.
View the Intentional Model Recipes here. Email your recipes to recipes@radicaltransitions.net. You can also leave them here in a comment.
In a conversation with friend and Radical Transitions recipe contributor, Linda Fabe, in Cincinnati last weekend, she inspired a possible distinction about the 4 conversations in the intentional mode we’re working with. Since shadow conversations are the “old” conversations that divided communities, the 4 conversations are the “new” conversations designed to build community. I like the distinction because of its elegant reminder of how focus makes the difference. Even this meta-conversation implies how the old conversations about money, allies, and power do not have the possibility that focus has in engaging the gifts of the community.
People continue to be amazed by the power of small acts as realizations of dreams. They’re empowering antidotes to shadow conversations about scale and speed, which are postponements of small acts. The irony of these postponement conversations is that talk about scale and speed sound important and worthy of attention and action. In fact, large acts of scale and speed often only engage the tangible asset wealthy few. Small acts democratize communities where assets run the gamut from very tangible to the very intangible.
Rules of the garage
• Believe you can change the world.
• Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
• Know when to work alone and when to work together.
• Share — tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
• No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)
• The customer defines a job well done.
• Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
• Invent different ways of working.
• Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
• Believe that together we can do anything.
• Invent.
1999 HP Annual Report
In light of many recent conversations, I’m now renaming some of the shadow conversations, particularly the “Consensus” conversation to the “Postponement” conversation. This is the conversation where we ask the question, “What permissions and agreements do we need?” It’s the conversation of postponements of what’s possible.
Posted a handful of Frequently Asked Questions on the Intentional Model site.
The question include:
Is the model for grassroots or institutional efforts?
How small should small acts be?
How does the model help us get to scale and speed?
What kind of community leadership does the model require?
What’s the role of ideas in the model?
How much funding does the model require?
Another example of the shadow conversation for Invitation is about what we can do on our own. We need to be careful about isolation and protectiveness as ways of limiting our resources and the possibilities of scale. Underutilized abundance exists in every community. Engaging it is a worthy conversation.
One of the theme of Radical Transitions that resonates with people that we share the model with is the realization that their process is stuck in what we refer to as a shadow conversation—conversations that can’t build community. Last night I was talking with someone whose group is bogged down trying to build consensus for a new logo and tagline that will be used to market a district. What to do about it? We propose:
The reality is that we don’t need to agree on everything for any of us to take action in the direction of our dreams. There are many small acts and invitations that do not require permission, support, or even interest from the whole.
Could that work for your group?
An Intentional Model - Shadow Conversations
When a community is vital, 5 kinds of connections occur. People know each other, look out for each other, connect each other, barter with each other, and engage each other.
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