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.
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.
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.
Everyone talks about building community. What’s interesting is what does and doesn’t build community. Our experience is that we build community any time we engage each other in conversations about dreams, small acts, gifts, and invitations (see the Intentional Model for more details). We prevent community any time we engage each other in shadow conversations about grievances, consensus, deficiencies, and blame.
In this sense, building community happens in the process of how things happen. So does the building of a new business, school, program, or event build community? It depends on the kinds of conversations we have in the process.
One of the reasons why we’re featuring “recipes” in the book is that many communities need a jump start in creativity. It’s not that they lack the ability to be creative. It’s that their individual and collective capacity for creativity has been hidden beneath a problem orientation to everything and everyone.
Each recipe suggests new combinations of gifts, assets, and opportunities. Like combining a local company work team, a group of seniors, a small flock of grade schoolers, a master gardener, and a vacant property the city is willing to sell for a dollar.
Recipes are essential for reminding people of their innate neurophysiological capacity to make random and new connections that lead to social innovations.
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