Something to invite participants to choose projects that are as systemic and large-scale as they dare.
(My name, what it's like for me considering Wisdom Council being in practice in my town, country, globally. http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-wisdomcouncil.html )
(Go-round of others' names, and a specific project or idea you've heard/experienced that gives you profound hope about the world.)
Marshall's babies-in-the-river story (points 12-7; 1 at individual scale); and my (6-1) extensions.
Donella Meadows' 12 leverage points
(bold)
12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards)
11. The size of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport network, population age structures)
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the effect they are trying to correct against
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops
Note the importance of senses beyond our sight, hearing, etc.; even intuition.
This model shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception.
6. The structure of information flow (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishment, constraints)
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
Corporate Personhood (points 5, 4)
Marshall's story of changing a school's culture/practices, parents voting in new school board dismissing principal (point 4); or, you stop a mega-store from opening in your town, and they build in the next town (?). No such thing as a closed system — importance of scale.
Dominic's input to baby-saving story (4)
3. The goal of the system
Of course if most others have a different purpose in mind for the system, any work you do on these earlier points will be constantly fighting upstream.
2. The mindset or paradigm that the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises out of
More powerful than that is what understandings/stories one has about the world and people, how things work in general. If these stories shift substantially, then one might reconsider each system's existence and purpose.
E.g. Walter Wink's Myth of redemptive violence, the idea that finding a wrong-doer and doing violence to them will make things better, one of several assumptions of power-over culture. The power-with inverse would be to find the wounded relationships and heal them. See other Assumptions of power-with culture.
1. The power to transcend paradigms
Even more powerful than that is the ability to hold one's story as a story, not as the one truth. From this understanding, if one shifts stories it's not about believing that now you have gotten to the final, one true perspective, but rather that you have shifted to a story that seems more true, or is simply more fun or better for yourself and/or others. This can bring a powerful flexibility, and humility. And if truth is not capturable in words, or in any paradigm, then it.
More about the highest leverage points
"One aspect of almost every culture is the belief in the utter superiority of that culture."
--Donella Meadows
Another way to express Meadows' highest-leverage points is:
"There's more than one way to live." (Daniel Quinn)
One story i have is that truth is experienced as a "pull" (of which NVC's needs are articulations in the direction of strategy — see Nonviolent Communication+under the needs.); and that this pull than as an idea or words. (Notice that this itself is an attempt to articulate the truth in words! - recursion!)
"Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation."
--Elton Trueblood
Trusting that pull. Having faith means being inspired to action, without knowing what the outcome will be.
For us to survive and thrive goes beyond tolerance of other ways, to an active embrace of creativity/diversity as part of (at least many of :-) our cultures:
Process Arts — in part, many particular processes; on all scales - from individual/interpersonal, to group, to community/neighborhood/organization, to region, to global; and covering all domains of life - communication/law/economics/politics/etc. In addition, there is process consciousness in general (2-1).
No simple definition, or perhaps any definition in words, can capture this movement because any such definition will be story-level, lacking the aliveness to, for example, reflect the dynamic interactions between power-with and power-over culture. E.g., the revolution of the "new" from Renaissance Europe being co-opted into consumerism and justifying ignoring the value in elder cultures; people-in-the-streets being managed into demonstrations. That said, the collective list of assumptions i asked you to read are my attempt to give some sense of it — http://ourpla.net/cgi/pikie?AssumptionsOfPowerWithCulture
Your homework is, given all this, what is a particular change you want to have happen? Get together with at least one other person here and work/play together to describe the change in observation/request language. Check with each other — at what leverage point(s) on Donella Meadows' scale are you intervening?