[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] Trying Hard To Get Real -- about the ICA

[KroegerD at aol.com]

David-Thanks for your insight and reflection.  As one who has twice  been 
riffed from a secular, economic job, I share your experience  somewhat.
 
I think energy directed toward what remains of the ICA - US is energy  
wasted.  It is now history!
 
Amelia and I have located what may be the next self-conscious POG movement  
in the Network of Spiritual Progressives.  At this point we are engaged and  
cared for by Being.
 
Dick Kroeger
 
In a message dated 1/14/2007 4:23:45 P.M. Central Standard Time,  
icadunn at igc.org writes:

This is  the second in a series of talking papers that attempt to broaden and
deepen  the conversation about the future of the ICA USA.

***
TRYING HARD TO  GET REAL--The Challenge of Intentional Community
David Dunn, January 14,  2007

As you might imagine, being ŒRIFFED¹ leads to a mini-tsunami of  deep
emotions and further reflections, along with a trickle of insights.  This may
also be true for our Board colleagues who thought about and chose  Œforce
reduction¹ from among the available strategies for saving the ICA  from
bankruptcy. The upcoming three-month anniversary of what I now refer  to as
³the ICA¹s October 16th frontal lobotomy² has prodded me to work up  just
enough spiritual prowess to set sail toward the abyss of meaning  making. It
is the new year and it¹s time to move forward

It seems  important to admit that while I eagerly process my life experience
by  writing, I don¹t presume that everyone is eager to share in my
³processing  out loud.² I will not think less of anyone who chucks the whole
thing in  the trash. For those who extend the benefit of the doubt, I hope to
offer  some provocative entertainment, if not priceless insight. Nothing  is
guaranteed. I welcome feedback, but ask you to be gentle. I¹m still a  little
tender in spots.

I¹ve tried for some weeks now to write  insightfully but have become mired in
the too-muchness of everything. I get  all wound up but never seem to get to
the bottom of anything. I also freely  admit that I am usually inclined to
choose a delimited topic and do my  level best to make it broader and deeper
than its natural boundaries  permit. Sometimes this habit leads to something
new and other times it  leads to entanglement without enlightenment. So I¹ve
chosen a more cautious  course this time. I¹ve chucked much of the writing to
date and instead I¹m  going to try to skim off the obvious stuff that rose to
the surface of the  bucket before I attempt any Œdunking-for-apples¹ type
maneuvers. I¹m  working out how to separate the disconcerting from  the
essential.

The first thing that I need to get off my chest is a  simple admission:
I am always falling down, but I know what I can do: I can  pick myself up and
say to myself, I¹m the greatest two.

There I¹ve  said it. I knew that I had to come clean on that first, key
point. It seems  important to acknowledge that I know and believe that this
is an  appropriate understanding of the way life is. What is striking to me
is to  be discovering the difficulty of living out of this understanding for
the  first time at age 64. I¹ve lived a sheltered life.

>From this side  of the RIF, the sanitary acronyms related to Œreduction in
force¹ are at  best quaint euphemisms. Yes, they reference fair labor
practice laws  intended to keep bosses and Boards fair-minded and
even-handed. But  reduction in force is a labored contrivance that avoids the
human truths.  Its use is an insult to our souls.

The truth about a reduction in force  is something far broader and much
deeper than a sterile acronym can ever  convey. In human terms and in no
particular order, a reduction in force is  a reduction in vision, a reduction
in wisdom, a reduction in energy, a  reduction in trust, a reduction in good
will, a reduction in context, a  reduction in possibility, a reduction in
imagination and a reduction in  momentum. I¹m headed toward praise and
dedication here, but I can¹t not  pass go. Avoiding confession on this walk
around the board (no pun  intended: game board, not board of directors) lands
us somewhere in life  where we don¹t want to be.

So I¹m going to offer a little perspective  on what a reduction in force
creates--in human terms--not in the language  of platitudes, euphemisms or
wish dreams. I¹m going to try to get us  grounded in reality so that we know
what we¹re up against when we come to  the spiritual prowess part that moves
us from ³life is never the way we  want it² to ³nevertheless we are free to
live.² Yes, the man at the pool  picked up his bed and walked, but I¹ve not
had any real luck with quick  miracles and believe that gradual and
considered miracles are a better  bet.

THE WAY LIFE IS AFTER A "RIF"
There are a number of interesting  and disconcerting physical, emotional and
mental realities after a RIF. As  stress levels go up, anxiety attacks and
tightness in the chest are not  uncommon. Eating levels may go up; Pecan
Sandies offer relatively low risk,  if temporary solace. It may be hard to
get to sleep some nights and it may  be hard to stay asleep other nights.
Some nights, especially when I¹m sans  my usual bed mate and have to throw on
three extra blankets just to stay  warm, I don¹t want to go to sleep at all.
I stayed up until 5 a.m. once  last November. It¹s not hard to wake up,
shave, dress and put on my shoes  in the morning, but it¹s devilishly hard to
face the day two hours  later.

Self-confidence and esteem are a sometime thing--not that they  weren¹t
always a little shaky. These days they seem to ebb and flow like  the tides
at the Bay of Fundy. Just when it might be really nice to enjoy a  little
playful, adult intimacy, my adult self can¹t quite imagine how to  pull it
off. Furthermore, while the first floor part of my adult self can  be light,
steady and unruffled, the basement part of my adult self is quite  another
matter. When I need to rummage around in the cellar for something  I¹ve lost
or need or want or whatever, light, steady and unruffled promptly  give way
to anger, frustration, grief, feelings of betrayal and shrill  demands for
acknowledgment, justice and redress. It ain¹t no emotional  picnic down
there; all is not sweetness and light.

Concentration is  either non-existent or hyper-focused, depending on the time
of day, or the  relative humidity, or the barometric pressure, or the phase
of the moon, or  how long it¹s been since I had a job interview or a
breakthrough in my  business plan, which ever I¹m into that day. I¹ve become
a great story  teller, working over the same material from a different angle,
finding a  nuance in the familiar drama that I had not noticed before. Though
I¹m  boring myself to tears and want to ³get on with it,² whatever ³it² is,  I
seem to be harnessed to this persistent, iterative load from the last  year,
recalling the events and players with whom I was more or less hauling  in
synch until the ground opened up and swallowed us whole, team,  harness,
wagon, and cargo.

This is where it becomes immensely  fascinating and frustrating to observe
how skillful I¹ve been--or not--in  grounding myself transparently in The
Power that posited me, while still  working on taking an honest, creative and
constructive relationship to my  situation, my interior and my undoubted
freedom to decide.

If I have  forgotten any important experiences of the recently-RIFFED I¹ll
receive any  and all additions, amplifications and corrections.
I have not forgotten the  other side to this coin, the other partner in the
tango. I have no doubt  that the members of ICA Board of Directors have their
own litany of bodily  woes, emotional frailties and mental mayhem that has
accompanied their  journey this last year. I pray that they may find a way to
speak their  truth.

ANOTHER LEVEL OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Why am I carrying on like  this? Hasn¹t this just been a rehearsal of the
obvious? Doesn¹t this just  rumple the sheets of the bed about which we all
know I must someday make a  decision? Why not just walk away from the pool
right now, the bed be  damned? I can think of at least two good reasons to
attempt to be both  sharper and clearer than broken crystal.

One, though the ICA¹s Board of  Directors seems to me to have ignored the
fact, we are, at bottom, an  intentional community, and our community‹we
might say our  corporateness--has taken a beating in recent years, economic
realities and  necessities notwithstanding. Remember the three dynamics of
the  social/organizational dynamics triangles? We¹ve witnessed the  inevitable
result of not just an imbalance in an organizational process,  but the
collapse of any organizational process. We¹ve not just witnessed  an
imbalance among the democratic, bureaucratic and symbolic aspects of  the
ICA¹s corporate life, our corporate creation has fallen victim to  the
simultaneous inattention of all three. Staff, board of directors and  the
ICA¹s supporters and friends have been asleep at the switch for at last  ten
years and more likely the last twenty years. Hear me well. ³I, David  Dunn,
former staff member of the ICA, was asleep at the switch.² We all  were.

The result of our inattention is having profound human  consequences, some
having to do with our relationships with one another and  others having to do
with the very being of our creation--the Institute of  Cultural Affairs.
Two, the corollary to ³symbol is key² is ³story is all.²  Our movement and in
particular our intentional community, has been adept at  telling stories.
Sometimes we told stories with the strategic intent of  energizing our
partners and colleagues. Think ³5,000 Town Meetings.² At  other times we told
stories to avoid the truth. Think ³Children need alert  and honest adults to
protect them from abuse.² Secondary integrity is a  slippery slope from
strategy to illusion and even worse, to  subterfuge.

It will be tempting to create a fiction about the reduction  in force that
laid off nearly all of ICA USA¹s senior program  staff--notably the staff
with values, practices and images grounded in the  Order Ecumenical. A smiley
face is not adequate. We need to be honest about  the operating images,
patterns, systems and structures that led both staff  and board down the
primrose path toward the insolvency of the institution  with which we were
entrusted. If we try to invent something new and durable  out of fiction or
ignorance, we¹re likely to create something new without  integrity or flawed
or both.

Our intentional community needs to  stand up, ask questions, take stock,
engage energetically and think  acutely. We need to attend to the human
fallout of this bomb that has just  exploded in our midst. I have reason to
believe that the ICA¹s board of  directors is exhausted, wounded, numb and
fundamentally clueless about how  to approach the future and how to relate
concretely and helpfully to former  staff members and to members of our
intentional community and other  stakeholders in the ICA. The consequence
must surely be an uncomfortable  mixture of consternation and remorse. We
need to wrap our collective arms  around them and hold them tightly until
they find the grace and confidence  once again to govern with enough
peripheral vision and depth perception to  include more than economics and
profitability in their calculations. Care  for these people. Ask for a role
on the Board. Take charge  again.

Some, if not all, former (or soon to be former) ICA staff  members--of whom I
am one--are exhausted, wounded, numb and fundamentally  clueless about how to
approach the future of the ICA and how to relate  concretely and usefully to
the shell of the organization that remains and  to the members of its board
of directors. The greater share of the employed  brains, vision and memory of
the ICA has just been let go without so much  as an exit interview. Pilots
and mechanics get more say about the future  when their companies face
bankruptcy. The consequence is a kind of  bewildering sense of being cast
off, discounted and left without standing  to figure out how to relate to an
institution and vocation that we helped  shape and embody but from which we
have just been practically abstracted.  Help us talk through this
discombobulation and find our way into a role  that is useful to the future.
Help mediate the severed friendships and  damaged collegial trust.

CONFESSIONAL AFFIRMATIONS
The least I can  say about this 33-year experiment in evolving a conscious
strategy to be  the People of God in a global, secular world is that we were
all naive to  think that we could remain viable, let alone thrive, with part
time amateur  managers managing by committee. We fell all over ourselves:
interpersonal  feuds and tyrannies, team revelries and guarded turf, tacit
agreements to  hold our noses and ignore the sacred cows and collusion,
Byzantine (or is  ³Rube Goldbergian² more apt?) accounting systems, and
failing to  acknowledge the harm done when one person¹s genius was felt or
understood  to threaten or diminish another¹s. We were never able to maintain
our  corporateness--after Joseph¹s death? after Oaxtepec? after the shift  to
regional offices? 

No one I know doubts the genius of the  Learning Basket Approach, Imaginal
Education, and the Rite of Passage  Journeys; the Neighborhood Academy,
community drama, and community resource  centers large and small; ToP methods
of facilitative leadership for  participatory design, economic
revitalization, organizational  transformation, and international
development; and HIV/AIDS education and  prevention based on community
capacity building and engagement. Lord have  mercy on my challenged mind if I
have inadvertently left out any of my  colleagues¹ inventions; mia culpa in
advance. But we were a collection of  irresponsible geniuses, some would say
uncharitably, working on immortality  projects. Most would affirm with
profound gratitude, that paid staff  members and volunteer colleagues alike
shared work on many fronts that, in  sum, established lasting social
inventions with the power to transform  society.

SUBSTANTIAL CHALLENGES
Now we¹re faced with at least four  tough, interrelated questions:

-- Do we intend to be an intentional  community that shares responsibility
for the future of the ICA?

--  Is the ICA a strategy whose mission has been fulfilled that we  may
celebrate and let go of or is it an institution with a futuric purpose  and
mission that we need to resurrect and reinvent?

-- Do we have  energy for this agenda or have we run out of steam?

-- What on earth do  we intend with the Ecumenical Institute? Death by
neglect?

I intend  to write more in the coming weeks and I hope that you will talk and
write  too. I¹m posting these talking papers on the  www.wedgeblade.org
"Repository" site under Reflective  Writings.

---
David Dunn
740 S Alton Way 9B
Denver, CO  80247
720-221-4661
cell:  720-314-5991
icadunn at igc.org






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