Global Research Assembly
Chicago Nexus
July 1976
OPERATING PRINCIPLES OF
INTRA GLOBAL MOVEMENT
INTRODUCTION
The following twelve groups of operating principles
contain those guidelines drawn from movement experience of some
20 years. The principles range from references to the Art of War
by Sun Tzu to the most recent insights gained from work in local
community development around the world.
While some two hundred principles are given, this
is only a beginning. This effort may be considered the base upon
which to build an even larger compendium for the guidance of Those
Who Care, whatever may be their particular assignment.
The emphasis throughout is on operating practically
in a time of doing. The sayings are arranged under twelve categories
which are the keys to success:
1. Tao 7. Speed
2. Structure 8. Control
3. Decision 9. Indirection
4. Information 10. Double Action
5. Discipline 11. Situation of Advantage
6. Human Nature 12. Planning
THE TAO
Effective operation in any dimension
requires insight into the profound
depth of life.
- The spirit is finally the key factor. Once the
troops' spirit has internally crumbled, the battle is lost.
- Use symbols strategically not superstitiously;
remember that profound change happens only through symbols.
- Use celebration as a tool for signaling the recent
victory and anticipating the future victory.
- Conduct accountability daily for the sake of
absolution.
- Allow the symbolic to take precedence over the
practical.
- Use your body, face, stance, tone of voice, posture
and dress as instruments of presence.
- Use humor to provide creative distance from tragic
absurdity.
- Discern how to give form to what is already happening.
- Dress intentionally for the occasion to honor
it and enable it.
- Use taskrelated decor to impact troops
with the profundity of the current campaign.
- Care for yourself in order to be able to care
for others. Your spouse can't care for you, your colleagues can't.
Let it go one day and it gets compounded.
- Accept tensionfilled assignments as caring
for you.
- Take time to lick your wounds.
- Remember the task is what sustains you; allow
the mundane to disclose significance.
- Go to Daily Office every day to remain an ally,
not an enemy of the Dark Night of the Soul and the Long March
of Care.
- Gain the advantage over the day by beating everyone
out of bed. Reap the harvest of the day by latenight brooding.
Demand a fine piece of creativity from yourself before you climb
between the sheets.
- Take good care of yourself by charting your day
and learning to deal with intrusions.
- Be a bold, inscrutable, mysterious presence.
- Remember there is more than one well that people
can fall down. Profound consciousness can be expressed in many
ways.
- Be sensitive to the new face of the movement
and give it concrete form.
- Wear, and be the presence of, the blue as a practical
reminder of the stance of Those Who Care.
STRUCTURE
.
A Structured Revolution concerns the
strategic use of troops for achieving
victory. Frontline warriors, backup
specialists, new recruits and the general
himself all engage in the common
battle for the common good.
- Use the resources, structures and forces of the
situation in which you find yourself; everything you need for
winning already exists in the situation.
- Organize the task according to the structural
forces available to do it.
- Make transrational assignments. Brood through
assignments carefully.
- Make assignments in such a way as to stretch,
not protect the troops.
- Make assignments according to the demands of
the mission, not according to an individual's neuroses.
- Organize your troops horizontally and insist
on participation from all.
- Continually reconfigure the troops to sustain
motivity.
- The fewer the troops, the greater the need for
their strategic placement.
- Have the name of someone in every micro.
- Management and control of the many is the same
as of the few. It depends upon the symbols that address the depths
of one's being.
- Use structures to care for human beings. Find
ways for all to be engaged significantly.
- Hold the tension between internal life and moving
it, moving it, moving it.
- Grasp the situation as a single task with one
aim, not merely the job you have to do
- Use the Troika.
- Select a person to shadow the consultant from
among the local leaders as a training tool.
- Use the local shadow to provide access to community
power centers in order to authenticate the local story and to
train future leaders.
- Favor team operation whenever possible.
- To do a miracle think it through, plan it well.
Provide the instruments beforehand, ensure that everyone as an
assignment and the tools needed to do it.
- Work behind the scenes to ensure that things
run smoothly. Whoever sees the need does the deed.
- Meet the enemy with fresh forces, disciplined
and wellprepared. When the enemy is equally well prepared,
avoid him.
- Protect your flanks. Position the enemy so that
his vulnerable places are unprotected.
- Know how to use both large and small forces.
- Let the mission do the healing. Keep plunging
the troops into the mission.
- Use the normal forces to engage the enemy and
the extraordinary forces to win. At the same time prevent the
enemy from uniting and consolidating his forces.
- When quality is important, give large chunks
of time to skilled people.
- Build events that engage new colleagues.
- Strike with the right force at the right time.
Momentum and timing are key. Watch out for the enemy gearing up
to strike you; protect your vulnerable spots.
- Meet financial obligations; it is an opportunity
for engaging colleagues rather than another drain on your energy.
DECISION
Decision is the key to winning or losing.
You win or lose before the battle. The
war can't be lost until you decide.
- Victory is won only by your prior decision to
win. To merely hope to win is to be defeated before you every
start.
- Identify the task to be done and put your resolve
behind it.
- Stage the happening that celebrates the decisional
victory.
- Remember the real issue is how to move it; resist
the temptation to worry about loose ends.
- Be versatile in your varieties of roles, as you
walk with kings and local man.
- Build your campaign plan and brand it on the
inside of your forehead.
- Use trial balloons as a tool to build consensus.
- Use the large group for overall consensus on
the plan, smaller groups to decide on the steps.
- Unclarity is the result of not making necessary
decisions.
- Keep the brackets on the presently insoluble.
- On a call, believe that the thing you are asking
for is possible for every person you're calling on.
- On a development call ask for one thing: money.
- Find a way to get paid for doing the mission.
- Shoot for the sky when making a call.
DISCIPLINE
Without a disciplined body of troops
operations will come to a standstill.
- Discipline has to do with shaping the forces
and the situation. It is your decision to keep at the task and
keep it moving.
- Establish a clear picture of the victory that
has been won, and of the next victory to be won.
- Motivate the troops to win. The motivation issue
is the major portion of the task to achieve victory.
- The general will work in the front lines as a
sign of the task's corporate nature.
- Sing to enliven the group and to symbolize the
common task.
- Rehearse the story that holds the real significance
of the task.
- Symbolize a statement of consensus by some ritual
observance.
- Know when to terminate a task.
- He whose ranks are united in purpose will be
an unopposable force.
- All house staff are generals, so avoid categorizing
some troops as exclusively backup, and assign them to circuits.
- Assign the special forces to exchange with the
warriors from time to time.
- The morale and discipline of the troops are your
responsibility. Regard them as your beloved sons and they will
die with you. Indulge them and they will be useless.
- A general thinks through his situation, formulates
his strategy and 'buys' time to await the hunch.
- There is one team and one task; the whole team
is responsible for the whole task.
- Bracket the apparently insoluble issues, but
name a time to reconsider them.
- Trust the models formed by consensus. Beware
of the latest bright idea.
- As you observe peoples' engagement in a task,
be careful also to observe the evident contradiction.
- Don't get caught with your models down. For each
task have a comprehensive checklist and use it.
- Centrums exist to serve the local.
- Judge the outcome of your works by the effect,
not by the effort.
- You are nobodies in history; you are solely out
to release new life.
- Never take yourself too seriously.
- To be the religious is to be "nothingness."
To seek money, notoriety or praise as your goals is to become
their slave.
- Look to yourself first to discover where the
perversions are.
- Hold in memory the lives of warriors who throughout
history gave their lives and strive to imitate them.
- Beware of 'going native'; resist the temptation
of thinking my area or region has such special problems that they
transcend the global model.
- The gun of an outfit is the decisive "someone"
who takes charge of a project, does not know what it means to
succumb to fear, and yet remains a nobody.
- Deal with the contradictions in every thing you
do at every moment.
- Keep all plates spinning, spot the slowest one
and give the necessary effort to accelerating it.
- Extend yourself to the task of daily changing
one person's life.
- Leave each call honorably with the door open
behind you.
- A Human Development Project is self sustaining.
Don't depend on outside money.
- Retain incoming funds for as long as possible
in the HDP.
INFORMATION
To command an army you must know the local
situation, the command issues and the tactical
situation. Not to know these elements
is to confuse the army and hand the victory
over to the enemy.
- Never demean the academic but berate those who
try to reduce life.
- Don't undertake a campaign until you know where
you are, what the circumstances are, what the trends are, what
the unique local factors are, what the ability of the leadership
is, what the organization and discipline of the troops is like
and whether or not you have a consensus.
- Observe, probe and spy on the trends of history
and the deep currents of the time. Know where people are talking
from and what they acting out of.
- Know the situation. Know the enemy. Know the
trends. Know yourself and your victory will be complete.
- Know the enemy and your real situation; otherwise
you are operating in an illusion and are in great peril.
- Insure victory by gaining access to a large reservoir
of data and insights from the global repository. Take from and
contribute to the repository.
- Keep objective statistical records to monitor
every phase of the operation and use them as wall decor.
- Always brief and debrief the circuit teams.
- Grid and art form every situation you are in
and let it inform your decisions.
- Use your third eye and third ear to estimate
the enemy's situation correctly and avoid having the situation
blow up in your face.
- Carve out time for brooding through the task
and force yourself to get it down on paper.
- Make the night deliver its wisdom.
- Use evaluation at the completion of a task for
the sake of informing the future.
- When reporting on the battle hold the tension
between using the objective level to celebrate the victories and
the interpretive level to extract guidance for the future and
the deep significance of the present.
- Take good notes. This represents a decision to
honor your colleagues' wisdom, to value the wisdom of others as
much as your own and to take responsibility for the mission by
being the Xavier.
- Know the principles you would not violate.
- Maintain your critical inventory of supplies.
- Use an objective consultant to deal with polar
log jams.
- Pay attention to the local mores.
- Remember the "Last Fat Lady."
- Use referrals and entrees when doing calling.
Don't call without an introduction.
- (HDP) Deal with groups individually. Know the
income of last year for each family to know if it increased.
- Insure that the local base is an independent
economically autonomous unit.
HUMAN NATURE
Strategic use of human propensities
is often the key to success.
- Build on strengths of others and live with their
weaknesses.
- Never cut off the enemy's escape but always cut
off your own.
- Create intentional chaos as seed ground for new
models.
- Do not press an "enemy" at bay for
this would lead to a desperate battle.
- Ask for too much rather than too little.
- Use basic contexts to relieve anxieties.
- Don't attack people, but, when necessary render
them impotent.
- Be able to identify incipient paranoia.
- Never tell people more than the situation requires.
- View a chaotic place as one where much work is
going on.
- Be attentive to insights of others.
- Look for ways to honor the group.
- Keep an attitude of detachment from the concrete
task while at the same time participating in it.
- Rehearse "you can bend history" from
time to time.
- Practice what you preach.
- Be firm, yet "cool".
- Don't broadcast your anxieties and beware of
negativism.
- Remember that development is evangelism not charity.
SPEED
Avoid protracted operations. Elongated
timelines hinder the operation. Short
timelines help it.
- Victory is the aim, not doing a process. Prolonged
operations reveal a decision to look good trying, but not to win.
- Move with speed by miracles. Operate miraculously
to carry out implementaries in your battleplan. Decide on what
the miraculous victory will be for the day.
- Set a short time to accomplish the task. Anything
longer than six hours becomes a work project, not a miracle.
- Do all the programs all at once. Win victory
in every aspect of the campaign in the very first week.
- Go in pursuit of the first major funding gift
that will be symbolic enough to release other funding.
- Don't get bogged down in last week's tactics.
Keep moving forward. Keep the momentum up. Keep on keeping on.
- Release colleagues for action who insist on standing
still when everything is demanding 'move it.'
- Keep the circuits moving; do one town in the
morning and another in the afternoon. Know when to dig in and
when to keep moving on.
- Long range planning can be a trap. It is impossible
to win a protracted war.
- Get on top of the situation before you hit the
room. Don't enervate the troops by long meetings that excuse from
doing the victory of the day.
- To win battles and take your objectives but to
fail to exploit the achievements may be described as wasteful
delay. They give the enemy a chance to regroup his forces and
strike back.
- Bracket all extraneous cares.
- When faced with difficulties, divide them and
bracket part of them. To do otherwise is to let them overwhelm
you.
- Think through what you want to accomplish every
day.
- Attack the major contradiction.
- Don't allow goals to paralyze tactics and implementaries.
- Avoid overkill when dealing with authorization.
Trust the nod that has been given and operate out of it.
- Create a timeline of the quarter, the week and
the day
- Institute a system of self checking daily, weekly,
monthly to grade your success in every phase of the operation
in order to sustain momentum.
- Remember as you go into battle that the war is
the next one hundred feet in front of you.
- Trust that every situation possesses the inherent
elements allowing you to move it.
- Hit the road by 8 o'clock.
- Manage the time you can control to achieve effective
management.
- Work over against the mindset of summer
relaxation in order to gear up for fall programs.
- Hold the tension between the temptation to immediate
action and kairotic time.
- Win in the situation by acting, it is not enough
to see through a situation and stand inert.
- Engage totally while waiting for clarity.
- Make everything you do a symbol. Organize tactics
and implementaries into miracles.
CONTROL
Either the enemy will determine the
situation and hence the victory; or you
will create the situation to which he
must conform. The one destined for victory
is in charge from beginning to end,
no matter what the circumstances.
- In every situation the elements exist that enable
it to be moved.
- Create your own situation.
- You are out to release the yes latent in the
situation.
- Turn every no into a yes. Believe that the person
you are calling on is capable of an affirmative response.
- Analyze the indicative mood in a situation. Know
the mood needed to win and gradually transform the indicative
mood into the necessary mood.
- Delimit the geography; deal with all the problems
simultaneously; push to the depth human issue; use symbolic power
to effect change; work with all age groups.
- Build drama into the schedule to avoid the necessary
humdrum turning into perfunctory routine.
- Build a temporary value screen for a particular
task to reduce the ambiguity just enough to enable it to move.
- Never assume a context; he who sets the context
generally wins.
- Transform your village or town to make possible
the transformation of every village and town. Your turf is the
whole world, your situation the whole of history.
- Being like Xavier allows one to have the whole
world wherever he is.
INDIRECTION
Life is always indirect. The strategy of
indirection is simply an imitation of life
itself.
- One who is master of the enemy's fate moves without
any trace of control; is an invisible catalyst; is constantly
on the alert for any manipulation on the part of the enemy.
- The one who uses the direct and the indirect
approach makes the devious route the most direct and turns misfortune
into advantage; the one who does not, remains at a disadvantage
and is defeated.
- Attack the enemy's strategy; this is the art
of indirection. You are out to release men from disabling mindsets;
you are not out to chain them to another yoke.
- Never attack the enemy's stronghold head on;
to do so is to lose the battle and your troops as well. Fight
directly only when there is no alternative.
- Utilize the element of surprise; come at the
enemy with the indirect approach. Find the weak point and then
move on with top speed. To fail to do this is to accept defeat
by default.
- Transform the structures from within so as to
move them into the future; to destroy them is to cut off all possibility.
DOUBLE ACTION
Formulating winning policies means to live
in creative tension; holding polarities is
balance within one's being; to fail to do
so
is to fall off on one side which leaves a
vulnerable point for the enemy to exploit.
- Social change is ever going on. Tension is of
the essence; conflict and struggle is that without which structures
cannot move into the future
- The authentic Transestablishment at any one moment
is either being the authentic Establishment or the authentic Disestablishment,
whichever history demands.
- There are times when the orders of the sovereign
are not to be obeyed. If there is no chance for success, do not
use the troops; if it is not in the best interests of the state,
do not act; if you are not in danger. do not fight.
- Don't give up; keep at it; to draw a line beyond
which you would not go is to resign in defeat.
- Neutralize public officials only enough to get
the task done.
- Avoid seeking support from middle echelon bureaucrats.
Don't report to underlings.
- Cooperate with nobody, but be prepared
to use everybody and everything to carry out your battleplan and
so win victory.
- Allow social agencies to enable the task in accord
with the plan. Never allow them to interfere with your battleplan.
- Keep the law without being bound by it.
- Obey God and the deep currents of history.
- Sustain the tensions built into your battleplan
as you carry out your own assignment.
- Intensify the complexity of any situation. This
initiates new paradigms of action. Do not try to force fresh chaos
into stale models.
- Beware of saying yes to all demands simultaneously.
Operate out of your revolutionary timelines and not the world's
timeline.
- Never attempt to do the revolution on somebody
else's terms.
- Keep your eyes open to the need for midcourse
correction.
SITUATION OF ADVANTAGE
He who knows when he can fight and when
he cannot will move only when he has the
advantage.
- Operate from a situation of advantage. Don't
waste your life in a situation where it is patently impossible
to be effective.
- Never move until you have the advantage; it is
suicide to move otherwise.
- Your purpose is to protect the people and promote
the best interests of the sovereign. If the situation is one of
victory, fight; if the situation is one of disadvantage, do not
engage.
- Move on the soft underbelly. Bracket the hardcrust
areas.
- Occupy a position which facilitates your actions;
protect your vulnerable spots; position the enemy so that his
vulnerable points are not protected. Without the advantage of
the situation you cannot get started.
- Get the enemy looking in another direction then
sneak up on him and attack swiftly. Beware, he is trying to do
the same to you. Watch the situation for signs of his presence.
- Don't enter a situation where you know you're
going to lose.
- Miss no opportunity to master the enemy. The
only alternative is a position where the enemy can master you.
- The crux of operations lies in pretending to
accommodate yourself to the designs of the enemy; when he presents
an opening strike swiftly.
- Never do the same thing twice in the same location.
- Obtain local authorization before you move in.
Obtain introductions through Aunt Ida and take Aunt Ida with you
on the calls.
- Build authorization before the campaign begins.
Build firm support after you have begun to succeed.
- Let the symbolic leader know you are there.
- Listen for the image your audience is operating
out of and weld it to reality in a new way.
- Tell the story that will find the hot button.
- To campaign effectively concentrate at first
on a few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding
results.
- Keep your temper. The minute you lose control
the situation takes charge of you.
- Keep your cool so that you can break up others'
cool. Never destroy that which you are over against.
PLANNING.
Effective operations depend on
effective planning.
- Trust the corporate planning methods as being
ontologically grounded. They work.
- Periodically take time to get out the big picture.
- Do the whole revolution before you start by means
of transrational planning.
- Give the whole group a picture of the total task
to avoid tunnel vision.
- Keep a comprehensive checklist of the total operation.
Know what you are bracketing and for how long.
- Cover the entire battle field transrationally.
- Work through in detail the steps required to
stage each event or complete each job. Clarify how each of the
specific tasks is to be done.
- Battleplan each day through to the last detail.
- Prioritize and timeline the jobs involved in
a task.
- Stay in dialogue with the situation and let it
inform you.
- Use intrusions and interruptions as a way of
checking the inclusiveness and practicality of your battleplan.
- The key to actuation is clustering and timelining
implementaries and doing continual tactical modification.
- Condition yourself to think tactically and contradictionally
all the time.
- Attack the major contradiction and avoid taking
potshots at whatever moves.
- When you win, do not repeat your tactics but
respond to the circumstances in an infinite variety of ways; modify
your tactics in accord with the current contradiction.
- Schedule the programs transrationally: 1 the
first quarter, 6 the next quarter, 36 the next quarter, 216 the
last quarter.
- Symbols occasion social change. The abstract
transrational model is high symbol and it is high symbol that
changes history.
- Focus on the imaginal impact of your charts.
- Do the whole operation with miracles.
- Don't underestimate the corporate power that
comes from squared off tables and centerpieces.
- Leave able generals room to move so they can
select the tactics suitable for victory.
- To select a town or village walk through it with
all your senses tuned; talk to the local people only after the
''aha" hits. Then apply rational criteria to check your intuitive
responses.
- Target the rural heartland, not the urban centers.
- Effectiveness is not efficiency.
- Treat indicative battleplanning as a term of
evangelism
- Use the allisgood stance for effective
contradictional discernment.
- A revolutionary uses shotgun, not a rifle.
- Follow the battleplan rather than your next good
idea.