ICA Estimates II

Chicago

Task Force V ­ Future Engagement

July, 1977

OPERATING PRINCIPLES

After years of building comprehensive models for social change, we find ourselves in a time of doing. The method of learning in a time of intensified doing is to do and then figure out what we did. After two years of doing Global Social Demonstration, these operating principles have emerged as helpful guide­posts for winning.

1. Speed is more important than taking all the right steps. You will be forgiven for breaking the rules if you get the job done.

2. Action spurs action.

3. Understanding follows accomplishments.

4. Participation precedes commitment.

5. Visible, physical, transformation is what captures, changes and catalyzes response: (a) Beauty calls forth the deepest response; (b) Economic signs call forth commitment.

6. Deep changes in humanness occur under the stress of doing and the press of time. ­

7. It takes more than the village to do a village. The private, public sectors, their national and local representatives' participation and decision are a part of a renewed, or model, village.

8. Our struggles are important only as they illuminate the task.

9. Globality, doing it for the globe, is the key to motivity.

10, The Consult is out to come up with tactics: without tactics vision never comes to be, contradictions will never be dealt with.

11. The first action after the Consult is doing the model. Paralysis comes when thinking it is necessary to gain clarity on the model before beginning. "I hear and I forget; I see and I know; I do and I understand."

12. Watch out for falling into "the expertise trap" (don't wait for the Acceleration Team).

13. The real block to emerging leadership is falling into known patterns, forms, and systems.

14. Training is awakenment and engagement.

15. Funding is simply self­support. The miracle comes with deciding that what you have is all that is needed.

16. It is simply impossible to have too many celebrations, and almost anything is an occasion to celebrate. That is the key to motivity.

TAKING CARE OF YOURSELF

Taking care of yourself has taken on a new edge due to the reality of depth engagement. This caring for one 's consciousness requires intentional planning.

The following 19 points derive from a Consult Trek Team's broodings on sustaining one's self while performing a highly mobile task:

1. Watch relations with the auxiliary ­ ensure yourself adequate distance (especially spatially), to be useful to them.

2. Report every cent of E.I. funds you spend so that a realistic future budget can be developed.

3. Set up one simple reporting system and stick to it. Carefully watch that any personal correspondence is such that it could be published.

4. Image yourself as a consultant: not there to do other people's work, not to have them work for you, but to give your wisdom and sweat.

5. Always have a collegium and a witness ready ­ not fixed ones, but your own edge.

6. Maintain the tension between chaos and order: ordering of teams is necessary to get the job done and there are many crises because of chaos, yet you are not out to annihilate one or the other .

7. You are the symbolic presence of the Nexus you are always first to arrive, last to stop working, keep healthy when others are ill, stay awake through a full day's work every day, always wear blue. You always dress and make up as if today were the Queen's visit, even if it's in levis and boots for a work­day.

8. Carry with you the decor, altar kit, journal and whatever "stability marks" tell you that you live where you are ­ you're not visiting.

9. Your Xavierism is not geographical, it's your team and its task; neither do you belong to a Nexus nor to a project nor to an Area.

10. Humor is in itself healing ­ every time you can laugh, giggle, guffaw, tell dumb jokes, do animal imitations, whatever ­ it's helpful.

11. There is practical and symbolic power in picking up an event in practice, like enabling a feast or doing a bath­house, and doing it 100% as a demonstration.

12. Know your team's strengths and put people where they can show them. Do not ever test a weakness, and go to great lengths to preserve symbolic leadership from ever having to expose one of their weaknesses. Use discretion.

13. Let people do the job you assigned them to ­ once contexted and organized, get out of the way ­ i.e. Set up a structure and then trust it.

14. In moving space, make all arrangements ahead of time: reservations and tickets, room assignments, male and female latrine designations, whatever. Any movement is horror to spirit people, but always necessary.

15. Gossip and gripes are best written down in full and burned. Read novels and cultivate some obscure history or skill when gossip groups start. One word from you has more power than buckets from most people.

16. Organize and clean everything all the time ­ especially space. Corporate space then team space then your apartment then your luggage, etc.

17. Nobody needs a confidante, and the worst thing you can do is to be one. The mystery is the only one worth telling secrets to. Cultivate as many tangents to such conversations as you can.

18. Know your own and your colleagues foundational assumptions, and don't bother trying to fight over them. For example, some people are out to change hearts and minds, some people are out to change the situation.

19. In mobile assignment, you experience yourself as starved for affection. Anyone assigned geographically has the luxury of affection for places, language, food, people. You don't. Especially you have no friends anywhere. Spouse and team are your only close relationships.

OPERATING FORMS

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In order to extract a victory, Global Community Forum has required of the movement, radically different troop configurations. The struggle of living with and sustaining the troops in these new forms has demanded new responses and creativity. The following items begin to point to the metamorphosis of the Corporate life.

1. Frequent corporate de­briefing, gives everyone ownership of the mission.

2. Weekly tactics created to relate troops to the three campaigns maintain a missional mythology.

3. Creative balance occurs when the tension is maintained between order and chaos.

4. A healing release of humor enables a fresh approach to situations.

5. Foundational understandings, open to flexible operation, care for humanness.

6. Deadly routine produces static situations and stagnant responses.

7. Individual break­looses take place when people are assigned to do that which they believe they cannot do.

8. Constructs built for ten people imposed on three, may fail.

9. When on death ground you have two choices ­ life or death. Choosing life leads to the victory.

10. Successful corporate events are those that are related to engagement.

11. Time limits enhance creativity.

12. Make assignments, create the context, then walk away and trust your colleagues.

13. The advantage of being up against the contradiction is that you only have one thing to do: deal with it.

14. In­Kind allows the world to participate in ­ the mission.

15. Circuit de­briefing becomes telling the new mythology of local man winning.

16. With great hesitation, we took an initial step out on the stage of life and found an audience of new colleagues applauding, demanding an encore.