Global Research Centrum: Chicago, SA, Social Methods
School 12/14/74
For my first full time job I was hired as an assistant dean in
the school of adult education at the University of Pittsburgh.
My particular charge was to prepare us for moving into expanded
facilities with expanded staff and to do something about our advising
services for adult students who were coming to school part time.
I did a fantastic job of tactical thinking and came up with a
tremendous set of implementaries and began implementing them.
I discovered in the attempt to analyze my contradiction that what
was going on there was just the objective fact that there were
people who had been registering for courses, taking two or three
a term at night, and had not consulted with anyone for four or
five years What had happened to them was that they had deviated
completely from any possible way in which all those credits could
be applied toward a degree. I took it upon myself to say that
this was not an effective operation and so I built a battleplan.
I started implementing it and implementing it and implementing
it.
Three months later the dean called me into his office and asked
me what I was doing. I told him that I was getting files updated
and sending out letters to people telling them we have counseling
services, and they are in serious trouble with their program as
It stands and they should come in He told me that about fifteen
or twenty of the other assistant deans and advisors had been complaining
about the fact that they have so many appointments that they couldn't
get anything done except see people. In that moment the fantastic
practical vision just collapsed. When your practical vision collapses
you are thrown into a profound awareness of rootlessness. Rootedness
is in a practical vision, being related to the future.
After I had that experience of indicative battleplanning, I left
that Job and got my second Job, also at the University of Pittsburgh,
In the department of English I was called to build a new curriculum
for the freshman English. program and I had learned my lesson.
I learned that when you zip through this process of practical
visionanalysts, contradiction, proposals and tactics
of practical implementationand start throwing implementaries
around, you are not only perpetually in this swirl, but also forced
into a second arena. It is not only what is to be done or inventing
a mission, but who is going to do it, it is the question of troops,
the question of corporate activity. What collapsed on me in the
dean's office was that I had not known enough to see that I couldn't
do any action by myself. I learned that lesson and so I built
a common symbol, first of all with a group of six or eight teachers.
We built ourselves a fantastic corporate discipline with fantastic
symbols. In 1968 we were the only instructors at the University
of Pittsburgh who had long hair and beards, and dressed in business
suits. It was fantastic. We created a corporate style of interchanging
with one another. Nobody knew what surprises were in store for
him when he showed up in class. He only knew one of us would be
there. We worked out a fantastic corporate consensus. We would
sit down and work things out over and over again. This is the
question of who is to do it or the question of the development
of corporate consensus. I learned that lesson thoroughly and three
months after I started doing this, the mission didn't collapse,
all my colleagues collapsed.
I resigned from my second job and went on to my third one. I am
not going to tell you about the third one. But it was the third
one that made me realize that when you have got some picture of
what is to be done and who is to do it, when your colleagues collapse,
your experience is somewhat like total ineffectiveness. You know
and yet the work collapses, and your colleagues collapse. You
notice that is an indirect way of saying that you collapse, too.
You show up in weakness. I was thrown into the awareness that
the real issue is not what is to be done, nor who is to do it,
but the real issue is how to keep at it. This is the question
of motivity.
When your vision is clear and you have your missional task, and
when you have a group of people who are going to do it, the issue
becomes one of common discipline, one of care. I learned that
one of the reasons those colleagues collapsed is that we did not
have clear symbols to focus on. There was no symbolic life. That
is to say, that they were not RSI grads. That is why they
collapsed. When you have created a body of people and are caring
for them, not for their sake but for the sake of that mission,
then depth motivity arises as a serious question. If one dynamic
I, inventing your mission and another is inventing the people,
the third is something like inventing Inventiveness. Motivity
methods make no sense whatsoever save in the context of a shared
act ion being implemented as common mission. If you go to a psychiatrist
for motivation he will fail you every time. Motivity depends fundamentally
upon a picture of mission, on a practical vision. It depends upon
a people to whom contexted motivity can happen over and over again,
the process of allowing corporate action to take place.
The question of depth motivity is how do you get other people
as excited as you are now. How do you do it? You don't do it unless
you build a corporately acting body and you do not do it unless
you have hammered out the practical Picture of mission.
Depth motivity shares some qualities with tactical thinking and
with corporate action. One is that depth motivity is totally practical.
The word you say to yourself over and over again is practical,
practical, practical, practical. It seems that depth motivity
has to do with the practical inclusive space in which a body of
people missionally operate. Once you have established a story,
one that deals with the mission and who the group is, then it
must deal with all of space, in our day the whole globe. And it
deals with timethat is all of timesort of kairotically.
What is the significance of the time we live in? This is an age
of resurgence. What time is it? If you will. Let me
give you an example of what an inclusive story is for mea
practical inclusive story.
In the first Bombay Lens seminar I was just a green, recently
retired hippie liberal, I told myself. At that t me India was
in the midst of the eighth year of no monsoons, terrible drought
and people were coming into the city. There was no food. The government
had set up distribution centers for food but they weren't working
and it looked at that time as if there wouldn't be any rain that
year either. I was talking with a young Indian business man around
the edges of that seminar and I said to him "things must
really be difficult for you right now in India"
He looked at me as if I had said "there is a fly running
up and down your nose" and said "What do you mean, things
are difficult?" I said, well, the drought and the food. He
said drought and starvation is just the way life is. He said "the
way it really is in India today is that 25 years ago when we became
independent, no one expected, including ourselves, that we would
ever be able to feed ourselves. We haven't fed ourselves yet,
but it is like when you get up in the morning and look toward
the East. Before the sun comes up, the sky turns pink We haven't
seen the sunrise but the sky is a glorious pink."
Now that is what I mean by a story that is a motivity event. The
story you tell about what you are doing is a true story, but it
is a story that you decide to tell. It is a story that takes the
given situation, the future, and the catalytic necessity of the
moment and lets meaning come through. As you tell stories, you
give little images. You sing them. Sometimes you ritualize them.
Every religion ritualizes and rehearses theirs over and over again.
Stories are true to the way life is. At the same time they are
that without which a group has no possibility of authentically
going on year after Year.
Stories change because the situation changes, as you are implementing
all those tactics. To keep doing corporate activities, change
the situation, and as soon as the situation changes the story
changes. But without missional motivity, a story that tells about
its community, its history, its destiny and what it is struggling
with at the moment, motivity is a joke. Motivity is not simply
an inclusive story. It is a way of making inclusive all of the
kinds of relationships that a group shows up in on its march.
It is a way of making inclusive its community. This has to do
with space. What I mean by relationships are those of space, to
time, to engagement . We tend to operate as if there is some space
which is important and some space which is not. Motivity methods
are miracles that allow all space to be significant. I have a
friend who once did a kind of indicative battleplan with a group
of people in his company and they discovered that the key to the
motivity on the shop floor would be to paint the bathrooms. Now
I would not suggest that you all run and paint the bathrooms and
think that that will get motivity going around your home or your
church. What I mean is, let that insignificant space in people's
imagination become profoundly significant. That is what I mean
by a motivity method or a motivity tactic or a motivity miracle.
I suppose you might as well say it right out loud that what it
means to do depth motivity is to do tactical thinking about the
depth mood of the times, of the people on its march through its
mission. Tactical thinking is not just about society. When you
decide to bring people into missional being you had better do
tactical thinking about where they are going to come from. When
you decide to motivate mankind, you have to decide what tactics
you do, to pick up particular people. You do not motivate anyone
by thinking globally, alone. What motivates him is to come up
with some gimmick that allows the whole globe which has sat out
there like insignificant space to come alive. Maybe you send him
on a trip to make all that space come alive. Practical significant
engagement is to actualize depth motivity tactics.
There are parts of my life that I don't particularly want to be
made significant. I spent the last quarter out marketing LENS
in Beirut, Cairo and Addis Ababa. Along about the middle of July
last year it became obvious to me that we had to go market this
course and so I employed all of my great tactical prowess with
the practical vision that someone else market those courses if
possible. First of all I came up with a list of five people who
ought to go. I thought that you don't decide that this particular
one ought to go. You say from this five, somebody ought to go.
Pretty soon I realized that one was going to do this and one was
going to do that and I looked around and pretty soon there wasn't
anybody else. I want to suggest that significant engagement is
to make it clear to people that there isn't anybody else to do
what it Is that has to be done
Significant engagement is the totally impossible task. We have
some fine people around this place who are great friends of mine
in that they can be depended upon to come around and say that
we don't have enough people to do a job. You know any of those
in any of your communities? I mean they are great people because
they keep reminding me that when you give them enough people to
do a job, the motivity inherent in an impossible task is over.
You are the only one and this body seriously expects you to do
this impossible task.
My dad was good at depth motivity. He used to have 17 things to
raise about my personal appearance. When I came home from college
one time my hair was not cut. I wanted my Dad to be proud of me
when I came home from college. So the next time I came home, my
hair was cut, but my shoes weren't shined. The next time I came
home my hair was cut and my shoes were shined, but my fingernails
were dirty. So the next time I came home from college, my fingernails
were clean, my shoes were shined and my hair was cut, but my suit
hadn't been to the cleaners for a while. He had commissioned me
as his son to go and be the genius of my university. He was telling
me that he seriously expected that to happen. That is what I mean
by significating engagement. It means this whole engagement. It
doesn't mean all the great opportunities.
When you scrub the floors, wash the toilets or go out and do RSI
recruiting, it has to do with significating that engagement. Depth
motivity has to do with making time significant all time
How do you invent gimmicks which allow all of history to show
up in a given moment? One of my favorite gimmicks is simply to
say that "I think the times we live in are just like the
times before the pyramids were built." I don't know if it
happens for you. Time comes in here and the pyramids show up sitting
right next to that candle. It is something like seeing to it that
destiny seeps through into every moment. Every moment allows you
to recover your whole personal past and project your whole future.
It has to do with keeping a group aware of its heritage. I am
not interested in the ways you do it. There are one thousand ways
to do it. The struggle of motivity is the struggle of allowing
the time that you have invested in your corporate action to be
significant, not in terms of your little particular group, but
in terms of your mission. I get angry with my colleagues when
they put out statistical reports that are not in a helpful, missional
form. It has to do with an imaginal way of dealing with that objectivity
which allows the future to be born, to be invented, now.
And now inclusive community. Motivity is about something like
what I used to experience In my family. I called it the "Bring
the Stranger Home" syndrome. Everybody was influenced by
it. I thought first of all it was Just my grandmother's concern.
Then my mother started talking like her. Then when my sister got
old enough and I went to college, she wanted me to bring Some
stranger home. It is something, every time you sit down to dinner
some stranger is sitting there with you. How is it that you create
events in the life of a body which lets them see that the table
they are sitting around is the table that every stranger in the
world sits around. The funny thing is when you invite some man
to come to dinner. Remember the character in the Broadway play,
"The Man Who Came to Dinner", who stayed for twelve
years? When you find a way to invite that child starving in Africa
to come and sit down to dinner with you; when you find a way to
let that humanness participate in your mundane situation, those
people come to dinner and never go away. Those are the arenas
in which you talk about motivity.
Now I want to talk for just a minute about methods of motivity.
It is hard because methods of motivity don't really exist. Methods
of motivity are tactical thinking in the midst of corporate action.
Methods of motivity are giving yourself enough distance on your
old causeandeffect image of how the universe runs.
Methods of motivity are giving yourself enough distance on your
I vs. they or sometimes we vs. they, the sort of brain washing
which all of us have had in our culture. We operate in terms of
other people, I, they, we. How do you come over against
that brainwashing, inventing and indirectly injecting events that
allow time and space and relationships and stories and community
to burst with life. That is all motivity is.
The only methods of motivity are the methods that your creativity
invents for motivity. It is hard for me to imagine giving a talk
on motivity methods because motivity methods happen in a particular
context. They happen when your colleagues are down. Mind the word
"indirect". That is not that you want to be indirect,
but you try to talk to anybody directly and motivate them. You
are dead before you start. What motivates mankind is care. The
only thing that motivates mankind is his care. The issue today
is not, "do I care?" The issue is trying to care effectively.
Don't you dare try to motivate me by coming to me whomping something
up. When you go out these days and try to tell stories that break
people loose, those stories better be true stories or they won't
work. Sometimes they have to bounce over against six walls before
you dare hope they will hit the target you aim at. All you are
doing is tactical thinking. You are throwing a set of tactics
into the depth human yearning of a body of people. You don't have
any guarantees that because you know these tactics the effect
will be this result. All you have is your integrity of operating
corporately.
I have a list of five operating principles for motivity methods.
1) Motivity methods involve the orchestration of every single
tactical system simultaneously. You all know how paralyzing it
is when you are sitting with seven different tactical systems
and nobody can pull them together. Motivity methods means orchestration
of your tactical systems, all the mission and all of its complicated
parts.
2) Motivity events depend on the time in which they show up. Motivity
events depend on time. What I mean is this. It may be fantastic
when you get a picture of the globe held by the global grid, and
the first time you saw the grid that space broke loose for you.
But it doesn't do that any more. The first time that minipark
came into a community, it transformed space. It doesn't do it
any more. What I mean is that particular motivity events become
part of your essentialistic given. They become part of your being.
They become part of your operating context. They become part of
your practical vision. They no longer motivate. I get angry with
getting the latest great idea out to everybody. That is fine.
It belongs to everybody. The problem is that you have to go invent
an even greater one the next time you need one.
3) Use the necessary, particular tactic, not the cute or not even
a great possible one. I mean the necessary one in the particular
situation. Motivity is dangerous. You are dealing with humanness.
You are literally dealing with the stuff of creativity itself.
You are dealing with lives. You do what is necessary, not what
you can do.
4) With motivity methods you are never in a hurry. You discover
that you can live with ambiguity. Even when the ambiguity is more
than usual, like the last quarter or two, you can live with it.
You are not out to find quick gimmicks in order to shortcut that
ambiguity. You live with it until you know. If you don't know
what the next step is on a journey of a body of people, wait until
you know. Figure out programs for your tactical thinking. Determine
the mood of the group. It gives you time and space. There is no
hurry. Never be in a hurry.
5) Motivity methods are about keeping the common awareness of
the mission, the common resolve to be the mission and the common
resolve to do the mission and the common mood of the mission.
Mood is not accurate the common "being" of the
mission. To keep on the march, that is what motivity methods are
about. They are to keen you on the march. You probably know more
methods than I do.
I want to close with what I think is the cost of being one who
has decided to be a motivity methodition. The first cost is that
you discover a sort of perpetual loneliness. When you are building
your mission, it is possible for you to have some friends. When
you are taking responsibility for corporate action, maybe it is
possible to have one or two. When you are taking responsibility
for the human motivity of a body of people on a missional march
you have no friend but one. That is Jesus. It is life. It is perpetually
lonely.
The second cost you discover hen you take that kind of responsibility
upon yourself is that there is no escape. You have no more loopholes
left. You can still escape when you are building your mission
and actuating your implementaries. You can always find little
cracks. You can escape when you are doing corporate activity.
You cannot escape when you are doing motivity methods. Motivity
methods depend on when you to deciding to be one hundred per cent
engaged in the mission as a one hundred per cent corporate man.
Then you have been granted the right to seriously deal with motivity.
Not until then. If you do not know whether or not you have established
your right, your colleagues do.
The third cost you discover Is that life keeps disclosing itself
to you all the time. You begin to do strange things. You try always
to talk with the cab drivers, or you catch yourself looking up
at the buildings above your eye level to see what kind of design
is there. Once I found myself riding the ferry back and forth
beneath the Sydney Harbor bridge, seven times, so I could keep
watching the Opera House. Disclosure happens. That wracks you.
You are wracked by perpetual exposure.
The fourth cost is a kind of perpetual uncertainty. You are enduring
because you are deciding to endure. You have been endured, but
because of that fact, you don't know. You have no guarantees.
You don't know what the next event will disclose. You don't know.
Let me be practical for a moment. If we go out of here with our
really incredible miracles, with those incredible frames, if we
go out there and start doing these things, in three months we
will all be dead. The task upon us is practically speaking to
create a people. You obviously can't do that without a concrete
vision. But you can't sustain that save you decide to be the guy
whose final thing, if all else went, is perpetually throwing tactics.
Perpetually acting corporately to motivate the deeps of life.
Not for yourself, You can't do that. Your care does that. Not
for your friends. Not even really for your colleagues, but for
every person across the earth, to whom the earth and its goods
and its decisions and its inventions of humanness belong.
Steve Allen