Global Research Centrum: Chicago
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 hippy 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