A Work in Progress
I’ve done my share of book learning, but experience has been my most important teacher and most of the ideas presented on this website reflect a combination of insights from my formal education and my subsequent life experience. A colleague once suggested to me that sharing the back stories may help others understand the deeper nuances. This page, which I started some years ago, attempts to relate elements of the story not presented elsewhere. It continues to be a work in progress.
Looking Up Stream/Expanding the Frame.
When I was an MBA student at the Stanford Business School, our professors regularly urged us to look upstream for the system source of whatever problems we faced down stream. I’ve been moving upstream in my thinking throughout the course of my career. It was during my years in Asia (1978-1992) that I began to look to look up stream in a systematic way, moving from a focus on managing individual local development initiatives to managing the transformation of national scale resource management systems to managing national and global scale social movements. Managing a social movement, of course, is a contradiction in terms. There is, however, a science of intervening to amplify and shape social movement energies.
My thinking about the differences in how between for levels of intervention and the implications for The four levels of program strategy from service delivery to movement building. The meeting with Vandana as the imputus to look upstream from corporate rule to see the larger picture of Empire. Finding myself ever more at odds with the establishment along the way.
Cultural Awakening
: The experience of deep culture shock from being emersed in an Indonesian cultureso different from my own and the outcome of falling in love with Indonesia. Then Ethiopia where I came to understand the destructive power of a dysfunctional culture that took me far beyond cultural relativism. Appreciation for the cultural gene pool. Coming to see the commonaltiy of underlying aspirations.
Structure – Hierarchy vs the power of self-organizing networks
Doing research with Alex Bavelas at Stanford on group dynamics. Air Force experience at Special Air Warefare center on insurgent networks and learning why it is nearly impossible to defeat an insurgency with conventional military force. Nicaragua family planning experience and learning the power of bottom up problem solving. The John Ickis thesis that structure must follow function in development organizations. The Ford Foundation applications in Asia and how I learned through my AID experience that one bureaucracy cannot debureaucratize another. UNCED, the emergence of Global civil society, and the power of social self-organization. The contribution of Riane Eisler to helping me see it in the larger social, historical context. Discovering The New Biology and life’s power for creative adaptation and self-organization. Parallels the social learning process.
Blueprint – command and control
Hierarchy<(
Degenerative
Social learn – self-organization
Network <(
Generative
Human Potential
: Maslow hierarchy, Willis Harman seminar on consciousness. Robert Kegan developmental psychology framework. The Erik Fromm Thesis that people will establish their presence in one way or another.
Cosmology – Creation Story
: Religious up bringing. Grandmother. Indonesia return and hearing from a Protestant minister that the problem with Islam is that it is ethical and monotheistic, which makes muslims difficult to convert to Christianity. Discover the story of the deeper nature of reality. The story of writing the Epilogue to When Corporations Rule the World. The need for meaning.
Planning – Blueprint vs. Social Learning.
AID experience with blueprint programming. Friedman and the term social learning. The Ford Foundation experience with developing social learning strategies to advance large-scale system change.
Money centered vs. Life centered.
Core values. Growth-centered vs. people-centered as an underlying theme of my work in Asia.
The Power of Expectations.
Theory X and Theory Y. Encounter with an accountant who saw money as the sole motivator. (Know they self). Sabaneros and peones: Learning about the power of expectations from the case of the ranch in Costa Rica discussed in Chapter 1 of The Great Turning. The feminist experience. Example in Made to Stick of brown eyes and blue eyes as a basis for class hierarchy (p. 111). The epiphany in a discussion in Albuquergue that the expertise resides in the group and how the expectation that we need outside experts is a diversion.
Functional vs Territorial Organization.
Sixto Roxas. The Natural Step. Jane Jacobs. Why government is necessary.
Pushing the limits, but staying within the boundary of acceptance.
The story about Getting to the 21st Century and the chapter on sustainable growth.