Process Reflections Initiative Forum 2012

One thing is for sure, no matter what the outcome of Initiative Forum 2012, the planning and organizing process that we have gone through has been intense.

It has been a journey that has given us very valuable and hard-earned understandings of how people work together.  In today’s Western culture, we are taught from a young age to take and give instructions.  It is how our conventional educational systems are designed, how our businesses are often run, and how our governments are usually set up.

We are not taught to meet our peers and colleagues face-to-face as equals and share our beliefs, ideas, and prejudices.  To decide a theme for a weeklong forum, plan the schedule, and bring the whole thing to life when there are no hierarchies and everyone’s opinions are held equally is something completely novel for us; it is an exercise in compromise and open-mindedness.

People have very different perspectives and opinions of how things should happen, and very often these are strongly held opinions that have their roots deep within our personalities and world-views. But these are people we have to work with, eat with, and live with. We have to learn to be honest with ourselves just as much as we have to be honest with the other person.  And even when we are honest, there is no guarantee we will understand each other—most of the time it is not what we say but how we say it.  

Learning to throw off the top-down approach to decision making and instead self-organize in a participatory manner is not something that can be taught or learned from of a book.  It has to be experienced first-hand and we have to retain such a degree of objectivity and wisdom as to be able to reflect on the proceedings, and then have the self-discipline to make personal adjustments.

It is certainly not easy, and I very much doubt we will have perfected this art by the end of Initiative Forum 2012.  But we will have begun our journey—a journey that is necessary if we ever want to stand a chance of repairing the damage our old societies have inflicted upon each other and the planet.  Self-organizing is so much more effective and quicker than working through hierarchical relationships.  It allows us to use our imagination, to be creative, and work where and how we are best suited.  But for this to happen, we have to relinquish our grasp on order and control.

We have to ask ourselves, ‘What IF we are brave enough to fully place our trust in those around us and walk into the unknown?’