How often have you discovered something new and dreamed of the possibilities for yourself and others, yet somehow failed to launch a new vision into reality? I am talking about everything from a discovery of compassionate communication and a dream of empowering family dynamics to knowing that you have a great product, that, if marketed well, could become the next IT thing. You, along with myself and many innovative thinkers, have been drifting in the clouds of dreamland because we haven’t acquired and mastered the techniques of design. The third step of Appreciative Inquiry is design.

Design is the context, the box, the often overlooked structure of an organisation or our individual life. If your dream is huge, according to Bernard J Mohr, the structure of your current life may be too small to hold it. If your organisation cannot launch a dream into its reality, it is because the social architecture of your organisation must be redesigned to support the new dream or vision.

“First we shape our structure and then our structures shape us” - Winston Churchill

Dreaming is thinking outside the box. Now we need a bigger box!

Imagine your dream as the center of a new possibility in your life. Now ask, what elements of organisation which, if redesigned, would support my dream? Look at the areas of time, money, work, leisure, social, and family life. Imagine how these would all look if they contained your dream. Be specific and detailed! Be an architect making detailed drawings of how a house is to be built. Be intentional about how different systems interact and affect each other. And now compare that to the design of your current life, or your current organisation. You will know what changes need to happen. Make the design of your life as intentional as your dreams.

Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end… any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.
Victor Papanek, industrial designer (from his book “Design for the Real World”)

Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.
Erik Adigard

Can you create your life with intention?

I heard this last night in my book club discussion of the Left Hand of God. We were discussing hope vs fear. “When I look at changing the world in any meaningful way, like reducing carbon emissions or impacting corporate greed, I don’t see how I can change it.” And then this occurred to me. You can’t change it. But we can. The problems we face at this time are too large for individual thoughts, plans, or actions to make a difference. It will take large groups of us moving in alignment. Buying and living and voting in alignment.

With Appreciative Inquiry, a plan of action emerges from a large group. This is unique, in that most action plans are the result of leaders, managers, or prominent people deciding on a plan and then trying to persuade or force others to comply. Appreciative Inquiry create a synergy- the combined thoughts and experiences and energies of many people that are greater than each individual.

Here is a great articulation of this difference:

“AI is intentional inquiry and directed conversation and story-telling that leads to a place of possibility. Possibility is fresh, new, and sacred. The story is the genesis of all that is human. Societies are stories, as are companies, schools, cities, families and individuals. There are bricks and mortar and flesh and bones, but all of it comes from a story. Even the flesh and bones of one person comes from a story of two people uniting to form another.

I can think of a many moments where groups reached a profound spot with AI and touched a sense of freedom. Usually one person would say something like, “From what we heard in these stories, we could_…” and there follows a collective deep breath and then silence as people consider the new “we could”. Possibility sits in the room as a space of silence and then thought fills the space. Where does the thought that enters at that time, which has a feeling of vitality and newness, come from?

It does not come from the person who spoke because that person would not have developed that thought without the conversations that led to synapses firing in a certain way. The thought is not merely a product of the collective because an individual must form the thought. The thought comes out of relationship, conversation, and newly created images. This “thing called AI” is one of the finest ways to experience the power of language and to hone our skills with words, ideas, and stories. There are times when the possibility is so stunning the group has to sit in silence if just for a couple ticks before saying, “well, yes, maybe, why not, let’s do it.” There must be a gap that arises in the field of the known to entertain the unbridled possibility of novelty. There is a break in the routine story and supporting conversations so something new can creep in. This is the opening where novelty can arise. With no gap, we only have the billiard ball predictability of continuity. The openness to new ideas is not coerced. People don’t have to force each other to listen to other’s ideas and possibilities: minds are opened because the nature of the stories are so compelling and energetic.”

Steinbach, John. Contribution to the AI Listserve, July 2005

Do you see how action plans that emerge from a whole group have unique possibilities?

To dream means to create in your imagination. Our wishes and wants are dreams. Our prayers are dreams. Even our fears are dreams. To dream is to enter the realm where the Divine Creator turns the atoms and quarks and particle waves into the world that streams by us as space and time.

By grounding our dreams in the reality of our life, and intentionally envisioning a practical and plausible means of channeling our vision into our world, our dreams become our world. Dreams become the organising structure of things.

In Appreciative Inquiry, the questions we ask are a means to discover our hidden best potential. We look at our peak moments, our best times, and what had gone right regarding a specific challenge we desire to change. The second step is to dream, which means to create a clear, results-oriented vision that is grounded in what we have already discovered to be possible. This stage of dreaming also requires us to asks, “what is the world calling us to become?”

Energy flows from the mental or conceptual realm into our everyday reality when we believe in a possibility. By looking to our own past, our own known successes and those of others, the possibility is grounded. We are creating with materials already on hand. We are creating as a continuum of our own past.

By asking, “what is the world calling us to become?” we acknowledge that we are aligned with Divine, life- sustaining intentions. We acknowledge our place in the web of life. When we ask for change, we accept that we are often a thing that could use some change! For the world to be the best possible place, you and I need to be our best possible selves. We need to bring forth and use our own potentials, talents, and gifts. I have found that all the good stuff like love, deep joy, and happiness come from our willingness to be an instrument of Divine healing and evolution. It makes using my creative powers to get a free car uninteresting.

“It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. It lies in having no goal to reach. It is not a calamity to die with dreams unfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace not to have any stars to reach. Not failure, but low aim, is the real sin.”

-Benjamin Mays

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

-Anais Nin

When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.

-Dom Helder Camara

Do you make time in your day to dream?

I took a one day workshop last weekend that totally blew me away. It is a new approach to facilitating groups who want to resolve specific problems. What we usually do in these situations is define the problem, talk about the problem, and then try to fix the problem. Our focus, from the moment that the discussion begins, is on the negative, on the deficits. Who did what to whom? Who is dysfunctional? How is this system unfair? It is like giving a kid a hammer. Soon everything becomes a nail! This is where we go for solutions.

Appreciative Inquiry asserts that our future is shaped by the questions we ask. You get an entirely different conversation, and an entirely different outcome, by beginning with “What is right here?” instead of “What is wrong?” Appreciative Inquiry begins with an examination of what is working, and then builds on that. For example, when a consulting firm applied Appreciative Inquiry to Avon Mexico’s problem with chronic sexual harassment complaints, the firm began with a study and interview of cross gender teams at Avon that were amiable. The results were amazing! Stories poured in from cross gendered teams discussing how they dealt with the tough issues of attraction, power, the glass ceiling for women, etc. Management models were created based on the studies of what was working already. A few years later, Avon Mexico was given an award for the best company for female employees!

Appreciative Inquiry taps the potential of what is already there. It releases positive, life affirming energy that cannot come forth when we focus only on what is wrong. Inquiry and change are not truly separate events. They are simultaneous. The nature of a question determines what results can show up. A question anticipates an answer. It is like a projector that organises all conversation, all possibilities, forward to an anticipated conclusion. Positive, expansive, inspirational and community building questions will produce….guess what? Positive, expansive, inspirational and community building results!

This is a highly simplified introduction to Appreciative Inquiry- but maybe one that will invite you to explore it further. I know that I will continue to research this exciting breakthrough in our understanding of what is possible for human potential.

The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but seeing with new eyes.

-Marcel Proust

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.

-Kierkegaard

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. -Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize Winner)

I didn’t want to leave! I loved all the people in that room dearly! I knew them inside out and they knew me. We had spent 6 days in the Poconos at a retreat together, doing life changing, gut wrenching, AHA! and laugh til you can’t breathe work alongside each other. And now we were supposed to scatter to different states and countries and lead our separate lives. Our group leader then read a poem by ee cummings that made me see how once people have touched you deeply, they never leave you. We carry each other in our hearts. I am essentially a collage of hearts and lives and smiles and hugs of those who I have been priveleged to know authentically.

This is the best love poem that I’ve ever found. I dedicate it today to my husband.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Happy Valentine’s Day to YOU! Celebrate all who have touched your heart today!

She came to see me in Advanced English class in high school, but once we got to talking, I realised that she’d been around a long time, pestering me to stop analysing other writers and just make up my own stuff. “SHHHHH!” I hissed, “You are going to get us in trouble!”

“Trouble,” she said, offering me a ripe pomegranate, ” is where the joy lives.”

I turned my back so that I could focus on the lecture, which was about the disambiguation of iconic representations. I needed to know this in order to ace the SATs, get a good scholarship, get a masters, and begin my life.

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, ” she sang, like Janis Joplin doing John Lennon. I managed to ignore her enough to get back to my plans.

And when my life had become a rut, a wasteland, a stifling cage of obligations, she came to me again, dangling a golden key. “I can get you out, ” she said, “but you are going to have to trust me.”

This is the voice of creativity. She won’t make sense to your sensible spreadsheet, but she will satisfy your soul. Juice your juju. Wink at your wanderer. Trust her? It ain’t easy. It is like trusting that if you leap, the net will appear. It is trusting the current to take you rather than booking a boat tour.

“Let yourself be silently drawn

By the gentle pull

Of what you really love.” -Rumi

“Follow your bliss, and doors will open where there were no doors before.”

Joseph Campbell

Did you SEE It? The sunset over the mountains that took me out of my troubles, and transported me to every place that’s ever been okay. The wild deer encountered on a winter walk with eyes of fragile magic.

The cat who curled into my sleeping child, to share the dreams of soft surrender?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

This is the query of the poet Mary Oliver in her poem The Swan. I ask it, silently, when those moments come and go where life is so astoundingly beautiful, poignant, precious, that my soul stretches. Something in my heart wells up, surges, sings harmony and pounds its resonating rythmns with the whirling earth. The whirling galaxies. The dizzy whirling delirious universe.

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

 You hear the hoo haw all the time. You find love by changing your type. Getting on the right dating site. Meeting your soulmate. Oh, no, that’s not right! Love comes from the stillness of inner work. Remove the barriers inside yourself. Be the right person. Visualise the right man. Or woman. So which is it? Do we get the hearts and flowers in life by hunting them down and elbowing out all the competition? Or do we trust that after enough therapy and transformation and meditation, and maybe even medication that the world outside of us will magically morph, and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman will come with our Happy Ending?

A parallel conversation takes place around peace and justice.  You must attend 6 environmental meetings a week, sign 9 petitions, and be at one protest rally or you will wake up tomorrow with Joseph Stalin as your mayor. No, that is creating the problem! I must never think about what I don’t want! So I will pray for my enemies and plant energy seeds of compassion and chant mantras. I will cower in my inner cave until the scary world out there learns to be nice to me.

What works? Well, I know what doesn’t work. Seeking external solutions until you are empty, depleted, exhausted, and cranky. Never getting what you want  but not wasting a moment to feel pleasure or connection or awe. It also doesn’t work to pray your guts out or gentrify your inner village while passively enduring a bleak and unsatisfying life.

Because what does work is to get your inner world and your outer world to line up.
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in
are different from the things we do.”
~ Freya Stark

Be a spiritual person first. Be a political person as a stand for your spiritual values. Take the love inside you and give it away and watch how it returns in unpredictable and humbling ways, and then give all of that away, too.  Visualise what you want. Then let the vision change you. Align your actions to that vision.

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
~ George Bernard Shaw

It’s the yin and the yang of existence. So, the solution to living love and living peace and living justice is to fly your freak flag. Show your true colors. You need to find within yourself what makes you unique and precious and gifted, then cultivate and percolate, and magnify all the good stuff inside you. But don’t keep it locked up. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Go fly it out in the world.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between conflict and drama. Conflict in life is inevitable. We are unique. We don’t see things exactly like anyone else. For instance, I am a person who likes to move things forward. I am an artist. I see my life and my work as a progression. I am perpetually in conflict with people who like stasis. Who like the status quo. Who seek the predictable, and who fear the motion of change. People who live by “I don’t like conflict” don’t know what to do around me. People who feel oppressed or bored or stifled generally like me. I am the hiking companion who is always saying, “I wonder where these other trails go?” My mind sees so many possibilities.

I can remember being this way, being in conflict with those around me, seeing and wanting something different, back to early childhood. I recall being annoyed by my mom’s French provincial living room set. I hated the gold couch, and had a distinct vision in my mind of how our living room could look with contemporary furniture. A white box couch, for instance. I could see it in my mind. I was only four. My mom wasn’t thrilled with the aesthetic critique from a four year old. (Now that I am a mom, I can better appreciate her predicament!) So we entered this conflict, which was a drama of who had the power and who had the money.

This seemed to perpetuate throughout my life. Politics is about the drama of power and money. Dating and marriage can be about the drama of power and money. Career is the drama of power and money.

Our lives are structured as a conflict of wills in which those who have the power and the money prevail. The rest of us are valuable to the extent that we can help the powerful make more money. And I’ve been successful by learning to frame my vision for a better world in terms of power and money. It will cost more if we don’t address global warming now. We will pay a high price later by skimping on funding for public education now.

Lately I’ve begun to question if we, as a society, aren’t looking at conflict, at the solution to the differences between people, between what we need or desire, in the wrong context. And this is why we have so much drama. Maybe we could use a new bottom line. Rather than Is it Profitable? Maybe our bottom line could be Is it Life-Affirming? Are we tapping the unique potential of every person? Are we making decisions that support, nurture, and enhance the whole web of life? Of a community? Of this family?
Could it be that the drama around conflict is due to our assumption that someone must win and someone must lose? Is someone’s new idea necessarily a force to be defeated? Or is it an opportunity?
Maybe those who challenge, critique, and contradict aren’t merely forces to be banished or subdued. Maybe they are opportunities. Maybe we are all at our best when no one wins but every voice is heard and honored.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.  -Joseph Campbell

Outsiders saw a seventh-grade boy with acne and a baseball cap who lived an unremarkable life among a bevy of male relatives. He attended middle school in Surprise, Az. Seemed shy. He built the occasional skateboard ramp and did wheelies on his bicycle down the streets of this subdivision of stucco homes north of Phoenix.

The truth is that “Casey Price” is a 29 year old convicted sex offender who successfully posed as a 12 year old in three middle schools before Dawn Gonzales had the savvy to suspect that something was not right. She found that his records were falsified, and called the police.

It turns out that “12 year old Casey” who lived with his uncle and grandfather, is really Neil Havens Rodreick II. And get this! His “uncle” and “grandfather”, who enrolled him in these schools, are really a web of convicted sex offenders and predators! But wait! There’s more. Rodreick met Lonnie Stiffler, 61, and Robert J. Snow, 43 when they were trolling the internet for minors. Roderick convinced these men that he was a minor, and got them to pose as his grandfather and uncle. They were having sex with Rodreick at home, while he trolled for young boys at school during the day.

I wonder how Stiffler and Snow reacted when they learned that they had, in fact, been having sex with an adult. I wonder if they were shocked and offended. And I also wonder how gullible we as a society are about sexual predators.

I don’t intend to vilify sexual offenders. I am convinced that they need help and compassion, not hate and condemnation. But we do need to structure our society and the lives of our children so that they do not come into contact with this kind of sick person. I think that we need to wake up about how intentionally deceptive a person needs to be in order to troll for children. Evidently, parents at “Casey’s” school are asking some hard questions about how easy it is to gain access to our kids as potential prey.

Here is a great article on keeping kids safe from predators. Perhaps the best advice is to keep involved with church, school and civic groups where your child attends. I observed an adult acting inappropriately with my daughter, showing too much attention. He bought her an expensive gift, while giving nothing to the other kids. I’m eternally glad that I was involved enough to see this happening.

I would like to hear from other parents who have an awareness that predators pose as kind, friendly, and harmless adults and even children. Sometimes they pose as clergy, or youth directors. I think that we need to wake up about everyone who “just loves children”. Not all love is healthy love! What do you do?