planning

Chart developed by Bobbie Harro (School of Human Services, Springfield College), circa MM.

The hub of this freedom wheel brings me back to one of my favorite Alan Watts essays, “Play and Survival,” in which the great Zen guru defines his version of the “spiritual base” like this: “Each one of us is a flowing, and if you resist it, you go crazy. You are like somebody trying to grab water in his [sic] hands — the harder you squeeze it, the faster it slips through your fingers.”

We’re daily reminded of our perpetual “flowing” when the efficiency gurus push us ever closer to the crazy zone. Of course Watts is talking here about a different kind of “resistance,” the kind that makes it tough (down in the core) to engage in this struggle with any kind of sustained energy. Key to our process (and therefore our “cycle”) is knowing when to go with the flow — maintaining balance — and when to do whatever it takes to stop (obstruct, derail or at least slow) the action.

Anyway I like this liberation rubric and the overall flow from “critical incident” to spreading hope — with solid stretches of coalition building, action planning, anger management and policy transformation along the way.

Watts would remind us to enjoy the ride, too. Play and survival. Or this earlier in the same essay: “Life is like music for its own sake.”

I want to believe that somewhere within all this operational momentum is a latent explosive force that will, once activated, bring the whole thing down, collapsing into itself. There is a sickness and it’s spreading. We have entered the age of Plague, and yet the illness is not new. One of the difficulties I face in recording all this is finding new language to describe an old problem.

One danger we face, in our effort to stem the tide of operational momentum (a very real kind of oppression), is that we will reach a point of limited movement or forced inactivity. Those familiar with the Plague and its ravages will recognize that pervasive feeling of exile, of standing still, frozen before the void. The first casualty, we know, is the collapse of courage, willpower, endurance. We cease looking to the future, and memory (institutional memory in particular) no longer serves a purpose. There’s a sense of being abandoned. Some light fires hoping to purge the infection but are then left homeless, staring at the ruins. And of course these radical arsonists will face heavy penalties for their actions, which helps no one. One could say there are people (even within our team) acting on crazy impulse as they wander the lifeless streets with darkness in their hearts.

But something must be done. We are losing the profession (our occupations) to political necessity and economic expediency. A response is required. This Plague is everyone’s concern, and while the mood is gloomy and we may feel an overwhelming sense of deprivation (for which many of us were not prepared), we need a plan, an action plan.

This journal is itself a hatched plan for communicating with the outside world but it’s not enough. The larger plan requires some version of the following:

mapping the whole environment; defining our position relative to the lethal center
clarifying our coordinates viz. other avenues of approach
defining the pieces, arranging pieces for better understanding
recognizing key players; keeping track of their movements

We’re not talking here about a wave of revolutionary violence but a coordinated action plan designed to make it clear that we are the answer to all their problems.

We have to start somewhere. All our recent work with productive modeling is just the beginning. Battles won on the design front are very satisfying but mean nothing in the end. The structural problems run much deeper, so while we defend the home front we must remember, too, that the plague’s reach is much wider than our own local institution.

We start at the center, then, and work our way outward.

We find it mysterious and telling that they have given us unfettered access to their online development sandbox. Suddenly we’re privy to inter-office memos and minutes from meetings we weren’t allowed to attend. Was this intentional or accidental? Bureaucratic snafu or just part of the master plan? Either way we now know things they either don’t care that we know or want us desperately to know but are afraid or unwilling to tell us. It’s a strange position and one that complicates our rhetorical standpoint as readers.

From a quick scan of the material we learn certain things about ourselves — we “have concerns,” we “seek clarification,” we “are coming up with our own plan,” and so on. This is the stuff of vague paternalism. Their minutes report on our actions like Pavlov recording his dogs’ daily drool. In scouring the universe for obstacles they have spotted the biggest one of all in us. We get in the way of their plan, although some among us are starting to wonder if “plan” is really too strong a word. They have momentum, clearly, but it’s obvious they really don’t know what they’re doing, which makes way (on brighter days) for opportunity.

Meanwhile and anyway, we now have a window into their world, and what we see when we dig through their sandbox (besides dismissive comments about us) is not too surprising — a rabid push for efficiencies, a drive to compress all time and content, a deep fixation on predictive data analytics as the new alchemical elixir by which all things base and bumbling (the people we are, the people we serve) turn magically, upon implementation and application, into gold.

We’ve decided to take all this with a grain of salt. S_ argues that we ignore it — this is all background noise, and we don’t have to listen. We can and should push forward, defining our own social and occupational realities, our own peda/androgogies, our own priorities rooted in guiding principles informed by research, experience, awareness, compassion and a baseline commitment to do our jobs well.

But some of us wonder if we’re just wasting our time. Yes, we should move forward, but with that insatiable monster fuming in the cave, is our own organizational momentum itself a risky move?

H_ says we need a design push. D_ wants to form some kind of coalition of no and storm the meetings to which we’re not invited armed with everything we know they don’t know we know about them. In short, we’re at a standstill, swallowing our own inertia.

Meanwhile the SPIDER CHARTS posted to their share-space look sick and scary.

The first thing we notice are the food offerings. We’re confident the donuts and coffee have not been laced with truth serum or something else to coax a resigned complicity, but who knows.

No doubt this horseshoe arrangement in the meeting chamber, the assigned seating, all these individually-wrapped peppermint Life Savers gathered in clusters on tables–let’s just say someone has invested some serious thought into keeping us both separated and oriented in a particular way, breath perpetually fresh and other-directed. We’ve been instructed not to speak to ourselves, meaning a deliberate attempt to divide us now underwrites all subsequent interactions.

Getting started we talk initially about how to plan to get along today, once we begin. On the whiteboard to my left is the PARKING LOT reserved, we’re told, for really great ideas, should any alight. The ice breaker challenges us to reflect on our own pasts in the interest (we presume) of anticipating some radically new and potentially communal, streamlined futures. There’s talk of confidence vs. uncertainty, of cultural stigmas, of anxiety and expectation.

By now we’re waking to the notion that either they have no concrete plan for today or the plan is just that — to have no concrete plan. There’s an odd tumbling sensation that presents when you spend a little time in a room with people whose plan is to have no plan. Still there appears to be a driving force, an over-arching master will or uber-momentum. I sense this by 11:30am as a new pressure builds behind the eyeballs that could be caused, my neighbor from downtown proposes, by the bright neon lights overhead. I don’t think so.

For my own part I’ve decided that trying to second guess their intentions is a fool’s errand. We’re dealing here with a headless monster whose multiple arms flail uncontrollably. Which is not to say this monster attacks without purpose. We just don’t know enough yet to understand what that purpose is–beyond, of course, the slow churning force of institutional change whose justification, as always, is the need for institutional change. A big monster at that scale seems to move at a very slow pace. On the ground, though, the mood is acceleration, speed at any cost and the removal of all obstacles, impediments to speedy progress. The monster’s food is time-the-enemy, and we know if the monster had eyes it would see in us a bunch of plump tasty slowpokes.

Time, then, is the threshold, the edge along which we must wage our opposition. Time as constructive illusion, not the stuff of programmatic efficiency. We’ll see how it goes.

Cycle of Liberation

What’s the Plan?

Cynicism is the new Action?

Re Treats