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Excerpts from Small Groups: The Process of Change
CHAPTER TWO: ORGANIZING: WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT? Organizing is a generative process. That is, once initiated, you need to keep active by identifying in others any feelings or ideas they may have. This will help you to understand how they are feeling about the future set of ideas and feelings that you are sharing with them. Remember, it is not that the people being organized have to have the outcome exactly figured out; it is often more important that you teach the process. That is the way you do what you do. In organizing, the three key processes are compassion, empathy, and patience. You yourself need a surplus of those three feelings that you can give to others. First of all, structurally you want to view the others as potential teachers to you. When you can admit to this possibility, compassion for yourself and the others’ compassion will flow from the bottom up, so to speak. Hence, you can empathize with folks because you are actually trying to view the world the way they do. It also helps to know others’ world views so you can reach out and suggest, according to their own emotional logic, how they can proceed. You can get close to seeing a path between where they and you are now to where they have been and the steps they’ve taken in the right direction. Obviously, getting this close to other people may at first seem both difficult and a bit of a risk. But if you have the patience to realize that others have invested in you this way over the years, you need to apply this patience to others. Secondly, you will also realize that change has an uneven character. So if you have no success on one, two, three occasions, you are still motivated to try again. Operating at deep levels of compassion, empathy and patience are good not only for others but are deeply satisfying for oneself. Patience is gained by noting that sometimes deeper learning is also acquired by failure more than mere success alone. So take your organizing failure and examine it closely. What, why, and when did the organizing not work out properly, what does that critically reveal about yourself, and what can you try out to change matters? CHAPTER FIVE: COLLABORATIVE The task-associative group level can only go so far in building group solidarity. There are two different issues we wish to discuss here: One is the emergence of interdependent behavior, and the other is further role decentralization. Rotating roles is important; otherwise, the silent ones have a “negative power” over the discussions and interactions of the group because no one is sure what the silent one’s notions are. Hence, the fear of offending may discourage further discussion, particularly when an issue is sensitive. When people have gotten past the stranger-to-stranger level and begun to learn who they are and who the other members are (from the previous chapters), a more complex collaborative group level may emerge. This interdependent collaborative level is a tighter, more socially cohesive group in which everyone, not just the leadership, will take responsibility in participation, process, actions, planning, and goals. Think of a group of professors who act in a collegial manner around a book or research project. They know one another professionally and personally, and they divvy up the various roles according to each person’s skills and interests. The word “collaborative” can be applied to a co-operative group or a conventional group. It can occur within conventional groups in which managers and staff get together to investigate a particular problem or staff take an initiative to improve certain dynamics of the organization. A co-operative could use this level to create co- operative affordable housing for people by using a mixed-income strategy or can found an organization to help give moderate- and low-income people access to computers. CHAPTER NINE: SELF-RELIANCE In the next three chapters we’re going to look at three platforms, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-determination, of interdependence or cooperation from three related, but I believe different, stages of interdependent development. Self-reliance is the most horizontal stage I am presenting. It involves cooperating at the community level or work site level at its lowest common denominator, an area crucial to any organization. It is basic to the concept of interdependence on a level that honeycombs the community or job site, doing this from a core group that impacts the “lifeworld community around it” or other parts of the work site. As I said before, the lifeworld community is made up of all the formal and informal connections people have within their community or workplace. Of course, this does depend upon the degree of activism the person brings to either the community or job site. But most of us influence more people than we are aware of, and I am advocating that we ought to influence even more. If our character is as I have presented more the person in cultural terms, then our capacity for both change and growth is most available in our formal and informal connections to others. |
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