Group Facilitation Quotes

We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

It’s often thought that the only function of pronunciation is to facilitate intelligibility; but it is also there to express personal or group identity.

If race disappears as a category of official division, as it has in most of the world, this will facilitate the emergence of a plural racial order where the groups exist in practice but are not official recognized - and anyone trying to address racial division is likely to be chided for racializing the population.

Your brain is run by information generated by nations, religions, ethnic groups, and other groups whose goals are perhaps not the same as yours. How long are you going to let this go on? You haven't signed a legally binding lease with any of these people or groups. You can recover your brain as soon as you decide to. Our brains are to be used by us, and only us, to facilitate the growth of our souls.

FACILITATORS EXPERIENCE mysterious emotions, fear, anger and numbness when working with groups and large organizations. That’s because group processes bring up abuse issues from the past. Understanding your own psychology better will make you a more effective facilitator by helping you (1) be sensitive to others, (2) remain centered and not go into shock when you are attacked, and (3) maintain equanimity and provide the group with a sense of safety when the group looks to you for protection in stormy times.

This is what one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, meant when he wrote in 1895 that the establishment of a sense of community is facilitated by a class of actors who carry a stigma and sense of stigmatization and are termed 'deviant.' Unity is provided to any collectivity by uniting against those who are seen as a common threat to the social order and morality of a group. Consequently, the stigma and the stigmatization of some persons demarcates a boundary that reinforces the conduct of conformists. Therefore, a collective sense of morality is achieved by the creation of stigma and stigmatization and deviance.

Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were “selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.

Game developers know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme effort and reward hard work. They know how to facilitate cooperation and collaboration at previously unimaginable scales. And they are continuously innovating new ways to motivate players to stick with harder challenges, for longer, and in much bigger groups. These crucial twenty-first-century skills can help all of us find new ways to make a deep and lasting impact on the world around us.

Most organised abuser groups call each particular training a “programme”, as if you were a computer. Many specific trained behaviours have “on” and “off” triggers or switches. Some personality systems are set up with an inner world full of wires or strings that connect switches to their effects. These can facilitate a series of actions by a series of insiders. For example, one part watches the person function in the outside world, and presses a button if he or she sees the person disobeying instructions. The button is connected to an internal wire, which rings a bell in the ear of another part. This part then engages in his or her trained behaviour, opening a door to release the pain of a rape, or cutting the person's arm in a certain pattern, or pushing out a child part. So the watcher has no idea of who the other part is or what she or he does. These events can be quite complicated.

Ask your friends what God has been teaching you about himself. Small groups can also be useful for facilitating these kinds of relationships.

the belief that a race-neutral society can produce procedural justice for all groups and that it will end prejudice and discrimination is not supported by research on color-blind racial ideology.

What's a City/NGO-sponsored Neighborhood Summit, you ask? It's a trumped-up group of hand-picked 'neighborhood leaders' who have been instructed in Asset Based Community Development and the Delphi Technique. Their goal? To create neighborhood associations that are managed and manipulated by facilitators who have learned 'consensus building' and are using it to further the (United Nations's Agenda 21) plans.

In perhaps the most revealing of all the health-related studies, a group of subjects who had contracted malignant melanoma received traditional treatment and then were divided into two groups. One group met weekly for only six weeks; the other did not. Facilitators taught the first group of recovering patients specific communication skills. (When it's your life that's at stake, could anything be more crucial?) After meeting only six times and then dispersing for five years, the subjects who learned how to express themselves effectively had a higher survival rate--only 9 percent succumbed as opposed to almost 30 percent in the untrained group.

Osborn’s theory had great impact, and company leaders took up brainstorming with enthusiasm. To this day, it’s common for anyone who spends time in corporate America to find himself occasionally cooped up with colleagues in a room full of whiteboards, markers, and a preternaturally peppy facilitator encouraging everyone to free-associate. There’s only one problem with Osborn’s breakthrough idea: group brainstorming doesn’t actually work.

The New Groupthink is also practiced in our schools, via an increasingly popular method of instruction called “cooperative” or “small group” learning. In many elementary schools, the traditional rows of seats facing the teacher have been replaced with “pods” of four or more desks pushed together to facilitate countless group learning activities. Even subjects like math and creative writing, which would seem to depend on solo flights of thought, are often taught as group projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited, a big sign announced the “Rules for Group Work,” including, YOU CAN’T ASK A TEACHER FOR HELP UNLESS EVERYONE IN YOUR GROUP HAS THE SAME QUESTION.

Crafting a business model is no different. Ideas placed in the Canvas trigger new ones. The Canvas becomes a tool for facilitating the idea dialogue—for individuals sketching out their ideas and for groups developing ideas together.

Information and Communication technologies have not so much changed cultural practices as reproduced and facilitated them. Groups and nations become networks, and in doing so, they reiterate their cultures and reforge their connections.

Not every investment requires money. As the girls in this book have shown, they want to know that people care about them and their well-being. They want to be seen and acknowledged for who they are and what they can contribute to the learning environment. Our collective community can respond to their needs by being there for them. But many schools around the country have also established girls’ groups as a way to provide encouragement for girls simply by convening them in regular conversation and sisterhood check-ins. These are good ways to facilitate conversation and to launch the next level of investment—one that does require financial resources. Join efforts to raise awareness about the conditions of Black girls in the racial justice movement.

Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34 Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference. According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.

Longino argues that in order to be able to distinguish rationality from irrationality we should take the social group as our basic unit. Science is rational to the extent that it chooses theories from a diverse pool of options reflecting different points of view, and makes its choice via a critical dialogue that reaches consensus without coercion. Diversity in the ideas in the pool is facilitated by diversity in the backgrounds of those participating in the discussion. Epistemology becomes a field that tries to distinguish good community-level procedures from bad ones.

Pure capitalism is great at rewarding the creative utilization of capital by one group of people in service to another according to present gross utility and refined use cases. But pure capitalism does not address the intentional placement of boundaries or the intentional facilitation of productive interactions accounting for net utility and holistic use cases. This is why pure capitalism at times is threatened by or presents threats to a variety of social and ecological ecosystems. And this is why permaculture economics is superior to pure capitalism, as it contains all of the benefits of capitalism plus some benefits that capitalism does not provide .

Though a person might not realize it, groups have a very powerful and dramatic effect on human behavior. Everyone acts differently when they are around people versus than when they are alone. SOCIAL FACILITATION The most basic theory regarding social psychology is that when a person is alone, he or she is more relaxed and not concerned about the appearance of their behavior.

MULTI-SIDED PLATFORMS bring together two or more distinct but interdependent groups of customers. • Such platforms are of value to one group of customers only if the other groups of customers are also present. • The platform creates value by facilitating interactions between the different groups. • A multi-sided platform grows in value to the extent that it attracts more users, a phenomenon known as the network effect.

The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.” This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves). In 1924, the Indian Rights Association, which defended the interests of indigenous communities, conducted an investigation into what it described as “an orgy of graft and exploitation.” The group documented how rich Indians in Oklahoma were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner” and how guardianships were “the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls.” Judges were known to say to citizens, “You vote for me, and I will see that you get a good guardianship.” A white woman married to an Osage man described to a reporter how the locals would plot: “A group of traders and lawyers sprung up who selected certain Indians as their prey. They owned all the officials…. These men had an understanding with each other. They cold-bloodedly said, ‘You take So-and-So, So-and-So and So-and-So and I’ll take these.’ They selected Indians who had full headrights and large farms.

Most cross-institutional change processes fail because they miss the starting point: co-sensing across boundaries. We need infrastructures to facilitate this process on a sustained level across systems. And because they don’t yet exist, organized interest groups go out and maximize their special interests against the whole, instead of engaging practitioners in the larger system in a process of sensing and innovating together. As

Through a process of social conditioning, however, White children are increasingly taught to associate only positive qualities with their own race and negative ones with other racial groups. The process of our cultural conditioning occurs through significant others (Sue, 2003), our educational curriculum (Minow, Shweder, & Markus, 2008), the mass media (Cortes, 2008), and institutions in society (APA Presidential Task Force, 2012; J. M. Jones, 1997).

Respecting individual and group autonomy means that we don't need a bunch of f*cking managers; it means that no matter how well positioned or knowledgeable you are, people can communicate and resolve conflicts best when speaking from their direct experiences and with genuine humility. Some of the first skills taught in conflict resolution, facilitation, and de-escalation trainings are how not to speak for others; you learn that you break trust when trying to represent others without their consent.

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.

We can be inspired by leaders we’ve never met and devoted to organizations with no fixed membership, such as nations, churches, corporations, and schools. Jonathan Haidt has argued that this capacity for devotion to leaders, organizations, and more abstract ideals might have evolved to facilitate cooperation in large groups, just as romantic love evolved to facilitate cooperative parenting. This capacity may depend on our ability to experience awe—to be moved by, and devoted to, things larger than ourselves and our familiar social circles. WATCHFUL

Other groups of color need to acknowledge the courage of Black America, and our indebtedness to them for what we have learned from their struggles. Although all groups can recount their own unique struggles for equal rights, African Americans have always been in the forefront in advocating for social justice. Many other groups of color (and other marginalized groups—women and LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer] individuals) have learned much from the Black movement, including the importance of group identity, and have profited from the work, struggle, and sacrifice of African American brothers and sisters.

So how, you might ask, do I exclude generously? This issue comes up a lot when I’m organizing large, complicated meetings for clients. These are some of the questions I ask them: Who not only fits but also helps fulfill the gathering’s purpose? Who threatens the purpose? Who, despite being irrelevant to the purpose, do you feel obliged to invite? When my clients answer the first two questions, they begin to grasp their gathering’s true purpose. Obviously people who fit and fulfill your gathering’s purpose need to be there. And, though this one is harder, people who manifestly threaten the purpose are easy to justify excluding. (That doesn’t mean they always end up being excluded. Politeness and habit often defeat the facilitator. But the hosts still know deep down who shouldn’t be there.) It is the third question where purpose begins to be tested. Someone threatens a gathering’s purpose? You can see why to keep him out. But what’s wrong with someone who’s irrelevant to the purpose? What’s wrong with inviting Bob? Every gathering has its Bobs. Bob in marketing. Bob your friend’s girlfriend’s brother. Bob your visiting aunt. Bob is perfectly pleasant and doesn’t actively sabotage your gathering. Most Bobs are grateful to be included. They sometimes bring extra effort or an extra bottle of wine. You’ve probably been a Bob. I certainly have. The crux of excluding thoughtfully and intentionally is mustering the courage to keep away your Bobs. It is to shift your perception so that you understand that people who aren’t fulfilling the purpose of your gathering are detracting from it, even if they do nothing to detract from it. This is because once they are actually in your presence, you (and other considerate guests) will want to welcome and include them, which takes time and attention away from what (and who) you’re actually there for. Particularly in smaller gatherings, every single person affects the dynamics of a group. Excluding well and purposefully is reframing who and what you are being generous to—your guests and your purpose.

spaces that at first may appear to reflect a simple condition are much more complex when the actions of individuals and groups are factored in. These unique patterns of movement through space can and should guide the architecture we build to serve them. For space only becomes truly public when people recognize it and utilize it as such. Great public space cannot be built as much as curated; it is architecture's responsibility to craft space in response to specific needs and unique practices. . . . it is not the space itself that is meaningful; it is the way space facilitates diversity, interaction, and new negotiations that makes it meaningful [David Adjaye, "Djemaa El-Fnaa, Marrakech: Engaging with Complexity and Diversity"].

I am well aware that certain exercises, tasks setup by the facilitator, can practically force the group to more of a here-and-now communication or more of a feeling level. There are leaders who do these very skillfully, and with good effect at the time. However, I am enough of a scientist-clinician to make many casual follow-up inquiries, and I know that frequently the lasting result of such procedures is not nearly as satisfying as the immediate effect. At it's best it may lead to discipleship (which I happen not to like): "What a marvelous leader he is to have made me open up when I had no intention of doing it!" It can also lead to a rejection of the whole experience. "Why did I do those silly things he asked me to?" At worst, it can make the person feel that his private self has been in some way violated, and he will be careful never to expose himself to a group again. From my experience I know that if I attempt to push a group to a deeper level it is not, in the long run, going to work.

The empowerment triangle turns drama upside-down, transforming the persecutor (or scapegoat) into a challenger, the rescuer into a coach, and the victim into a creator. The empowerment dynamic allows all the roles to be essential for growth. In the drama triangle, the persecutor works with issues of power, the rescuer works with issues of responsibility, and the victim works with area of vulnerability: The drama triangle is familiar to many of us. We all know this pattern inside ourselves. We get stuck in a situation that we want to escape, and it creates drama. By leaning into the dynamic and entering deeper into relationship, we can work the energy so that it becomes an enriching transformation. If you can work this in a group, then you’ve subdued the scapegoat archetype and turned it into something more life affirming. The most important thing about the drama triangle is to make people aware of it. When a group can understand and recognize how this is a kind of destructive pattern, it becomes empowered to change the pattern. Uncoupling drama from our organizational and personal lives is the key. The group as a whole can embody a role to create safety and make sense of the system. Transformation from the drama to the redeemed starts with a pause, then an inquiry of what’s happening here, then a recollection of the three roles and who is playing what role in this context. Once the system is self-aware, ask the questions: “what else is possible? How can I become so centered that something new can happen? How can a new perception take place?” With enough safety and connection, the group will be able to follow the healing energy into re-organization and re-integration of the parts. Claiming or remembering your own archetype can protect against falling into one.

An implicit assumption in many normative debates is that private solutions cannot be relied upon for complex problems. Can private governance facilitate cooperation in sophisticated transactions, in large groups, in heterogeneous populations, under conditions of anonymity, or across long distances? Or will problems such as free riding and prisoners’ dilemmas lead to market failure? All of these are empirical questions whose answers are usually assumed rather than investigated. Yet mechanisms of private governance are far more ubiquitous and far more powerful than commonly assumed. Mechanisms of private governance work in small and large groups, among friends and strangers, in ancient and modern societies, and for simple and extremely complex transactions. They often exist alongside, and in many cases in spite of, government legal efforts, and most of the time they are totally missed. The more that private governance solves problems behind the scenes, the more people overlook it and misattribute order to the state. Milton Friedman, for example, recognizes that private rule enforcement could work, but considers it rare: “I look over history, and outside of perhaps Iceland, where else can you find any historical examples of that kind of a system developing?” (Doherty and Friedman, 1995).3 After reading this book, I hope Friedman would answer instead that private order is all around us. Private governance is everywhere and responsible for creating order not just in basic markets but also in the world’s most sophisticated markets, including futures and advanced derivatives markets. If the success of private governance were limited to the examples in this book, the track record should be rated superb. Yet they are a fraction of what has worked and will work in the future. I hope this research inspires others to document some of the countless mechanisms that have made markets as robust as they are. Research in private governance not only

recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent. Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics. So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.

To wit, researchers recruited a large group of college students for a seven-day study. The participants were assigned to one of three experimental conditions. On day 1, all the participants learned a novel, artificial grammar, rather like learning a new computer coding language or a new form of algebra. It was just the type of memory task that REM sleep is known to promote. Everyone learned the new material to a high degree of proficiency on that first day—around 90 percent accuracy. Then, a week later, the participants were tested to see how much of that information had been solidified by the six nights of intervening sleep. What distinguished the three groups was the type of sleep they had. In the first group—the control condition—participants were allowed to sleep naturally and fully for all intervening nights. In the second group, the experimenters got the students a little drunk just before bed on the first night after daytime learning. They loaded up the participants with two to three shots of vodka mixed with orange juice, standardizing the specific blood alcohol amount on the basis of gender and body weight. In the third group, they allowed the participants to sleep naturally on the first and even the second night after learning, and then got them similarly drunk before bed on night 3. Note that all three groups learned the material on day 1 while sober, and were tested while sober on day 7. This way, any difference in memory among the three groups could not be explained by the direct effects of alcohol on memory formation or later recall, but must be due to the disruption of the memory facilitation that occurred in between. On day 7, participants in the control condition remembered everything they had originally learned, even showing an enhancement of abstraction and retention of knowledge relative to initial levels of learning, just as we’d expect from good sleep. In contrast, those who had their sleep laced with alcohol on the first night after learning suffered what can conservatively be described as partial amnesia seven days later, forgetting more than 50 percent of all that original knowledge. This fits well with evidence we discussed earlier: that of the brain’s non-negotiable requirement for sleep the first night after learning for the purposes of memory processing. The real surprise came in the results of the third group of participants. Despite getting two full nights of natural sleep after initial learning, having their sleep doused with alcohol on the third night still resulted in almost the same degree of amnesia—40 percent of the knowledge they had worked so hard to establish on day 1 was forgotten.

Every Day Take Your Daily Doses Black Cumin (Nigella sativa) (¼ tsp) As noted in the Appetite Suppression section, a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, controlled weight-loss trials found that about a quarter teaspoon of black cumin powder every day appears to reduce body mass index within a span of a couple of months. Note that black cumin is different from regular cumin, for which the dosing is different. (See below.) Garlic Powder (¼ tsp) Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies have found that as little as a daily quarter teaspoon of garlic powder can reduce body fat at a cost of perhaps two cents a day. Ground Ginger (1 tsp) or Cayenne Pepper (½ tsp) Randomized controlled trials have found that ¼ teaspoon to 1½ teaspoons a day of ground ginger significantly decreased body weight for just pennies a day. It can be as easy as stirring the ground spice into a cup of hot water. Note: Ginger may work better in the morning than evening. Chai tea is a tasty way to combine the green tea and ginger tweaks into a single beverage. Alternately, for BAT activation, you can add one raw jalapeño pepper or a half teaspoon of red pepper powder (or, presumably, crushed red pepper flakes) into your daily diet. To help beat the heat, you can very thinly slice or finely chop the jalapeño to reduce its bite to little prickles, or mix the red pepper into soup or the whole-food vegetable smoothie I featured in one of my cooking videos on NutritionFacts.org.4985 Nutritional Yeast (2 tsp) Two teaspoons of baker’s, brewer’s, or nutritional yeast contains roughly the amount of beta 1,3/1,6 glucans found in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials to facilitate weight loss. Cumin (Cuminum cyminum) (½ tsp with lunch and dinner) Overweight women randomized to add a half teaspoon of cumin to their lunches and dinners beat out the control group by four more pounds and an extra inch off their waists. There is also evidence to support the use of the spice saffron, but a pinch a day would cost a dollar, whereas a teaspoon of cumin costs less than ten cents. Green Tea (3 cups) Drink three cups a day between meals (waiting at least an hour after a meal so as to not interfere with iron absorption). During meals, drink water, black coffee, or hibiscus tea mixed 6:1 with lemon verbena, but never exceed three cups of fluid an hour (important given my water preloading advice). Take advantage of the reinforcing effect of caffeine by drinking your green tea along with something healthy you wish you liked more, but don’t consume large amounts of caffeine within six hours of bedtime. Taking your tea without sweetener is best, but if you typically sweeten your tea with honey or sugar, try yacon syrup instead. Stay

.....while language facilitates communication within the group, it also crystallises cultural differences, and actually heightens the barriers between groups.

Vaccine trials in general, and childhood vaccine trials specifically, are purposely designed to obscure the true incidence of adverse events of the vaccine being tested. How do they do this? By using a two-step scheme: First, a new vaccine (one which does not have a predecessor), is always tested in a Phase 3 RCT in which the control group receives another vaccine (or a compound very similar to the experimental vaccine, see explanation below). A new pediatric vaccine is never tested during its formal approval process against a neutral solution (placebo). Comparing a trial group to a control group that was given a compound that is likely to cause a similar rate of adverse events facilitates the formation of a false safety profile.

American democracy ... means profoundly different things to different people. The complexity of this tradition is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, the fact that it is possible for groups to weave together such different stories of citizenship has generated perpetual disagreement over what it means to be a good citizen. And because much of this disagreement is based, not on facts, but on choices about which aspects of the country’s heritage to emphasize, and on how stories are interpreted, this disagreement has proven nearly impossible to resolve. At the same time, however, these different ways of imagining the nation— however partial and imperfect— also play a powerful role in political life by embedding a diverse array of citizens in structures of meaning that encourage political commitment, help people interpret changing political realities, and enable them to chart courses toward alternative futures. As a result, they facilitate citizen involvement in political life. If one accepts the view that widespread citizen participation is necessary for a functioning democracy, then one must welcome the participation of even those citizens with whom one disagrees.

He who is doing the talking is doing the learning.” This is the essence of the Socratic method of facilitation. Our adult learners bring with them vast amounts of knowledge and experience. Letting them share their wisdom with the group is what makes adult learning such a rewarding experience for us.

Our job is not to have all the knowledge; it’s to create experiences where everyone can share knowledge.

When people are not accountable and cannot evaluate their own efforts, responsibility is diffused across all group members (Harkins & Jackson, 1985; Kerr & Bruun, 1981). By contrast, the social facilitation experiments increased exposure to evaluation. When made the center of attention, people self-consciously monitor their behavior (Mullen & Baumeister, 1987). So, when being observed increases evaluation concerns, social facilitation occurs; when being lost in a crowd decreases evaluation concerns, social loafing occurs.

Social facilitation experiments show that groups can arouse people, and social loafing experiments show that groups can diffuse responsibility. When arousal and diffused responsibility combine, and normal inhibitions diminish, the results may be startling. People may commit acts that range from a mild lessening of restraint (throwing food in the dining hall, snarling at a referee, screaming during a rock concert) to impulsive self-gratification (group vandalism, orgies, thefts) to destructive social explosions (police brutality, riots, lynchings).

The Brainstorm Itself As we mentioned at the start, brainstorming sessions need to be facilitated. The facilitator sets up the room and makes sure there are pens and sticky notes or paper for every participant, and that the space is quiet and comfortable. The facilitator also helps frame the question, manages the warm-up, makes sure everything that is said is recorded, and manages the rules. We recommend that all participants have their own pens and notepads and write down their ideas. That way, the group isn’t constrained by how fast the facilitator can record ideas, and there is less chance of losing a potentially great idea.

Cunningham derived inspiration from studying the funeral rituals of various cultures. And she ended up adopting one from the Jewish tradition. In it, the person presiding over the funeral asks everyone except for the immediate family to form two lines facing each other, making a kind of human hallway from the gravesite to the cars. Then the rabbi asks the immediate family to turn away from the grave and walk down that makeshift aisle, and as they do so, to look into the eyes of their friends, who “are now like pillars of constancy and love.” Cunningham described it as “a way to usher them into the next part of their journey, and the next stage of their grieving.” As the family walks by, the people at the farthest-back part of the line fold in and follow them, and then the rest, slowly, join a kind of procession out of the cemetery. It is a simple structural process that helps organize a group and facilitate a graceful exit. Yet it does so in a purposeful way that supports the people who most need it, connects them to the people still present, and gives everyone a way to move forward together.

Closer examination of the hate crime framework reveals substantive flaws in this approach. A central shortcoming is its exclusive focus on individual acts of violence rather than on dismantling the systemic forces that promote, condone, and facilitate homophobic and transphobic violence. Hate or bias-related violence is portrayed as individualized, ignorant, and aberrant—a criminal departure by individuals and extremist groups from the norms of society, necessitating intensified policing to produce safety. The fact is many of the individuals who engage in such violence are encouraged to do so by mainstream society through promotion of laws, practices, generally accepted prejudices, and religious views. In other words, behavior that is racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant, and violence against disabled people, does not occur in a political vacuum. And it is not always possible to police the factors that encourage and facilitate it.

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Because an organization’s structure and how its groups work together may have been established to facilitate the design of its dominant product, the direction of causality may ultimately reverse itself: The organization’s structure and the way its groups learn to work together can then affect the way it can and cannot design new products. CAPABILITIES

Because an organization’s structure and how its groups work together may have been established to facilitate the design of its dominant product, the direction of causality may ultimately reverse itself: The organization’s structure and the way its groups learn to work together can then affect the way it can and cannot design new products.

Aleister Crowley has been a damaging influence in the popular mind, a trend facilitated by the general license inspired by Jungian thought, which so often desires to descend to the depths and integrate shadows that wise men transcend. In Jungian thought, finer standards are reversed, as Jung himself demonstrated in his private life. Crowley is a god of diverse Satanist and New Age groups, and his feminine persona was known as Alys, to use his own name for that abnormal phenomenon. The ascension of Alys is not a pretty sight, and is more than enough to sicken anyone even remotely sensitive. It is very fashionable nowadays to eulogize the Beast, another designation of Crowley. In a typically commercial work, Colin Wilson justified Crowley's philosophy of 'do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law'. That is as good as glorifying the personality of Crowley, which is bad form by any standards save the satanic.

What exactly is a platform? A platform is a business model that facilitates the exchange of value between two or more user groups, a consumer and a producer (see Figure 1.3). In order to make these exchanges happen, platforms harness and create large, scalable networks of users and resources that can be accessed on demand. Platforms create communities and markets that allow users to interact and transact.

For thousands and thousands of years, humans lived in small intergenerational groups. There were no mental health clinics—but there was plenty of trauma. I assume that many of our ancestors experienced post-traumatic problems: anxiety, depression, sleep disruptions. But I also assume that they experienced healing. Our species could not have survived if a majority of our traumatized ancestors lost their capacity to function well. The pillars of traditional healing were 1) connection to clan and the natural world; 2) regulating rhythm through dance, drumming, and song; 3) a set of beliefs, values, and stories that brought meaning to even senseless, random trauma; and 4) on occasion, natural hallucinogens or other plant-derived substances used to facilitate healing with the guidance of a healer or elder.

attunement, and spiritual healing, the Cayce readings suggest that as individuals attune themselves to higher states of consciousness, they literally raise their personal vibrations in the process. Not only does this raising of vibrations facilitate personal healing, but it enables the individual to become a catalyst of healing for others. The material provided to the Glad Helpers Prayer Group states that

The idea is to try to become as precise as possible; the clearer you are on what is and isn’t working for you, the better you can set your wayfinding direction. For instance…What you initially logged as “Staff Mtg—Enjoyed it for once today!” might, after you’ve looked at it again, be more accurately restated as “Staff Mtg—Felt great when I rephrased what Jon said and everyone went ‘Ooooh—exactly!’ ” This more precise version tells a much more useful story about what specific activity or behavior engages you. And it opens the door to developing even greater self-awareness. When your entries have that kind of detail in them, your reflections can be more insightful. When journaling your reflection on the log entry about that staff meeting, you might ask yourself, “Was I more engaged by artfully rephrasing Jon’s comment (getting the articulation dialed in just right) or by facilitating consensus among the staff (being the guy who made the group’s ‘Now we get it!’ unifying moment happen)?” If you conclude that artful articulation was the real sweet spot of that staff meeting moment for you, that important insight can help you be on the lookout for content-creation opportunities over group facilitation opportunities. Take this sort of observation and reflection as far as you find helpful (and no further—you don’t want to get stuck in your journal).

The Group Product Manager Role There's a role in larger product organizations that I find especially effective. The role is titled group product manager, usually referred to as GPM. The GPM is a hybrid role. Part individual contributor and part first‐level people manager. The idea is that the GPM is already a proven product manager (usually coming from a senior product manager title), and now the person is ready for more responsibility. There are generally two career paths for product managers. One is to stay as an individual contributor, which, if you're strong enough, can go all the way up to a principal product manager—a person who's an individual contributor but a rock‐star performer and willing and able to tackle the toughest product work. This is a very highly regarded role and generally compensated like a director or even VP. The other path is to move into functional management of the product managers (the most common title is director of product management) where some number of product managers (usually somewhere between 3 and 10) report directly to you. The director of product management is really responsible for two things. The first is ensuring his or her product managers are all strong and capable. The second is product vision and strategy and connecting the dots between the product work of the many teams. This is also referred to as holistic view of product. But lots of strong senior product managers are not sure about their preferred career path at this stage, and the GPM role is a great way to get a taste of both worlds. The GPM is the actual product manager for one product team, but in addition, she is responsible for the development and coaching of a small number of additional product managers (typically, one to three others). While the director of product management may have product managers who work across many different areas, the GPM model is designed to facilitate tightly coupled product teams.

Our liturgy, music, small groups and Bible studies, programming, fellowship, and leadership should facilitate true transformation in the way of Jesus and participation in God’s reign.

Sreedhar noted that there needed to be more than two languages in contact for a true pidgin to be born: if there are only two languages in all, there is no language problem, as each of the two groups already has a language. A pidgin is only needed if there are diverse groups of little people who have no shared language, people who need to be integrated into a single group. A pidgin does not emerge in order to facilitate conversation with the rulers. The people who would eventually speak the pidgin had to come from ‘two or more different and mutually unintelligible language backgrounds’, and there needed to be a ‘dominant (and usually alien) language which supplies much of the vocabulary’.

Life design brainstorming has four steps, and a very structured approach to coming up with lots of prototypable ideas. Typically, if you are the facilitator who brings the group together, you might have already framed the brainstorming topic. You want a team of no fewer than three and rarely more than six people who have all volunteered to help. Once the group is convened, the session proceeds as follows.

We might want to consider instead the new opportunities and affinities that are opened up through coming together to fight the environmental crisis. Ecological justice groups like Extinction Rebellion are calling for citizens’ assemblies—innovative institutions that can allow people, communities, even entire countries, to make important decisions in ways that may be more just and fairer than party politics. Similar to jury service, members are randomly selected from across the country. The process is designed to ensure that assemblies reflect the population in regard to characteristics like gender, age, ethnicity, education level, and geography. Assembly members hear from experts and those most affected by an issue. Members then come together in small groups with professional facilitators and together work through their differences and draft and vote on recommendations.69

The innovation framework of your business is the premise of progress since the ability to maintain your business relies intensely upon innovation. Consequently, dependable IT support is vital for organizations in many ventures. The digital age is growing quickly. New businesses and more limited size organizations that don't have the right IT framework ought to consider the reality quickly. Benefits of IT support reevaluating While there are a bunch of benefits related to further developing your business reliance and utilization of advancements, you could exploit the accompanying benefits with outsourced IT support services in Wisconsin. By reevaluating IT services, organizations can set aside sufficient opportunity and cash. Profitability Re-appropriating company's IT support and IT needs are considerably more savvy contrasted with utilizing a group of prepared experts. It implies that you won't need to change your business innovation foundation or disturb your income just to keep up with specialized norms within your business. You can exploit a few advantageous IT-related services for a somewhat sensible charge. Direct spotlight on business development Maintaining a business and discovering arrangements that encourage development is justifiably difficult. Notwithstanding outsourced IT support services would permit you to divert your concentration to center business works that will at last guide development, diminishing dangers and the possibility of zeroing in on the company' score activity. Lower the dangers Other than this, your business will likewise be in less danger of functional vacation as you have a group of specialists to help your business. There are many benefits to re-appropriating IT support, particularly when you contrast the reevaluating arrangement with recruiting a group. In any case, it would be insightful to assess your alternatives while reevaluating and guarantee that the greatest support is given to the entirety of your IT needs, as various organizations will offer various types of assistance. Admittance to profoundly qualified specialists It would not be a sufficient answer for hazard utilizing profoundly prepared IT experts to keep up with your ideal specialized foundation. Additionally, you will be unable to deal with these issues all alone. Approaching a pool of exceptionally prepared IT experts who are accessible when you need them will benefit your business. Regardless of whether you can bear the cost of the expenses of utilizing a group of IT subject matter experts, you may struggle to find the right devoted staff, and recruiting a group would be a without a doubt tedious interaction. Recruiting outsourced IT services facilitates the business cycle and allows you to zero in on different activities. You don't have to deal with a group all alone.

In movement work, I have been facilitating groups to shift from a culture of strategic planning to one of strategic intentions—what are our intentions, informed by our vision? What do we need to be and do to bring our vision to pass? How do we bring those intentions to life throughout every change, in every aspect of our work?

The God of Israel modeled for us how to embed something in the memory of a group or peoplehood. When God instructed Moses in matters pertaining to the ongoing tutelage of Israel, he tells Moses the reason for the great “Song of Moses” that will follow in Deuteronomy 32. This song proclaimed God’s ways, his honor, his judgment, and his salvation. God wanted Israel to take this to heart, to hear it, to internalize it. So, he says, “Now write down this song and teach it to the Israelites and have them sing it [‘by heart’ MSG], so that it may be a witness for me against them” (Deut 31:19 NIV). They were to learn the song by heart. So, the song of Moses is in memorable poetry and was to be formally articulated in ways to facilitate memorization by the community. It was to be sung, oralized. But we note also that it was to be written down.324 The textual version of the poem was necessary for maintaining its permanence from generation to generation, to check its accuracy. Here we see the dynamic dialectic between the written word and the oralized word—the oralized word can be ephemeral, so must be preserved in writing. The written word is enduring but must be oralized.325

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…American men actually engage most in hunting and fishing. The desire of men in wealthy societies to re-create the food-gathering conditions of very primitive people appears to be an appropriate comment on the power of the hunting drives discussed earlier. Not only is hunting expensive in many places – think of the European on safari in Africa – but it is also time-consuming, potentially dangerous, and frequently involves considerable personal discomfort. Men do it because it is ‘fun’. So they say, and so one must conclude from their persistent rendition of the old pattern. What is relevant from our point of view is that hunting, and frequently fishing, are group activities. A man will choose his co-hunters very carefully. Not only does the relative intimacy of the hunt demand some congeniality, but there is also danger in hunting with inept or irresponsible persons. It is a serious matter, and even class barriers which normally operate quite rigidly may be happily breached for the period of the hunt. Some research on hunters in British Columbia suggests the near-piety which accompanies the hunt; hunting is a singular and important activity. One particular group of males takes along bottles of costly Crown Royal whisky for the hunt; they drink only superior whisky on this poignant re-creation of an ancient manly skill. But when their wives join them for New Year's celebrations, they drink an ordinary whisky: the purely formal and social occasion does not, it seems, merit the symbolic tribute of outstanding whisky. Gambling is another behaviour which, like hunting and sport, provides an opportunity in countless cultures for the weaving of and participation in the web of male affiliation. Not the gambling of the London casino, where glamorous women serve drinks, or the complex hope, greed, fate-tempting ritual, and action of the shiny American palaces in Nevada, and not the hidden gambling run by racketeers. Rather, the card games in homes or small clubs, where men gather to play for manageable stakes on a friendly basis; perhaps – like Jiggs and his Maggie – to avoid their women, perhaps to seek some money, perhaps to buy the pleasant passage of time. But also to be with their friends and talk, and define, by the game, the confines of their intimate male society. Obviously females play too, both on their own and in mixed company. But there are differences which warrant investigation, in the same way that the drinking of men in groups appears to differ from heterosexual or all-female drinking; the separation of all-male bars and mixed ones is still maintained in many places despite the powerful cultural pressures against such flagrant sexual apartheid. Even in the Bowery, where disaffiliated outcast males live in ways only now becoming understood, it has been noted that, ‘There are strong indications that the heavy drinkers are more integrated and more sociable than the light. The analytical problem lies in determining whether socialization causes drinking or drinking results in sociability when there is no disapproval.’ In the gentleman's club in London, the informally segregated working man's pub in Yorkshire, the all-male taverns of Montreal, the palm-wine huts of west Africa, perhaps can be observed the enactment of a way of establishing maleness and maintaining bonds which is given an excuse and possibly facilitated by alcohol. Certainly, for what they are worth in revealing the nature of popular conception of the social role of drinking, advertisements stress the manly appeal of alcohol – particularly whisky – though it is also clear that there are ongoing changes in the socio-sexual implications of drinking. But perhaps it is hasty to regard the process of change as a process of female emancipation which will culminate in similarity of behaviour, status, and ideals of males and females. The changes are still too recent to warrant this. Also, they have been achieved under sufficiently self-conscious pressure...

Adults with ADHD as a group have often experienced more than their fair share of disappointments and frustrations associated with the symptoms of ADHD, in many cases not realizing the impact of ADHD has had on them. When you reflect on a history of low grades, forgetting or not keeping promises made to others, repeated exhortations from others about your unfulfilled potential and the need to work harder, you may be left with a self-view that “I’m not good enough,” “I’m lazy,” or “I cannot expect much from myself and neither can anyone else.” The end result of these repeated frustrations can be the erosion of your sense of self, what is often called low self-esteem. These deep-seated, enduring self-views, or “core beliefs” about who you are can be thought of as a lens through which you see yourself, the world, and your place in the world. Adverse developmental experiences associated with ADHD may unfairly color your lens and result in a skewed pessimistic view of yourself, at least in some situations. When facing situations in the here-and-now that activate these negative beliefs, you experience strong emotions, negative thoughts, and a propensity to fall into self-defeating behaviors, most often resignation and escape. These core beliefs might only be activated in limited, specific situations for some people with ADHD; in other cases, these beliefs color one’s perception in most situations. It should be noted that many adults with ADHD, despite feeling flummoxed by their symptoms in many situations, possess a healthy self-view, though there may be many situations that briefly shake their confidence. These core beliefs or “schema” develop over the course of time from childhood through adulthood and reflect our efforts to figure out the “rules for life” (Beck, 1976; Young & Klosko, 1994). They can be thought of as mental categories that let us impose order on the world and make sense of it. Thus, as we grow up and face different situations, people, and challenges, we make sense of our situations and relationships and learn the rubrics for how the world works. The capacity to form schemas and to organize experience in this way is very adaptive. For the most part, these processes help us figure out, adapt to, and navigate through different situations encountered in life. In some cases, people develop beliefs and strategies that help them get through unusually difficult life circumstances, what are sometimes called survival strategies. These old strategies may be left behind as people settle into new, healthier settings and adopt and rely on “healthy rules.” In other cases, however, maladaptive beliefs persist, are not adjusted by later experiences (or difficult circumstances persist), and these schema interfere with efforts to thrive in adulthood. In our work with ADHD adults, particularly for those who were undiagnosed in childhood, we have heard accounts of negative labels or hurtful attributions affixed to past problems that become internalized, toughened, and have had a lasting impact. In many cases, however, many ADHD adults report that they arrived at negative conclusions about themselves based on their experiences (e.g., “None of my friends had to go to summer school.”). Negative schema may lay dormant, akin to a hibernating bear, but are easily reactivated in adulthood when facing similar gaffes or difficulties, including when there is even a hint of possible disappointment or failure. The function of these beliefs is self-protective—shock me once, shame on you; shock me twice, shame on me. However, these maladaptive beliefs insidiously trigger self-defeating behaviors that represent an attempt to cope with situations, but that end up worsening the problem and thereby strengthening the negative belief in a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle. Returning to the invisible fences metaphor, these beliefs keep you stuck in a yard that is too confining in order to avoid possible “shocks.

In his book-length review of the executive functions, Dr. Russell Barkley (2012) explored the reasons that these skills evolved in humans in the first place. He makes the compelling case that it was the selection pressures associated with humans living in larger groups of genetically unrelated individuals, which made it selectively advantageous to have good self-regulation skills. That is, these abilities became more important to survival as humans became more interdependent with and reliant on dealings with people who were not family. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and executive dysfunction continue to have effects on the myriad relationships and social interactions in daily life. These connections include romantic and committed relationships/marriage, relationships with parents, siblings, children, and other relatives, friendships, and interactions with employers, coworkers, and customers. The executive functions in relationships also figure in the capacity for empathy and tracking social debt, that is, the balance of favors you owe others and favors owed to you. The ability to effectively organize behavior across time in goal-directed activities gains you “social collateral.” That is, the more you deliver on promises and projects, the more that you will be sought out by others and maintain bonds with them. Some of the common manifestations of ADHD and executive dysfunction that may create problems in relationships include: • Distractibility during conversations • Forgetfulness about matters relevant to another person • Verbal impulsivity—talking over someone else • Verbal impulsivity—saying the “wrong thing” • Breaking promises (acts of commission, e.g., making an expensive purchase despite agreeing to stay within a household budget) • Poor follow-through on promises (acts of omission, e.g., forget to pick up dry cleaning) • Disregarding the effects of one’s behavior on others (e.g., building up excessive debt on a shared credit card account) • Poor frustration tolerance, anger (e.g., overreacting to children’s behavior) • Lying to cover up mistakes • Impulsive behaviors that reduce trust (e.g., romantic infidelity)

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

To facilitate the exchange of direct and reflected knowledge among virtual team members, leaders must proactively create a group culture for virtual interactions not explicitly related to work tasks.

5. Question Ball Give each person a full sheet of blank paper. Ask everyone to write a question that they have on the paper. Ask them to print their question so someone else can easily read it and to not sign their name. Have them ball up the paper. You can then collect the question balls in a bucket and redistribute them by throwing one to every person in the class. Or if the group needs a physical energizer, you can ask them to stand up and have a snowball fight with the question balls, seeing how many people they can hit in 30 seconds. Then, at a signal, ask everyone to pick up a ball, open it, and use any person or resource in the room to help answer the question on it. After a few minutes, ask everyone to read their question to the class and give its answer. The facilitator and the other learners can comment as necessary.

Secret #1 The Fundamental Secret of Facilitation You can achieve more effective results when solutions are created, understood, and accepted by the people impacted.

For some time now, the conventional wisdom at most agencies has been to partner with experts in specific fields—social networking, gaming, mobile, or any other discipline—in order to “get the best people for the job.” But given the success of AKQA, R/GA, and so many other innovators, perhaps it can be argued that to be truly holistic in our approach, it’s better to grow innovations from one’s own stem cells, so to speak, than to try to graft on capabilities on an ad-hoc basis. Some would no doubt argue that it makes the most economic sense to hire experts to execute as needed, rather than taking on more overhead in an increasingly competitive marketplace. But it should be pointed out that it’s hard to have the original ideas themselves if your own team doesn’t have a firm grasp of the technologies. Without a cross-disciplinary team of in-house experts, who knows what opportunities you—and by extension, your clients—may miss. “It comes down to the brains that you have working with you to make it a reality,” John Butler, cofounder of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, tells me. “The history of the ad agency is the Bernbach model—the writer and art director sitting in a room together coming up with an idea,” he says, referring to legendary adman Bill Bernbach, cofounder of DDB and the man who first combined copywriters and art directors as two-person teams. Now, all that’s changed. “[Today, there are] fifteen people sitting in a room. Media is as much a part of the creative department as a writer or an art director. And we have account planners—we call them ‘connection planners’—in the room throwing around ideas,” he says. “That facilitates getting to work that is about the experience, about ways to compel consumers to interact with your brand in a way that they become like free media” by actively promoting the brand for you. If his team worked on the old Bernbach model, Butler adds, they would never have created something like those cool MINI billboards that display messages to drivers by name that I described in the last chapter. The idea actually spun out of a discussion about 3-D glasses for print ads. “Someone in the interactive group said, ‘We can probably do that same thing with [radio frequency identification] technology.’” By using transmitters built into the billboards, and building RFID chips into MINI key fobs, “when a person drives by, it will recognize him and it will spit out a message just for him.” He adds with considerable understatement: “Through having those capabilities, in-house engineers, technical guys who know the technology and what’s available, we were able to create something that was really pretty cool.

[T]he existing sovereign national states are mostly of such dimensions and composition to render possible agreement on an amount of state interference which they would not suffer if they were either much smaller or much larger. . .Planning, or central direction of economic activity, presupposes the existence of common ideals and common values; and the degree to which planning can be carried is limited by the extent to which agreement on such a common scale can be obtained or enforced. It is clear that such agreement will be limited in inverse proportion to the homogeneity and the similarity in outlook and tradition possessed by the inhabitants of an area. Although, in the national state, the submission to the will of a majority will be facilitated by the myth of nationality, it must be clear that people will be reluctant to submit to any interference in their daily affairs when the majority which directs the government is composed of people of different nationalities and different traditions. It is, after all, only common sense that the central government in a federation composed of many different people will have to be restricted in scope if it is to avoid meeting an increasing resistance on the part of the various groups which it includes. . .There seems to be little possible doubt that the scope for the regulation of economic life will be much narrower for the central government of a federation than for national states. (Hayek 1948: 264–5, footnote omitted)

+   Small groups are not necessarily the most significant way to help people grow in relationship to God and to one another. +   People connect in all four spaces, not in just one or two. +   Community happens spontaneously. +   We can facilitate environments that help people connect.

Recommended Reading Lyssa Adkins in her book Coaching Agile Teams describes the responsibilities and working methods for the agile coach. She provides details on the skills, techniques, and methods an agile coach can use to develop into a seasoned mentor and coach. Jean Tabaka in her book Collaboration Explained describes the content, structure, techniques, and tools for executing collaborative events. Kaner et al. offer practical advice on facilitating decision-making in their book the Dynamics of Group Decision-Making.

The session director is a facilitator, not a guide in the sense that the term has been used in this book up until now. To be credible and knowledgeable and capable of running a session, a facilitator may be a scientist or engineer, should have some general psychedelic experience, and have been a participant in one or more sessions devoted to creative problem solving. Everyone who will be a facilitator should also be at any pre-session meetings of the group. The facilitator’s responsibility is to keep the group focused. If during the morning, a participant is weeping or agitated, a facilitator may reassure the person by holding his or her hand, but should not discuss or interpret what is being experienced, if possible. The goal is to help the participant back into a state of attentive relaxation.

IF THEY CAN’T be their Monday-through-Saturday-self when they are with you in group, they will have a hard time applying their faith in everyday situations. IF THEY CAN’T share their doubts in community, they will dwell on them privately. IF THEY CAN’T ask you their questions, they are going to ask someone else. IF THEY DON’T admit their struggles to someone, they will never experience the power of bringing things to light in a way that facilitates freedom and forgiveness.

Note, however, that a community’s supply of social rewards is limited, so we’re often competing to show more loyalty than others—to engage in a “holier than thou” arms race. And this leads, predictably, to the kind of extreme displays and exaggerated features we find across the biological world. If the Hajj seems extravagant, remember the peacock’s tail or the towering redwoods. But note, crucially, that sacrifice isn’t a zero-sum game; there are big benefits that accrue to the entire community. All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior.38 The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.39 Today, we facilitate trust between strangers using contracts, credit scores, and letters of reference. But before these institutions had been invented, weekly worship and other costly sacrifices were a vital social technology. In 1000 a.d., church attendance was a pretty good (though imperfect) way to gauge whether someone was trustworthy. You’d be understandably wary of your neighbors who didn’t come to church, for example, because they’re not “paying their dues” to the community. Society can’t trust you unless you put some skin in the game.

The week before Notes Day, all facilitators attended a training session to help them keep each meeting on track and make sure that everyone—the outgoing, the laid-back, and everyone in between—was heard from. Then, to make sure something concrete emerged, the Working Group designed a set of “exit forms” to be filled out by each session’s participants. Red forms were for proposals, blue forms were for brainstorms, and yellow forms were for something we called “best practices”—ideas that were not action items per se but principles about how we should behave as a company. The forms were simple and specific: Each session got its own set, tailored specifically to the topic at hand, that asked a specific question. For example, the session called “Returning to a ‘Good Ideas Come from Anywhere’ Culture,” had blue exit forms topped with this header: Imagine it’s 2017. We’ve broken down barriers so that people feel safe to speak up. Senior employees are open to new processes. What did we do to achieve this success? Underneath that question were boxes in which attendees could pencil in three answers. Then, after they wrote a general description of each idea, they were asked to go a few steps further. What “Benefits to Pixar” would these ideas bring? And what should be the “Next Steps” to make them a reality? Finally, there was space provided to specify “Who is the best audience for this idea?” and “Who should pitch this idea?

• Launched Real Time Talent, one of the most innovative workforce development initiatives in the country. It links the curriculum and training for more than four hundred thousand postsecondary students with the skill requirements of employers in the state (RealTimeTalentMN.org). • Created the Business Bridge, which facilitates connections between the procurement functions of large corporations and smaller potential suppliers located in the region. As a result of this effort, participating businesses added more than $1 billion to their spending with local businesses in two years—a year ahead of their goal. • Helped to build the case for investing more aggressively in higher education. By strengthening relationships between business and higher education leaders, and using a fact-based set of findings to justify investing more than an incremental amount, a coalition organized by Itasca helped increase spending in the state by more than $250 million annually. That’s not bad for a group of people with no budget, no office, no charter, virtually no Internet presence, virtually no staff—but a huge abundance of trust.

In addressing a subcommittee of the National Science Board (it oversees the National Science Foundation) charged with reviewing “transformational” science, he remarked: My colleagues and I have studied approximately 175 research organizations on both sides of the Atlantic, and in many respects the Santa Fe Institute is the ideal type of organization which facilitates creative thinking. And here’s a quote from Wired magazine: Since its founding in 1984, the nonprofit research center has united top minds from diverse fields to study cellular biology, computer networks, and other systems that underlie our lives. The patterns they’ve discovered have illuminated some of the most pressing issues of our time and, along the way, served as the basis for what’s now called the science of complexity. The institute was originally conceived by a small group of distinguished scientists, including several Nobel laureates, most of whom had some association with Los Alamos National Laboratory. They were concerned that the academic landscape had become so dominated by disciplinary stovepiping and specialization that many of the big questions, and especially those that transcend disciplines or were perhaps of a societal nature, were being ignored. The reward system for obtaining an academic position, for gaining promotion or tenure, for securing grants from federal agencies or private foundations, and even for being elected to a national academy, was becoming more and more tied to demonstrating that you were the expert in some tiny corner of some narrow subdiscipline. The freedom to think or speculate about some of the bigger questions and broader issues, to take a risk or be a maverick, was not a luxury many could afford. It was not just “publish or perish,” but increasingly it was also becoming “bring in the big bucks or perish.

The wise leader does not intervene unnecessarily. The leader’s presence is felt, but often the group runs itself. Lesser leaders do a lot, say a lot, have followers, and form cults. Even worse ones use fear to energize the group and force to overcome resistance. Only the most dreadful leaders have bad reputations. Remember that you are facilitating another person’s process. It is not your process. Do not intrude. Do not control. Do not force your own needs and insights into the foreground. If you do not trust a person’s process, that person will not trust you.

Teams that commit to decisions and standards do so because they know how to embrace two separate but related concepts: buy-in and clarity. Buy-in is the achievement of honest emotional support. Clarity is the removal of assumptions and ambiguity from a situation. Commitment is about a group of intelligent, driven individuals buying in to a decision precisely when they don’t naturally agree. In other words, it’s the ability to defy a lack of consensus.

But perhaps most important of all, having too many people on a team makes team dynamics during meetings and other decision-making events almost impossible. That’s because a good team has to engage in two types of communication in order to optimize decision making, but only one of these is practical in a large group. According to Harvard’s Chris Argyris, those two types of communication are advocacy and inquiry. Basically, advocacy is the statement of ideas and opinions; inquiry is the asking of questions for clarity and understanding. When a group gets too large, people realize they are not going to get the floor back any time soon, so they resort almost exclusively to advocacy. It becomes like Congress (which is not designed to be a team) or the United Nations (ditto).

Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, and others would later use their power in ways that would have made my father throw up. Dad could hardly have imagined how they would help facilitate the instantly corrupted power-crazy new generation of evangelical public figures like Ralph Reed, who took money from the casino industry while allegedly playing both sides against the middle in events related to the Abramoff Washington lobbyist scandal. And after 9/11, the public got a glimpse of the anti-American self-righteous venom that was always just under the surface of the evangelical right. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others declared that the attack on America was a punishment from God. And after the war in Iraq began, some loony group of fundamentalists started picketing the funerals of killed soldiers and screaming at bereaved fathers and mothers that God was punishing “faggot America.” What they shouted openly was what the leaders of the religious right were usually too smart to state so bluntly, but it is what they had often said in private. What

Ritualistic abuse refers to organised abuse that is structured in a ceremonial fashion, often incorporating religious or mythological iconography (McFadyen et al. 1993). The ritualistic activity is typically structured by 'deviant scriptualism', in which abusive groups parody traditional religious symbols and ritual practices (Kent 1993a, 1993b). The majority of cases of ritualistic abuse involve female victims and facilitation by parents (Creighton 1993, Gallagher et al. 1996), although early research on sexual abuse in child-care arrangements emphasised the presence of ritualistic abuse in some cases (Finkelhor and Williams 1988, Waterman et al. 1993).

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Let me take you back in time a little,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, an elegant woman in a beige and pale blue wrap. She’s the director of the Center for Science and Environment, a group that’s played a leading role in the years of battles over air quality. In the 1990s, she tells me, Delhi’s air was so bad “you couldn’t go out in the city without your eyes watering.” India had no regulations on vehicles or fuel, so despite advances elsewhere in the world, engines here hadn’t improved for 40 years, and fuel quality was abysmal. It was the activist Supreme Court that changed that. Its judges started issuing orders, and from 1998 to about 2003, a series of important new rules came into force. Polluting industries were pushed out of the city, auto-rickshaws and buses were converted to CNG, and emission limits for vehicles were introduced, then tightened. “These were pretty big steps,” Roychowdhury says, and they brought results. “If you plot the graph of particulate matter in Delhi, you will see after 2002 the levels actually coming down.” The public noticed. “I still remember the 2004 Assembly elections in Delhi, where the political parties were actually fighting with each other to take credit for the cleaner air. It had become an electoral issue.” So how did things go so wrong? The burst of activity petered out, and rapid growth in car ownership erased the improvements that had been won. “If you look at the pollution levels again from 2008 and ’09 onwards, you now see a steady increase,” Roychowdhury says. “We could not keep the momentum going.” Indeed, particulate levels jumped 75 percent in just a few years.14 Even the action that was taken, she believes, “was too little. We had to do a lot more, more aggressively.” Part of the reason government stopped pushing, Roychowdhury believes, is that the moves needed next would have had to address Delhiites’ growing fondness for cars, so would surely have prompted public anger. “There is a hidden subsidy for all of us who use cars today,” she says. “We barely pay anything in terms of parking charges, we barely pay anything in terms of road taxes. It is so easy to buy a car because of easy loans. So there is absolutely no disincentive.” About 80 percent of transportation spending is focused on drivers, even though they’re only about 15 percent of Delhiites. “The entire infrastructure of the city is getting redesigned to facilitate car movement, but not people’s movement.

Everybody brainstorms; therefore, brainstorming is good. But does it work? Claims about the success of brainstorming rest on easily tested assumptions. One assumption is that groups produce more ideas than individuals. Researchers in Minnesota tested this with scientists and advertising executives from the 3M Company. Half the subjects worked in groups of four. The other half worked alone, and then their results were randomly combined as if they had worked in a group, with duplicate ideas counted only once. In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher quality, too: independent judges assessed the work and found that the individuals produced better ideas than the groups. Follow-up research tested whether larger groups performed any better. In one study, 168 people were either divided into teams of five, seven, or nine or asked to work individually. The research confirmed that working individually is more productive than working in groups. It also showed that productivity decreases as group size increases. The conclusion: “Group brainstorming, over a wide range of group sizes, inhibits rather than facilitates creative thinking.” The groups produced fewer and worse results because they were more likely to get fixated on one idea and because, despite all exhortations to the contrary, some members felt inhibited and refrained from full participation. Another assumption of brainstorming is that suspending judgment is better than assessing ideas as they appear. Researchers in Indiana tested this by asking groups of students to think of brand names for three different products. Half of the groups were told to refrain from criticism and half were told to criticize as they went along. Once again, independent judges assessed the quality of each idea. The groups that did not stop to criticize produced more ideas, but both groups produced the same number of good ideas. Deferring criticism added only bad ideas. Subsequent studies have reinforced this. Research into brainstorming has a clear conclusion. The best way to create is to work alone and evaluate solutions as they occur. The worst way to create is to work in large groups and defer criticism. Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs’s cofounder at Apple and the inventor of its first computer, offers the same advice: “Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.

The Paradox of Pushing Too much force will backfire. Constant interventions and instigations will not make a good group. They will spoil a group. The best group process is delicate. It cannot be pushed around. It cannot be argued over or won in a fight. The leader who tries to control the group through force does not understand group process. Force will cost you the support of the members. Leaders who push think that they are facilitating process, when in fact they are blocking process. They think that they are building a good group field, when in fact they are destroying its coherence and creating factions. They think that their constant interventions are a measure of ability, when in fact such interventions are crude and inappropriate. They think that their leadership position gives them absolute authority, when in fact their behavior diminishes respect. The wise leader stays centered and grounded and uses the least force required to act effectively. The leader avoids egocentricity and emphasizes being rather than doing.

Three factors greatly facilitated the emergence of more inclusive political institutions following the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution. The first was new merchants and businessmen wishing to unleash the power of creative destruction from which they themselves would benefit; these new men were among the key members of the revolutionary coalitions and did not wish to see the development of yet another set of extractive institutions that would again prey on them. The second was the nature of the broad coalition that had formed in both cases. For example, the Glorious Revolution wasn’t a coup by a narrow group or a specific narrow interest, but a movement backed by merchants, industrialists, the gentry, and diverse political groupings. The same was largely true for the French Revolution. The third factor relates to the history of English and French political institutions. They created a background against which new, more inclusive regimes could develop. In both countries there was a tradition of parliaments and power sharing going back to the Magna Carta in England and to the Assembly of Notables in France. Moreover, both revolutions happened in the midst of a process that had already weakened the grasp of the absolutist, or aspiring absolutist, regimes. In neither case would these political institutions make it easy for a new set of rulers or a narrow group to take control of the state and usurp existing economic wealth and build unchecked and durable political power.

Harsh Interventions There are times when it seems as if one must intervene powerfully, suddenly, and even harshly. The wise leader does this only when all else fails. As a rule, the leader feels more wholesome when the group process is flowing freely and unfolding naturally, when delicate facilitations far outnumber harsh interventions. Harsh interventions are a warning that the leader may be uncentered or have an emotional attachment to whatever is happening. A special awareness is called for. Even if harsh interventions succeed brilliantly, there is no cause for celebration. There has been injury. Someone’s process has been violated. Later on, the person whose process has been violated may well become less open and more defended. There will be a deeper resistance and possibly even resentment. Making people do what you think they ought to do does not lead toward clarity and consciousness. While they may do what you tell them to do at the time, they will cringe inwardly, grow confused, and plot revenge. That is why your victory is actually a failure.

Kaleidoscope Yoga: The universal heart and the individual self. We, as humanity, make up together a mosaic of beautiful colors and shapes that can harmoniously play together in endless combinations. We are an ever-changing play of shape and form. A kaleidoscope consists of a tube (or container), mirrors, pieces of glass (or beads or precious stones), sunlight, and someone to turn it and observe and enjoy the forms. Metaphorically, perhaps the sun represents the divine light, or spark of life, within all of us. The mirrors represent our ability to serve as mirrors for one another and each other’s alignment, reflecting sides of ourselves that we may not have been aware of. The tube (or container) is the practice of community yoga. We, as human beings, are the glass, the beads, the precious stones. The facilitator is the person turning the Kaleidoscope, initiating the changing patterns. And the resulting beauty of the shapes? Well, that’s for everyone to enjoy... Coming into a practice and an energy field of community yoga over and over, is a practice of returning, again and again, to the present moment, to the person in front of you, to the people around you, to your body, to others’ bodies, to your energy, to others’ energy, to your breath, to others’ breath. [...] community yoga practice can help us, in a very real, practical, grounded, felt, somatic way, to identify and be in harmony with all that is around us, which includes all of our fellow human beings.
 We are all multiple selves. We are all infinite. We are all universal selves. We are all unique expressions of the universal heart and universal energy. We are all the universal self. We are all one another. And we are all also unique specific individuals. And to the extent that we practice this, somatically, we become more and more comfortable and fluid with this larger, more cosmic, more inter-related reality. We see and feel and breathe ourselves, more and more, as the open movement of energy, as open somatic possibility. As energy and breath. This is one of the many benefits of a community yoga practice. Kaleidoscope shows us, in a very practical way, how to allow universal patterns of wisdom and interconnectedness to filter through us. [...] One of the most interesting paradoxes I have encountered during my involvement with the community yoga project (and it is one that I have felt again and again, too many times to count) is the paradox that many of the most infinite, universal forms have come to me in a place of absolute solitude, silence, deep aloneness or meditation. And, similarly, conversely and complimentarily, (best not to get stuck on the words) I have often found myself in the midst of a huge crowd or group of people of seamlessly flowing forms, and felt simultaneously, in addition to the group energy, the group shape, and the group awareness, myself as a very cleanly and clearly defined, very particular, individual self. These moments and discoveries and journeys of group awareness, in addition to the sense of cosmic expansion, have also clarified more strongly my sense of a very specific, rooted, personal self. The more deeply I dive into the universal heart, the more clearly I see my own place in it. And the more deeply I tune in and connect with my own true personal self, the more open and available I am to a larger, more universal self. We are both, universal heart and universal self. Individual heart and individual self. We are, or have the capacity for, or however you choose to put it, simultaneous layers of awareness. Learning to feel and navigate and mediate between these different kinds and layers of awareness is one of the great joys of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga, and of life in general. Come join us, and see what that feels like, in your body, again and again. From the Preface of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga: The Art of Connecting: The First 108 Poses

Fun With all the pedagogical goals involved in a course, it’s easy to forget that the class can still be fun. On the first day of class, Bill states, as an explicit goal, that he wants everyone to look forward to coming to class each week. Well-facilitated case discussions are engaging and often punctuated by humor. Even if your personal style is on the somber side, you can still encourage participants to enjoy coming to class and emphasize that you personally look forward to class, too. If you tend to be unexpressive when you speak, then say in words how excited you are to be in this class with this group.

race talk between several individuals does not occur in isolation from other observers or students; although other participants may not have actively engaged in the dialogue, they are usually vicariously involved. By shutting down the communication between two individuals, it shuts down the entire group process.

If there is anything that can be termed White culture, it is the synthesis of ideas, values, and beliefs coalesced from descendants of White European ethnic groups in the United States (Barongan et al., 1997).

Although most White immigrant groups were confronted with prejudice and oppression when first arriving in America, their experiences in the United States have been qualitatively different than the experiences of people of color (Takaki, 1998). In a significant way, European immigrants over the past century and racial minorities face opposite cultural problems. The new Europeans were seen as not American enough, and they were pressured to give up their strange and threatening ways and to assimilate. While it might take several generations, the offspring that were successful in this process could usually expect to become accepted citizens.

Second, there is something insidiously pathological about the melting pot concept in its assumption that groups should assimilate. Wehrly states, “Cultural assimilation, as practiced in the United States, is the expectation by the people in power that all immigrants and people outside the dominant group will give up their ethnic and cultural values and will adopt the values and norms of the dominant society—the White, male Euro-Americans” (1995, p. 5). Many psychologists of color, however, have referred to this process as cultural genocide, an outcome of colonial thought (Guthrie, 1997; Thomas & Sillen, 1972).

The myth of the melting pot is predicated on several false assumptions: (a) a receptive society, (b) an equal status relationship between culturally different groups, and (c) its morally and politically neutral character. In reality, the melting pot is used to mask White supremacy and White privilege (topics, as we have seen, that impede race talk).

people of color is a necessary condition to dispel stereotypes and fears (Allport, 1954; APA Presidential Task Force, 2012; J. M. Jones, 1997). Ironically, White Americans are most likely to have contact with people of color who represent only a narrow spectrum of the group—those who have gotten into trouble with society or who need special help.

allegations of playing the race card and the pressures of political correctness are games of verbal jujitsu used by dominant group members to portray and redefine White talk as the silenced, oppressed, and dissenting voice, while back talk is portrayed as the untouchable incorrect stance that needs to be challenged.

Flexible organizational structures, in which teams across functions or disciplines organize around solutions, can facilitate good connections. Media conglomerate Publicis has “holistic communication” teams, which combine people across its ad agencies (Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Publicis Worldwide, and so on) and technology groups to focus on customers and brands. Novartis has organized around diseases, with R&D more closely connected to markets and customers; this has helped the company introduce pathbreaking innovations faster, such as its cancer drug Gleevec. The success of Seagate’s companywide Factory of the Future team at introducing seemingly miraculous process innovations led to widespread use of its core-teams model.

Simply go to Google and click on the Google image tab. Once there, choose various words at random. We might put in “squid” and then look at all the pictures the word squid generates. Print out one or two images generated by the word squid. Then pick another word at random such as “architect.” Pick two images under the architect category and print them out as well. After you go through a series of ten random words and have printed pictures, these are used as a Random Stimulation exercise. Here’s how it would work in a group setting. We would say to the group, “We are currently trying to figure out a way of increasing sales and revenue” (from the bowling ball company example). Now we ask the group to set that problem aside and look at a stack of random images. When looking at the images the group members are only to say what those images remind them of, as a facilitator writes down the phrases and words they mention.

Managing the Neutral Zone: A Checklist Yes No   ___ ___ Have I done my best to normalize the neutral zone by explaining it as an uncomfortable time that (with careful attention) can be turned to everyone’s advantage? ___ ___ Have I redefined the neutral zone by choosing a new and more affirmative metaphor with which to describe it? ___ ___ Have I reinforced that metaphor with training programs, policy changes, and financial rewards for people to keep doing their jobs during the neutral zone? ___ ___ Am I protecting people adequately from inessential further changes? ___ ___ If I can’t protect them, am I clustering those changes meaningfully? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary policies and procedures that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary roles, reporting relationships, and organizational groupings that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I set short-range goals and checkpoints? ___ ___ Have I set realistic output objectives? ___ ___ Have I found the special training programs we need to deal successfully with the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I found ways to keep people feeling that they still belong to the organization and are valued by our part of it? And have I taken care that perks and other forms of “privilege” are not undermining the solidarity of the group? ___ ___ Have I set up one or more Transition Monitoring Teams to keep realistic feedback flowing upward during the time in the neutral zone? ___ ___ Are my people willing to experiment and take risks in intelligently conceived ventures—or are we punishing all failures? ___ ___ Have I stepped back and taken stock of how things are being done in my part of the organization? (This is worth doing both for its own sake and as a visible model for others’ similar efforts.) ___ ___ Have I provided others with opportunities to do the same thing? Have I provided them with the resources—facilitators, survey instruments, and so on—that will help them do that? ___ ___ Have I seen to it that people build their skills in creative thinking and innovation? ___ ___ Have I encouraged experimentation and seen to it that people are not punished for failing in intelligent efforts that do not pan out? ___ ___ Have I worked to transform the losses of our organization into opportunities to try doing things a new way? ___ ___ Have I set an example by brainstorming many answers to old problems—the ones that people say we just have to live with? Am I encouraging others to do the same? ___ ___ Am I regularly checking to see that I am not pushing for certainty and closure when it would be more conducive to creativity to live a little longer with uncertainty and questions? ___ ___ Am I using my time in the neutral zone as an opportunity to replace bucket brigades with integrated systems throughout the organization?

The idea that “chunking” input can have an effect on deeper circuits, as well as their description of complementary facilitative and inhibitory circuits, are directly relevant to neural dynamics underlying the Reaction Model that is predicated on interpretations of “grouped” stimulus input.

Because an organization’s structure and how its groups work together may have been established to facilitate the design of its dominant product, the direction of causality may ultimately reverse itself: The organization’s structure and the way its groups learn to work together can then affect the way it can and cannot design new products.

There is always that little voice in your head saying, “What about me?” Sometimes that little voice drowns out the cry of the team, and the collective results of the group get left behind.

organization and its ability to forecast the future. Within every organization are people whose dominant characteristic is either creativity or logic. If you’ve been on a team that includes both groups and didn’t have a great facilitator during your meetings, you probably clashed.

Some who study self-deception, denial, etc. believe these are healthy practices if they facilitate our happiness without infringing on the happiness of our fellows. They speak of self-deception, denial, etc. as “useful fictions” or “positive illusions” and ballyhoo them as staples for both the individual and society. (For his book Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception [1996], Daniel Goleman studied how people and groups play along with factitious designs to scotch the animus and anxiety that would be loosed if an etiquette of honesty were somehow enforced.)

if you are consistently afraid of groups, perhaps you are either too ambitious and want to save everyone, or think that you must be managing the situations at hand. In this case, it may be helpful to remember that if you want to do too much, you will have to depend on using your own power, and that dependence will exhaust you and make you uncertain. We do not need leaders who can change the world because of their personal power, because change is inherent in people and nature. Our communities, however, need our essential selves and our awareness, not our power, to notice and track such changes. Our world needs our awareness of the roles, themes, and feelings we experience. Insecurity occurs if we push to succeed. Let nature help with the work. We do not need more of the standard kind of leaders, but instead are looking for sensitive facilitators with moment-to-moment awareness.

Nutritional Yeast (2 tsp) Two teaspoons of baker’s, brewer’s, or nutritional yeast contains roughly the amount of beta 1,3/1,6 glucans found in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials to facilitate weight loss. Cumin (Cuminum cyminum) (½ tsp with lunch and dinner) Overweight women randomized to add a half teaspoon of cumin to their lunches and dinners beat out the control group by four more pounds and an extra inch off their waists. There is also evidence to support the use of the spice saffron, but a pinch a day would cost a dollar, whereas a teaspoon of cumin costs less than ten cents. Green Tea (3 cups) Drink three cups a day between meals (waiting at least an hour after a meal so as to not interfere with iron absorption). During meals, drink water, black coffee, or hibiscus tea mixed 6:1 with lemon verbena, but never exceed three cups of fluid an hour (important given my water preloading advice). Take advantage of the reinforcing effect of caffeine by drinking your green tea along with something healthy you wish you liked more, but don’t consume large amounts of caffeine within six hours of bedtime. Taking your tea without sweetener is best, but if you typically sweeten your tea with honey or sugar, try yacon syrup instead.

expecting those with rank to recognize their unconsciousness means asking that they be of a higher spiritual and intellectual caliber than the rest of the participants. While this demand seems, at first, to be warranted, it usually meets with resistance because those with rank experience themselves as being oppressed, first, by the participants who are criticizing them, then by the facilitators. The people who revolt against rank are, in the moment of attack, not only victims, but also powerful in a sort of spiritual way. They feel empowered by their quest for “justice.” Like those who provoked them, however, they are often unconscious of their power. Victims don’t automatically deserve halos.

Shervin Pishevar’s other star investment, Uber, was embroiled in its own case about whether it was as humble and powerless as it claimed. A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance. Because the drivers had signed that agreement, they had blocked the easy path to being employees. But under the law, if they could prove that a company had pervasive, ongoing power over them as they did their work, they could still qualify as employees. To be a contractor is to give up certain protections and benefits in exchange for independence, and thus that independence must be genuine. The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age. It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” Judge Chhabria similarly cited and tore down Lyft’s claim to be “an uninterested bystander of sorts, merely furnishing a platform that allows drivers and riders to connect.” He wrote: Lyft concerns itself with far more than simply connecting random users of its platform. It markets itself to customers as an on-demand ride service, and it actively seeks out those customers. It gives drivers detailed instructions about how to conduct themselves. Notably, Lyft’s own drivers’ guide and FAQs state that drivers are “driving for Lyft.” Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one.

The principle of optimal distinctiveness: we look for ways to fit in and stand out. A popular way to achieve optimal distinctiveness is to join a unique group.... Studies show that people identify more strongly with individuals and groups that share unique similarities. The more rare a group, value, interest, skill, or experience is, the more likely it is to facilitate a bond. And research indicates that people are happier in groups that provide optimal distinctiveness.

In that year, in Moscow, a ministerial conference of the Group of Eight (G-8) countries on combating transnational organized crime stated that the ministers had “agreed to consider putting certain responsibilities, as appropriate, on those professionals, such as lawyers, accountants, company formation agents, auditors, and other financial intermediaries who can either block or facilitate the entry of organized crime money into the financial system.”45 The 2003 revisions to the Forty Recommendations of the FATF implement the G8’s “Gatekeeper” initiative by extending basic AML/CFT prevention requirements, including the reporting requirements, with some qualifications, to a list of “designated non-financial businesses and professions” that includes casinos; real estate agents; dealers in precious metals and precious stones; lawyers, notaries, and other independent professionals and accountants in certain defined circumstances; and trust and company service providers.

Why is race talk difficult between and among people of color? Why are some people of color hesitant to address interracial/interethnic differences? These are questions often asked privately by groups of color, but seldom publicly discussed for fear of negative consequences and the destruction of political unity (Orbe et al., 2013; Sue & Sue, 2013).

while the politeness protocol, the academic protocol, and the color-blind protocol serve as ground rules that prevent race talk by Whites, the commandments (a) “Thou shall not air dirty laundry in public” and (b) “Thou shall not speak ill of one another and destroy group unity” are equally powerful forces preventing people of color from honestly dialoguing about their thoughts and feelings toward one another.

For too long the various fields of knowledge have been closed to the majority of people, because of knowledge barriers (such as entrance exams), financial barriers (tuition), class barriers (guilds, unions, and directors of admission), language barriers (each group adopting its own arcane terminology with the supposed purpose of facilitating communication among members but with the effects being a rebuff to the uninitiated). These obstacles are undemocratic in that they do not let an individual have free access to knowledge that society has collected — our common inheritance, the greatest store of wealth to which we are all heirs. Such barriers have resulted in an elite group that understands and a mass of outsiders who are excluded from knowledge. For example, in earlier times the Bible was only available in Latin or Greek and accessible exclusively to priests and scholars. That exclusivity is kept alive today in the medical profession. There are innumerable, hidden psychological and social pressures that keep people from being free to explore the constructive use of their hands and minds. Because of artificial limitations on who shall know, society fails to reap the knowledge, the productivity, and the peace and well-being that come from universal participation. In a very real sense, we are hoarding our wealth rather than investing it in the best blue chip stock on the market — human ability.

It may be helpful to identify a cultural guide; someone willing to help the person understand his or her racial/cultural group; someone willing to introduce the person to new experiences; someone willing to help process one's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

To understand the dilemma faced by people of color in race talk we must first become aware of (a) the situational context of oppression that they live under, (b) the ensuing psychological costs associated with racism, and (c) the negative personal and group consequences for breaking their silence.

In a racial dialogue, communication style differences may not only portray the behaviors of socially marginalized groups as inferior and undesirable, but may trigger stereotypes from Whites of the angry, hostile, and violent Black man or woman. Likewise the reticent, subtle, and quiet communication style of Asian Americans may be seen by Whites as being passive, inhibited, unfeeling, and guarded. Among traditional Asian culture, however, indirectness and subtlety in expressing oneself are seen as signs of maturity, wisdom, and appropriateness.

These organizational policies and practices may appear neutral and nondiscriminatory in nature because they are applied to everyone equally, but their effects are to disadvantage certain groups while advantaging others.

all groups hold stereotypes, biases, and prejudices and can on an individual level discriminate against one another: People of color can discriminate against Whites and even against one another. But not all groups hold the power to impose their values and lifestyles on others, and thus hypothetically cannot oppress on a broader level. Many multicultural scholars contend that racism is about institutional power, a form of power that people of color just do not possess (APA Presidential Task Force, 2012; J. M. Jones, 1997; Sue & Sue, 2013).

Becoming aware of the customs and contradictions of the dominant group is a coping mechanism that maximizes survival.

Racial dialogues are microcosms of race relations in the United States; reenact the biases, prejudices, and stereotypes of the wider society; invalidate and punish dissenting voices; and force compliance on groups of color.

claims of reverse racism especially on topics of affirmative action allow majority group members (Whites) to turn the tables on their accusers by implying they are now the ones being discriminated against. Although this flies in the face of all economic, educational, and employment data (APA Presidential Task Force, 2012; J. M. Jones, 1997), the focus of the debate now becomes one of portraying White Americans as the victims.

The findings suggest that the teachers should relax their control and allow the students more freedom to choose their own topics so as to generate more opportunities for them to participate in classroom interaction. Doing so might foster a classroom culture that is more open to students’ desire to explore the language and topics that do not necessarily conform to the rigid bounds of the curriculum and limited personal perspectives of the teachers (2010: 19). At the same time, this assumes a common denominator of shared community, a community of practice in which the learners all feel themselves to be members, with the rights and duties that such membership entails. This means the teacher needs to work, initially, on creating – and then sustaining – a productive classroom dynamic. Managing groups – including understanding, registering and facilitating their internal workings – is probably one of the teacher’s most important functions. But, whatever the classroom dynamic, there will still be learners who feel an acute threat to ‘face’ at the thought of speaking in another language. It’s not just a question of making mistakes, it’s the ‘infantilization’ associated with speaking in a second language – the sense that one’s identity is threatened because of an inability to manage and fine-tune one’s communicative intentions. As Harder (1980) argues, ‘the learner is not free to define his [sic] place in the ongoing [L2] interaction as he would like; he has to accept a role which is less desirable than he could ordinarily achieve’. Or, as he more memorably puts it: ‘In order to be a wit in a foreign language you have to go through the stage of being a half-wit – there is no other way.

most people, including Whites, perceive racial relationships as binary: Black–White only (Pew Research Center, 2012). So, when matters of prejudice or discrimination are brought up for discussion, other groups of color, such as Asian Americans, Latina/o Americans, and Native Americans, often feel left out of the dialogue and rendered invisible (B. S. K. Kim, 2011; Takaki, 1998).

Liberation is to life in all its fullness, meaning the fullest possible developments of people’s gifts and potentialities. Liberation is for enabling people to grow in their own wholeness but also become facilitators of wholeness in widening circles of outreach in a society suffering from multiple oppressions producing pandemic brokenness. Liberation is from the many forces in individuals, relationships, groups, and social institutions that foster brokenness and diminished wholeness for countless people.

Perhaps most centrally, the blockchain is an information technology. But blockchain technology is also many other things. The blockchain as decentralization is a revolutionary new computing paradigm. The blockchain is the embedded economic layer the Web never had. The blockchain is the coordination mechanism, the line-item attribution, credit, proof, and compensation rewards tracking schema to encourage trustless participation by any intelligent agent in any collaboration. The blockchain “is a decentralized trust network.”194 The blockchain is Hayek’s multiplicity of private complementary currencies for which there could be as many currencies as Twitter handles and blogs, all fully useful and accepted in their own hyperlocal contexts, and where Communitycoin issuance can improve the cohesion and actualization of any group. The blockchain is a cloud venue for transnational organizations. The blockchain is a means of offering personalized decentralized governance services, sponsoring literacy, and facilitating economic development. The blockchain is a tool that could prove the existence and exact contents of any document or other digital asset at a particular time. The blockchain is the integration and automation of human/machine interaction and the machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) payment network for the machine economy. The blockchain and cryptocurrency is a payment mechanism and accounting system enabler for M2M communication. The blockchain is a worldwide decentralized public ledger for the registration, acknowledgment, and transfer of all assets and societal interactions, a society’s public records bank, an organizing mechanism to facilitate large-scale human progress in previously unimagined ways. The blockchain is the technology and the system that could enable the global-scale coordination of seven billion intelligent agents. The blockchain is a consensus model at scale, and possibly the mechanism we have been waiting for that could help to usher in an era of friendly machine intelligence.

Chevron, for example, has a decision-analysis group whose members facilitate decision-framing workshops; coordinate data gathering for analysis; build and refine economic and analytical models; help project managers and decision makers interpret analyses; point out when additional information and analysis would improve a decision; conduct an assessment of decision quality; and coach decision makers.

You’ve begun to master several techniques for controlling your anxiety. You’re learning the finer points of interaction and studying ways to apply your interactive skills. The next step is to add community resources—relevant agencies, groups, and organizations—to your self-help program. As you consider your particular needs, look to your own community for ways to enhance your social system: Parks and recreation departments, churches and synagogues, singles groups, self-help groups, clubs, volunteer organizations, business associations—there is an infinite array of resources to choose from. Contact your local chamber of commerce, consult newspapers for upcoming activities, and even inquire at area shops about any clubs or groups that share an interest (for example, ask at a garden center about a garden club, at a bookstore about a book club, and so on). Working through the exercises in this book is merely one component of a total self-help program. To progress from background knowledge to practical application, you must venture beyond your home and workplace (and beyond the confines of a therapist’s office, if you are in counseling). For people with social anxiety an outside system of resources is the best place to work on interactive difficulties. Here are three excellent reasons to use community resources: 1. To facilitate self-help. Conquering social anxiety necessitates interaction and involvement within the community, which is your laboratory. Using community resources creates a practical means of refining your skills and so moving forward on your individual map for change. 2. To diminish loneliness. Becoming part of the community provides the opportunity to develop personal and professional contacts that can enhance your life in many ways. 3. To network. Community involvement will not only give you the chance to improve your interactive skills, but will allow you to promote your academic or work life as well as your social life. Building connections on different levels can be the key. Any setting can provide a good opportunity for networking. In fact, I met the writer who helped me with this book in a fairly unlikely place—on the basketball court! A mutual friend introduced us, and when the subject of our professional interests came up, we saw the opportunity to work together on this project. You never know!

Joseph Grinkorn is a founder of The Morris Group Companies who provides the help in social networking and robust applications, using his expertise to help facilitate some of the biggest deals on the private market.

Sarah and the seven other women in the group were introduced to mindfulness with a simple exercise. Each woman was given a raisin, along with the following instructions from the group facilitator. 1.Observe the object. We are going to refer to this as an object, even if you recognize this and immediately know the name of it. By calling it an object, we are encouraging you to encounter this object as if for the first time. 2.Take note of its shape, size, color, and contour. 3.Notice how the light reflects off its surface. 4.Smell the object, taking in the various aromas. 5.Notice how your body responds to those aromas. 6.Lift it to your ear. 7.If you move it between your fingers, does it have a sound? There was a long pause between each instruction as the women lifted the raisin to their eyes, nose, and ears. The group facilitator continued, again with long pauses between the instructions. 8.Put the object against your lips without opening them. 9.Notice how it feels. 10.Notice if your mouth or body starts to react to having it there. The group facilitators could hear the women salivating as they anticipated putting the raisin in their mouth. 11.Now put the object in your mouth and roll it around with your tongue. Try not to bite it. What sensations do you notice? This can be a sharp example of how your mind anticipates something, and reacts physiologically to it by preparing for it. After another long pause, the facilitator continued. 12.Eventually put the object between your back teeth and slowly and deliberately take one bite. Notice the explosion of flavors. Can you decipher the different flavors? Can you observe where one flavor ends and the next one begins? 13.Then, very slowly chew into the object and follow the trajectory of its contents as they move down your esophagus. Notice the aftertaste and the echo of the aftertaste.

To get the group to be vulnerable, he said, we facilitators needed to share an even more personal story than we expected our clients to. We would set the depth of the group by whatever level we were willing to go to; however much we shared, they would share a little less. We had to become, in effect, participants.

Competing in a 100-pushup challenge in the office This is another example of an activity that can be a way to facilitate group bonding but isn’t necessarily inclusive of people with different levels of physical ability. Especially in startups with a younger median age, team activities can tend to skew toward those enjoyed by a very specific subset of the population. Things like fantasy sports teams; foosball, ping-pong, or pool tables; and fitness challenges can give off a “tech bro” kind of vibe. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be allowed, and it might not be possible to find an activity that every single person will love, but it’s important to pay attention to the type and variety of activities and rituals and who they might be unintentionally favoring or excluding.

When Sony was introducing the boom box, the company gathered a group of potential customers and held a focus group on what colour the new product should be: black or yellow. After some discussion among the group of likely buyers, everyone agreed that consumers would better respond to yellow. After the session, the facilitator thanked the group, and then mentioned that, as a bonus, they were welcome to take a free boom box on the way out. There were two piles of boom boxes: yellow and black. Every person took a black boom box.’5 Clearly what people say isn’t always a true reflection of what they think, so we need a way of getting into these shadowy issues and seeing how they affect the customer’s goals.

Being a Helper It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. —GENESIS 2:18     One of the joys of being an older woman is helping teach the younger women how to be helpers for their husbands. Daughters and daughters-in-law need to hear your wisdom when it comes to marriage. Sharing your experience becomes a great reward of your station in life. When I make this suggestion to a group, many women who have adult children will quietly comment that they don’t have anything to teach anyone else. In fact, they are intimidated by the next generation and feel insecure about their experience. This is the perfect reason to begin mentoring another woman. You’ll both discover the depth and breadth of your wisdom as wives and mothers. As a mature adult, you can be the one who encourages your daughters and daughters-in-law in how to be helpers to their mates, one of the great principles of marriage. What a difference it would make if more women would uphold their husbands as they attempt to rise above the pull of the world and toward God’s purposes. You can be the facilitator who will help women to understand and implement Paul’s teaching in Titus 2:3-5: “Teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live…. Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.” As a grandparent, the easiest way to teach is by example. Often married children are not eager to ask their parents about marriage, but they cannot deny your living and modeling Scripture. Be available to help when it is requested. We must be sensitive that we don’t barge unannounced into their lives, but be prepared when the time comes. Prayer: Father God, as a mature woman of God, I want to be used to encourage other women how to be makers of their homes. Give me the perfect timing to be available. In the meantime I will demonstrate Your Word by my life. Amen.  

WHILE I THINK the reasons for postmortems are compelling, I know that most people still resist them. So I want to share some techniques that can help managers get the most out of them. First of all, vary the way you conduct them. By definition, postmortems are supposed to be about lessons learned, so if you repeat the same format, you tend to uncover the same lessons, which isn’t much help to anyone. Even if you come up with a format that works well in one instance, people will know what to expect the next time, and they will game the process. I’ve noticed what might be called a “law of subverting successful approaches,” by which I mean once you’ve hit on something that works, don’t expect it to work again, because attendees will know how to manipulate it the second time around. So try “mid-mortems” or narrow the focus of your postmortem to special topics. At Pixar, we have had groups give courses to others on their approaches. We have occasionally formed task forces to address problems that span several films. Our first task force dramatically altered the way we thought about scheduling. The second one was an utter fiasco. The third one led to a profound change at Pixar, which I’ll discuss in the final chapter. Next, remain aware that, no matter how much you urge them otherwise, your people will be afraid to be critical in such an overt manner. One technique I’ve used to soften the process is to ask everyone in the room to make two lists: the top five things that they would do again and the top five things that they wouldn’t do again. People find it easier to be candid if they balance the negative with the positive, and a good facilitator can make it easier for that balance to be struck. Finally, make use of data. Because we’re a creative organization, people tend to assume that much of what we do can’t be measured or analyzed. That’s wrong. Many of our processes involve activities and deliverables that can be quantified. We keep track of the rates at which things happen, how often something has to be reworked, how long something actually took versus how long we estimated it would take, whether a piece of work was completely finished or not when it was sent to another department, and so on. I like data because it is neutral—there are no value judgments, only facts. That allows people to discuss the issues raised by data less emotionally than they might an anecdotal experience.

There are two important lessons here. First, foreign aid is not a very effective means of dealing with the failure of nations around the world today. Far from it. Countries need inclusive economic and political institutions to break out of the cycle of poverty. Foreign aid can typically do little in this respect, and certainly not with the way that it is currently organized. Recognizing the roots of world inequality and poverty is important precisely so that we do not pin our hopes on false promises. As those roots lie in institutions, foreign aid, within the framework of given institutions in recipient nations, will do little to spur sustained growth. Second, since the development of inclusive economic and political institutions is key, using the existing flows of foreign aid at least in part to facilitate such development would be useful. As we saw, conditionality is not the answer here, as it requires existing rulers to make concessions. Instead, perhaps structuring foreign aid so that its use and administration bring groups and leaders otherwise excluded from power into the decision-making process and empowering a broad segment of population might be a better prospect.

Tactical decision games are situational exercises on paper representing a snap shot in time. A scenario is handed out that describes a problem related to your profession (law enforcement, security, military, business, etc). The facilitator sets a short time limit for you to come up with a solution to the problem presented. The TDGs can be conducted individually or in a group setting. As soon as time is up, with the facilitator using “time hacks”, an individual or group is told to present their course of action to the rest of the group. What you did and why? Justifying your actions to everyone else! It is important that individuals or groups working together are candid and honest in their responses. You’re only fooling yourself to do otherwise. The lesson learned from the TDGs can make you more effective and safe in the performance of your job. The time to develop the strength of character and the courage to make decisions comes here, in the training environment. Mistakes can be made here that do not cost a life and valuable lessons are learned.

I define accountability as the willingness of team members to remind one another when they are not living up to the performance standards of the group.

Commitment is about a group of intelligent, driven individuals buying in to a decision precisely when they don’t naturally agree. In other words, it’s the ability to defy a lack of consensus.

in the content and bring ideas to discuss during the session. Then, when everyone was together, Craig facilitated a dialogue on the topic and ensured that everyone had a chance to share their thoughts and connect them to both their group and the work that they did. Prior to these sessions, Craig shared that his colleagues often squabbled over resources, resisted collaboration on even simple ideas, and it felt like people were actively working against one another to build up their own department while breaking down others. He was amazed that, as he introduced these leadership concepts, like team trust, credibility, and accountability, both the conversation and cooperation among peers gradually shifted. The risk that he took—reimagining meetings and sharing new ideas—transformed his environment.

The automatic tendency of humans to reciprocate both favors and disfavors has long been noticed as extreme, as it is in apes, monkeys, dogs, and many less cognitively gifted animals. The tendency clearly facilitates group cooperation for the benefit of members. In this respect, it mimics much genetic programming of the social insects. We see the extreme power of the tendency to reciprocate disfavors in some wars, wherein it increases hatred to a level causing very brutal conduct. For long stretches in many wars, no prisoners were taken; the only acceptable enemy being a dead one. And sometimes that was not enough, as in the case of Genghis Khan, who was not satisfied with corpses. He insisted on their being hacked into pieces.

OM CHANTING Various studies have shown that OM chanting deactivates the limbic part of the brain responsible for our basic emotions (fear, pleasure, anger) and our impulses (hunger, sex, dominance and care of offspring). Since the effectiveness of OM chanting is associated with the experience of vibrations around the ears, scientists have suggested that these sensations are transmitted through the auricular branch of the vagus nerve. As the vagus nerve branches off into the inner ear and larynx, controlling the opening and closing of the vocal cords and tone of the sound, it appears that this is stimulated during the vocalization of the O and M sounds. In addition, by performing chanting in exhalation, the vagus nerve is activated in its role as manager of the parasympathetic system. In addition, chanting, by facilitating the lengthening of the exhalation, further amplifies the effect on the parasympathetic system. This is why this practice helps to calm and relax the body and mind. -Find a quiet place to sit comfortably. -A good position is to sit with your legs crossed and your back straight. -Wear comfortable cotton clothes that do not tighten any part of your body. All body channels should be free and comfortable. Place the palm of your right hand (facing upwards) on the palm of your left hand at navel level. Close your eyes for a few minutes and relax your mind and body. Slowly feel the vibrations that occur in every part of your body. When the vibrations become more intense, start breathing deeply. Hold your breath for a second and then slowly exhale. Initially count to 7 as you exhale. This ought to be duplicated thrice. As you exhale the third time, sing "oooooooooo..." Feel the vibrations in your abdomen (and under your chest). After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Breathe in again (slow, deep breaths). As you exhale sing "ooooo..." and feel the vibrations in your chest and neck. After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Inhale again (long, deep breath). As you exhale, sing "mmmmmmmm...". Feel the vibrations in your head and neck. After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Inhale again and as you exhale say "oooommmm..." or "aaauuummm...". About 80% of the sound should be "aaauuu..." and 20% should be "mmmm...". Repeat the previous steps 3 times (you can do it up to 9 times). After the Om meditation, relax and concentrate on your regular breathing for about 5 minutes. TIPS -Wearing white clothes and being in a white environment will improve your experience. But the rule of white is not fundamental. -A good place could be a quiet room or a garden with shade. Your eyes, ears or other sensory organs should not be disturbed. -Do not consume alcohol for at least 8-10 hours before meditation. -It would be better not to eat or drink anything for at least 2 hours before meditation. The body's channels should not be blocked in order to achieve maximum results. This applies especially to the digestive system. -The best times for this meditation are early in the morning or late at night. -For beginners, singing "aum" can cause dizziness. It is recommended to proceed slowly and try to learn one step at a time. In this way you will prepare body and mind for the next step. -It is very important to open your eyes slowly when your breathing has stabilized. -If you cannot sit on the floor, you can try sitting on a bed or a chair. The most important thing is to keep your back straight. -Doing this kind of meditation in a group brings more peace and harmony to all members than doing it alone.

The key elements of a Critical Response Process session are the four core steps of the Process and participants in three roles: an artist showing work, a facilitator, and a group of responders.

Until today, Marcos has denied any connection to “trolls,”22 despite the data that we at Rappler exposed in a three-part Marcos propaganda series in 2019. Not so subtly, the messaging on his social media accounts began with changing the past. To begin with, he repeatedly lied about his education at Oxford University and Wharton. After being caught in the lie by a Rappler exclusive,23 his Senate office quietly changed his résumé on the Senate website, but he doubled down on the lie,24 a lesson many people, including Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, have learned is easily facilitated by social media. His disinformation network also hijacked popular pages and news groups with copied-and-pasted comments that slowly chipped away at the legacy of the Aquino family, long seen as his family’s nemesis—all