Helen Haste Quote on Generations and Measuring Change

Earlier this month, I got to spend a few days with Andrew Jones (TallSkinnyKiwi), one of my favorite people. We’ve been friends going on 15 years now, and it’d been a few years since we were last in the same world region at the same time. This time, it was attending The Feast, a conference on social entrepreneurship in New York City, with other missional pioneers involved with Matryoshka Haus. (More of an update on this international network another time. If you’re interested in its roots, see my posts in the category on the Training Trail and Doxology. This is the same network, just a newer name.) (P.S. Andrew probably had more extensive blogging about The Feast than anyone else there. Check out his series of posts from October 1, 2009, for more details on some very informative TED-style presentations.)

While at The Feast, I mentioned a quote on generational changes and paradigm shifts. Andrew deftly whittled it down to a line of a mere 144 characters and Tweeted it. It may have been the most reTweeted item from the event. He also posted this condensed version on his blog: “You measure change, not by behaviors altered in the first generation, but by what the next generation takes as a given.”

Anyway, that paraphrase got a lotta buzz, and the full quote is even better. In case people are interested in the quote I use about generations and change, and the original source, here it is:

In the long run, what counts is how the next generation thinks. How far new ideas permeate culture is not measured just by attitude change during one generation, but by what is taken for granted in the next.

~ Helen Haste, page 149 in The Sexual Metaphor: Men, Women, and the Thinking that Makes the Difference (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-674-80282-9)

Ms. Haste used that statement to begin a chapter on”The Next Generation” (i.e., the “post-feminist” generations), whose members grew up not having to fight the social and political battles of the feminist movement in the 1960s and ’70s especially, but who inherited the results of those who did. Since these younger generations of women and men live in a world that takes feminism as a given, what does that mean?

Whether we approve the worldviews and agendas of feminism or not, if we want to understand the context of the world we now live in, we’ve got to grapple with what is really there and not just with what we believe should ideally be there. If we don’t choose to contextualize for that real world, we shouldn’t really complain when everyday people are repulsed by our presence and/or presentation. We can’t blame their responses totally on their spiritual blindness when we prove ourselves to be culturally blind, can we?

If you are interested in seeing how I used this quote in the context of church transitions, check out my post from June 2008 on Paradigm Transition: Do we have just 25 years to do this? From a futurist / culturologist / research and development perspective, I suggest that non-missional churches may have a remaining shelf-life of less than 25 years … So, how will you seek to shift your organizational culture so that the next generations of disciples in your church/gathering/group will take a missional mindset as a given?

 

Launching of a Limited Edition Blog: SuperHero Sidekick!

In the darkest of times, just before the dawn, we long for superheroes to appear on our horizon. And as we know from every cosmic epic and comic book episode, every real superhero relies on a sidekick.

So, henceforth and forthwith: I am — wait for it — SuperHero Sidekick!

And, in my SuperHero Sidekick persona, I have just launched a limited edition blog – SuperHero Sidekick – for those who want to go beyond the now-newly-traditional social-entrepreneurial triple bottom line of community, ecology, and economy by integrating them all around spirituality.

Know any organizations that are attempting a “quadruple bypass,” trying to accomplish something good, but without all four of those elements?

Nuh-uh-uh, it’s not full-on good!

Check out the first post in my limited-edition blog on SuperHero Sidekick: Spiritual Entrepreneurship and Adventures in the Quadruple Bottom Line, and let’s see what we can explore on how to work all four goals in the same vein of good …

See you there, and until then, be a superhero sidekick to some you love today: Onward, upward, goodward!

 

RD1-8 ~ Opal Encounters, Immersions, and Expeditions

4. Opal Encounters – lab experiences with a seven-level simulation game in cultural fieldwork. Each level synthesizes progressively more complex concepts/skills, and also integrates with the Curriculum and the Immersions and Expeditions.
5. Opal Immersions and Expeditions – installation learnings with concrete and visual media (e.g., games, toys, trading cards), case studies, and community field trips to observe and interpret cultural interactivity.

Besides offering content and skills, all modules in the Opal Connection Zone Curriculum will eventually have several other layers of training sources:

• Film studies, which put concepts into a narrative framework, and that helps learners apply things to realistic situations of real people.
• Simulation game segments, which give learners a safe setting in which to try their hand at applying cultural interpretation and contextualization as individuals and as teams. (Opal Encounters.)
• Immersion learning exercises and community expeditions, which apply framework concepts and fieldwork skills in real-world settings and also train participants in skills of teamwork building through practical experiences. (Opal Immersions and Expeditions.)

Each of these layers may hold more appeal to participants of particular learning styles, but everyone using the full Opal Systems approach needs to learn from them all. Again, from a strength-based approach, we all have areas in which we “shine” because they are easy for us. We also all have areas in which we have to “stretch” because they aren’t so easy for us. If we do not choose to pursue both stretching and shining as individuals, how quickly we could end up creating an organizational culture that reflects only our preferred strengths and has huge gaps where we ourselves as leaders do! Keeping a balance between stretching and shining helps us work toward an intercultural connection zone where we regularly remember our need for the providential differences of others, so we all can cover what others lack and together create an organizational system that corporately shines.

I developed the initial framework for the Opal Encounters simulation game in the very late 1990s and early 2000s. Early editions of an introductory version and of the first of seven levels were run in the early 2000s. There is a significant amount of development work remaining, but that should be far easier once the Opal Connection Zone Curriculum has been completed, because the simulation game needs to reflect the finalized set of concepts and ministry skills found there.

Along the way of developing all these other Opal components, I have brainstormed learning experiences that don’t rely just on words and books. Culture includes so many other elements, that it makes sense to explore them, too, as a way of understanding the complexity and impact of cultural systems. And so, in various stages of completion, are a large number of experience-based learning opportunities. These might include studying a film and all the products that are created from it – press kits, action figures, posters, manga, games, etc. All of these products contain marketing messages, and marketing is, in part, about cultural contextualization. Or it might be a guided fieldtrip to a Holistic Health Fair in order to observe, analyze, and interpret the paradigms and cultures of people who present teachings or run exhibition area booths.

These Opal Immersions and Expeditions are in various stages of development and completion, but they do range across the entire scope of the Opal Connection Zone Curriculum and help give it a much richer learning texture.

This ends the first Opal Systems Research and Development series.

 

RD1-7 ~ Opal Connection Zone Training Curriculum

3. Opal Connection Zone Curriculum – training system of 30 core concepts and 15 skills distributed across seven topic categories (humanity, individuality, community, organizationality,culturology, ecology, futurology). All modules use illustrations from films, media, Encounters labwork, and Immersions and Expeditions.

Although that catalyzing church plant experience in the early 2000s initially took me in the direction of studying cultures and how to composite intercultural entities, it took me in another direction later: organizational systems. Two years after exiting that difficult church plant experience, I stumbled across an intriguing quote in a booklet. It summarizes much of what I eventually learned from my reflections on how we organize and who we put in charge.

The organization can never be something the people are not. ~ Price Pritchett in The Ethics of Excellence

As with my earlier passing on a quote from Gossip, this has its own ironies: How often can you give a “Price quote” that has nothing to do with money, but could have a lot to do with costs?

My experiences and this quote helped me take a deeper look at how the ways we organize ourselves can lead to health or toxicity, and how the roles and expectations we give our “leaders” can structure whether others become passive consumer-enablers or active producer-participants. In the late 2000s, I processed a deeper level of that long-ago church plant and other difficult church/ministry experiences. I detailed many of my findings when I blogged 80,000-plus words in 2008 on toxic organizations and leadership styles. (You’ll find most of that material is in my futuristguy blog category on Recovery from Spiritual Abuse.)

Those years of reflection also incorporated my additional training and experiences in strategic foresight (also known as futurology – studies of the future). These insights proved important to considering how particular ways of organizing affect a group’s possibilities for the future. Will an organization’s people be flexible enough to adapt to changing cultural environments, or not? Will they passively just let the future unfold around them? Or will they discern, choose, and pursue what is a more preferable and constructive course?

Meanwhile, I continued to think through my experiences and write on other topics relevant to the overall theme of missional ministry and cultural contextualization. Eventually, I figured out that, since the mid-1990s, I’d written over a million words – not all of them worth reading, of course. But even those excess words helped clarify my thinking. Finally, in 2009, it seemed time to stop writing and begin editing. This two-year editing project (which is being beta-tested by a small cultural studies group) will result in the Opal Connection Zone Curriculum.

This Curriculum brings together four major concept and skill sets needed for healthy ministry contextualization:

• Culturology identifies where a culture currently stands in its values, beliefs, and behaviors.
• Kingdom Culture offers a portrait of what an ideal, transcultural biblical culture looks like. In other words, what all of Christ’s disciples of all races, places, times, and spaces should be and do – as individuals and as gatherings of the Church. (Using the theological principle of theodicy – that God is in the process of declaring Himself righteous and just and loving before the watching universe – we can study issues of evil and their manifestation in the “kingdom counterfeit” that opposes Kingdom Culture.)
• Futurology helps a culture’s people decide their preferred future, in terms of what they want to be, become, and do.
• Organizational systems design helps people tie all these things together and get organized to get there.

The Curriculum also explores seven areas that contribute to building an intercultural Opal Connection Zone. This multicultural-to-intercultural encounter zone moves people toward Kingdom Culture. When we composite cultures and embrace “the social other,” we have the opportunity to facing fill in our spiritual gaps and filing off our toxic topics.

There are three to eight topics in each of these seven areas, along with two or three practical skills that naturally arise from each area:

• Humanity – General aspects of being image-bearers of God, how they shape us both to individuals and cultures. They include gender, sexuality, generations, tribes, race, nations, and civilizations.
• Individuality – Specific aspects of individual being (like learning styles and creativity) and how we grow (spiritual formation, maturity).
• Community – What brings us together as groups and communities, and how do we keep from splitting apart over difficulties and differences.
• Organizationality – Our leadership systems, whether our ways of organizing lead to healthy or toxic impact, and ways to look at the processes of change.
• Culturology – How cultures come together, change, and transfer their legacies to next generations. Ways of looking at cultures, and six kinds of cultural workers in Kingdom enterprises.
• Ecology – Our relationship with the earth. Organic models for a diverse range of Kingdom enterprises that are viable, reproducible, and sustainable. Toxic clean-up when organizations go awry.
• Futurology – Core skills of strategic foresight and keeping on a constructive Kingdom trajectory as individuals, communities, and cultures.

The first release of the Opal Connection Zone Curriculum is slated for early in 2011.

Next post is the last installment in this first Research and Development series. RD1-8 covers additional layers for learning in the Opal Connection Zone Training Curriculum.

 

RD1-6 ~ Opal Profiles (Assessment Tools)

2. Opal Profiles – assessment tools on information processing modes, communication styles, teamwork styles and roles in transformation, and cultural fluidity. Results are described as they relate with the Pyramid, so they are integrated with the main theory.

So – I was learning from a situation of apparently unhealthy leadership and ministry breakdown on the way to potentially becoming intercultural. Meanwhile, it occurred to me experiencing unsuccessful teamwork didn’t necessarily help in understanding who could actually best facilitate a healthy and successful intercultural teamwork environment. But since I come from a strongly multicultural background myself (both of my parents exhibited many characteristics of what Jesus called, “people of peace”), I started seeing Scripture in a different light. I concluded that a particular kind of intercultural people, whom I called interpolators, seemed to show up in the middle of drastic cultural change situations – like what we’re undergoing globally these days – and make a positive difference.

In the late 1990s, I’d noticed such a pattern among the many teens and twenty-somethings in the Bible whose historical accounts we have: Esther, Ruth, Mary the mother of Jesus, David, Daniel, Timothy, Titus, and others. Such young men and young women as these were all at least bicultural, and many were living in a crucial time of cultural upheaval. And, intriguingly, each seemed to have an older generation mentor. For instance, Esther was of Jewish descent, though living in exile in a gentile nation, and Mordecai mentors her to use her providential position as queen to help deliver the Jews from genocide. Timothy apparently is bicultural as well, with a Jewish mother and a gentile father. He emerges as a leader in the critical early years of the Church, and his mentor, Paul, is tricultural – a Jew and a Roman citizen, reared in a gentile nation.

So … how do we identify interpolators and other kinds of crosscultural workers in this day and age?

After I completed the Opal Pyramid, the next segment of the Opal Systems to emerge was the Opal Profiles. I did the initial development mostly in 2003-2004. These assessment tools help identify the kinds of roles individuals can best play on a team that attempts to composite multiple cultures into an intercultural Kingdom Culture church, ministry, or other spiritual entrepreneurship endeavor. All emerge from the assumptions of strength-based ministry, that God has created us different in our processing abilities and cultural fluidity, and that these differences mean all can participate and produce, not just consume. Weaknesses and missing abilities cannot always be overcome by more training; we are usually more successful when we just let people work in their providential areas of strength. Thus, each person can play a specific role in helping make a difference for the Kingdom. They also rely heavily on aspects of learning style theories, a fascinating topic which I’ve continued to study since 1997, when I was introduced to them by Dr. Kathy Koch of Celebrate Kids, Inc.

Opal Profiles also rely on an integrated or “fractal” approach: what is true for something at the most simple level of being an organism or in a system, is also true at each more complex/sophisticated level of interaction between that organism or system and any other part within it or anything outside it. So, what people who take the assessment tools find out about themselves as individuals theoretically “in isolation,” also helps them understand better how they function in ways consistent with that when they’re in such communal settings as:

• Their own primary information processing culture, and their main identity subculture(s) within the larger cluster of that particular approach to processing information. This is assessed in the Opal Integration Styles instrument.
• The Opal Discipleship Communication Styles instrument assesses everyday communications with others.
• The Opal Teamwork Styles and Cultural Roles instrument assesses roles in small groups and teams.
• The Opal Cultural Fluidity Potentials instrument assesses settings that could involve cultural conflict (e.g., businesses, social groups, international travel, etc.).

For instance, using this approach, someone who naturally focuses just on analyzing detail and making lists and flowcharts, will generally prefer debate as their dominant communication style. (Debate focuses on comparing and contrasting of details between systems, and assumes people are motivated to make decisions based on having clear and “convincing, logical” information about why their system is wrong and my system is right.) They will also tend to gravitate toward hierarchical authority structures on teams, churches, and political systems – as these likewise embody black-and-white thinking and step-by-step approaches to tasks, processes, and social change.

There are some cultures where this set of detail-debate-hierarchy traits would be viewed as completely positive and necessary, whereas other cultures would consider the exact same set as utterly toxic! If a detail-debate-hierarchy person does not become more “culturally fluid,” he or she will likely find any kind of crosscultural encounters very stressful; his/her primary culture holds such a high value on being clear and accurate and “right,” that there is no mental perception or passionate value on encountering or incorporating “otherness.” And many other individuals and cultures simply will not tolerate that. Thus, everyone in the encounter misses out on some clarity in thinking and in truth that they need, because they have let the perceived (or actual!) negativity in the style of the deliverer put them off from hearing the truths underneath.

In short, the ways we process life as individuals and cultures automatically sets us up for specific relationships of culture clash with those who process life differently from us. They also set us up for culture shock if our typical way of processing life conflict with social changes. However, the main point is that these styles and roles go together and are all “of a piece.” They create a seamless, coherent set that manifests compatible traits at all levels. This set includes: information processing modes, personal and social values, communications, teamwork, authority structures, and potential for crosscultural fluidity. These are the major dimensions assessed and described in the Opal Profile tools.

Next post, RD1-7, is on the training curriculum of Opal Connection Zone.