Trying Hard to Get Real: the challenge of intentional community

David Dunn, January 14, 2007

As you might imagine, being ?RIFFED? leads to a mini-tsunami of deep emotions and further reflections, along with a trickle of insights. This may also be true for our Board colleagues who thought about and chose ?force reduction? from among the available strategies for saving the ICA from bankruptcy. The upcoming three-month anniversary of what I now refer to as ?the ICA?s October 16th frontal lobotomy? has prodded me to work up just enough spiritual prowess to set sail toward the abyss of meaning making. It is the new year and it?s time to move forward.

It seems important to admit that while I eagerly process my life experience by writing, I don?t presume that everyone is eager to share in my ?processing out loud.? I will not think less of anyone who chucks the whole thing in the trash. For those who extend the benefit of the doubt, I hope to offer some provocative entertainment, if not priceless insight. Nothing is guaranteed. I welcome feedback, but ask you to be gentle. I?m still a little tender in spots.

I?ve tried for some weeks now to write insightfully but have become mired in the too-muchness of everything. I get all wound up but never seem to get to the bottom of anything. I also freely admit that I am usually inclined to choose a delimited topic and do my level best to make it broader and deeper than its natural boundaries permit. Sometimes this habit leads to something new and other times it leads to entanglement without enlightenment. So I?ve chosen a more cautious course this time. I?ve chucked much of the writing to date and instead I?m going to try to skim off the obvious stuff that rose to the surface of the bucket before I attempt any ?dunking-for-apples? type maneuvers. I?m working out how to separate the disconcerting from the essential.

The first thing that I need to get off my chest is a simple admission:

"I am always falling down, but I know what I can do: I can pick myself up and say to myself, I?m the greatest two."

There I?ve said it. I knew that I had to come clean on that first, key point. It seems important to acknowledge that I know and believe that this is an appropriate understanding of the way life is. What is striking to me is to be discovering the difficulty of living out of this understanding for the first time at age 64. I?ve lived a sheltered life.

From this side of the RIF, the sanitary acronyms related to ?reduction in force? are at best quaint euphemisms. Yes, they reference fair labor practice laws intended to keep bosses and Boards fair-minded and even-handed. But reduction in force is a labored contrivance that avoids the human truths. Its use is an insult to our souls.

The truth about a reduction in force is something far broader and much deeper than a sterile acronym can ever convey. In human terms and in no particular order, a reduction in force is a reduction in vision, a reduction in wisdom, a reduction in energy, a reduction in trust, a reduction in good will, a reduction in context, a reduction in possibility, a reduction in imagination and a reduction in momentum. I?m headed toward praise and dedication here, but I can?t not pass go. Avoiding confession on this walk around the board (no pun intended: game board, not board of directors) lands us somewhere in life where we don?t want to be.

So I?m going to offer a little perspective on what a reduction in force creates?in human terms?not in the language of platitudes, euphemisms or wish dreams. I?m going to try to get us grounded in reality so that we know what we?re up against when we come to the spiritual prowess part that moves us from ?life is never the way we want it? to ?nevertheless we are free to live.? Yes, the man at the pool picked up his bed and walked, but I?ve not had any real luck with quick miracles and believe that gradual and considered miracles are a better bet.

The Way Life Is After a RIF There are a number of interesting and disconcerting physical, emotional and mental realities after a RIF. As stress levels go up, anxiety attacks and tightness in the chest are not uncommon. Eating levels may go up; Pecan Sandies offer relatively low risk, if temporary solace. It may be hard to get to sleep some nights and it may be hard to stay asleep other nights. Some nights, especially when I?m sans my usual bed mate and have to throw on three extra blankets just to stay warm, I don?t want to go to sleep at all. I stayed up until 5 a.m. once last November. It?s not hard to wake up, shave, dress and put on my shoes in the morning, but it?s devilishly hard to face the day two hours later.

Self-confidence and esteem are a sometime thing?not that they weren?t always a little shaky. These days they seem to ebb and flow like the tides at the Bay of Fundy. Just when it might be really nice to enjoy a little playful, adult intimacy, my adult self can?t quite imagine how to pull it off. Furthermore, while the first floor part of my adult self can be light, steady and unruffled, the basement part of my adult self is quite another matter. When I need to rummage around in the cellar for something I?ve lost or need or want or whatever, light, steady and unruffled promptly give way to anger, frustration, grief, feelings of betrayal and shrill demands for acknowledgment, justice and redress. It ain?t no emotional picnic down there; all is not sweetness and light.

Concentration is either non-existent or hyper-focused, depending on the time of day, or the relative humidity, or the barometric pressure, or the phase of the moon, or how long it?s been since I had a job interview or a breakthrough in my business plan, which ever I?m into that day. I?ve become a great story teller, working over the same material from a different angle, finding a nuance in the familiar drama that I had not noticed before. Though I?m boring myself to tears and want to ?get on with it,? whatever ?it? is, I seem to be harnessed to this persistent, iterative load from the last year, recalling the events and players with whom I was more or less hauling in synch until the ground opened up and swallowed us whole, team, harness, wagon, and cargo.

This is where it becomes immensely fascinating and frustrating to observe how skillful I?ve been?or not? in grounding myself transparently in The Power that posited me, while still working on taking an honest, creative and constructive relationship to my situation, my interior and my undoubted freedom to decide. If I have forgotten any important experiences of the recently-RIFFED I?ll receive any and all additions, amplifications and corrections.

I have not forgotten the other side to this coin, the other partner in the tango. I have no doubt that the members of ICA Board of Directors have their own litany of bodily woes, emotional frailties and mental mayhem that has accompanied their journey this last year. I pray that they may find a way to speak their truth.

Another Level of Acknowledgment Why am I carrying on like this? Hasn?t this just been a rehearsal of the obvious? Doesn?t this just rumple the sheets of the bed about which we all know I must someday make a decision? Why not just walk away from the pool right now, the bed be damned? I can think of at least two good reasons to attempt to be both sharper and clearer than broken crystal.

One, though the ICA?s Board of Directors seems to me to have ignored the fact, we are, at bottom, an intentional community, and our community?we might say our corporateness?has taken a beating in recent years, economic realities and necessities notwithstanding. Remember the three dynamics of the social/organizational dynamics triangles? We?ve witnessed the inevitable result of not just an imbalance in an organizational process, but the collapse of any organizational process. We?ve not just witnessed an imbalance among the democratic, bureaucratic and symbolic aspects of the ICA?s corporate life, our corporate creation has fallen victim to the simultaneous inattention of all three. Staff, board of directors and the ICA?s supporters and friends have been asleep at the switch for at last ten years and more likely the last twenty years. Hear me well. ?I, David Dunn, former staff member of the ICA, was asleep at the switch.? We all were. The result of our inattention is having profound human consequences, some having to do with our relationships with one another and others having to do with the very being of our creation?the Institute of Cultural Affairs.

Two, the corollary to ?symbol is key? is ?story is all.? Our movement and in particular our intentional community, has been adept at telling stories. Sometimes we told stories with the strategic intent of energizing our partners and colleagues. Think ?5,000 Town Meetings.? At other times we told stories to avoid the truth. Think ?Children need alert and honest adults to protect them from abuse.? Secondary integrity is a slippery slope from strategy to illusion and even worse, to subterfuge.

It will be tempting to create a fiction about the reduction in force that laid off nearly all of ICA USA?s senior program staff?notably the staff with values, practices and images grounded in the Order Ecumenical. A smiley face is not adequate. We need to be honest about the operating images, patterns, systems and structures that led both staff and board down the primrose path toward the insolvency of the institution with which we were entrusted. If we try to invent something new and durable out of fiction or ignorance, we?re likely to create something new without integrity or flawed or both.

Our intentional community needs to stand up, ask questions, take stock, engage energetically and think acutely. We need to attend to the human fallout of this bomb that has just exploded in our midst. I have reason to believe that the ICA?s board of directors is exhausted, wounded, numb and fundamentally clueless about how to approach the future and how to relate concretely and helpfully to former staff members and to members of our intentional community and other stakeholders in the ICA. The consequence must surely be an uncomfortable mixture of consternation and remorse. We need to wrap our collective arms around them and hold them tightly until they find the grace and confidence once again to govern with enough peripheral vision and depth perception to include more than economics and profitability in their calculations. Care for these people. Ask for a role on the Board. Take charge again.

Some, if not all, former (or soon to be former) ICA staff members?of whom I am one?are exhausted, wounded, numb and fundamentally clueless about how to approach the future of the ICA and how to relate concretely and usefully to the shell of the organization that remains and to the members of its board of directors. The greater share of the employed brains, vision and memory of the ICA has just been let go without so much as an exit interview. Pilots and mechanics get more say about the future when their companies face bankruptcy. The consequence is a kind of bewildering sense of being cast off, discounted and left without standing to figure out how to relate to an institution and vocation that we helped shape and embody but from which we have just been practically abstracted. Help us talk through this discombobulation and find our way into a role that is useful to the future. Help mediate the severed friendships and damaged collegial trust.

Confessional Affirmations The least I can say about this 33-year experiment in evolving a conscious strategy to be the People of God in a global, secular world is that we were all naive to think that we could remain viable, let alone thrive, with part time amateur managers managing by committee. We fell all over ourselves: interpersonal feuds and tyrannies, team revelries and guarded turf, tacit agreements to hold our noses and ignore the sacred cows and collusion, Byzantine (or is ?Rube Goldbergian? more apt?) accounting systems, and failing to acknowledge the harm done when one person?s genius was felt or understood to threaten or diminish another?s. We were never able to maintain our corporateness?after Joseph?s death? after Oaxtepec? after the shift to regional offices?

No one I know doubts the genius of the Learning Basket Approach, Imaginal Education, and the Rite of Passage Journeys; the Neighborhood Academy, community drama, and community resource centers large and small; ToP methods of facilitative leadership for participatory design, economic revitalization, organizational transformation, and international development; and HIV/AIDS education and prevention based on community capacity building and engagement. If I have inadvertently left out any of my colleagues? inventions, mia culpa in advance. But we were a collection of irresponsible geniuses, some would say, uncharitably, working on immortality projects. Most would affirm with profound gratitude, that paid staff members and volunteer colleagues shared work on many fronts that, in sum, established lasting social inventions with the power to transform society.

Substantial Challenges Now we?re faced with three interconnected questions.

• Do we intend to be an intentional community that shares responsibility for the future of the ICA?
• Is the ICA a strategy whose mission has been fulfilled that we may celebrate and let go of or is it an institution with a futuric purpose and mission that we need to resurrect and reinvent?
• Do we have energy for this agenda or have we run out of steam?
• What on earth do we intend with the Ecumenical Institute? Death by neglect?

I intend to write more in the coming weeks and I hope that you will talk and write too. I?m posting these talking papers on the www.wedgeblade.org site: Reflective Writings.

-- DavidDunn - 22 Jan 2007