Fundamental things to pay attention to

[BrianBirch]

Penny and James have illuminated us with fundamental vectors - identifying, form, time and space.
These strike me as useful to a facilitator as ways to go with the questions.

What if we ask "What is happening?".
I'm wondering if it us useful to have a view somewhat divorced from the facilitator. I'm reminded by David Grove's comment about a "cafe at the edge of the universe", and I may even be thinking of a ply at the edge of that acafe, also able to look at the facilitator.

Fundamental things to pay attention to seem to be:
-Perceivers
-Experiences of perceivers. This could includes resources, patterns, necessary conditions of a desired outcome, sequences, indeed many of the things we learn about.
-Choices of the perceivers, including desired outcomes. Somehow it strikes me that whatever the experience, the choice points seem separate. A different choice can change the whole experience, but won't change the identity of the perceiver (I take a different road, but I am still me).
-Time
-Space
-Facilitator, if they exist in a situation. They seem to influence attention heavily.
-Facilitator's experience
-Facilitator's choices

I'm now thinking of things a supervisor could point to in a clean-ish way. We could say the facilitator is just another perceiver. Or the supervisor. We could ask if there is a relationship between differnet things:
-a perceiver's experience and a choice
-a perceiver's experience and time
-a perceiver's experience and a facilitator's experience
-a perceiver's experience and a facilitator's choice.

I am wondering if these are clean "places" to usefully st up a clean space exercise with.
By divorcing ourselves from a particular perceiver, we can deal with many perceivers and perhaps see things more objectively than from an amateur's facilitation perspective. Will it help towards equal opportunity information?

[phil]

There's a lot in there - might benefit split into different posts?

In your list of fundamentals, I would add Context and Environment.

You say:

A different choice can change the whole experience, but won't change the identity of the perceiver (I take a different road, but I am still me).

I don't think we can state that as a fact. It may feel that way because identity is a self-referential pattern. What I am is what I think I am. Or rather 'thinking what I am is what makes me what I am' (I think!) If we accept even some of the dictum : 'We are but patterns that repeat themselves', we may be someone different having made one choice, compared to who we might have been if we had made another choice. However we can never make that comparison because, as far as we can tell living is serial, not parallel. Yes there may be theories about parallel universes. In everyday life, in the moment, a simple choice between two options is binary; opening one door closes the other. If we try to go back through the door, we cannot, it is a new door.

Even the concept of choices is a construct. 'Are you going to take the blue pill or the red pill?' 'No thanks, trying to give 'em up.' Was that a choice? Or just the next thing happening?

Phil

[Corrie van Wijk]

Hi Brian: "By divorcing ourselves from a particular perceiver, we can deal with many perceivers and perhaps see things more objectively than from an amateur's facilitation perspective. Will it help towards equal opportunity information?"

Sorry to have waited so long with an answer, I've been thinking about this since Christmas and the answer emerges just now: How would you manage to divorce yourself from a particular perceiver, you're being one of them?

It reminds me of a discussion we had in Kansas City in 2003 between David and Ken: Ken stated that you cannot have a system without the facilitator being a part of it; hence David was forced to adjust his ABC-model and add 'D' (just his luck: D for David) to it. Later David tried to escape from it by replacing the capital 'D' with a modest undercast 'd', and since he came up with his out-of-the-box thinking (which Ken inspired him to), D became the space-outside-the-box (which Philip calls 'developmental space'), with the Greek E the knowledge which emerges from that and -- finally -- almost out of the picture, the undercast 'f' for facilitator.

The only way you can escape from your own view, which is composed of all the things you accidentily learned in your life, is to focus on the process, which is what Penny and James are trying to do with the fundamental vectors they have identified: identifying, form, time and space.

I'm working on a structure to include all clean processes and made some progress with my 'black box', with which I try to trace the informationprocessing.

[Steve Saunders]

its somewhat incomplete vectors without momentum and field, though, Corrie.

the full model is in my book :-)

xx S

[Corrie van Wijk]

I know, I was just referring to Brian's quote of J&P.