One Rationale for Working with Groups

In the last 20 months there has been a confluence of ideas and concepts from various sources that seem to contribute to common themes, although not with absolute clarity. In the last three weeks four of these seemed to come together in two realizations about living out a future.

1. Elaine Stover, a workshop presenter for the Institute for Cultural Affairs: Facilitation is about honoring, about profound respect……participation through honoring and trusting what the group is capable of, individually and collectively.
2. Studs Terkel, quoted as saying: Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. In short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
3. William T. Williams, a painter seen on a broadcast of UNC-TV’s North Carolina People, described an incident in which he had paint on his hands and accidentally touched a canvas. It brought back memories of contact with his grandmother and elderly women in the church when he was very small: What it reminded me of was the whole idea of the laying on of hands, that affirmation of me as human being………affirming life in the face of all the adversity in the world.
4. Tom Friedman, in The World Is Flat: ……be a good collaborator, leverager, adapter, explainer, synthesizer, model builder, localizer or personalizer……be able to learn how to learn, to bring passion and curiosity to your work, to play well with others and to nurture your right-brain skills…

The first realization to emerge is that as planners we can think in terms of helping an organization make sense of its outside world by working with the connections among the people that make up its inside world. This would be particularly true for a planning office in a university.The second recognizes that we all have these desires of being honored, treated with respect and attaining our affirmation; some of us are more conscious of our own thirsts for these than are others. Those of us who feel these needs the most are among those with an obligation to help the world by creating experiences wherein people can meet these basic human needs.