http://www.stfx.ca/institutes/coady/text/about_publications_occasional_citizens.html.

What Is ABCD?

It is an approach to community-based development, based on the principles of:

* Appreciating and mobilising individual and community talents, skills and assets (rather than focusing on problems and needs)
* Community-driven development rather than development driven by external agencies

It builds on:

* Appreciative inquiry which identifies and analyses the community’s past successes. This strengthens people’s confidence in their own capacities and inspires them to take action
* The recognition of social capital and its importance as an asset. This is why ABCD focuses on the power of associations and informal linkages within the community, and the relationships built over time between community associations and external institutions
* Participatory approaches to development, which are based on principles of empowerment and ownership of the development process
* Community economic development models that place priority on collaborative efforts for economic development that makes best use of its own resource base
* Efforts to strengthen civil society. These efforts have focused on how to engage people as citizens (rather than clients) in development, and how to make local governance more effective and responsive.

http://www.synergos.org/globalphilanthropy/02/abcdoverview.htm

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Steve L. Robins, Professor and Diversity Trainer speaks about Unintentional Intelligence:
M1 (mindlessness) + M2 (multiple redundancy messages) = UI (unintentional Intelligence)

He explains that cognitively we can only do one thing at a time. Our brain writes cognitive scripts for what we do, so we can be efficient by not having to spend time thinking carefully about everything. We do this for anything from breathing, brushing our teeth and driving. We have very good cognitive scripts for complex tasks.

M2 (multiple redundancy messages

Because of this state of mindlessness, if we get the same message over and over again we have no defense against it. We can brand products, concepts, professions (i.e. a nurse is a woman a doctor is a man)… we brand people, race. We can get 13 year old girls to want to kill themselves because they are not thin enough.

Robins did the following experiment with us to demonstrate this point: He told us to repeat the word “top” ten times and after the tenth time he asked us the following question, which we were supposed to answer without thinking: “What do you do when you get to a green light?” We all said stop. He went on to point out that if with such a simple exercise he could get us to give the wrong answer, when we all knew the right answer, then a lot of different kind of beliefs about different races can also affect us even if they are not true.

Robins went on to talk about how to change these pattern: Neurons in the brain are connected by synapses, every time we act the body releases a protein in the synapses that when repeated solidifies the pattern down in our brain. In order to form new patterns a person has to have a chance to practice that pattern over and over again.

In our working cultures we have all kinds of cognitive scripts related to how we see and value diversity and these are formed partly by the multiple redundancy messages sent to us by our culture, our own lack of knowledge and experience of different perspectives and ways of seeing the world (because we tend to naturally associate with people who are like us) and our organizational culture that generally tends to value a certain kind of personality over another.

So what does this have to do with Agile? Well, so much of agile is about innovation and amplifying learning. Corporate cultures are not typically examples of thriving places that value diversity (and I don’t mean just having affirmative action programs, but beyond that, having a working culture that allows people to bring their diversity into the work place and rewards it). Diversity is a direct challenge to our mindless orientation towards work. It can challenge us to be more mindful, and mindfulness is an important basis of amplifying learning and being innovative.

I find the concept of cognitive scripts a helpful one for my own approach to Agile Work. Part of the work of a Process Facilitator is to help people to become conscious of their cognitive scrips, nurture diversity in the group so that cognitive scripts can be challenged to give birth to innovation. The key to this kind of change is for the Process Facilitator to work closely with team members to create repeated opportunities for this kind of interaction so that new cognitive scripts can be written.

It is helpful for the Process Facilitator to work with team members to reflect on the relationship between multiple redundancy messages as they relate to Agile Work. For example when starting an Agile project, beginning by reflecting on the fact that Agile Work transforms our competitive orientation towards work into a collaborative orientation. An examination of the multiple redundancy messages we receive in popular culture and corporate culture about these two orientations may be very useful for team members to become conscious of, if they are to make this shift in thinking and practice. As an exercise, a Process Facilitator could simply ask the team to list examples of corporate and media messages that support competition and those that support collaboration.

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Steve L. Robbin, Grand Valley State University, Professor and Diversity Consultant

His mother married an American Serviceman in Vietnam in the 1970’s and came to America. It was a bad time to come from Vietnam. He used to get beaten up at school. She never commented on this but when she would be cleaning him up the tears would be rolling down her face. She had come to America in hope for a better future for herself and her child and this was not it.
One time when he was away at university she called him saying that she had bought new furniture for her house and the store had delivered old furniture to her and refused to take it back. So he made a fake lawyer letter head and wrote a stern letter to the shop and soon after they delivered the new furniture with a dozen roses.
Soon after he married his mother called him and said that you have your wife to take care of you now. One week later he got a call from the police that she had hanged herself in her home.
When he had his first child he started to reflect on these experiences and to question some of the views he had about race and racism. Up to this point he had held conventional stereotypes of lazy Blacks, Hispanics etc.

Are we interested in diversity training or diversity education. Ask anyone with kids which they would prefer for their children: sex education or sex training?

You grow up in a middle class neighborhood with professional parents who tell you that you can do anything if…? “you work hard”. At the conceptual level we believe American society to be based on a meritocracy but at an operational level other realities affect the degree of success a person achieves: wealth, connections and access.

An African immigrant to America (a workshop participant)shared her experience of what the concept of working hard meant for her: a black person can work 10 times harder, losing her soul in the process and for what? To get to the top and be hated by whites for it.

“Truth is the condition that allows suffering to speak.” Cornell West
From the lens of “if you just work hard” truth and suffering looks like whining and complaining.

Sense of entitlement
The same workshop participant told the story of having worked for many years as a nurse and several other jobs at the same time and finally bought a house. She invited her white neighbor who was kicked out of his home to live in her house. After some time of supporting him (cooking for him and cleaning up after him), because of the demands he was making on her she asked him to leave. He refused telling her that she is only an immigrant to this country and that he is entitled to stay in her home because this is her country and she has benefited from this.

The American dream of solving the problem of poverty through material gain (working hard) has become intolerant of suffering and hardship. If you don’t overcome this suffering you should not talk about it.

Attribution Theory
1) We live in a just world and you reap what you sow
2) Fundamental attribution error: internal locus of control (they are there because they did something wrong)
3) Ultimate attribution Error: external locus of control (she got the job because of affirmative action)

People like Condoleezza Rice and Tiger Woods, Opera etc are held up as the rule and not the exceptional successes that they are.

Who here considers themselves nice?
N.I.C.E not inclined to critically examine

What is racism
Racism is a sociological idea
Any ism is a system of values, beliefs, behavior. What do you need to create a system? Power.
A Racist is: racial prejudice + power + discriminating action

Now Orleans situation:

Myopic – view things not in context of historical racism… problem to see things in perspective because people in power explain things away very well
“Racism without racists” De Silva the idea of this book is that you don’t even need racists anymore to have racism because of the systems of society.
“White washing race: the myth of a color blind society.” book to read

Shift from the manufacturing economy to knowledge economy is taking poor people out of the economy. In the past poor people could work in factories, earn better salaries and improve their material condition.

1995 the human genome project- one human race
In America one can change race depending on what state one lives in.
A mathematician spent a lot of time calculation how removed people are to each other and found that the farthest removed one person can be to another is 52nd cousin. Concept of race is very problematic
you can change your race based on what state you live i.e. one drop rule or one eight, or one sixteenth makes you black.

The first case in American history challenging the concept of all white men having rights was a Japanese man arguing that he should have the same rights as a white man because his skin is white. It was ruled that one had to be Caucasian and white to have rights. The next case was brought forward by an East Indian man who said that he was Caucasian but he lost because he wasn’t white enough.

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From a Talk by Jack Mezirow, Founder of Transformative Learning Theory

Serious shortcoming of our culture is freezing people into positions. I have been a liberal democrat all my life and it’s very reassuring to share those biases with others… the hardest thing to do in adult learning is to step outside of this and to listen to others.

Transformative learning is learning that transforms problematic frames of reference to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective and emotionally able to change. Such frames of reference are more likely to generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified.

Some transformations are out of the realm of understanding or conscious experience. Unless transformation also takes place in terms of critical reflection of epistemological issues it is not transformative learning.

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It seems to me that most people who have had any kind of success on serious projects, or in life, can probably point to a profound collaborative experience at the core of that experience. In my last posting, “tools vs. capabilities” I said that because Agile is fundamentally a process of collaboration and our culture is fundamentally is a culture of contest, we need to recognize that learning Agile requires a transformation at the level of character more than methodology. Despite the fact that we may have had profound experiences with collaboration, because we are also deeply influenced by our environment, there are limits to what we can understand about it. We need not look further than the agile disciplines to see how most of our working and social practices are not supportive of Agile perspectives. For example empowering the team and the concept of self-organizing team is a direct challenge to most of our social, economic, cultural, community and familial structures which are essentially hierarchical. The discipline of amplifying learning is a direct challenge to the practice of excessive specialization which manifests itself in the form of expert elitism. How can any one of us ever hope to have a culture of learning and innovation if we come from a culture of expertise and hierarchy based on that expertise?

This is where transformative learning comes in. Agile requires of us not just an ordinary, but transformative learning experience. When we learn, we take something new and fit it into an old category or assign an old meaning to it. Categories are ways in which we organize our learning, they can also be called frames of reference. If we encounter an experience for which we have no category it is hard to understand it. For example have you ever been in a conversation or taken part in a course where what you were learning was so foreign to you that you didn’t even know what kinds of questions to ask to help you understand it?

Our frames of reference are shaped through the influence of our culture, language, and experiences, which all interact to set boundaries to future learning. This is because outside of these categories it is impossible for us even to register something new, let alone seek out its reality in an unprejudiced manner.

How often do you find yourself in a new learning situation where you feel overwhelmed, frustrated or even angry? It is possible that at those times you may be at the threshold of a transformative learning experience. You can have two reactions: one would be to dig deep and try to figure out why you are disturbed and see what insights you are led to and the other would be to just give up on the idea and find arguments against it.

Another way to recognize a potential opportunity for tranformative learning is to reflect on the following question: have you ever had an experience where you were faced with some new learning and because you have had a similar experience or because for some reason you see yourself as an expert in that field you have not been able to derive the proper learning from that experience? You may have realized this at a later time after numerous interactions with a similar experience where you slowly started to recognize gaps in your own understanding.

In order to derive the full benefit of a new experience that doesn’t fit into the realm of our experience we must have a transformative learning experience. A transformative learning experience is an experience that requires of us to examine the values and limitations of our old categories and assign new meanings to them. This does not mean that all of our previous learning is invalid. A transformative learning experience allows us to expand our frames of reference to allow for more complexity and at times possibly to integrate two previously perceived dichotomous approaches.

For a detailed introduction to transformative learning theories, its thinkers and history check out this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_learning on Wikipedia.

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