Thanks to good-old-Good, just stumbled upon this nifty document entitled "Building Agency in the Face of Uncertainty", which is a process tool for helping educators and leaders (and anyone, really) focus on and proactively work with the future. It works with two variables: first, our perception of the future, and how 'uncertain' or 'inevitable' we percieve it to be; and second, our locus of control, and how we see our responses to the future being in our own hands or in the hands of others.
Basically, it asks a series of tough questions, making one assess where one is at, in terms of perception/control of the future. Do you have enough skills to shape your destiny, regardless of a stock market crash or climate change or zombie apocalypse? Do you have a fixed sense of what's coming? Or are you moving through a fog of uncertainty and helplessness? Once you've fixed your current position (and interrogated your assumptions about said position), you then try to figure out where you want to be. And then you're asked:
What has to change for you to get there?
What information and knowledge would you have to have generated?
What allegiances and support would you have to have built?
What ideas would you have had to give up?
Why and when would this be the right orientation to have towards the future?
What are the 5 ways you would be able to move to this quadrant from your previous quadrant?
These questions have the effect of moving one's focus away from one's fears and negative emotions and into concrete images to work for. Say, if one's vision of an ideal future (and there are many futures and ways of making them!) is a Transformed Philippines, then what does the present Untransformed state look like? And what will it take for you to get there?
Grateful for being able to read this at a time when the constant Dementor-feeling drives out any feeling of power and control. Need to go through this process properly (not just theoretically) but for now, even just the bones of it blasts away some of the haze and makes me look beyond the mundanities and into other, larger concerns. (Doesn't quite hit NP technological singularity levels yet, thankfully.) The use of the term "agency"--something I thought I'd left behind from my days of literary theorizing--is an added comfort.
I still don't exactly know what the next stage for me will be, but my choices are more-or-less driven by these images of my ideal future:
Politically--increasingly decentralized government, federalist even, with various forms of devolution that are appropriate to the cultural and ecological needs of each area. Indigenous subsidiarity, in the sense that bodong councils or shariah courts can comprise its formal structures as called for. Political mindsets geared for service and sacrifice, with no space for arrogance or curtness just because you're busily doing something "important". No hierarchies, and definitely no stealing--so much so that it's not just about Government, but in the political agreements of how people deal with and treat each other.
Economically--given that in the Philippines, the circles of political and economic power are more or less concentric, both have to change in similar ways. This would be congruous with what Otto Scharmer (via Peter Barnes) calls Capitalism 3.0, an "intentional, inclusive, ecosystem economy that upgrades the capacity for collaboration and innovation throughout all sectors of society (focus on ecosystem innovation)." Will definitely write further on Capitalism 3.0, but for me, the economic shift is probably the most tangibly exciting: green tech, cradle-to-cradle technology, economic human rights, liberalization of knowledge and capital flows. In a way, we're lucky to be stuck in Capitalism 1.0 since there are less structures to undo, but I still do wonder...
Culturally- that which is the soul of everything. Language. Food. Artisan production. Education. Less western consumerist. More real. More spirit.
Part of the challenge of wanting to make a vision real is the choosing of where to begin. Here I am muddling through the pain of bureaucracy, but steadily yearning for the freedom of culture yet again. Education, perhaps? Mark Taylor's call to abolish the university as we know it comes to mind--abolish all permanent departments, he said, and create problem-focused interdisciplinary programs on various topics such as Mind, Body, Law, Networks, Language, Space, Money, Life, Water, etc. Took that essay up for my English 1 and English 10 classes, once upon a time, and I still do wonder if that image somehow took root in my students' minds...
Ironic that this is now being typed in the bowels of Malacañang. Bone tired and the day's not yet done, but I am grateful. If there's anything that's worse than death, it's ceasing to have a vision of the future, any future. When you're so tired that you have no hope of imagining anything beyond the next meeting, the next day, the next week...then what is living for? As Fred Polak warned us so eloquently, once a society's image of the future begins to decay and lose its vitality, the culture does not long survive. If that's true for societies, then it must be especially true for people.
One must never stop dreaming.
