Welcome to Ma’ikwe’s Tool Box!

Tools for groups come in all different shapes and sizes. A tool can be a framework for understanding, a quick tip, or an interactive exercise. Some are as simple as holding an intention, or reminding yourself to smile. Here’s a few of my favorite tools to play with. Enjoy! Ma’ikwe

The Compassion Exercise

I was blessed at the age of 24 to discover a remarkable personal growth course called Avatar®. Here’s a simple exercise (from the book ReSurfacing®, by Harry Palmer) you can use as an opening or closing for a meeting, as a mediation tool to help people start feeling more connected, or as a personal practice. You can find out more about Avatar at www.avatarepc.com

THE COMPASSION EXERCISE by Harry Palmer

Honesty with one’s self leads to compassion for others.

Objective: To increase the amount of compassion in the world.
Expected Result: Increase in understanding and a personal sense of peace.

Instructions: This exercise can be done anywhere that people congregate (airports, events, beaches, etc.). It should be done on strangers, unobtrusively and from some distance. Try to do all five steps on the same person.

With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself: “Just like me, this person is seeking some happiness for (his or her) life.

With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself: “Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in (his or her) life.

With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself: “Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness, and despair.”

With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself: “Just like me, this person is seeking to fulfill (his or her) needs.”

With your attention on the person, repeat to yourself: “Just like me, this person is learning about life.”

Copyright 1994 by Star’s Edge, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Avatar and ReSurfacing are registered trademarks of Star’s Edge International.

Spectrums

Spectrums are cool. They are a great way to get to know your group and loosen up people’s judgments of each other.

Here’s how it works: in any given group, any personality trait (say, being quick to form opinions) and its opposite (being slow to form opinions) can be seen as two ends of a spectrum, with people who are more of an average speed falling in the middle. The simplest way to use a spectrum is to just have a conversation about it and what the implications are of having people in different places along the spectrum (hmmm… what happens when you have a room full of people who are mostly slow to decide, and a few quick ones?)

Or, you can turn it into an interactive exercise. Even people who have lived or worked together for years express surprise at what they learn from doing this together. Besides, it gets folks up and out of their seats (and if your meetings tend to be boring, movement can really help!)

An example: On one end of the scale is the trait “I do my best work alone” and on the other end, “I do my best work with lots of other people around”. Designate one wall of the room as “alone workers” and the opposite one as “big group workers”. Have folks picture an imaginary line running between those two points. Then, ask everyone in the group to get up and place themselves along this line, using their bodies as the marker to indicate how they see themselves. Inevitably, some people have a hard time picking a spot… for them, it depends on their mood or the kind of work we are talking about, etc. (and that is interesting in and of itself).

But you will always have a range. You can actually see the diversity in your group embodied by the exercise. And then you can talk about it. Notice how this affects your ability to get things done together. Does it explain any tensions you’ve had in the group? Does it help anyone understand anything about someone else that they have found baffling? What else can this tell us?

Repeat with various traits, such as, “I make decisions rationally” and “I make decisions non-rationally” (which can include things like intuition and emotions); “I hold a grudge” and “I let things go very easily”; “I prefer to lead” and “I prefer to follow”. Particular types of groups can get more specific.

(If a group shows a bit of resistance to this, I usually end with something along the lines of “I loved this exercise” at that end, and “I think this was a waste of time” at the other– it helps break any tension that the exercise itself may have inadvertently caused, and it’s always helpful for a facilitator to display a bit of humor that makes it clear we don’t take ourselves too seriously.)

…and…

I have a very fine consensus and facilitation mentor in Laird. One of the simplest and most useful things I’ve learned from him is to develop a practice of substituting the word “and” any time you have the urge to start a sentence with “but”… especially when you are responding to what someone else has just said about your own idea. It’s remarkable how much this simple tool can help a group start shifting into listening to each other, honoring each other’s input and being additive with our creative thinking as a group. Consensus is, at its heart, decision-making that is inclusive, and what better way to start down that road than to correct our most basic use of language that is argumentative?

The Inspiration Tree

Created by Ma’ikwe’s former community, Sol Space (from which this company takes its name) the Inspiration Tree is a visual way to record the impact and magic of something. We’ve used this mostly with events. We start the Tree at the beginning of the gathering, asking people to write at the roots some of the influences and inspirations that brought them here. Then, on the trunk, we have them write their intention for the event. At the end of the event, we have people come back and write on the branches what they are taking with them back out into the world. Here’s pictures from a Tree that was up at the Fellowship for Intentional Community’s Sept. 2006 Art of Community conference in Seattle Washington:

(Click on an image to see the larger version.) 

The Inspiration Tree is a great tool for artistically-oriented groups or for any group that suffers from too much talk and not enough… everything else! It’s also good for getting input in a passive, ongoing way if you have people arriving at different times. You’ll notice we didn’t get a lot of people filling this one in. One lesson from this particular conference is to make sure you have it in a place where people will come across it casually– we had it tucked away, and it wasn’t as effective as it could have been.

The Global Ecovillage Network’s Mandala

In addition to being a process geek, I’ve also worked for years as a sustainability teacher. What I love about the GEN Mandala is that it brings the two worlds together, making it clear that true sustainability has to include not just ecological solutions but also attention to the social realm, world view and economics. This is a great tool for starting to contemplate what being a resident of planet earth means to all of us, and is especially potent for those organizations that have a social justice or sustainability vision.

http://ecovillagedesignsouthwest.org/the-mandala/