“Retreat” or “Lab”
Cohort One of the Campus’ Four Rivers course has just had an unforgettable, 5-day residential session to complete its study of the A-B-C-D “rivers” of Awareness, Behaviour, Community Building, and Designing with Complexity. It was unforgettable because imprints of the human touch never fade.
You may hear more about that later. We sure had a wonderfully heart-warming and mind-expanding time together but that’s not why I’m writing now. It’s about the language and how it’s shaping our thinking and reality.
We called the first and only face-to-face gathering of the cohort a “retreat.” Probably none of us was thinking that people go on a retreat to get away from it all. Well, that certainly was not what we did. We instead got into the thick of various change-making practices, including working the complex developmental challenges of the Campus itself.
As I looked into the mirror wearing an old, threadbare t-shirt that I still like very much, all what came to my mind was its story. It was a hot summer day in 2011 when the Zuccotti Park in New York City was buzzing with the joyful noises of the Occupy Wall Street protestors.
Walking around in the park, sampling some tasty street food and running into old friends, I stumbled upon a long line of half-naked men and women wearing only bras on the upper part of their body and holding shirts or t-shirts in their hand while waiting for their turn at the stencil painters’ stall. I joined the end of the queue and here was my reward for the long wait:
The stencilers worked with black ink. The pinkish print came with the t-shirt that I got originally at the San Francisco Bay Area OD Network conference sometime in 80s when they gave a “VIP” t-shirt to all their speakers. Looking at it in the mirror, I noticed the words “PRACTITIONER’S LABORATORY.”
The message in the bottle, thrown in San Francisco into the ocean of time, floated to New York and finally, arrived at my home in Brighton in the UK. It is asking me, what difference could it make if the next cohort of the Campus would not have a “retreat” but a “Changemakers Lab”? What’s your take on this this idea?
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About the Author: George Pór
