Exposure to what's possible and human progress

What creates positive change? Certainly many things do, but one thing I believe is undervalued is simply exposing people to what's possible.

My experience with people suggests to me that we all want things to be better for us and other people we care about. Unfortunately, many times we do not know what is possible for us. A simple example that I have encountered here in New Mexico is that there are few people here that have been exposed to good meeting technology. More recent inventions (or recognitions may be a better word) like Open Space, Dialogue, World Cafe, T-groups, Presencing, etc. are not well known here. Without having experienced these techniques, people resort to older, more stodgy meeting structures that fail to get them the outcomes they desire.

Another example comes from education. Education is very labor intensive to do well: students need personal attention to advance their learning. This means that we need many, many teachers. Unfortunately there is generally not enough money invested in exposing teachers (and students) to really good teaching. (Pretty normal ego defenses also mean that some teachers do not want to be exposed to what's possible for fear of looking bad or feeling guilt over past teaching.) And so teachers continue on frustrated and students muddle through without much interest in learning. 

We could all benefit from realizing that a lack of exposure is not our fault. In some ways it is a form of poverty and may be equally challenging to transcend. With that understanding we would seek out exposure to new methods, which we could then compare with our past experience. If the new method turned out to be ineffective, we need not adopt it. But if it is truly better (for us and others), then we will be very motivated. Even without trying specifically, we shift subtly to desire the new vision of what is possible. This desire creates small and large actions that gradually move us towards that possibility. In this way life for all is improved.

This exposure is extremely powerful because it unlocks the agency of each person to work towards a good. There is nothing more efficient than intrinsic motivation. If we take these lessons seriously, we would invest much more money in exposing people to best practices, to unique powerful experiences, and to demonstrations of how wonderful life can actually be.

The only danger is that the new possibility either scares us due to its unfamiliarity or that we become demoralized by how far we appear to be from that vision of the possible. People may decide that they cannot get from here to there and become depressed. The solution to this challenge is to structure exposure in manageable chunks, to "scaffold" the experience. This means that it should be managed intentionally by people who have experience these more advanced methods.

When it comes to social organization and culture, most of us have strong ego defenses. We so strongly associate ourselves with what we have arbitrarily learned from our peers and our environment that we are not willing to consider alternatives. We do not want to acknowledge that some ways may be better than what we grew up with. If we take this lesson to heart, we would find innovation begin to explode as the resistance to exposure and change melted away.

I have a somewhat controversial proposal to make. What if subjected social organizational methods and structure to open competition just like we do for businesses? We could let people put some methods and ways of doing things forward as superior. Then people could sign up to try out these methods for a period of time, to really experience them (that is critical: simply hearing about them is not the same at all), and then provide feedback from their perspective. In this way, we could learn if something were truly better than something else, or simply just another way to do it. This is critical information because it begins to point ways to a better future, reducing confusion and eliminating doubt. It could not be manipulated because it would be an open process with full transparency. I think if the government were smart they would even support this process financially as a source of major innovation and progress. 

Exposure + Open Participation and Feedback => An emerging understand of what is better => Accelerated progress!