Transformational Strategy:
Facilitation of ToP Participatory Planning

By Bill Staples

By Richard West of ICA Taiwan

background="images/ww-titlea.jpg" Reviewing this book has been a journey of sheer delight.  Having lived and worked for 45 years with many of the ToP people who created the processes, tested them out, changed them and argued about whether this way or that way was more effective, it's been a trip into the past which has brought new meaning to my life. 

I'm incredibly grateful to Bill Staples for the book and to his colleagues, who have added their own experiences and opinions. I see both Bill's incomparable rationality and inclusiveness which illuminate the work of the last 40 plus years resulting in ICA's (ToP's) participatory process.

After reading the first third of the book, I woke up that night with a whole universe of memories, themes, stories, emotions, opinions and experiences of using and adapting the methods, and remembering the many meaningful relationships. 

First, I find the story of ToP's participatory processes to be an incredible journey of "practical consciousness."  How the process came to be as well as how all the pieces fit together is important for facilitators, old and new.  I remember when a group of us were in the Outback of Australia doing a "consult" for an Aborigine community project in Oombulgurri, near Wyndham. Our ICA dean was at the blackboard, pausing, at a loss as to what to do next.  After a moment, he handed the chalk to Jim Wiegel, who picked it up and simply continued the creative process on the spot.  That consult was a forerunner of dozens done to launch Human Development Projects in incredibly diverse situations and countries where full participation was as important within the facilitation team as it was within the community.

Second, is how Bill has managed to put all these participatory processes into the context of transformation imagery.  And they were/are transforming.  After a series of programs in Sumatra, Indonesia, the GM of a government-owned plantation company told me that 17 years ago he had made a suggestion to the then GM. He was told when his opinion was wanted, he would be asked for it.  The current GM then asked me...  "Is this the time?"  I laughed, painfully, as I remember, and said “Yes, I guess it is.”

Third, I'm thinking how much experience and wisdom is included in this relatively short book and how much blood, sweat and tears, but also joy and confidence has come out of the experience of creation.  You can see that through the documented stories.  It's a book both for the new facilitator and the experienced.  I learnt things that I didn't know and found new ideas that I like and will try, or in some cases will go back to - I had forgotten them as I focused on others.

Fourth, the book reminds me how we don't find meaning in our lives, we create it.  Thousands of communities, both organizational as well as geographic, are recreated in ToP processes, some of them possibly for short times, but the community of practice of participation is still alive and growing. Individual lives have been transformed.

The last reflection is from The Tao of Leadership, by John Heider, first brought to our notice to by our Taj Hotels colleague in India.  We bought copies in bulk at a Mumbai bookstore and handed them out to all the participants in our strategic planning workshops.  We always started with No 17, The Midwife.  It comes back to me when I find myself focusing on structure and I quote from it a bit, substituting “group” for “person”.  The quote has to do with “being”:

 "Remember you are facilitating another person's (group's) process. It is not your process.  Do not intrude.  Do not control.  Do not force your own needs and insights into the foreground.  If you don't trust a person's (group's) process, that person (group) will not trust you”.


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