I’ve volunteered to do a workshop at the First Global Conference on Positive Change. Here is the approach.
How to change positively? Everything is energy and energy is always conserved. So, systems, by necessity, tend to settle in the lowest configuration possible. Moving them into a higher configuration, requires energy too. This energy we can call “free energy”. Change requires “free energy”. The question now becomes, “How can we free energy?” A second question arises: “how do we guide this free energy positively?”.
Energies are stored in tensions, and tensions are energies. You’ll have noticed that there are tensions everywhere. Inside you, between human beings, between groups of people. And, ultimately, between nations. Tensions build and need to be released. This creates motions. In Physics this is called the First Law of Motion: Action = – (minus) Reaction. The minus sign suggests, that reaction works contrary to (the cause of) action. Reaction somehow is “negative”. How to change positively?
Energy reside inside you, me, human beings. The energies of life, are tensions too. So, these tensions create motiond too. This is what I like to call E-motions. You act because of your E-motion; people act on E-motions. Most of the times, we instinctively react. Action = – (minus) Reaction. Which is, by default “negative”. We’ve learned that to “go away” makes more sense than to “engage”. We should learn to create positive change instead of react negatively. Guiding this process is called “process facilitation”
Our task now becomes, “Configure. How to guide the release of E-motions in a positive way?”. Over the years, I’ve been developing an approach that enables us to investigate the current system and search for creative resolutions, to find positive (re)configurations. Using objects, (LEGO, Playmobile) figures and placing them on a map, you recreate your configuration of elements. This makes the tensions visible and communicable. We can give at-tention to them. We can move them, finding paths of change.
Interested: join the 1St Global Conference on Positive Change – Amsterdam, Apri1 13th – 14th. We’ll recreate situations, and invent or create ways to positively change a system.
