Category: Uncategorized

• Mental Health Self-Help Tools
• Using Advocacy as a Self-Help Tool
• Support for self care for patients with chronic disease
• Self-care isn’t enough. We need community care to thrive.

We mostly view government (The System) as a repository of solutions to problems we can’t solve ourselves. I don’t know if this was ever true, but it certainly isn’t true now, especially in the lives of our community of people with disabilities. The capacity of government to take responsibility for solving any problem is undermined by pressure to reduce expenditures, frank corruption, incompetence, and a virtually universal refusal to ever take responsibility for anything that goes wrong. This “Not Me” attitude occurs both in disaster, and more recently, as a general marketing framework. “Don’t expect much from us”. Government’s response is randomly useful and randomly destructive,.

So, when we act as though the government has as its purpose the solving of our life problems, and we suffer disappointment when it doesn’t, we are perpetuating a species of victimhood for ourselves from which we can’t exit. We can only feel more deeply victimized and helpless.

We need to stop looking at The System as a Solution to our problems in living as people with disabilities. It will never be that. At the same time, there is an enormous amount of resources tied up (embedded) in The System, even if an ever-increasing amount of those resources are used in monitoring, administration, and political purposes that have nothing to do with support. The mission of support, the supposed purpose, gradually becomes more and more to deny support, investing in administrative complexity to make support increasingly difficult to access. Everything about The System is double-edged, and we can’t ever be sure what edge we will get when we try to use it the way it is supposed to work.

While we can’t depend on The System, we can’t simply ignore it either. We must make use of The System or forgo the resources. Frankly, we currently have no way of taking the resources in The System and making them directly available, nor are we likely to anytime soon.

As we think they were intended.

To deal with this reality, we must adopt a dual approach that will seem unnatural:

• We must get better at extracting support from The System as it is, not as we wish it would be. This will require us to be far more strategic in our interactions with the System, and we will have to understand that The System will continue to deteriorate even as our advocacy creates some local real improvements in how it works. Local improvement, but System-wide slow breakdown is the trend for the foreseeable future.
• In addition to extracting support from The System, we will need to disassociate resources from The System that we can use for building an alternative that I have called Our System. For example, we might advocate to move resources from parts of The System that are moribund or useless to ones where there is a better chance of being able to use them to create Our System.

This is an abstract overview of how the three motifs must be woven to expand our control over our lives and our freedom of choice.

Next Time: Using the System as a Tool

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• Twine: open-source tool for telling nonlinear stories
• Risk and Strategy Entwined
• Alexander’s “A Pattern language”
• “Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”― Stephen King

FutureStrategy has three motifs, like the three cords in the image, but functioning as flows rather than things. The three flows arise out of the model from the last slide.

Using The System as a Tool

Our Community will continue to depend on The System for a long time, even as we build an alternative. The sheer amount of social resources embedded in The System makes it impossible to seriously consider going “off the grid”. But we can begin to reduce our dependence on The System by viewing it as a Tool that we use to support our personal and social lives rather than as The Solution, a perspective that makes us instant victims when The System fails to support us.

Advocating with The System for Valued Change

We can advocate with The System to trigger valued change, as I described earlier in this series. Advocacy requires us to perturb The System (whatever it is), making it choose between embracing the valued change that drives our advocacy or be forced to uncontrollably change by the pressure from The System’s environment. Our goal in expanding our advocacy is to perturb more deeply and comprehensively.

Building Our Systems of Support

We can build Our System to make up for the failure of The System, as we do now when we have no choice. We can build Our System as a local, stable, small-scale alternative to The System, so that between The System and Our System, we have better dynamic supports that allow us to explore life’s possibility and expand the scope of our free choice.

Although I outlined the three motifs as separate, it doesn’t take much effort to realize that they are intertwined as we play them out in our lives and communities. At the same time, each of the motifs requires its own ways and means to become effective. For example, if we were to take our success in building Our System and turn it over to The System, our work would soon be transformed into just another version of The System.

This reality doesn’t mean that we don’t look to improve our success by observing how each of the motifs is evolving, asking ourselves how success in one can support success in the others.

I’ve included the opensource narrative creation tool Twine because weaving multiple strategies is more like creating a complex story than it is like building a ”Strategic Plan”.

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The use of constraints in advocacy requires a different view of them than our day-to-day understanding. The above model is not a complete one for understanding constraints, but it has the advantage of being concrete and simple.

The basic idea is that the strongest constraints are the ones that a target system wishes to protect most carefully. I have put them well inside the “boundary” of the system to imply that. The System Boundary is “Active” because it is always interacting with the weak constraints that stabilize its overall activity.

The weak constraints are on the boundary. Even though they are weak, they are still integrated with the target system to some extent. The target prefers to keep these weak constraints unable to materially affect the target’s activity even though they can’t simply eliminate the weak constraint interaction with the target system. So, the target system “manages” weak constraints to keep them predictable and less able to affect the Strong Constraints.

The simplest way to think of the role of weak constraints in “ordinary reality” is to view their individual constraint activity as a roughly repeating cycle. The target system manages these weak constraints by managing what it believes is the specific weak constraint cycle. The goal of management of weak constraints is to minimize the costs of management by reducing the effects of the weak constraint on the target system.

Being real constraints, the weak constraints are not entirely predictable. As advocates, we can also intentionally change the activity of one or more weak constraints to destabilize the target system in ways the target can’t anticipate. This successful destabilizing requires the target to respond in ways outside its normal routine, creating a leverage point for advocacy. We use this leverage point to coordinate and enable our effort to change the target in the same way we use our knee, for example, to pivot for a shot in a pickup basketball game or use our hands to alter the coordination of knitting needles to produce a particular knot.

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• Recovery and Recovery Support
• Peer Support and Social Inclusion
• 10 Guiding Principles of Recovery
• Recovery Toolkits for Communities and Events
• Person-Centered Planning

Recovery is a specific framework of mutual support that has general use in building our counterstroke and embracing the values of personalism as our framework for eliminating belittlement.

Recovery focuses on individuals building personal control over the parts of their life (variously called symptoms, barriers, or processes of oppression), using natural supports and mutual support networks to build these recovery skills.

There are many techniques and concepts for creating recovery skills, and some are included in the resources in the post. But at its base, Recovery is about creating a personally customized response to what prevents you from living a free life of choice, using your own knowledge of yourself, your creativity, and the experience of those who support you. The particular tools you embrace to support your recovery journey are less important than that those tools speak to you, and make it easier for you to go forward.

FutureStrategy is my framework for the disability community to use in developing both our resistance to the current degradation of our living conditions and life possibilities and as a way of thinking about how we might build a different future.

FutureStrategy is a detailed perspective on the possibilities of where we are now and where we might go. It isn’t a magic talisman or 7 steps to total success. There is no simple answer to the problems we face now or in the near term. If we want a real solution, we will have to create one.

Simply stopping the attacks we face now will not restore what was. Our society is headed in a direction which will cause great pain for the disability community (and everyone else), and that direction was set a long time ago. We can make things better or worse in the short run, but we can’t reverse the decline of our society completely.

As a first step in describing FutureStrategy, I will be going through an Overview presentation that I developed, using a slide format to talk about the basic ideas, one at a time. The slides will include notes for each idea and I will publish them on this blog.  I will also include occasional posts about other issues that illustrate the ideas of FutureStrategy as they arise.

In a few months, I will begin to publish material from a second presentation, a much longer and deeper one, that expands and details the ideas of the Overview. I will make these available through a subscription service called Patreon so that I will be able to fund my work on these ideas. There will be tiers for the subscriptions, including one that allows access to all the blog posts for $2 a month. The other tiers will include various materials and a podcast.

I hope you will consider subscribing, and I would like to know what you think of the material I publish in the next few months from the overview presentation.

I would also be able to do the presentation in person for a group if you think that would be useful. Email me at wayofthefan@gmail.com if you become interested in a presentation after you see the slide-based posts.

I have been trying to understand change (both ongoing and intentional) since an epiphany I had in late 1970. Although I was always interested in change as a part of my personal framework of meaning, most of my effort to learn about change has been motivated by my membership in, and my commitment to, the disability community.

Over the last year, I have been trying to frame what I have learned so that disability advocates can make better use of these ideas to actively respond to the large-scale degradation of social, political, and financial life that American society is currently undergoing. This degradation is not just a result of the current administration, but a longstanding trend in our society that has paralleled and sometimes contextualized our successful rights activism.

This degradation is beginning to overwhelm our historically effective approach to rights advocacy, an approach based on what were reasonable assumptions at the time. These assumptions are gradually being corrupted, undermining our previous ways of building personal autonomy and freedom of choice.

While we must resist this degradation, resistance will not be nearly enough to preserve our community’s values. There will be no going back to what we considered stability.  We will need to simultaneously use whatever remains available to us in our larger society, resist the agenda of degradation that is the current reality, and create something new.

Very difficult to actually pull off.

We need a strategy. We need a larger way to think about what we face.

We need a strategy. Not an operational plan or a logic model or an advocacy tactic, or any of the other things we regularly and wrongly call a strategy.

We need a real strategy!

A strategy is not a plan like the one we make for a funding proposal. That is an operational plan and includes measurable outcomes and a (usually) cynically specific set of steps for reaching those outcomes.

A strategy is a framework for thinking about two realities we can’t avoid in our advocacy work:

• The future is always unpredictable
• We only have limited resources (people, technology, energy, money, spirit)

If the future was predictable and we had more resources than we could ever use in 100 years, we could create an operational plan and achieve our goals every time.  All we would have to do is get good at writing logic models.

But the reality isn’t set up that way.  Because of the mismatch between how we are required to plan and reality, we often scale back the outcomes in our operational plans to make sure we reach them so that we can continue to get funding or praise or organization and personal stature. Avoiding failure is more important than depth of impact.

This is a reasonable response to a system and a society that believes change can reliably be produced like candy bars in a factory. So, once you have the right technique (the right change plan), you can crank change out forever.

A strategy allows you to create variability in the face of the unexpected. Operational plans suppress variability in the name of predictable outcomes. However useful predictable outcomes are in seeking funding, variability is the way you survive over the long term.

The best example of using variability to keep playing the game you want to play is evolution.

Evolution isn’t about creating the perfect organism, though we tend to interpret it that way because of our basic human narcissism. Evolution is about generating variability so that no matter what happens, life will continue.

The hummingbird and the flower have evolved to match one another so that need and opportunity become a single integrated process. The results of this evolutionary matching (the outcomes of the plan as it were) aren’t in the organism, they are the relationship between organism and environment.  This relationship (an outcome in the larger strategy of evolution) is a complex system that ages over time. Every complex system (including our advocacy and the targets of our advocacy) is the expression of a kind of operational plan, the same kind that we often confuse with a strategy.

So, evolution is a strategy and each expression of its framework is an operational plan. All operational plans eventually collapse. But the evolutionary strategy continues.

So, how do we build a strategy?