Presentations, Seminars, and Workshops

Team Planning by Reviewing the Future

A 1-2 hour presentation.

Explore a more creative and insightful alternative to consensus building and five-year plans. A group can effortlessly and intuitively plan its projects by doing a presumé, which reviews accomplishments from a future time. Then you can compare individuals' views of the group's progress to determine alignment and get insight for new directions.

A resumé reviews accomplishments from the present, and a presumé reviews accomplishments from a point in the future. Besides being a truly collaborative effort that readily develops buy-in by participants, this process provides a great way to cut through wishful thinking, pessimism, and resistance to change and planning.

 

Possible benefits of this workshop:

You will:

• Determine desirable consensual goals for any period of time without imposition from management
• Easily develop buy-in of participants
• Learn the sources of time pressure and time poverty
• Learn how typical ways of planning tend to perpetuate the past, restrict creativity, limit well-being, and intensify time pressure and anxiety
• Identify the forces that are currently moving your group in various directions
• Learn a method to reverse our typical way of thinking about the future and eliminate its typical pressure and tendency to perpetuate the past

 

Highlights and Key Points:

Our planning usually involves thinking about the future room we've created separate from the present room, trying to see what's coming down the pike toward us from the future room, and what we'd like to see in the future.

Why is this kind of planning limited? The flow of time is actually a product of ignoring negative feelings and emotions: our experience of the flow of time actually seems to be the sum total of all our repressed negative emotions. The stronger the flow, the more the past determines the future. Rather than carefully thought out plans, we have little clarity about a future within a raging river of time that is quite determined by past events. This way of planning can produce a future that's a treadmill of stagnant events, with little chance for greater productivity, change, and enjoyment.

Thinking and planning for future times is fine and necessary, but seeing and feeling separate future rooms within the flow of time is a waste of time and an impediment to creativity, productivity, and well-being.

If our experience of linear time results from trying to get away from negative feelings and emotions, what's the chance that our planning done within the flow of time will also not be partly an attempt to avoid some feelings?

Is there some way to make plans and set goals without having them determined by old patterns and their underlying emotions? Since patterns are problematic only if we can't seem to stop their momentum, and since all momentum is carried by--or is--the flow of time, if we can stop the flow of time we can stop any or even all of these problematic patterns. This claim makes sense if we know that the flow of time is actually the sum total of all our repressed negative emotions. So changing this flow is a way to deal with these old feelings and break up our old problems, including pessimism and optimism in their different forms.

Whatever we can do to encourage a sense of timelessness rather than a flow of time will help stop whatever emotion and habitual behavior is currently active.

Is there some feeling that makes up some of the momentum that is moving you to plan now? How are these feelings moving you to plan? In which directions are these feelings moving you?

Doing the presumé exercise can put a dent in the momentum of time and dissolve some of our habitual patterns.

The presumé may bring about an unusual sense of completion, well-being, or peacefulness. Why? We're usually trying to get ahead, perhaps struggling against time, looking forward to happiness and completion in the future. This becomes a habit so that we're almost constantly off balance and dissatisfied with what's happening now. Stopping the flow of time with this exercise puts a dent in this momentum of seeking and its dissatisfaction. Yet doing it in this way also allows us to make plans and think about the future.

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