Brief reasons for experiencing/ experimenting with a structured
planning process in a seminar course:
1. We often have to work in groups (e.g., in meetings), get frustrated by
the group's inefficiency or power dynamics, and yet find it difficult to do
something to improve the group process.
2. Environmental planning and advocacy increasingly involves participation
in community planning and conflict resolution.
3. In many realms of society, including the business world, the new sense
of leadership is closer to facilitated planning, in which a decision is right
if it is followed through by the group. (The old leadership was that an
individual was supposed to have the right answer and then direct others to
follow.)
4. More generally, there is a growing emphasis on the need for a vigorous
civil society, that is, of institutions between the individual and, on one
hand, the state and, on the other hand, the corporation. ICA's techniques
for the planning process have been developed through three or four decades
of "facilitating a culture of participation" in community and institutional
development.
Peter Taylor, Feb. 98