SMALL GROUPS EFFECTIVENESS

Laurie mentioned a paper by Stephan A. Schwartz titled:  Trends that will Affect Your Future...
She brought this to my attention when we were discussing our group and mentioned the effectiveness of small groups in this paper.  I excerpted a section having to do the efftectiveness of the Quakers upon society. Stephan focuses in this section on their "laws" because "Taken together, they constitute a proven Strategy of Beingness.

“It was not what we did that mattered,
although that was important.
It was not what we said, although
that too was important. What mattered
was our ‘beingness’. The essence
of who we were, that is what
made the British choose to leave India.”
Gandhi

"In the whole of American history, from the colonial era to the present day, there have been a total of less than one million Quakers. Today, in a population of approximately 300 million, about 250,000 of us are Quakers. It is such a small faith that most people have never met a Quaker and never will, and few know anything about what they believe.
And yet . . .
If one works back to the headwaters of every one of the major positive social currents I have listed (and many more besides), one finds a small group of Quakers.
Here is a percentage breakdown of Quakers in religion:
● Protestant (all sects) 52%
● Catholic (all sects) 24.5%
● Jewish 1.3%
● Muslim 0.5%
● Quakers (Society of Friends) 0.0008%

Below are movements in American society with the Quakers at the core.
● abolition
● public education
● penal reform
● women’s suffrage
● civil rights
● nuclear freeze
● environmental protection

How could this be, I thought? How could this tiny group of people create movements that ultimately involved millions, and because enough people personally changed, made the change the new society norm? Studying the histories, eight laws—I hesitate to call them laws, but because they are constants in each case, I think they have earned the term—began to emerge. They were not at all what I had anticipated. Taken together, they constitute a proven Strategy of Beingness:

● law number one—the individuals, individually, and the group, collectively,must share a common intention
● law number 2—the individuals and the group may have goals, but they may not have cherished outcomes
● law number 3—the individuals in the group must accept that their goal may not be reached in their lifetimes, and be OK with that
● law number 4—the individuals in the group must accept that they may not get either credit or acknowledgment for what they have done, and be authentically OK about this
● law number 5—each person in the group, regardless of gender, religion, race, or culture, must enjoy fundamental equality, even as the various roles in the hierarchy of the effort are respected
● law number 6—the individuals in the group must foreswear violence in word, act . . . or thought
● law number 7—the individuals in thegroup must make their private selves consistent with their public postures
● law number 8—the individuals in the group, and the group collectively, must always act from the beingness of life affirming integrity"

Read the entire paper >