(from the Huffington Post)
Spontaneous and Relentless Compassion
This TED Talk, is about a geo-political exercise I created for public school children in 1978. Its consistent successful outcome over the last three decades (negotiating and solving fifty inter-locking global problems, and having every nation’s asset value and societal good increased), I would say is based almost entirely upon the nature of the relationship between the teacher and the students, and between the students themselves. The game board itself is a multi-level tower of Plexiglas covered with thousands of game pieces and layer upon layer of complex, global crisis requiring hyper collaborative problem solving, in the midst of chaos, uncertainty, and adversarial pressures. Everything is, and is designed to go wrong on every level and in every sphere… all at once… for everyone.
And yet what I find, when my students are thrown into this super-heated crucible with its recipe for immediate and complete failure, that instead of boiling over they add new ingredients, performing a sort of alchemy, turning leaden problems into gold. Solving problems in the Game is certainly a messy process, with false starts, inaccurate assessments, and wrong-headed impulses. But the thought of there being no way out does not seem to occur to the children, although the situations presented are structured to appear that way. No way out, they come to realize is a self-designated option created by the conceptual mind. This concept actually has no inherent existence in reality.
The children have a lack of pre-conceptions, a lack of experience really, of what has or has not worked, of what can or cannot be useful. Because of that innocence, or naivete, their solutions come across as bold, creative, and often wildly open-hearted. Their failures, which I fully expect and accept, are welcomed as sincere experiments. They are working from a place before perspectives harden and attitudes solidify, where for example, compromise is demonstrated to be a lack of separateness from others, rather than being seen as personal sacrifice. Compromise as a method does not seem to be experienced as a lost of self. Rather the students’ over riding concern in negotiations is for a happier outcome for all…
– Arianna Huffington and Chris Anderson