Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Conceptualizing a Reconnection

Each raindrop seems so uniform; just part of the wall that's descending from the leaden sky as we are finally tossed into the season of Fall. The showers are varying from light to insistent, but in all cases, the rainy season has begun. So it's easy to contemplate water right now; we're enveloped by it in a meteorological sense, encapsulated by its presence around us.
All this week I've thought about rain and how it can be such a great example of perceived disconnection. Sitting in the living room and watching the cars outside, headlights illuminating the raindrops, their paths punctuated by the sound of the wheels on the wet pavement. Each raindrop appears to be separate, though it is traveling at the same rate, in the same direction, and reflects the same basic physical form as every other raindrop. Project members and proponents tend to do this; seem to be disconnected from the whole when in fact all are moving toward the same goal, so a dual existence is established, one separate, but still connected.
In a project, the members tend to operate from their own space. Maybe it's the whole 'every snowflake is unique' thing, but there are so many instances where this is the case, just like that rainwater that is perceived as separate raindrops.
We separate the oceans, though as William McDonough noted in this week's video, all of the oceans are part of one system, much like a 'toilet that doesn't flush.' We have different names for rivers and streams and lakes, though it's all the same water traveling through those conduits.
So if every goal to be achieved will have some disconnection between the phases of the project, perhaps a lesson is to be learned from the under-appreciated raindrop. It’s let loose from the sky, its existence then determined by the environment around it and anything that will interact with the raindrop.
This could also be the way to establish a project. The design of the project and launch could be exactly like a raindrop leaving the cloud; purposefully and without any fanfare. Since we have learned that an educational approach is not the most successful per the studies conducted, we know that frontloading a project with educational buy-in promotional trappings would be mainly ignored.
For this reason, though I would want to have some educational information available for a project, I wouldn’t need to address everything at inception. Instead, having the educational products be manufactured during creation of the project would help give cause for all invested project members to be involved and cooperating with one another. This would be applied as well to producing the follow-up information and continuation of the project.
Much like how raindrops converge upon striking a surface, pooling immediately, thus would the project members combine to become part of the whole again, which would ensure that the end result is more successful.