Community Generativity*
Generativity is born in the community along with the infants of all sorts of homes and families. No child is excluded from the potential for generativity by their birth-families, schools, communities, cultures, or nations. The critical issue here is this: what do the families, schools, communities, cultures, and nations do to stimulate, facilitate, and actualize the potentially unlimited brainpower with which each child is born?
Figure 1 illustrates the Basic Community through which an individual takes a journey:
- Homes and Neighborhoods prepare the infants with linear conditioning and mechanical responses.
- Schools and Training empower the children with discriminative learning skills and introduction to information responses.
- Colleges and Technology Centers empower the students in generative individual processing with an introduction to human processing systems.
- Government and Service Agencies empower the citizens in generative organizational processing with an introduction to organizational processing systems.
- Business and Industry empower their employees in generative marketplace processing with an introduction to marketplace and environmental processing systems.
* Carkhuff, R. R. Community Generativity, Chapter 5. Saving America. Amherst, MA: HRD Press, 2010.
Figure 1. The Generative Community
As may be noted, each of the community components may be related to the other components. This is the key to effectiveness in “The Generative Community.”
Thus begins the individual’s journey to maturity: generativity in communities, in cultures, in nation-building, and civilization. This paradigm will serve as a foundation to guide you in building your images of civilization. They are processable! Their architecture is actionable! They are generative!
Generative Homes
History is replete with studies of the effects of neglect upon child development. Scientists, psychologists, and nutritionists have all concluded that neglect is a powerful “depressor variable.” When neglect intervenes in a child’s life, the effects are disastrous: physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Clearly, the environment in the form of parents and their surrogates did not stimulate and support these children.
Their parents did not know how to do so because no one had ever taught them how to do so. They could not teach their children because no one had ever taught them. They could not support their children’s learning because no one had ever supported their own learning.
The neglected children, many of them superior in intellectual resources, were destined to live with minds and bodies enslaved by intellectual limitations just as surely as the children’s ancestors had been enslaved by chains. Many of these children were to subsist below poverty levels on their poor farms. Some were to move to the city and join the ranks of the unemployed, or they were to become less than full persons because of financial dependence on the welfare system. Others were to opt for a criminal career ladder and end up in prison or the morgue.
All because we did not help them to actualize their superior potential.
And no amount of guidance will serve to guide them down the path to education, no amount of rehabilitation counseling will help them to actualize their potential, no amount of psychotherapy will help them to emerge as full human beings, no amount of correctional counseling will give them back their freedom.
Because we are not ready for our own fulfillment, our own actualization, our own emergence, our own freedom, we will not give these children theirs.
The Facilitative Effects of Stimulation
Some people rise above their bonds to study the effects of a human environment upon little human beings. This brings us to the studies of children in Milwaukee by Rick Heber and associates. In the 1970s, they studied the relationship between poverty and mental functioning. It divided the children of intellectually-challenged welfare mothers into two groups. In the experimental group, the researchers carefully selected teachers and trained them to work with the infants of the mothers on welfare. The teachers, in turn, trained the mothers of infants to respond sensitively to the children, and to stimulate and reinforce their learning activities.
In other words, all parties involved worked together to maximize the impact of the environment at the point where the child was going through the greatest growth. And they did this through skills training. Skills for the teachers, skills for the parents, skills for the children.
What do you suppose the difference in I.Q. was between the experimental and control infants in the welfare study after three-and-one-half years?
10 points? 20 points? 30 points?
The differences between the children who were nourished intellectually and those who were not was 33 points.
Think of it! The study focused upon children who, in the absence of continuous responsiveness and stimulation, are destined to live out their lives as city slum dwellers at best—and at worst, may have no lives at all!
The children in the welfare study, in the presence of continuous responsiveness and stimulation, may exercise their superior abilities to rise above their places of origin.
The difference?
The enslaved group was abandoned to the “benign neglect” of the playpen and the TV set.
The free group was saved by committed and disciplined people who put the human being back into the learning equation.
But most of all, the free group was saved by skilled people who taught skills to people who, in turn, taught skills to other people.
In the instance of neglect, the unattended children may drop by more than 30 I.Q. points over a period of several years. In the instance of facilitation, the attended children may gain more than 30 points over a period of several years.
The difference between facilitation and neglect is the difference between life and death itself. And it is the use—or the absence—of skills that makes all the difference!
Generative Schools
All educators are familiar with the “Achievement Deficit.” With each year of schooling the Black children fall further and further behind on the “Achievement Curve.”
Well, some Black parents worried long and hard about it. And they were determined to do something. There were Black leaders who taught them that if Black people get involved, their kids will learn fast. Back in the 1990s, the people of Chester formed the first charter school in Pennsylvania: The Chester Village Charter School.
They formed a Black school board. They appointed a Black headmaster. They increased the ranks of Black teachers to teach their 100% Black students. And they fell further behind on the “Achievement Curve!”
Falling Further Behind
Not only did they fall behind in achievement but also in attendance, deportment, and all other indices of functionality. Daily, when arguments broke out at the lower class levels, the upper class students emptied their classes and brawled in the halls. Teachers, themselves, were not safe from assaults and flying missiles like erasers and chalk. Many of us know the scene because we saw it on The Wire.
Outside the school, the reputation was as a “feeder school” to the violent public high school. The “Boyle Street Gang,” graduates of the Charter School, served as “Murder, Inc.” for the City of Chester: just leave $100 in the right place and you could have anyone assassinated!
To be sure, 85% of the boys over 16 years of age were in the criminal justice system. Nearly two-thirds of the girls over 16 were pregnant and on welfare. Things were out of control!
The leader and the teachers were in a state of depression because the kids were not learning the way they should. They felt that they had done everything that they could do naturally. And they cared! Above all else, they cared! Yet things got “worser” as they say.
Most of all, the kids were in a state of agitated depression. They came in innocent and hopeful. They opened to an experience that they found harmful. They left street-wise and fearful.
Some dropped out. Others “fell out.” Most just “passed out”—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Those who “passed on” found that the Village Charter School had been a training ground for the Chester Upland Public High School: it prepared the students for the retarding experiences which lay ahead.
Getting Ahead
501 out of 501! The Charter School got its rankings in the State of Pennsylvania. It was dead last in achievement. Things could not get any worse. It had become the highest priority for closing in the state—”The failed Charter School.”
Now the school faced the feared standards of “No Child Left Behind,” the controversial federal legislation. The school’s goal was to make “AYP,” or “Adequate Yearly Progress,” which none of the schools in the district had made before.
Yet the leaders never gave up! They internalized their own inadequacies. They had no finances for consulting and training, so they could not even find prescriptions for the limitations that they diagnosed. Nevertheless, they sought help.
The help came in the form of “The Possibilities Schools” which introduced a new curriculum—literally, “The New 3Rs.”
“The New 3Rs” were dedicated to teaching the learners to think. In terms of the conventional curriculum of “The Old 3Rs,” the learners were taught to co-process the content with the teachers by employing “The New 3Rs:”
- Relating to exchange images;
- Representing images in operational forms;
- Reasoning with the new images.
Both kids and teachers responded with enthusiasm; all had found a new and “awesome” way of learning. They responded accordingly with awesome effort.
The most important thing that “The Possibilities Schools” program did was to install one of those Headmasters who never gave up believing in the kids. His name was John Linder and he was, himself, a “homeboy” from Chester who never gave up hope. He was empowered in “The New 3Rs” and he took an incredible journey into teaching effectiveness. “The Possibilities Schools” now had the model they needed for everyone—teachers and students alike—to emulate.
The second most important thing that “The Possibilities Schools” program did was to install Dale Kelly as the Assistant Headmaster. Ms. Kelly acted as a “lead-teacher” who managed the entire school as if it were her class. She loved every child as her own and empowered every teacher as agents of the children. Indeed, “The Possibilities Schools” now had the agent that they needed to learn from.
Empowered with both model and agent for “The New 3Rs,” the students of The Village Charter School went on to break all records for performance. To be sure, it became the only school in the district to accomplish the coveted AYP—above 10% overall.
From 501 to AYP! Here is the rap the students put together and recited:
“The Relating Rap”
by the Students of Chester Village Charter School
I. Village Charter is The Relating School.
It teaches us The Relating Rule—
Relate to people and relate to knowledge,
Relate to skills that get us into college.
II. Above all else, we relate to read.
To decode our reading, we break down the deed.
Our guiding rule is “Basic Interrogatives.”
That breaks down into “Viable Perogatives.”
III. “Who is doing what to whom?”
That’s the basic question we have to assume.
“How and why are they doing their thing?”
“Where and when?” answers everything.
IV. We relate the same in order to write,
Who, what, when, where, how and why?
“5WH” is our formula.
It makes performers out of us all.
V. When we began we were the worst,
Now we know we are the first!
“We’re Number One,” that’s just deserve,
We’re getting ready to jump the curve.
VI. Village Charter is The Relating School.
It teaches us The Relating Rule.
We relate to people and relate to knowledge.
We relate to skills that get us into college.
Generative Colleges
Of all “The Preconditions of Civil Disorder” defined by the Kerner Commission as the essential ingredients for civil disturbance, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Racial prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future. The key to unlocking the doors of community crises is empowerment in generative processing.
Civil Disorder
Among “The Preconditions of Civil Disorder.” the following are most critical:
- Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing, resulting in continuing exclusion of great numbers of blacks from “The American Experience.”
- Social, political, and economic conditions of inner-city communities constituting a “clear pattern of severe disadvantage for blacks compared with whites.”
Indeed, the frustrations of powerlessness had led some Blacks to the conviction that there was no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances and of “moving the system.” These frustrations were reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government as well as the private sector of the white society that controlled them. To be sure, it is the great fear of “home-grown terrorists” that will drive the intelligent majority community to once-again invite the minority community to participate in The American Experience.
At American International College, leaders of both the Black and white communities were recruited to be empowered in processing interdependently the ongoing crises of their time. In other words, the empowered participants processed in “real-time” to generate solutions.
The American Experience
Clearly, the solution to exclusion is inclusion: full participation in the mission of The American Experience:
- Cultural relating
- Participative governance
- Free enterprise
These became the goals of the first Center for Human Resource Development (HRD). The programs were based upon the “Core of Generativity”:
- Relating to Images
- Representing Images
- Reasoning with Images
We began with the human relations skills that enable us to relate not only between groups but within our own groups. Over a month-long program, we divided blacks and whites into groups. Within each group, we empowered the members to relate effectively to each other with interpersonal communication skills. Next, we brought the groups together to relate between groups. The cul¬tural relating was immediately successful and the participants were ecstatic. Cultural relating is the cornerstone of all human endeavor. It led us directly to our next steps.
Since the majority community addressed the minority community with “benign neglect,” our “Real People’s Congress” com¬mitted immediately to defining and implementing a “Shadow Government.” Our community leader, Andrew Griffin, became our “Mayor Pro Tem.” His mission was to engage all members of the community with one basic question:
“What would you like to do with the rest of your life?”
They answered universally:
“We would like to be everywhere that impacts us.”
An incredibly profound answer! We had our assignments. We were off-and-running to meet the needs of our citizens. Participative governance is the core ingredient of The American Experience. It led us directly to our next steps.
Basically, the responses of thousands of citizens directed us to initiate entrepreneurially in both the public and private sectors. We developed our programs in the terms that the people conceived—”from womb-to-tomb!”
- Pre-parenting skills
- Early childhood preparation
- Primary and secondary education
- Private and public sector employment
- Participation in governance
- Participation in politics
- Participation in integrated housing
- Participation in recreation and fitness
- Participation in counseling and guidance
- Participation in bereavement and other benefits
Obviously, in order to accomplish these objectives, we had to define and implement new roles for ourselves. Not only did we need to define new areas of thinking and relating, we also had to implement new areas of lobbying and publicizing!
The most powerful outcomes were professional:
- In terms of cultural relating, all graduates attended college, and more than 50% were graduated (this from a population with an average 7th grade education).
- In terms of participative governance, all graduates participated in city government, with many assuming leadership roles (Ray Jordan became a Massachusetts State Senator and chaired the Ways and Means Committee).
- In terms of free enterprise, the graduates out-earned the majority community (three of the graduates became millionaires).
Perhaps the most dramatic outcomes were personal as well as beneficial to the community:
- None of the men ever committed another crime (all had criminal records before the HRD program).
- None of the women ever went on welfare again (all had been on welfare before the HRD program).
The formula was straightforward:
Engage the disenfranchised in The American Experience and they will respond as all other Americans have.
The HRD graduates will never stop growing! Generativity is a spiral that never ends!
Generative Government
Back in the late 1960s, the HRD Center in Springfield developed a graduate program in Human Resource Development—Community Resource Development (HRD–CRD). More informally, this program was known as “The Shadow Community,” installed because of the “benign neglect” that the majority community and its governance reflected upon their marginal black and brown citizens.
The Shadow Community
The mission of “The Shadow Community” was to bring together representatives of all organizations affecting and affected by HRD and CRD. Accordingly, the Center recruited heavily from leaders of the private sector as well as leaders from the public sector and the community-at-large. In their regular sessions, they processed interdependently the critical issues of their time: social, economic, employment, educational, and other areas. For each problem area, the CRD group generated solutions that they then acted upon.
For example, to improve deteriorating socioeconomic conditions in the inner-city, the CRD group contributed to the architecture of “Bay State West,” a revitalization of business development in the core of the inner-city.
To improve employment and economics, the CRD group lobbied both the private and public sectors for entry-level positions for which the HRD program was responsible for training and supporting.
Educationally, the CRD group initiated Educational Achievement Programs for those left behind by conventional public education; e.g., New Careers Programs for the old career drop-outs!
Along these lines, “The Concentrated Employment Program” was converted to a college-degree preparation program in which “90-day wonders” received training in core living and learning skills, and specific working skills of their individual choices.
Programs in many other areas such as housing and welfare and criminal justice all followed with astounding results. A 20-year follow-up indicated the following enduring highlights of performance:
- All graduates were gainfully employed, many at executive, management, and supervisory levels, including one who ultimately sat on the Board of Directors of a Fortune 500 firm.
- All graduates went on to complete at least one year of college at many different post-secondary institutions, including one graduate with a doctorate from Harvard.
Moreover, the college in which the graduate program was housed received due recognition. While all colleges in New England experienced significant declines in applications for admissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the years the HRD Center was in operation, American International College (AIC) experienced an increase of 15% to 20% in applications. According to J. Walter Reardon, Vice President, Massachusetts Mutual, and a graduate student in the program, “This was a million-dollar public relations miracle. It was as if parents and their children were saying, ‘At least AIC is dealing with the relevant problems of our time.’”
The demonstrations were important: marginalized people really can participate and perform in The American Experience.
The implications are profound: what is the majority doing preventing the minority peoples from participating in The American Experience?
Perhaps the most important demonstration of the CRD group was the introduction to computerized contributions to be performed. In these group meetings, Dr. Bernard G. Berenson, a pathfinder in computer applications, introduced the groups to the use of
computers. Based as the major industries were upon actuarial data, the computerization came to spur the revitalization of the Springfield insurance industry.
In summary, the major facets of The American Experience were processed in the CRD group in the HRD Center:
- Cultural relating in relations within, between, and among the private, public, and community sectors;
- Participative governance in responding and then initiating proactively to the crises within, between, and among the private, public, and community sectors;
- Entrepreneurial enterprise in generating, risk-taking, and managing new initiatives leading to new enterprises within, between, and among the private, public, and community sectors.
The participants in the CRD group had indeed designed and implemented The Shadow Community. In so doing, they, them¬selves, were transformed from prime Human Capital to “enlightened citizens.”
Generative Business
After all is said and done, it is not the energy crisis that has put America on the edge of bankruptcy—economic, social, and moral. It is the “generativity crisis!”
This crisis in generative thinking spreads virus-like, just below the surface, blurring our abilities to observe and diagnose. Osmotically seeping through our permeable membranes, this virus penetrates the very thought processes of our brains.
The virus brought with it a continuous and incremental rein¬forcement schedule of benefits—of “quick hit” innovations and successes. Most seductive, it brought with it incalculable wealth—multi-trillion dollar markets that capitalistic society had never known before.
In return, the virus asked that those who participated in its “shell game” forgo any generative thinking. “Outside the box!” became an expression defining the forbidden territories of generative thoughts.
By abandoning our history of generativity, we also abandoned our future in generativity. In so doing, we have lost not only our potentially infinite brainpower but also our potentially eternal souls.
The Generativity Explosion
At the same time in the late 1950s and early 1960s that Jack Kilby was inventing the microprocessor, we were studying human processing. Here are the conclusions of a report we made at the time.
In interviews, we found that what made Kilby’s contributions profound were not the products and services he generated, but the generative processes he employed. In other words, Kilby had a thinking system—a processing system—for generating breakthroughs.
- Relating to images—Immersing in the phenomena for weeks or even months, positioning to elicit the images that they yield to him.
- Representing images—Conquering the operations involved and developing preliminary models, systems, and technologies to represent them.
- Reasoning by exploring—Exploring the representations by expanding the new possibilistic models, systems, and technologies.
- Reasoning by understanding—Understanding new images by narrowing to preferred probabilistic models, systems, and technologies.
- Reasoning by acting—Initiating action programs by planning to achieve objectives within the preferred models, systems, and technologies.
Moreover, once he had developed productive images, Kilby shared them with his colleagues. He stimulated them to generate and share their images. Together, they treated all images as input to interpersonal processing of new and more powerful images.
Finally, and most important, Kilby lived and processed interdependently inside the phenomenal images he and his colleagues generated. He dedicated himself along with other phenomenal components to accomplishing the phenomenal functions. He employed the phenomenal processes to enable the components to accomplish the functions. In effect, he merged with the phenomena. What he had generated, he now innovated.
Kilby is the model of the generative innovator. He built models of the phenomenal operations. He processed these operations generatively—individually, interpersonally, and finally, interdependently.
Processing is all about phenomena. Phenomena are the people, data, and things that we encounter in our daily existence. Phenomena may be as small as a skill step in a simple task we must perform or they may be as large as the great missions of our business, our econ¬omy, or our society. Every experience is phenomenal.
Phenomena are defined by their operations: the functions they discharge; the compo-nents they invest; the processes in which they engage; the conditions from which they derive; the standards they set. In essence, phenomena, themselves, are processing systems: component inputs are transformed into function outputs by generative processes under specifiable conditions and with measurable standards.
Generative processing, then, is about generating phenomena: qualitatively improved images of phenomenal functions, components, processes, conditions, and standards. Ultimately, we learn to live and process within the phenomena we have generated. Genera¬tive processing is dedicated to generating qualitatively better and more powerful images of the phenomena with which we work! In short, generative processing is a “best processes” approach to breakthrough thinking. It is what we taught to staff members of the major insurance corporations in the 1960s and 1970s.
Perhaps the most powerful principles that we conveyed to the leaders of the insurance industry in Springfield were those of “entrepreneurial generativity.” This was the real genius of the American capitalistic system. From our earliest days, we have been driven by the generativity engines of Franklin, Hamilton, and Washington. Entrepreneurial leaders such as Edison, Ford, and Rockefeller defined the core infrastructure of the 20th century—electricity, combustion engines, motor cars, highways, energy, and finances. Tom Watson, Sr., generated the model for “The Golden Age of American Business” in the second half of this 20th century with systems and sales of business machines and computers.
This was a tradition carried on by J. Walter Reardon. For his graduate thesis, Reardon designed the architecture for transforming the Department of Public Relations at Mass Mutual into the Division of Corporate–Community Communications. This became the platform for “mutual growth” of both the private sector and the community.
The Generativity Solution
As has been demonstrated, every stage of human generativity builds developmentally and cumulatively. This means that each stage builds upon the previous stage. From the perspec¬tive of science, each lower-order stage is a precondition for a higher-order stage.
Thus, homes and neighborhoods provide the foundation for schools and training. Similarly, the colleges and technologies build developmentally upon the schools; government and services upon colleges; and business and industry upon government.
In this context, The Generative Community is the source of Community Capital (see Figure 2). As may be viewed, every component in the community is “the developmental source of New Capital.
Figure 2. Community Capital
These potent sources of growth operate synergistically to generate the truly capital community, a prepotent source of “The Generativity Solution.”
Empowered by the Community Resource Development Programs of the 1960s and 1970s, the results were identified as “The Springfield Miracle!” The historic “City of Homes” had been transformed from the dying industrial town of the 1960s to the thriving Information Technology Center of the 1980s:
“Today, the city’s industrial plants have been shutting down, but service industries and small-scale ‘job shops’ have taken their place. The biggest growth has been in the financial services, accounting firms, and insurance companies. All of these factors have converged to reduce unemployment below 3 percent.”*
In our graduate and undergraduate programs at American International College, the dying industrial town had discovered that it was mismatched to meet the conditions of the evolving Information Age.
Through generative leadership, its community components were aligned to facilitate the instantaneous communication of growth-relevant information. All community compo-nents were integrated in “Community Generativity.” For example, the minority groups actually reached the standards of performance of the majority groups on indices such as earning power.
This was a glorious time for Springfield and its citizens! Empowered by the “Skyhooks of Generativity,” the people had pulled themselves up by their own “bootstraps of growth”—personal, educational, governmental, and business in “The Synergy of Corporate– Community Growth” modeled in the graduate program by Reardon’s architecture.
Springfield had risen—like Phoenix out of the ashes—to define itself as a thriving “Information Center.” It had reinvented itself as a Generative Community. It had generated its own “Generativity Solution.”
* Nocera, J. The Springfield Miracle. Newsweek, June 6, 1988, pp. 45–48.