Dreaming

This is the path from the individual to a collective vision. This is the stage that will shift your project from the “Pre-Forming” to the “Forming Stage“,  or what M.Scott Peck calls “Pseudo Community”.

It is the process of “Hearing the Call” that builds the motivation and begins the hero’s journey.

This is the stage of maximising creativity – the “Aha moments” of new discovery. Neurologically it especially involves the pattern recognition areas of the right hemisphere, the model building region above the occipital lobe, and the pre-frontal cortex.

Every project starts with the dream of a single person. But evidence seems to show that possibly 90% of projects get stuck in the dreaming stage, because people do not share their dreams. No one can realise a dream on their own. In the dreaming stage we need to build a team around our dream, and this starts by telling others about it.

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Educator, suggests that the practice of freedom requires that the initiator’s dreams have to die, to make their “Easter” in order to be “resurrected” as the collective initiative of the whole team. If I am working on “your project” there is a different energy than if I am working on “our project“. It is only after this that everyone can identify equally with the idea and will commit to it one hundred percent.

After presenting the idea, this is achieved through a “Dream Circle” where participants answer the “Generative question”:

“What would this project have to be like that afterward you can say, you could not have spent your time in any better way?“

The Dragon Dreaming method for collecting this vision through the Dream Circle, lets everyone answer that question, without critique, until all participants pass. This vision is then read back to those present in the past tense.

From this circle arises an animate “dream manifesto”. It is an animate living document because it can always be changed, and because it creates a very strong motivational attraction from the vision to the implementation.