Co-Created!

An upclose shot of the rose window mandala from the City Hall building or Paris's 1er Arrondisement

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The last two weeks I have been working with a team of 24 people to co-create.

Yes, that word again. What does it mean exactly? Well, I am discovering that in 'normal' terms its a little like magic.

The Mission of a company or an institution is their most fundamental and intimately important statement there is. It sets the whole direction of everything the organization does. In normal planning, one would be crazy to open and entrust the formation of the mission statement to a bunch of strangers.

But that's what we just did!

I messaged the entire 3500 person database of the 1Mandala project and invited anybody to participate in a co-creative group. Anybody. In fact, I made a specific point not to invite anyone specifically. Twenty five people from Michigan to Romania, to Venuzuela, to Italy to Costa Rica joined in. I laid out the task at hand, the old version of mission statement (or as we call it the Statement of Intention) and opened it wide up for discussion, revision and change.

And... people jumped in. Over two weeks over 80 messages were exchanged over this one little sentence! A beautiful international cross-section of folks, in different languages discussed word after word, meaning after meaning. In the end we were refining gramatical constructs and prepositions to get it just right.

And we got! We did soooo much better than I ever could have alone, or for that, matter, faster and more efficiently than through a normal group voting process.

I know. I lead this exact process with a public gallery back in Canada. It took A YEAR of meetings to get mission statement. And if I can be so bold, it wasn't nearly as unaminous an accord nor as elegant and meaning-FULL sentence. Each word in our mission has been discussed and has a wealth of meaning beaneath it that adds to the depth and strength of our intention.

All in two weeks. Beautiful.

Here it is:

"Our shared intention is to co-create a grand mandala of creative
portraits that reflects and celebrates the emerging oneness
consciousness on Earth"

And now, I shake my head at the power of 25 people holding such a grand, focused and shared intention. An intention that implicit within is an openeness to gather more and more folks into the co-creative process that we just went through..

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The 1Mandala Co-Creation Group:

http://groups.google.com/group/1mandala-co-creation