[Ailist] SWOTs and AI

[JSevolve@aol.com]

Long before I heard of AI I had alreadybenusing SCOT instead - "challenges" 
for "weaknesses" - as someone else said, the "threats can be more of an 
environmental issue and doesn't seem as much of a drain - especially when you 
focus the conversation on matching up strengths with the challenges and 
threats to see what the system has within it to address them! In fact there 
were several staff retreats I did in which we processed each threat with a 
discussion of what the group had to combat the threat and by the time the 
discussion was done, wwe had moved all of the threats to the Opportunities 
column! The first time this happened for me i was surprised but from then on 
I planned it in, without telling the group, and they always did it!

I do not think that it helps anything to avoid hard stuff (or even to think 
of it as a shadow) when doing AI processes. That taps into the social justice 
issues we discussed last year, too. In each case, we focus on the resources 
we have to deal woith things and make lemonade out of the lemons. Again - 
Bernard and Jane contributed that language - we are looking for the 
"life-giving forces" not the happiest moments - this is not Pollyanna work, 
it is transformative! So when we ask the question, we should ask for 
energized moments, when we were functioning well, when we addressed 
challenges with the right stuff, etc. Then the stories we get of when things 
were hard are couche din terms of what great things folks did to change 
things. When new issues arise, we then have these old stories of how we won 
the battle last time!  I shared a story 2 years ago of how a group of women 
in an oppressed urban neighborhood expressed powerful hostility and anger 
about the unjust conditions of their lives and their community - and we began 
to ask what the root of the anger was (an expression of a powerful sense of 
justice, hope and expectation...) and what its usefulness (motivation to 
action, empowerment, demands for justice and change). They went out of there 
fortified with stories of when they had made real change in the face of 
injustice and a clear sense of their efficacy.

Sorry to write so long. 

Jessica