When Ben Broome and others ran a session of Interactive Management work
with the Tarahumari Indians in Mexico, a strange thing happened. At some
point in the work the Indians stopped talking in English and lapsed into a
heated discussion in their native language. After a prolonged period of
this, it was discovered that what they were talking about was this:
After lo many "interventions" by well-meaning consultants and government
"helpers", the Tarahumari (having done their own structural models with
the help of the IM team and the IM process) had made a startling
discovery. The discovery was that the reason the help from many outsiders
for many years had been relatively ineffectual was that the outsiders did
not understand enough about the Tarahumari culture and thought patterns to
know what they needed to know in order to help. But even more exciting
and fundamental was this: The Tarahumari recognized that in order to
enable the outside well-meaning helpers to help them, the Tarahumari
themselves had to provide the necessary foundational patterns to the
outsiders and explain these patterns to them, before the outsiders could
understand what was important.
All of the IM staff had a good cry after that.
If you would like to know more about this story, you could try to contact
Ben Broome on Cyprus, where he is in a followup year to his Fulbright year
with the Turks and Cypriots.
-- John N. Warfield Johnwfield@aol.com