MKPUSA WTF: Power Plays, Rescues, Secrets, and Lies

 

In the year 2000 the Mankind Project International entered into an agreement with a consultant to provide multicultural awareness training to a selected group of men interested in implementing multicultural awareness. Major money was donated and major money was spent over the course of four years in its implementation. 

What was originally proposed was a series of 3 training courses for the initial team and for the initial team to integrate and pass those trainings on to the communities. The first level training was so impactful that the leader body tried to make it a required training for all leaders but that was watered down to a single non-specific requirement for multicultural training.

Because funding was always difficult and the leadership had a huge money shadow around paying a consultant, the leader body muddied the waters by creating a whole variety of different multicultural trainings which confused the issue and the goals of the initial multicultural initiative.  They interrupted the process with a series self-created training diversity which generated income locally and for the authors.

What occurred within the multicultural initiative was that a couple of leaders “originated” a workshop based on maybe 30% of the first level training copyright and sought to get paid to present it and to make it the “requirement” for leaders and Leaders in training.  This redirected the goals of the multicultural initiative and the organization sought to have that training work to satisfy a requirement and to self-fund the initiative.

I'm going to stop here because I'm not going to document 15 years of going down this fork of the road at this time. What I want to say is that because the organization stayed focused on 30% of only the first of three trainings, the organization and the leader body completely missed the other tools available to them if they had honored the original agreement.

I'm talking about the conflict resolution modules that were offered in Level 3 of the consultant’s proposal. I'm talking about the Cooperative Process.

The Cooperative Process utilizes additional guidelines and tools to refocus groups in relationship with each other to avoid power plays, rescues, secrets, and lies. 

Consider how if we had been using these tools within the multicultural initiative, the leader body, and within the board leadership we could have avoided a lot of the pain and human cost of these past 20 years. We could have avoided what we are going through now.

I will paraphrase what I have been writing currently for our outside groups and what we presented to the Multicultural Council in 2004:

Cooperative Process represents an addendum to the work and a set of tools available to us for when we go deep and/or when we get stuck. It comes from the foundations of TA work and the work of Claude Steiner, who identified limitation of strokes (acknowledgments), secrets, lies, and power plays to be ways that we can potentially disrupt functional relationships.

Holding cultural level accountability, or cancel culture, misses the opportunity to address personal and interpersonal accountability, learning, resolution, and growth. Toxic call-out culture, where we use shame and blame to move people or groups out of our way, can best be addressed using the tools we have already learned.

Because many of us are in the forefront of Multicultural or DEI work, we are increasingly at risk for well-intended or accidental harm through diverse interpersonal contacts and growth. A potential unintended consequence of a lack of understanding around competitive behaviors is that it may exacerbate and continue to oppress those people we committed to help and reinforce the institutional limitations we hoped to change.

Historically excluded persons generally carry the emotional labor of this work and are often the subjects of this cancelling call-out behavior. When a team or a project fails, it is the historically excluded that get impacted most and often blamed for the dysfunctions.

If we begin to understand and challenge the cultural rules in place around how I learned to get what I want without considering the impact it has on others, then we can begin to effectively cooperate with each other and use new tools to effectively move forward together.

 Again, based in the I'm OK/you're OK theories of transactional analysis I have found that this process illuminates not only my relationships with this organization but also my relationships with family friends and other groups that I've worked with. Just like the modern ism behaviors in the Saturday workshop, these are common pitfalls that the culture teaches us to avoid accountability and progress. 

In this case, in MKPUSA, cooperative process was proposed again at the ECI level but it never got off the ground because of the power plays, rescues, secrets, and lies....

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Editor's note: I want to reiterate That each one of these stories is in a sense exactly that: a story.  Unless a person has incredible imagination and can create alternative worlds, the stories usually have a grain of truth. I suppose if anyone takes my story personally, they might know of the grain of truth that they're reacting to.  Luckily within the intentional men's community most of what they know is that anything that comes out of another man's mouth is just projection on the first level therefore they are protected against even noticing that there is truth in the other man's statement. That has worked for us for 30 years in this community.   It allows us to closely guard our shadows and keep secrets.