North America, live in an environment that strips many or most of their choice options away. Society's goals and life's happenings eat at the individual's goals/options, often at subconscious levels in culture, myths, and habits, leaving them starving at a fruit-free bare pole. Most mammals and people who have had their options stripped away go into depression, various illnesses, and die. This depressive patterns holds for most groups and companies. Most companies die young for similar reasons. Actually this pattern holds in all human affairs, and shows up most clearly in the learning process called strategy. Companies and nations with poor strategy risk learned helplessness and defeat the same ways as individuals do. By going from individuals to groups and into companies, this polar-focus pattern propagates through society in waves, leading individuals and organizations into failures.

"A plan, like a tree, must have branches if it is to bear fruit; a plan with a single aim is apt to prove a barren pole." -- B. H. Liddell Hart in "Strategy"

     In this toolkit we introduce a strategic learning process that helps you. It generates a flow of meaning, flowing through holistic dialogue, which combines an internal dialogue you-to-you, dialogue between you and others, and dialogue with our living environment (see more on Dialogue in the Operacy Toolkit). Holistic dialogue is living learning strategy that generates better awareness and alignment with the larger social and environmental processes that govern our lives. It allows us to be more in touch with life, to better anticipate, envision, and navigate the fast waters that the river of life gives us from time to time, and to play for win-win and triple-win solutions.
     The process generates resonance, resilience, and growing synergy between the various parts of life. And it's also the basic play pattern (see Five Phase Theory - How we learn and solve problems in the Operacy Toolkit). The process both extends and follows our vision, and enhances our vision in a playful growth spiral.

     Our goal is to grow 'pole' people optimistically into 'Tree' and/or 'Sun' people, fully living in the river of life. Our aim to generate a person who can simply shrug off more of the nasty things in life. A person who can if necessary curl up into a ball like a porcupine, and become a sun, as many Eastern Buddhists can in severe circumstances. And the same process works for groups and companies.

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