This week was the birthday of the great filmmaker Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, the self-styled ‘romantic anarchist’ who made films about the
lives and issues that the rest of society did not care care about. Fassbinder
possessed a rare ability to explore the edge of human understanding, to expand our
consciousness through the camera. In his
films one finds the gaze of attention on those who don’t normally have a voice
in our political system. Fassbinder was a director of the frontier.
I was in Utrecht on Thursday to offer a workshop on Talents,
our new developmental process for organisations to experience the concepts of
Open Talent and Advantaged Thinking. Fassbinder
was not in my mind, but I suddenly made the connection when people were trying
to interpret the language of ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘advantaged’ into Dutch. This,
they said, was about borders and frontiers.
While they believed in the positive principles of the vision, they found it hard
to maintain its energy and focus in the negative restrictions within which they
worked. In many ways, Talents is about
the journey one can make to liberate practice from such shackles, so the interpretation
made sense. However, the language of frontiers
has other resonances that are worth exploring.
In America, the psychology and political significance of
frontiers was famously documented by Frederick Jackson Turner in his
influential Frontier Thesis of 1893. Jackson claimed that the moving frontier
line in America, populated by early pioneers in search of fortune, led to the
foundations of American democracy and personality (both good and bad). The
frontier was a place where the institutional mindsets and hierarchies of European
settlers were transformed through experience into the free-thinking
individualism of American liberty.
Putting the political theory to one side, we are left with the
idea of the frontier as a place of personal and social transition for those
pioneers who dare to explore it. The connection of Open Talent and Advantaged
Thinking with this image has a compelling significance. As concepts, they challenge the restrictive
deficit-based approaches that have grown up in our social system, with the
optimism that we possess the assets to create sustainable solutions. We are all the children of Maslow’s
hierarchy, but now we are being asked to turn our focus on supporting needs upside
down and embrace the freedom of investing in positive risks.
Advantaged Thinking is a new frontier for those in search of
a different way of working. It cultivates
the liberty of talent, and the revolution that we actually all possess it, no
matter what stereotype society has given us to live through. Fassbinder would have
understood this very well. He would have
said - we need to keep telling the story. I am sure in the Netherlands it is just
beginning.
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