The Player is the core, indivisible unit of a team. The Player has the power. You are the player.
In the Race to Zero Carbon, your TEAM is your STATE as a whole.
Individuals (Voter Consumers) are PLAYERS - the core, indivisible unit of the team.
Individuals (Players) coordinate to form SPECIALIZED TEAMS within the state team. Teams can be households, corporations, clubs, schools, counties. They can also be groups formed around a cause or solution, for example: Team Solar, Team Divestment, Team LEED.
The efforts of all teams must add up for the State to succeed in the race.
The Player is the basic unit of the Team.
The power comes from the Player.
The effectiveness of a team comes from the power of the Players, the quality of the chosen play, and the quality of their teamwork.
We often forget how much power we have. This forgetfulness has three main sources.
Antidote: BS Detector
Mechanism: Those who seek control (not genuine power) require others to be obedient. They thus develop systems to extract obedience. Your sense of powerlessness is a product of this marketing. Gene Sharp analyzed this dynamic in his study of nonviolent struggle.
In Sharp’s view, all effective power structures have systems by which they encourage or extract obedience from their subjects. States have particularly complex systems for keeping subjects obedient. These systems include specific institutions (police, courts, regulatory bodies), but may also involve cultural dimensions that inspire obedience by implying that power is monolithic (the god cult of the Egyptian pharaohs, the dignity of the office of the President, moral or ethical norms and taboos). Through these systems, subjects are presented with a system of sanctions (imprisonment, fines, ostracism) and rewards (titles, wealth, fame) which influence the extent of their obedience.
Sharp identifies this hidden structure as providing a window of opportunity for a population to cause significant change in a state. Sharp cites the insight of Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563), that if the subjects of a particular state recognize that they are the source of the state’s power, they can refuse their obedience and their leader(s) will be left without power.
This is a powerful idea. Many dictators have been overthrown when people recognize their power and refuse obedience. Think “Arab Spring” and the “Velvet Revolution.”
Of course, recognizing your power to overthrow a dictator is one thing. Channeling your power to construct a sustainable world is quite another. It’s a lot of work. This leads to the next reason to forget your power.
Antidote: Commitment
Mechanism: Faced with profound work to be done - we like to claim we are powerless. In “You are Free, like it or not”, David Cain explains it like this:
Sartre believed that we have much more freedom than we tend to acknowledge. We habitually deny it to protect ourselves from the horror of accepting full responsibility for our lives. In every instant, we are free to behave however we like, but we often act as though circumstances have reduced our options down to one or two ways to move forward.
This is bad faith: when we convince ourselves that we’re less free than we really are, so that we don’t have to feel responsible for what we ultimately make of ourselves…
We often think of freedom as something that can only make life easier, but it can actually be overwhelming and even terrifying. Think about it: we can take, at any moment, any one of infinite roads into the future, and nothing less than the rest of our lives hinges on each choice. So it can be a huge relief to tell ourselves that we actually have fewer options available to us, or even no choice at all.
In other words, even though we want the best life possible, if life is going to be disappointing, we’d at least like that to be someone else’s fault.
Antidote: Trust and Team Building
Mechanism: The biggest obstacle to feeling your power is not knowing how to deal with other people’s power, with conflict. To achieve amazing things, we often have to collaborate with others. We don’t control them. Everyone’s up to stuff, no one is listening. How do we move these lunks?! Attempts at collective action become frustrating.
Don’t give in to the frustration. It is tempting to avoid teamwork and to go for control. But then that takes you back to the “External Disinformation” stage, where someone is extracting obedience from someone else in a bid for control. Let’s not go that way. Let’s build the team!
As a Player, you will be able to extend your power far more effectively when you develop teamwork skills. What’s the best way to do that? Check out Shift-It Coach’s “The Joys and Challenges of Group Dynamics”.
And here are some tips from Garuda AACE:
Tuckman teamwork theory is the best illustration on graph which shows the link between group relationships (the horizontal axis) and task focus (the vertical axis).
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