How We Do It

We work with people… for their vision. We do this by bringing with us resources, talents and skills in terms of the 3 i's, Mobian learning, conversation and communications. 

Ideas, Information, Intelligence:  The 3 i’s

Here at The Brook Besor we consider our “stock in trade” to be the 3 i’s, that is to say: ideas, information and intelligence. We are knowledge workers and we like to connect people to ideas, information and intelligence that they recognize as light bulbs; whether they are answers to quandaries or simply ways to move forward toward their vision or solutions to what were once intractable problems, a light bulb turns on over their heads.

Now some people, we’ve heard, keep trunks of pancakes. We, on the other hand, keep trunks of ideas - ideas that we have gathered over time, some decades ago and some as recently as last week. And we know what ideas have worked where and with whom and the ideas that don’t.

We are also information gatherers as well. What do you need to know? What information do we need to help you? If we don’t have it at hand, we can find it.

And we supply intelligence. Most things we do in our jobs with organizations involve instituting something—we are called upon to establish, organize, to set in motion some program, activity or project. Maybe it is a survey questionnaire; maybe it is a training; maybe it is a change in a welfare program. Whatever it is, it is imperative that we take into account the person(s) we are doing it to. How is the person going to interpret that question? What level of knowledge and skills do the persons have already before they take the training? If you offer the program in Bedford Falls, what makes you think people will come? These are the types of questions that we need to have intelligence about.  

Mobian Learning

If you stop to think about it, running and walking require us to become off-balanced. In order to keep from falling and to stay upright when we get off-balanced we have to put one leg in front of the other …alternately. “Left, right, left, right” is what we intoned during drill. If we just stayed with one or the other: left or right, we would become still. That’s kind of the idea behind “Moebian learning.” For an organization and its people to keep moving, staying erect they must live in the tension between balance and falling while at the same time being in accord with gravity, the ground, the space around them, and what may be just around the corner.

We encourage Moebian learning that is the fusing of opposites, of dichotomies. We do not want the people we work with to think they have to treat things only objectively or only subjectively, but both objective and subjective—learning not only from the experience and ideas of “authorities” or only from their own experience and ideas, but from setting up a conversation between the two and listening to it. This kind of learning is called Moebian, after the 19th-century topologist August Moebius, who invented the figure known as the Moebius Strip. You can make one by cutting a half-inch strip off the side of a piece of typing paper, giving one end a twist, and taping it to the other end as in the illustration:

                                   

The applications of the Moebian notion in our work and your work are endless. Do this. Make a Moebius strip. Write the word, outside, on one side of the Strip and inside right behind it on the other side. Then place your pencil point on outside and pull the Strip along underneath it. Soon you’ll find that you have reached the word inside. This two-sided figure is one-sided! Experiment with one and see if you can discover its other properties. And in your work do things that bring together—that oscillate among—dichotomies: lion and lamb, rote and discovery, process and product, work and play, teacher and learner, individual and group, experience and theory, doing and thinking. Instead of pushing “either/or” do “both/and.” 

Conversationally Working Relations

We find the most benefit from work circumstances that are conversationally styled where we establish common ground for the give-and-take of exploring one another’s vision, ideas, information, intelligence. Understanding begins as we listen and learn from one another. It is not enough to understand what we agree about. Often it is in understanding our differences, our contradictions, what we don’t agree about that we begin to discover novel beliefs and novel solutions to our problems. 

 

Communication

We know about and use telecommunications. We have the requisite presence on the Internet; our email is up and pings whenever we get new messages; we have a variety of phone numbers for cell phones, VoIP phone service, and an old fashioned land line; and we have a post office box for old fashioned mail delivery. It isn’t enough, however, to have the means for communications. Communications have to be meaningful. We rely on meaningful communications as we strive for clarity in our work with others. We want to make sure we will deliver what has been asked of us and that we do so at the time and in the manner requested. We’ll take the time and effort to understand and to make sure we have an understanding between us of what we are being asked to do.