Visioning

I have been asked by several quarters to be involved in their campaigns for the Philippine national and local elections in May 2010, just as I have been invited to write for a political blog to cover Baguio and neighboring areas, among other things. And important decisions and directions like these have been given deep thought and actually caused sleepless nights. For such has been my desire for the city of my heart to recover its charm and natural beauty that I am devoting my current existence to this singular purpose with grim determination.

There have been meetings and gatherings discussing the problems of the city and so many well-meaning folk who are putting in their 2 cents worth in making suggestions, just as I have been doing in this blog for several years. The Philippines is certainly not lacking for brains and muscle and heart, but what is wrong? Why have we not been able to get past our humdrum lives and gotten started on the past to greatness? Why are we committing the same mistakes and seem to be able to compound our problems further.

Focus Group Discussions 2009

In March last year, I had the privilege of being in the company of great minds and hearts and we gathered in focus groups to try and take the first steps at addressing the Philippines problems.

This was a national effort and I was so interested in the group because all the country’s problems are present in Baguio City — BUT MAGNIFIED because the area is relatively small and the degradation of the environment is oh so visible. The ill-effects of bad management are very evident especially because, more than any other city in the Philippines, Baguio is a place familiar to and beloved by many folks several generations older and younger than my own.

The focus groups were fascinating, because all we talked about were dreams and plans and possibilities without care as to who the person was in front of you or beside you. At the end of the night, we would say, “By the way I’m Lisa and I live in Baguio City and you are…?” You see, it did not matter who we were — we were caught up in the dream of a better world and knew that we had the opportunity to fix things in the world.

I cannot expect each and every site visitor to this blog to understand, just by reading the article before him or my about page to understand or be able to fully appreciate what the discussions here are all about, for what is before him shows only one of the many facets of this complicated city. There are many issues that must be dealt with, and although they seem isolated, actually each one is an integral part of the whole, each one affects the whole.

Problem solving can create other problems

The problem with problem solving, is that when one item is addressed, another problem might crop up as a consequence of thereof. For example, build a flyover here to bypass bottlenecks and you might actually cause a bottleneck elsewhere. So the flyover might not have been the solution but instead a vehicle reduction-pedestrian friendly program should have been instituted instead.

So I prayed and prayed for enlightenment as I am more reactive than progressive, more a doer than a thinker. In life offline, I am used to solving problems so that my knee-jerk reaction would be to plug holes wherever one sprouts up and I end up getting tired just plugging all the time. Of course I am an avid reader but there’s just no way to read everything and be able to apply all sorts of new and interesting concepts at being able to cope, just like there are 165,000,000 references in Google to the phrase make money online which actually cause people to lose money online by attempting to try them all out.

So then one quiet day figured it out. The cause of all the problems.

During the PAGASA workshops in Baguio we were alerted to the causal relationships. We can say that institutions cause societal problems but at the root of all that is the individual. And the solution to the problem — the individual! So that for society to change for the better, the individual must become the change he wants to see in the world (Mahatma Gandi’s words, of course, not mine).

But I have found that one’s awareness of his role is society is not enough! It is so not enough.

Even if we are able have each Filipino take a Workshop of hope, we still will not know what to do afterward.  We will end up becoming in search of leaders, we will feel the urge to do something about society but the world is still in bad shape anyway.

Then one quiet night, I figured it all out.

What we need is VISIONING.

The reason we are in a rut is because we lack vision. We have been put on survival mode by the bad people in the world, made desperate and hopeless, wanting only to live till the next day, with little children no longer dreaming of pursuing their passions but instead wanting only to “go abroad” when they grow up. And this is sad. And no matter how intelligent we might be individually, a lot of us, including myself, might be ignorant of the way the world really works and that, in fact, we have to reorient our thinking about how to go about things.

For many people, to earn more one has to spend less. I have found, for example, that the more I pay my employees the more I earn. Interesting, no? Some of us also believe in the idea that to be rich others must be poor. This is so wrong! We can all succeed together. We have to believe in abundance, that there is more than enough for everybody, that if we set the ball rolling for creativity and honesty and industry to be rewarded then world poverty will end.

I am sure that what I am proposing has been thought of by others far more intelligent than myself, but I am pleased to have come up with this idea on my own, with my thoughts and experiences threading in my mind.

Let us stop trying to solve problems. Let us start by agreeing on a vision for the city. It does not have to be one of those corporate interview questions that ask, “How do you see yourself in 10 years?” or “How do you see Baguio in 20 years.” My brother has always said, ask the right question and you get the right answer. So the preliminary question would now be, “What is the right question to ask when trying to determine what we want for ourselves?” What is our visioning question?

We are more likely to reach an objective if we can see it, and can imagine the steps to reach it. During our focus group discussions, the members, broken up into smaller groups all yielded the same process. That in itself was so interesting, and interestingly simple.

Ano? Paano? Sino?

The question put before us at that time was, “How do you feel about  — — running for President of the Philippines?” Many of the participants, because they were civic leaders, and probably because they did not believe that the man who gathered us all together was fit for the job, refused to answer that question and each small group came up with the same formula. We all wanted to do bigger things not just campaign for a man.

We first wanted to imagine the Philippines that we wanted (ANO), plan the steps on how to get there (PAANO), after which we would find the leaders who would be agents of the plan (SINO).

What I have to acknowledge though is that the company I was with was an excellent one. Sometimes, visioning can sometimes yield poor results because the people who might be giving the answers cannot see beyond their personal circumstances and limitations and desires.

So it is not enough to ask Juan de La Cruz the right questions, it is important that the visioning question be asked of the best citizens of any place. The ones who possess a genuine, selfless love for their fellowman and the place where they live. Folks who have seen a world beyond their limited circumstances, folks who are more mature and have seen Baguio at its finest.

For it is really hard to imagine something that has not been seen before. This cannot be a question answered by students, for example, because they have only seen the four walls of their classrooms, the road en route to their schools and the four walls of their homes. The question is best answered by people who have known the city for a long time — even before 1990.

So what is Baguio’s Visioning Question?

When we launched Imagine Philippines last May, the question everyone answered was when were you proudest to be called a Filipino? The next question was “How did you feel during that moment?”

Many answered People Power, When Cory Addressed the US Congress, others talked about being abroad and being able to propose solutions that were accepted by an international audience. We answered that we felt proud, we felt humbled, we felt dignified, we felt powerful.

For Baguio, I would say the question should be “What are the characteristics of Baguio as a city that you would most like to see?” And I can imagine we will say clean air, traffic-free and smiling faces, all residents productive and prosperous. So then we will be working for the dream of a pollution-free, traffic-free, happy city.

What will follow then would be policies and programs that will go toward achieving these goals, and any projects that run contrary to these ideals will then be simply a bad idea and should not be pursued.

Visioning must then be the first step that a politician, for example, should take before creating a program of action that is to be presented to the electorate in May. Of course the creation of the program of action is yet another process that candidates must pursue.

It is not enough to make promises or ask that a person be voted in on the basis of accomplishments (for situations change and there must be a mechanism to be able to address things as they come and, as I mentioned above, problem solving can actually create  other problems) or, worse yet, on the basis of name recall. Voters should ask for more than these.

Now, when it comes to creating a program of action (the Paano that will work towards the Ano) really is a more complicated process and we will not get here. Then there’s getting the Sino, who are the agents of the plan, to win in an election. We will also not get into that here either.

A Vision for Baguio City

So now I ask you, dear readers, both from within and without the City of Pines, “What are the characteristics of Baguio as a city that you would most like to see?”

These are mine — clean, grean, safe, progressive, prosperous. I am sure you can add a million more and, as long as these are positive and beneficial to all, we cannot go wrong.

I believe this will be a good starting point for the recovery of the city we all love.

And should you be able to formulate a better question, please don’t hesitate to post it below!

And we would appreciate knowing your thoughts and your visions…

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