[VBbuilders] 12 Questions for our credibility

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

Hi, I'm still in Vienna!  As you know, I've been grappling with my 
future ever since I've been here.  I share my conclusions and I am 
curious to know if you might like this or not.

I'm sharing my thoughts about future steps for Minciu Sodas as a lab, 
network and business.  I wonder how this might fit with your own visions 
and dreams.

I've been thinking about my life goals and my business direction.  I 
want to organize a culture of independent thinkers, of many small leaps 
that we can verify rather than one big leap of faith.  I'm realizing 
this has a lot to do with establishing our own credibility to ourselves 
and others.  Instead of "Trust me!" it's the spirit of "Don't trust me. 
Verify me!"

In my art work I'm portraying 12 questions by which I've engaged 
independent thinkers over the years to get to know them. 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/50525222@N00/4345880583/sizes/l/
The questions are relevant roughly in this order:
   1. What do you care about?
   2. Do you care about thinking?
   3. What do you value?
   4. What do you seek to know?
   5. What do you wish to achieve?
   6. Would you think out loud?
   7. Where do you think best?
   8. What is your dream in life?
   9. How can we help each other?
  10. What do you truly know about?
  11. What lessons can you share?
  12. What do you know of God?

Unanswered questions point to weaknesses in our credibility.  How can 
others find my "help" of much use if I'm a lost soul, if I'm not 
self-directed, if I don't know my own dream-in-life, I don't know what I 
want to achieve myself, I don't know what I value?  What's the point of 
them debating with me if I don't care about thinking or if I won't think 
out loud?  What is the credibility of my knowledge and authority if I 
don't seek to know anything and don't know where or how I think best?

I believe the scale can work effectively as a guide to where a person's 
credibility breaks down.   I think there are people who might value that 
as a foundation for a culture of self-directed people working together.

I'm in Vienna, Austria visiting Franz Nahrada.  He's very supportive of 
this approach and suggested I develop a website and brand "12 
Questions".  I've just acquired the domain http://www.12questions.org

I'm also happy that these 12 questions are very much like the questions 
in the Structured Visual Thinking (TM) Discovery Framework, as John 
Caswell has confirmed.  
http://www.grouppartnerswiki.net/index.php?title=The_Business_Equation   
Last spring in London our Minciu Sodas team visited John at his Group 
Partners offices.  Their consulting approach is the most profound that 
I've ever encountered and they work intensely with executives at the top 
levels of the largest companies.  We tentatively agreed that Minciu 
Sodas might phrase a related approach in the Public Domain, especially 
for individuals and noncorporate groups.  I'm happy that these 12 
questions might be the core of such an approach. They also use a lot of 
visual thinking and that encourages an artistic approach.

I'm setting up http://www.12questions.org as a place for people to post 
their answers to the questions as text but also to express themselves 
with all the creative arts.  All of the site will be in the Public 
Domain.  We will help each other create such works that express us and 
can be freely shared, too.   The business opportunity that I see is that 
person A pays person B to help person C express themselves.  I think 
this fits with my maxim that "Money brings people together, but you 
can't pay people to care."  If we need help to express ourselves, then 
we ask others to help, but we don't pay them directly ourselves, because 
that would interfere with them caring about us, and then they might just 
do whatever we signal them to do.

The result will be a Second Life type of world but with the simplest 
technology and for "real world" people.  And we'll interact in simple 
ways, but especially pointing to posts such as "kind words" at other 
online venues that support our credibility with each other.

Online venues can participate if they have clear leaders, if they are in 
the Public Domain except as noted, and if they take up the 12 questions 
as part of their activity.  Typically we might discuss one question per 
week, twelve weeks in all, every year at such a venue.  Does this make 
sense for your venue?  This is how I imagine the Minciu Sodas network 
being reborn as a 12 Questions network.  How best might this work in 
practice?

I'm thinking of starting such a series on March 1 at interested venues.  
I am doing related month long art shows in April in Vienna, Austria and 
in May in Vilnius, Lithuania and we can portray and show our 
dreams-in-life and other answers there.

The 12 questions will help me and others know who to invest ourselves in 
when we organize global teams for paid work.  They will also help in 
collecting stories and patterns about real life, which is question 11, 
"What lessons can we share?"

I am encouraged by this direction.  What do we think?  Who might like to 
participate?

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms at ms.lt
+370 699 30003