Having a few tens or hundreds of people instead of thousands or millions of people is more manageable and you can create a higher quality conversation. So again the idea of a cross-section or a full-spectrum is what makes it into a microcosm.
Microcosm mean how to#
So you know they each have some special knowledge because of particular interests or experience that can, if it is handled well, contribute to the growing wisdom of about how to deal with the issue. When an issue comes up and some manager says “What do we do with this?“, various people answer “Whatever you do is going to affect people like me in this way“. In that effort you want to have a few of each of these different kinds of people present in the conversation.
You have lots of different people who have an interest in what’s going on there, also the decision-makers who are going to have to decide on what’s going to happen. We’d need to include some people using it for enjoyment – you have boating people and their water-skiing buddies and swimming and diving people and people using the lake for fishing, for example – and you have the environmentalists, and the people who rent cabins and boats, and some of the government people in charge of managing it, and some farmers who are using the water for irrigation, perhaps a local Native American tribe and some developers who want to build a hotel on the shore, and so on. Let’s say we’re dealing with the issue of how to manage a large lake.
Microcosm mean full#
But we can get a good sampling – a full range – of people with diverse interests, information, power, etc., involved with the issue. We can’t really get ALL the stakeholders – EVERYONE who has a stake in the issue, EVERYONE in ALL the interest groups potentially involved. We confront similar challenges if we are doing a stakeholder dialogue. So creating a smaller microcosm that reflects the diversity of the larger population allows us to approximate what would most likely happen if we COULD engage everyone in the larger population – much the way public opinion pollsters do asking questions of a random sample of some large population. There simply aren’t resources for that and many people aren’t willing to participate, etc. So having wisdom-generating conversation directly involving everyone in a whole community or country is basically impossible. That kind of support is not readily available to a population of thousands or millions of people. With support, a microcosm can generate an inclusive systemic perspective, that can then be shared with a much larger population. For example we may need to be helped to see things that are not easily seen, like the dynamics that take place in systems. There are many other things that go into having high quality conversations, and even more that go into having a wisdom-generating conversation where people are taking a broad perspective and stepping out of their usual frames of thinking. Thus it helps to have good process, good information, and good facilitation available to us. We don’t automatically have the capacity to hear one another well, nor do we usually have sufficient information at hand on an issue. The wisdom-generating property of a microcosm comes from people really hearing each other and learning a lot about the subject they’re deliberating. Random selection tends to do well at getting that kind of diversity, and it is another way to generate a microcosm.** We want a diversity of cognitive styles*, for instance – diverse ways of thinking: intuitive people, rational people, compassionate people, and so on – and people with diverse experience, etc. This can achieve even greater diversity, by including kinds of diversity we don’t often consider. Another approach is pure random selection, such as what we currently use for the initial call for jury duty. We can ensure that a microcosm has the same proportion of women, the same proportion of people of color, the same proportion of various kinds of diversity that exist in the larger population. How do you get participants for a microcosm group with that kind of diversity?ĭemographics is one way. This is important because in our current political system certain people are elected to “represent” the larger population, yet they do not reflect the diversity of that larger population. This is an edited version of the video on this page.Ī microcosm of a larger whole is a way to reflect the make-up of a certain group or population.