Axioms of
Collaborative Design
Copyright © 1981, MG Taylor, Gail and Matt Taylor

1. The future is rational only in hindsight.

2. You can't get THERE from HERE but you can get HERE from THERE.

3. Discovering you don't know something is the first step to knowing it.

4. Everything someone tells you is true: they are reporting their experience of reality.

5. To argue with someone else's experience is a waste of time.

6. To add someone else's experience to your experience--to create a new experience--is possibly valuable.

7. You understand the instructions only after you have assembled the red wagon.

8. Everyone in this room has the answer. The purpose of this intense experience is to stimulate one, several, or all of us to extract and remember what we already know.

9. Creativity is the elimination of options.

10. If you can't have fun with the problem, you will never solve it.

11. The only valid test of an idea, concept or theory is what it enables you to do.

12. In every adverse condition there are hundreds of possible solutions.

13. You fail until you succeed.

14. Nothing fails like success.

The Transition Manager's Creed
Copyright © 1982, MG Taylor, Gail and Matt Taylor

Transition Management is a specific kind of management.

It is required at specific historical moments in the life of an organization, corporation, city, country or planet.

That moment is the transformation from one state of being to another.

The Transition Manager facilitates the process of the transformation by combining the vantage points of strategic planning and project management, and forging an environment in which the creative energies of a group of people can function for mutual and planetary advancement.

The role and duties of the Transition Manager are specific; and the ethical framework of the Transition Manager is of the highest order.

The Transition Manager may or may not be in an apparent position of authority or power; s/he may or may not be recognized for the work performed--these issues are circumstantial and a matter of practical consideration.

The Transition Manager works for no agency alone, s/he pledges allegiance to life, planet Earth, humankind, and the community within which s/he works.

The Transition Manager is responsible to life's quest to reach a higher order of being, manifested in specific accomplishments.

No matter what wok role or position the Transition Manager assumes, s/he functions from sapient authority in performance of the duties.

Organizations in transformation are in the mature phase or exist in an environment that is in a mature phase of its life cycle. In those circumstances, human credibility, certification and authority are based on the assumptions of the old paradigm that is undergoing severe stresses.

The Transition Manager maintains the ability to operate in two different, and often hostile, environments; this ability is essential to creating the bridge necessary for successful transformations.

The Transition Manager must remain free from entrapment by either the old or the new; the correct vantage point is from both and from a healthy transition with no commitment to a predetermined outcome in the specific.

The Transition Manager's fiduciary responsibility requires that s/he gain not undue advantage from the experience.

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