An Upgrade: The Ladder of Empowerment (and a Chain Reaction)

I think it happened in 1983, when I was a chemist. I was in my lab waiting for a chemical reaction to finish. I began to think about the saying, “Give someone fish and you feed them for a day, but teach them to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” I was impressed by the jump in power between giving fish and teaching a skill like fishing.

It was a huge jump, but not enough to change the world. I asked myself if another jump were possible.

My mind didn’t see one more jump, but two: “Teach someone to learn and they change their whole lives; then teach them to teach others how to learn and the world is transformed.”

I felt goose bumps and awe. In thirty seconds or less I had realized that there were four levels, not two. And the fourth level was a worldwide chain reaction of empowerment and peace: people supporting each other to learn skills that would change their lives, and then teach others. Later, I would call it the Ladder of Empowerment:

The vast potential of this idea comes from the fact that almost all people and organizations on Earth are operating on the bottom two rungs, when they could be operating on all four, especially the top two rungs.  That’s why this idea is an upgrade.

Being a chemist, I was familiar with chain reactions. Coal dust and gasoline explosions were chain reactions. So were the polymerization reactions that formed plastics. Nuclear chain reactions produced great energy, too.

I began to think about chain reactions that involved people. Multilevel marketing was a kind of chain reaction. So were chain letters and chain email. Alcoholics Anonymous, however, was a chain reaction of empowerment. It began in 1935 with two people and within forty years had spread support to over half a million people.

By 1984, I was running small groups called Goal and Growth Groups.  My vision was to spark a chain reaction that would grow as fast as AA but spread further because it would be for the general population, not just for people with a specific problem.  Although the Goal and Growth Group members succeeded in improving their lives, it turned out that there were many other things that I needed to think about before a chain reaction would spread.  The small groups evolved into something much more powerful, something that I call superprograms. 

I won’t define superprograms right now.  For now just think of them as pairs of people who support each other to make small efforts and to work on projects that improve their lives and/or help others.  If you can picture that, I can next give you a sense of the potential power of a chain reaction of empowerment.

Someone loaned you a copy of this book. Imagine that they support you to read this book and use it.  Over four months you make one or two lifestyle changes.  You prove to yourself that this approach works. Then you take two months to invite perhaps three others to read the book and try the approach. In those two months, you explain what the program has done for you, check for interest, and loan a copy of the book with an offer of support.  Your support is personal, rather than impersonal.  It is flexible in you support people in ways that fit their lifestyle: through any combination of the following: short phone calls twice a week, emails, perhaps a lunch or breakfast meeting once a week.

Now imagine that you invite three or four people, but only get two who are ready to take advantage of.  If each person can manage to get two people to participate, here’s how fast it would grow:

                               Number of People

                                                1

6 months                                  2

1 year                                      4

1.5 months                               8

2 years                                     16

2.5 years                                  32

3 years                                     64

3.5 years                                  128

4 years                                     256

4.5 years                                  512

5 years                                     1,024

5.5 years                                  2,048

6 years                                     4,096

6.5 years                                  8,192

7 years                                     16,384

7.5 years                                  32,768

8 years                                     65,536

8.5 years                                  131,072

9 years                                     262,144

9.5 years                                  524,288

10 years                                   1,048,576

10.5 years                                2,097,052

11 years                                   4,194,304

11.5 years                                8,388,608

12 years                                   16,777,216

12.5 years                                33,554,432

13 years                                   67,108,864

13.5 years                                134,217,728

14 years                                   268,435,456

14.5 years                                536,870,912

15 years                                   1,073,741,824

15.5 years                                2,147,483,618

16 years                                   4,294,967,296

16.5 years                                8,5899,34,592  (more than the current world population)

17 years                                   17,179,869,184  (more than highest predicted population)

A chain reaction of empowerment has advantages over conventional empowerment structures. A conventional structure might be a university or a community college. Here are the advantages:

1.  It’s much less expensive.  It takes much less infrastructure.  In other words, you don’t have to build school buildings and pay employees.  People can support each other in homes, in libraries, in restaurants, in church building—almost anywhere.  That makes it useful even in situations of poverty.  (Yes, much of it can be done orally, until someone learns how to read.)

2.  In this case, because of Rung Three, people are learning how to learn.  Thus it’s more flexible and appropriate.  There is less of a tendency for meaningless, irrelevant subjects to be taught and learned, as are taught in many conventional institutions.  People are being supported to learn things that they need in the immediate or near future.

But it also has disadvantages:

1.  It starts out more slowly and makes less of a splash.  Look back at the table: In two years, you would only be working with about sixteen people.  Meanwhile, someone teaching three semesters a year, four classes a week, and twenty people a class would have reached 240 people.  If people are in too much of a hurry, they will frown on chain reactions because of the slow start.

2.  People usually have many doubts that it could really work.  These doubts are a major factor in preventing the spread of a chain reaction.  Until they are dealt with, a chain reaction cannot work. These doubts, and other problems of chain reactions, will be dealt with later in the book.

To apply this idea, you might start out giving people “fish.”  That helps them like and respect you. Then you might teach someone a specific skill that they want.  This is the equivalent of the second rung. Then, having shown that you can empower them in a traditional sense, you can offer superprogram support, so that they have the means to learn a variety of skills and habits that will improve their lives. Finally, you can make a case that if they pass on support to learn to a few people, and if it spreads, then it will help stabilize our common life-support systems, the environment, the global economy, and so forth.

But there is really a lot more to learn, before this upgrade can have its full impact.