The 7 Year Window of Preparatory Work and Learning

The first of the named strategic windows — 2017 to 2024 — in which the language, the literature, and the backbone were built before there was anything to run on them.

Seven years of work with nothing visible at the end of them except documents and relationships. In this window allies were gathered from tribes and nations around the world; the critical path and the Pattern Language of the new vision were discerned together; the foundational literature of the movement was articulated; and the provisional structure and the backbone of infrastructure and technology were built and tested among hundreds of individuals and groups. The window closed as the body began assembling itself.

It is load-bearing because it is the part of the arithmetic that is easiest to omit and most expensive to skip. Mondragon is cited for exactly this reason: the school preceded the cooperative by thirteen years. A movement that appears suddenly usually had a long invisible preparation, and a movement that tries to skip the preparation discovers it has no shared language, no tested pattern, and no one who has walked with anyone else long enough to be trusted with anything.

In the Game, this window is why there is a Pattern to hand a newcomer at all — why a Cell in its first week has words, cards, and a rhythm rather than having to invent them. It is also the honest shape of what a person joining now inherits: not a beginning, but a seven-year foundation laid by people they will mostly never meet.

In the System, it sits as the first of the strategic windows, preceding the window of crisis and opportunity, which it exists to prepare for. Named as beginning in 2017 in anticipation — which is to say the window was declared before the crisis it anticipated, on the basis of a reading that has since been tested by events rather than by argument.

Also called: the preparatory window Stands on: Time · Learning · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language · Foundational Literature Opens onto: The 7 Year Window of Crisis and Opportunity · The 10 Year Grand Strategy · Critical Path · Mondragon · The Movement · The First Few · New Era In play: beyond Sources: The 7 Year Window of Preparatory Work and Learning (root page, draft) · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, §Timing (draft) · The 7 Year Window of Crisis and Opportunity (root page) · The Little Book of the Great Game — Second Draft, Mondragon told with its wounds (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The 7 Year Window of Preparatory Work and Learning Open: The root page dates the window 2017–2024 and says the body began assembling in Spring 2024; other pages date the crisis window from 2024, so the two abut exactly, which is tidier than events usually are. · The page names a person and several instruments — a provisional structure, a new vision and plan — whose own pages were not checked here.