4. Starting with a process: the functional approach

To get the vision of successful practitioners going the Academy started with concrete tasks people could use on the spot and continue on their own. Participation and taking responsibility is much easier on a small scale involvement. The functional approach means creating a particular process to enable people (or organisations) to transmit their intentions or purposes into adequate action and interaction. According to famous Form Follows Function structures will generate from here related to the process initiated. This approach takes into account that process and emerging structures might develop differently than expected.

Examples illustrating the functional approach

§       Small concrete task: the Role Play (see No. 2) was used to involve people on the spot to embody the diversity of their professional environment.

§       Abandonment: A Supervision tool for practitioners was first started, then redefined into a tool for peer focused intervision & feedback culture and later set aside.

§       Later implemented structure: IFF member organisations asked for more political control on the Competency Profile project than originally intended. A steering committee was established to meet this need. Later it modulated its role into a mere Advisory Committee.

Personal experiences

•  We were happy to work on content and organisational aspects at the same time and be able to continuously adjust according to challenges of the process.
• The functional approach was very satisfying for us: proceeding functionally is close to our experiences as practitioners. We have expected that other Feldenkrais peers would feel similar.
• We struggled to notice that making up a structure first and later filling with content and options on how to proceed seems easier to follow for most people. Difficulties in structural approaches merely arise later when making up respective content for the structures and finding people to work on that content.