Encouraging Leadership and Decisionmaking

Whether encouraging entrepreneurship or more generally just proactive tendencies, the vocational toy project has been placing a particular emphasis on empowering individual participants to step up and play a role in leading the project. This includes frequently surveying participants about their individual preferences for collective direction, and to a further degree, encouraging everyone to help manage our progress towards those ends. One of the biggest ways we’re pursuing this is to emphasize a daily meeting for everyone in the group. Beyond updating everyone on the day’s agenda, this also serves as a chance for each person involved to gain practice running discussions and managing diverse groups. We were constantly warned not to provide adolescent participants with meaningful choices, as such a gamble invites unknown volatility. And while this approach has not been without challenges, we remain convinced that everyone in the project will continue to encounter difficult adversity outside the project – and be forced to make the choices to deal with it. In turn, the more we can provide a supportive environment to encourage thoughtful decision-making, the better for all involved. (Let’s help each other learn to face uncertainty while we’re working together.) It may not be easy, but such practice holds many advantages to facing tougher decisions with less guidance down the road.