For many years in the Possibility Management gameworld we've searched for a meeting format that meets four important criteria.

1. Simple to learn and use.
2. Non-hierarchical, based on a circular or galaxical org chart rather than a pyramid.
3. Effectively includes and empowers a wide variety of unique individuals.
4. Unleashes and integrates group intelligence for efficient and wise decision-making.

It has been a struggle.

At long last, here is something that truly inspires us: Torus Technology. The funny thing is that we had to invent it ourselves!

This website is intended to be your free online mini-handbook for how you too can shift to using Torus Technology in your company, project, community, government, organization, club, etc.

The distinctions, thoughtmaps, models, and processes in this website are all copyleft. This means they cannot be copyrighted. This is all open-code thoughtware from Possibility Management donated to the creative commons.

(Creative Commons Attribute and Share Alike International 4.0 License - CC BY SA Int'l 4.0 by www.possibilitymanagement.org)

A multitude of handicaps are hidden in any hierarchical power structure:

• The enthusiasm and intelligence of the vast majority of participants is suppressed and wasted while top-down decisions may serve personal agendas instead of the whole organization.
• Employees and participants tend to direct their unused creativity towards making useless conflicts and projecting their authority-figure issues on bosses and colleagues rather than standing in their own authority.
• Due to its rigid structure and minimized intelligence, hierarchical systems do not swiftly adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Nor do they make good use of innovative opportunities.
• Those who do whatever it takes to climb the hierarchical ladder get the power positions. Those best at doing whatever it takes to get power tend to be psychopathic. Hierarchies naturally select for psychopathic leaders.
• When someone proposes an action in a group then all participants tend to look to the hidden authorities who secretly decide what the group will do or not do (often before the meeting even begins). This commonly causes intense frustration and disappointment. The whole group cannot agree on doing one things so nothing is done.

One problem with majority votes is that 49% of the people may resist or disagree with a decision. To avoid this, some form of consensus decision making may be adopted. Even in flat circular organizations consensus can entangle you in huge problems.

• Consensus can take a long time to reach while pros and cons are endlessly discussed until all members (or all minus two) can come to an agreement.
• Most forms of consensus grant certain people the power to veto any decision. This veto power easily undermines the entire decision making process.
• The way a proposal is formulated can determine the outcome of a consensus decision. For example, if the the proposal is, "Let us cut the trees down to allow sunshine to hit the rooftop solar panels," and one person vetoes the decision, then the trees remain standing. But if the proposal is, "Let us leave the trees standing even if they block the sun from the solar panels because the trees were here before the solar panels," and one person vetoes the decision, then the trees are cut down.

Torus Technology meetings liberate both individual and team potential almost 100%. This enhancement can be an ongoingly exhilarating experience.

• The enthusiasm and intelligence of each individual is fully liberated to decide what needs to be done and what you personally want to do about it. Any person can start any kind of  NODE they want, join any existing NODE, and leave any NODE at any time.
• There are no targets for authority figure projections or conflicts. Each person is their own authority making their own decisions, contributing their full creativity unhindered by opinions or rules from bosses or managers.
• Since even one person is all it takes to start a NODE, novel approaches and innovative opportunities are swiftly noticed and adopted. Many parallel experiments occur simultaneously and the results are shared at each CONVERGENCE for everyone's benefit.
• Decisions effecting the entire TORUS are made at the NODE level using NODE intelligence. When the NODE'S decisions are proposed at each TORUS CONVERGENCE, resistance from the rest of the TORUS is consulted for its intelligence. Anyone who has unsatisfied resistance to the decision automatically joins the NODE during the next DIVERGENCE to make a better decision. This way, those who are affected by the decision or who have useful knowledge are included in the decision making. As a result, decisions are wiser and more completely adopted by the TORUS.
• Since there are no positions of safety or power in a TORUS, there is no place for a psychopathic personality to gain and hold territory or defend a power position. A one person NODE making decisions for the TORUS gets ridiculous pretty fast.
• During a TORUS CONVERGENCE every suggestion for an action can be adopted immediately by anyone wanting to do it without having to wait for a group consensus.  Even if you are the only one who immediately sees the importance or value of a particular action, you can start it without waiting. If others see the value of that action they can join you during the next DIVERGENCE. If nobody joins you, then that's just feedback.

From the outside a TORUS looks like a beautiful geometrical energy field, a vibrantly flowing organism

From the inside, however, the TORUS may feel like a chaordic beehive buzzing with self-directed activity. The dynamics seem disorderly.

Since in the Torus, individuals are under their own recognizance, the movement resembles automobile traffic circling l'Arc du Triumph in Paris, free-wheeling in every direction while each driver gets safely to where they want to go.

The Torus weaves itself with THREADS and NODES.

A THREAD is an individual person's resources, their attention, intention, ideas, efforts, wishes, connections, knowledge, skills, impulses, experiences, and commitments. Within the TORUS each individual is free to weave their THREAD of resources wherever they like.

A NODE is a project, an initiative, a task, a goal, defined and committed to by the exact people who are interested in the best outcome of that effort. The stakeholders of any particular NODE are self-appointed. A NODE may either be a one time meeting or an ongoing collaboration.

The TORUS alternates between two states, DIVERGENCE and CONVERGENCE. This is the TORUS breathing.

During DIVERGENCE, the THREADS spread out and meet in private with whichever NODE they choose. THREADS do whatever creation, research, practice, production, or decision-making is needed so that they are energetically fed and the purpose of their NODE is accomplished.

During CONVERGENCE the NODES of the TORUS come back together into one space. New NODES are announced, and completed NODES are officially disbanded. Each NODE has a chance to report what the TORUS needs to know about the NODE'S activities. If a decision has been made at a NODE, the decision applies to the whole TORUS. Therefore each decision is checked for ratification by measuring the RESISTANCE to the decision from everyone in the CONVERGENCE.

The basic TORUS agreement about decisions is to agree to disagree during the decision making process, and after the wisdom of dissent is extracted during the process, to agree to agree.

Final decisions are recorded by the SCRIBE in the TORUS CODEX.

The TORUS CODEX is not located at the center of the TORUS. The CODEX is not the basis of the TORUS. The CODEX is kept outside the TORUS, over on a shelf somewhere, in case anyone in the TORUS needs to refer to it. The CODEX is not a set of rules that dominates the TORUS gameworld, but rather more like a set of guidelines...

Each NODE selects a SPACEHOLDER for the NODE to hold and navigate the space while the NODE is meeting and also between meetings until the NODE is dissolved. A NODE functions like a mini-TORUS, a TORUS withing a TORUS, which will sometimes spin off its own NODES to go handle specific issues or tasks assigned by the NODE and will then report back to the NODE.

THE 'UNIFORM TEAM'

Teams originate to fulfill various needs.

One kind of Team could be called a 'Uniform Team'.

What is a 'Uniform Team'?

Members of a 'Uniform Team' all wear the same uniform.

That, of course is a simplified and generalized definition, yet it gives you a simple place to start understanding what a Uniform Team might be about.

The way a Uniform Team makes decisions is by some kind of unanimous vote, whether that is 51% majority, Consensus Minus One, the Resistance Method, or the choice of the Benevolent Dictator, all is chosen together.

The result is the assumption that the members of a Uniform Team should all agree.

They should use the same thoughtware.

They should seek equality.

They should not make creative moves until after they have presented their idea and the whole Team agrees that they should go ahead and create the thing.

The motivation for being on a Uniform Team can come from a longing for being accepted, fitting in, finding a family of like-minded friends, and knowing about and approving what the Team is up to.

On a Uniform Team the Team's evolutionary steps are somehow more predictable, organized, comprehensible, and... uniform.

THE 'TRANSFORMATIONAL TEAM'

Another kind of Team could be called a 'Transformation Team'.

What is a 'Transformational Team'?

Members of a 'Transformational Team' have in common that they are ongoingly in some kind of Transformational process. Their 'uniformity' is their chaos.

The foundation for how a Transformational Team makes decisions is radical trust and radical reliance.

Radical Trust is, "I trust myself to take care of myself around your creations."

Radical Reliance is, "I rely on your reliance on me," which includes that there are Pirate Agreements between Transformational Team members to stay in Transformation creation and to stay communicating what they are discovering.

One Transformational Team member may have no idea what another Transformational Team member is creating, and yet they still can love them and trust them and rely on them to keep creating and learning (going around the Learning Spiral) and sharing what they are creating and learning.

The main creation criteria on the Transformational Team is:

1. Does it deepen our shared Context?
2. Is it safe enough to try?
3. Is it good enough for now?

On a Transformational Team the Team's evolutionary steps unpredictably morph out of control and yet provide entertaining inspiration for further evolution navigated by ECCO(Earth Coincidence Control Office).

CONTEXT

Who sets the CONTEXT for your TORUS?

The CONTEXT is your TORUS' relationship to consciousness and responsibility. The CONTEXT spits out a set of distinctions depending on whether your TORUS is established at child level, adult level, high level, or radical level responsibility. Ordinary modern

-culture organizations originate in child level responsibility.

Until the CONTEXT of your TORUS is clarified and agreed upon in a CODEX you do not have a TORUS. Instead you have an ordinary meeting.

Your CODEX is the Rules of Engagement of your GAMEWORLD, your distinctions. Perhaps the most crucial ingredient to a successful TORUS is being clear about the CONTEXT out of which the CODEX of your TORUS GAMEWORLD emerges.

The distinctions of your TORUS can be clarified and agreed on. Clarity leads to power. By establishing which distinctions apply in your TORUS as the original focus of your TORUS you give it the power to create its full potential.

We are finding that best practices for TORUS TECHNOLOGY include these distinctions:

• Being honest about your dishonesty, being authentic about your inauthenticity. Radical honesty.
• Taking responsibility for the level of responsibility being taken in the TORUS. Radical responsibility.
• You have a survival strategy. You are not your survival strategy. There is a difference between feelings and emotions.
• It is impossible to be a victim. You empower whoever you blame. Low drama is not life.
• Gremlin is on your leash, sitting at your side, ready to create nonlinear possibilities at your command.
• Reveal the fear behind your stories - "My Box is freaking out. I made a story about you. My story is ______. The fear behind my story is _____. I am responsible for my fear and my story. What do you think about my story?"
• Sword of clarity out, Disk of Nothing out, Gremlin alert at your side, paying attention to your attention, being centered (having your energetic center on your physical center), keeping a grounding cord from your energetic center to the center of the Earth, holding a cleansed personal bubble of space, keeping a small here and a small now, presence.
• Trust yourself to take care of yourself around other people. Trust the other NODES to have as much integrity and good will as your NODE does. Radical reliance on the Bright Principles.
• The TORUS is fed when participants put their attention on the 'WE' of the TORUS.

TIMING

With regards to time agreements, if everyone in a group is doing the same thing at the same time, for example, in a workshop, then the timing of when people come together or take a break can be determined spontaneously depending on what is occurring during the workshop. However, when everyone is in different places at the same time, such as in a DIVERGENCE, the timing for the next CONVERGENCE needs to be agreed upon beforehand.

A TORUS takes in new members and lets go of unnecessary members like an amoeba, with complete organic equanimity. It is no big deal.

A TORUS is not a burden that takes energy away from participants. A TORUS is an amplifier that allows more energy to flow through each person's life.

CONVERGENCE MANAGER, SCRIBE, AND GUARDIAN

Each CONVERGENCE is held and navigated by a CONVERGENCE MANAGER. The job of the CONVERGENCE MANAGER is to impeccably navigate each CONVERGENCE space for logistical matters, efficiently facilitate NODE reports, measure resistance for ratifying decisions, announcing the beginning time for the next CONVERGENCE, selecting the CONVERGENCE MANAGER for the next CONVERGENCE, and announcing the DIVERGENCE.

In addition to the CONVERGENCE MANAGER you will need a SCRIBE taking notes of any decisions which need to be entered into the CODEX. If needed, the SCRIBE can also make a public listing of existing NODES.

We also suggest that your TORUS select a temporary KAITIAKITANGA or RANGER, someone to be GUARDIAN of the CONTEXT during a Torus Meeting who immediately signals with the Purple Card from a neutral but clear perspective if ever the CONTEXT is not being respected.

BUMBLEBEES AND BUTTERFLIES

The originator of Open Space Technology, Harrison Owen, discovered that certain participants of nonlinear meeting technologies do not conform to the ordinary participation roles. He named them Bumblebees and Butterflies. We also find them in TORUS TECHNOLOGY.

Some people have a tendency to jump from NODE to NODE, picking up bits of information and dropping them here and there, slipping in and out of various NODE meetings asking dangerous questions but not even sticking around to hear the answers. The result is valuable cross-pollination throughout the TORUS These are the Bumblebees!

Some other people have a tendency to flutter about the TORUS at odd hours spontaneously enjoying their own beauty and delicate presence. They tend to care about and generally improve the overall mood of spaces. You might find them hanging out at the café, listening to the worries or ecstasies of people who feel a bit lost or frustrated in all the hubbub of the TORUS. These precious Beings are the Butterflies!

Both Bumblebees and Butterflies are welcomed contributors to any TORUS.

SPACE

New age style meeting circles are often filled with decorations such as silks, flowers, candles, shells, crystals and other memorabilia. People's attentions naturally focus on the decorations. Try the following experiment. Start with the flowers in the middle of the circle and ask people to notice their experience. Then take everything out from the middle and place it on an altar in the corner of the room. Then put it all back in the middle of your meeting circle again. Then take it all out again. Than ask people if they noticed any difference, and if they did notice something, to explain what the difference was. You may find that having anything in the middle of your circle fills up the space of emptiness that you need to connect with other people across the circle, and the void that you need to create new possibilities. Keeping the middle of the circle free and open then becomes a practice for creating more magic and not just a neurotic rule.

Our research is revealing that each person is born with a potential connection to their own unique 'Archetypal Lineage'.

Your 'Archetypal Lineage' is the service you were born to provide to your Village. Some people refer to your Archetypal Lineage as your 'calling' or your 'destiny'.

Your connection to your Archetypal Lineage is merely a 'potential connection' because your destiny is optional. This means that you have a choice about whether you live as your Archetypal Lineage in action, or not. Your life does not become the dance floor for your Archetypal Lineage until you choose that.

We are discovering that after you balance out the distortions from school and modern culture in your Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Energetic Bodies, then your 'fifth body' activates and comes online. Your fifth body includes the parts of you that naturally interact with your Archetypal possibilities, so we call your fifth body your 'Archetypal Body'.

Who would you need to become to have the capacity to choose to live as your Archetypal Lineage? (This is what we would classify as an 'interesting' question, one that it would be life-changing and worth finding an experiential (not theoretical) answer to.

Jacking-in to your Archetypal Lineage only makes sense after you have made some significant steps along your adulthood initiation path, otherwise, when your Archetypal Lineage sends a job down the tube onto your bench and asks you to give a talk to a group, or to go connect with someone you don't know to make them a nonlinear possibility offer, or to land a specific distinction in a space to make something completely different possible, and you are (your Box is...) too afraid to do this, then the assignment gets stuck in the tube. Another job comes down the tube and gets stuck behind the first not-done job. It does not take long before tube is jammed up with undone jobs from your Archetypal Lineage and it is a mess. Better not to jack-in to your Archetypal Lineage until you are willing and able to do the jobs that land on your bench.

Yet the potential connection to your Archetypal Lineage tends to secretly influence your preferences. In case you want to become more aware of what is going on in your Archetypal Lineage department, here are a couple of notes.

We are finding that Archetypal Lineages tend to fall into four nameable categories:

1. Earth Guardians
2. Village Weaving Intimacy Navigators
3. Evolutionaries
4. Gameworld Builders

Our current research is showing that:

• Earth Guardians and Village Weaving Intimacy Navigators tend to prefer to be in Uniform Teams.
• Evolutionaries and Gameworld Builders tend to prefer to be in Transformational Teams.

This would explain why when a gameworld gets to the size that it requires a Meta Ring to take care of the overall gameworld needs, when the whole gameworld comes together it is best to use a Meeting Technology that satifies both Uniform Teams and Transformational Teams at the same time!

Fortunately just such a Meeting Technology exists! It is called 'Torus Technology'.

In a Torus Technology meeting, you go into 'Divergence' and spend creation and private meeting time with your own Archetypal Lineage or specific projects, and then you come back into 'Convergence' and share decisions that were made, report on your projects, reorganize groups, and prepare fo the next 'Divergence'. In this way your gameworld lives because it breathes out through Divergence and breathes in through Convergence.

"You don't change things by fighting the existing gameworlds. You change things by building new gameworlds that make the existing gameworlds irrelevant."

We human beings live, work, create, and play together gameworlds which we construct out of nothing and which we have decided to play in together. Checkers, soccer, school, religion, towns, government, money, insurance, property ownership, rent, taxes, driving licenses, banks, loans, credit cards, phone contracts, the grocery store, the post office, etc. etc. etc. are all gameworlds we have created out of nothing. They each have a context, distinctions, thoughtware, and rules of engagement written in a Codex.

We were not taught about our power to create and modify gameworlds because the gameworlds try to protect themselves from being changed. Knowledge about gameworlds is not presented in modern culture education, not even at the graduate level. That time is over.The secret is out.

To gain practical experience using distinctions about gameworlds, do the experiments in these three S.P.A.R.K.s:

Spark-057-en: A problem signals the start of the next gameworld.

Spark-146-en: Either you consciously design each gameworld you live in or you are a pawn in someone else’s gameworld.

Spark-170-en: You may fear archetypal love because it leaves civilization behind as a stupid gameworld.

More information and Experiments are at https://gameworldbuilder.mystrikingly.com.

You might even consider participating in a Gameworld Builders Lab.

If this stuff turns you on it could be that your Archetypal Lineage is in the Gameworld Builders category! Check it out at http://4lineages.mystrikingly.com.

A TORUS is a GAMEWORLD. Building a TORUS makes you a GAMEWORLD BUILDER:

Whether you are originating a new TORUS, shifting the CONTEXT of a GAMEWORLD, or are transforming one of your current GAMEWORLDS into TORUS TECHNOLOGY we wish you all the best.

Feel free to contact any of us from the TRAINER TORUS if you would like guidance or support. We definitely want you to succeed. We have discovered in our own experience that it turns out to be a rather big deal.