What Remains Open

The most significant open question raised by the Tuesday afternoon is whether the intimacy that made its processes work is reproducible or merely fortunate. the Cardinal Scale's water disagreement resolved as well as it did partly because of features that no architecture can guarantee: the two groups had a reservoir of prior trust, the facilitator had the support of an experienced mentor, and the disagreement, while real, had not yet hardened into the kind of identity-based division that facilitated process cannot easily reach. A different community, with less prior trust or a more polarized disagreement, might have had the same architecture and a worse outcome. The architecture creates conditions under which good outcomes are more likely. It does not produce them, and the gap between creating conditions and producing outcomes is where the honest uncertainty of the whole project lives.