Orienting from the emerging future

Abstract

Guidance intervention faces great ecological, social and cultural challenges which prevent or hinder people from becoming what they are in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous society such as ours. In this environment, one of the essential functions of guidance is to transform the contextual conditioning factors and social determinants that hinder people's decision-making, self-realization and development. It is not enough to generate changes in the symptoms that evidence the problems. It is necessary to transmute the underlying structures, the mental models that sustain them and the sources responsible for generating them in order to achieve a better relationship with oneself, with others and with the whole system, as advocated by the social justice approach to counseling. From this perspective, guidance is about building critical awareness, naming oppression and injustices, questioning what is normal, encouraging people to work together and working on a variety of levels that require guidance practitioners to address the structures and systems generating the problems that people often experience as induced. One of the intervention methodologies most in line with this approach is that derived from Theory U, consisting of the classic triangle of: a) Observation: opening one’s mind, heart and will; b) Reflection: allowing one’s inner knowledge to emerge; c) Action: generating new possibilities for action, experienced and then integrated for each person and in their organizations.