You think that because you understand ONE, you understand TWO,
because one and one makes two. But you must understand AND.
- Sufi proverb
Power of Two
What can one person do in a movement of hope and imagination? More than you can imagine…
If that one person spends one day talking to two people about what they could create… (1 + 2)
And if the next day, those two people each talk to two different people… (1 + 2 + 2 + 2)
And if the next day, those two people each talk to two different people…(1+2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2+ 2 + 2)
And so on, and so on…
Then, in 10 days, 2,047 people will be talking about creative ideas for your city’s future…
In 15 days, 65,535 people will be talking about even more possibilities...
In 20 days, 2.1 million people will be talking about hope and imagination in your city…
The mathematical equation for the power of two is x = n (2
^(d+1) – 1), where n is the number of people you start with (in our case, just 1 person); d is the number of days, and x is the total number of people who are involved in the process. The equation assumes two things: First, that once a person tells two people, they are not telling anyone else; and second, that there are no repeated conversations. Both of these assumptions are unlikely to be true in reality, of course, as we are likely to talk to more than two people and we are likely to continue talking to them (and others) about possibilities for the future.How quickly a public conversation about hope and imagination can emerge in our communities!
In Imagine Nagaland, in 2001, more than a thousand interviews happened in a matter of months!