 What do human beings value? It is a question that is both personal and social. It is personal as each person's valuation is personal. You are a human being. It is social as you are a person in relation to other people. It is social as you can exercise your ability to gain what you value by and with the help of others who are like you in so many ways. Living involves expending yourself, all your time, all your natural energy and everything you come to own. Focus on empowerment arises through looking for that best bargain in what you elect to receive and accomplish through expending the resources that are yours. This work is in the nature of efficiency engineering support for your part of humanity. It is to provide you opportunity to best define what has value to you and to understand what it will likely cost you to gain or accomplish what you value. One of the most effective tools we have for this is our understanding of investment. What we do involves a cost in terms of our personal commitment of what we have to expend. This is our personal expenditures and it is what we value for the purpose of achieving a result that is also what we value. We call it a good investment when what you gain through accomplishment is personally considered more valuable than what you had to commit to achieve it. In elisting others becomes a way to share cost and to better assure the valued result. The more we learn about personal investment, the more effective we become and the greater our individual and corporate empowerment. One of the more effective understandings for optimizing what we get from expending our time and effort is the realization that we are going to expend it all. Every moment we live will be used for something. All our effort, learning and abilities will be expended. Consider the personal expenditure we make as young adults seeking to enjoy the benefits of family, of joining our lives with another and raising the next generation. Even though we spend our youth years investing in enhancing our personal capacities and expending upon ourselves through training, education, skill building and the like, there is still the potency of family. It is not just becoming more effective as a social unit. It is also that very human understanding that there is value in just being a unification of people for commonly held purposes. It is a source of personal value. Though we can vary in many ways, we still seem to share that sense of value that draws us to taking part in finding those common purposes with others. The cost incurred in pursuing any one personal investment is loss of potential from pursuit of alternatives. Making a decision limits freedom, but the value of personal freedom can be replaced by unity promoting common purpose choices that are available to a family unit. Having choices is freedom a human value. Becoming a family unit involves both a cost and a new value in choices that come available. Making such choices is a part of living and we make them every day we are alive. It is not just the major choices as joining lives with one another, but whether we are to actively pursue other, less personal purposes. How much of your personal time and effort would you be willing to commit to achieve some increased level of political freedom? It involves a choice that is potentially yours to make. In our study of human performance, we are examining the potentials for leveraging our sense of human purpose and our value in joining efforts with others based on common senses of value on purposes we share with others. Our general empowerment is one of promoting personal choices in how our time and efforts are spent and personal or family election is on what is likely to be gained or accomplished through those expenditures. It is necessary to address the common commitment of humanity tending to the limits of human life itself. We have needs that must be filled if we are to live. We have limits to our strength and concentration. We have limits to our intelligence and wisdom that we are able to apply. Also by humanity itself, we are able to consciously and effectively manage and have effect upon the time, strength, learning and other human capacities that are ours. That too is investment. If we expend great physical energy, we can grow stronger and more agile. But this is at the cost of expending time to both seek the effect and to rest from our physical efforts. In a light manner, we can expend mental energy increasing our knowledge to think effectively, but there is a cost there as well. We actually expend most of what we have just in living. The remainder is available for intentional decision. In this study based on empowerment, we expend to gain effectiveness in our intentional decisions. The investment is time and attention both in receipt and interactive exploration of what we learn. The desired product is an increase in human capacity to make intelligent and informed personal investments. The value is not in the knowledge base as the new factual information is far from extensive and most of it being human already known and accepted. The value is not in the information itself but an expanded way to see and understand our world. It is on this basis that we examine concepts like the expansion of the grand jury to apply management to governance. It includes cost and benefit in terms of paying jury members for participation. And as humans, it includes people working together for commonly valued results as supporting our government in secrecy decisions for sensitive information. It is human to demand services from the economy and government that we own. It is human value in potentially rejecting massive complicated laws you cannot readily receive and value. It is us as empowered humans who can address the ineffectiveness and damaging nature of current governance with knowledge of costs and benefits making changes. It is human to share this with others minimizing the cost to us as individuals and maximizing our corporate effect. What we cover in this course is witness to that human truth that it is all about us that we really are the only party in interest. One of the more effective pieces of intelligence is the nature of change that we the people can put into effect by general mandate. For the personal investment, the change is made once and will be very difficult to un-make. When established by a people acting as a unit, the cost may be significant but the result will continue as a benefit for a long time With mandate, the necessary personal investment can be quite limited. Receipt of the basis for mandate and general agreement is sufficient to add to the empowerment of those who are more involved in the change. Those whose greater investment was their personal choice. Likewise, where a greater personal investment is reasonable, it can be multiplied in effect by the inclusion of the support of others. If the cost is acceptable, there may be an expanded grand jury to review secrecy matters, to review legislation or to take other support of a regulatory actions. The grand jury once in place will also be a tool for further investment. Empowered people can decide whether there is sufficient value from expanding or shrinking any future grand jury efforts. That too is an investment potential and there is so much more. The jury is a sampling of humanity. It is not a group of special people who can grasp personal privileges from having taken part in the new jury system. They are to be individuals representing all of us. What they decide will be like what people in general will decide. What they choose to do is what in general we would choose to do if we were on that jury. The materials we have been addressing in this study are truly powerful. They empower citizens to accomplish what citizens commonly value. They can initiate and maintain such changes as people feel will benefit humanity. They can serve those who we employ to do the day-to-day management of our nation, providing them with ability to address matters to a sample of the public or to receive what the public would mandate for their action. So how many times will citizens have to come together to initiate the expansion of our system of grand juries to function as a support for government and as a means for citizen management over government? Of course it only requires that change once. Better still once the change is made by the public through their mandate. It is not going to be reversed until the people change their minds concerning the value they have in being in support of and in charge of central governance. This is not one of those political matters where administrator and authority feels compelled to challenge and reverse the accomplishments claimed by some earlier set of privileged leaders. What we are discussing in this course is the potential for civilization level management of humanity with the general concept of civilization operating for the benefit recognized by we the people. The exercise of privilege yields waste where it costs time and effort just to maintain what leaders would do for the benefit of commoners. There is a need to constantly review and re-evaluate these property taxes and how the rent or taxes if you prefer are to be collected in support of government by privileged leaders. The exercise of privilege and land ownership includes the need for owners to hire experts if they want to continue with even the limited ownership that privileged-based leaders have permitted to common citizens. Consider the result of a state-level mandate that any transfer of property in the state records is a service rather than a source of regulation. It is that granting new deeds is an immediate act with the state taking care of its own records as it serves the citizens. That change would be made once. It would not have to be made a second time. Also it is likely that the change would be relatively permanent. Once gained as a service it could easily cost public careers for leaders who tried to reverse it. Simply taking things from the public terminating a service while creating costs for citizens would be unlikely. It is especially unlikely when that change has just been accomplished at considerable personal cost to people through the commitment of a man to a mandate. The fact that the leader preferred the privileged approaches is unlikely to be accepted by the public as any sort of improvement in their lives. We do have some general intelligence and its technical support for decision makers. These are rules derived from experience with efforts to accomplish things in the past. In that sense these do not function as science but as general knowledge that can support intelligent investment of our time and effort with reasonably accurate expectations for what our efforts can accomplish. We all necessarily act on expectations of what something will cost, what we will commit, and the likelihood of what we will be able to gain through our expenditure. Both are expectations not factual valuations. As human beings we do the best we can to develop more or less accurate expectations. Our need for intelligent evaluation is a basis for learning. Wouldn't we try something that does not work? It discourages our future attempts to do the same. When we try something that is rewarded with a result we personally value, we are encouraged to use the same approach again. We call it learning by experience. I also note that much of our educational culture seems intent on a different learning. One that insists on recognizing the right way things are done and trying with greater intensity and effort if it does not seem to work. Indeed there are times when that pays off and we are able to gain what we value by that method. There are also many more times where the unexpected result is made worse as reality tends to be consistent. The effort here is to be aware of our humanity and that both of these approaches to learning and improvement are available for your application. In complete accord with the general purpose of this work the choice is yours. You are empowered by having that choice as a basis for understanding and working with reality. The choice is yours. You are empowered in your dealings with others as they also learn how to approach their own decisions. Some will prefer one approach over others as a general matter. Others including most who take this course will be a bit more intentional in selection. That is empowerment. Being able to have intentional effect on how you learn is a very deep empowerment. We have a few technical rules from estimating that may serve you well in making intelligent investments. We will be urged to evaluate costs before deciding to commit personal time and energy. Based on the weakness of expectations for our future situation any estimated cost based on a personal action will have to be doubled by unexpected costs. When it comes to doing things it will generally take twice as much time and effort to gain accomplishment as can be reasonably estimated before starting the effort. We seem to be pretty good at understanding the value we seek through our action but this general rule will well best assure that we have a workable upfront expectation for what we must commit to gain it. We know that there is going to be an active resistance to anything that we try to accomplish just because it will require some change from what we otherwise expect to happen. Change is always approached as a cost. Also in any project there are unplanned complications or challenges that have to be addressed on the way to accomplishment. This is a consistent reality. What the general estimating rule accomplishes is the inclusion of an investment to handle a reasonable amount of contingency and it is not that we can plan where those contingency challenges will arise they cannot be planned as they seem almost random. We just plan to have sufficient resources to address them as they arise. This general rule has been tested by time and experience. We are able to build buildings and businesses and the contingency allowance is usually sufficient to handle the unexpected as it arises. We are able to plan vacations in retirement and the expected contingencies of lost vehicle keys, mistakes in communicating with providers, illnesses and other unplanned matters can generally be handled by the contingency without loss of purpose being served by our efforts. Your ability to plan effectively will almost always be rewarded. This of course assumes that you have approached the desired result in terms of investment rather than just another more intensive attempt to accomplish something that has previously failed. For the next focus we return to that concept that brought us together in the beginning with another point of intelligence that can serve us in seeing and understanding the investments that are most likely to serve us. We return to the basic understanding that we the people are the United States and without us there is no nation. We are the public and there is no other public to be served. We are society and there is no society here but us. The new addition is that we when addressed as a unit are a single unit. We cannot go in two directions at the same time. We cannot enter into conflict without ceasing to be a unit where we go as a nation we go together. What we do as a nation is what we accomplish not what some do in overcoming others. One obvious reason for our never seeming to go much of anywhere as a nation is that our leaders are intent on going where we will not go as a people. In our current culture especially that arising from political rule the focus is taxation and spending for the benefit of the public. With the blindness that has been promoted in our culture leaders tax us based on what the public will tolerate and spend on what leaders decide is beneficial to the public. It is taxing without citizen support. It is spending without citizen approval. There is no citizen choice no freedom for the American people. Our alternate understanding built on performance concepts is that we the people will tolerate taxing to run the government that operates in our name and we have hopes that our leaders will not waste what is taken from us. And then there is the American common law. Our leaders are elected to represent us. They have no good basis for seizing anything without permission of the owners. They have no basis for spending anything that is not approved by we the people. We are the sovereign the owner the source of all political authority and the source of all that government holds in our name except as members of us. Our leaders are not some special party in interest. They are elected. They are most certainly not some sampling of we the people who share a purpose with we the people who elect them. They are our agents, our employees, people who work for us. Denying this leaves no basis to continue receiving public funds as their income. The division of legal reality from our cultural application is stark and real. As long as we seek to quarrel over issues we can go nowhere as a nation as a society or as a people. Of course this also sets our path for empowerment. It is recognition of our potency as we the people and our ownership over the nation and its governance and its economy. We are the only party in interest where we find such value that we are not quarreling among ourselves. We have the power to do whatever an owner is authorized to do with what is owned. This is power not influence. It is not potent through convincing powerful people to take sides with us against other citizens. Power does not come from electing some champion to enter into political conflict on our behalf. Power comes from our agreeing on when, where, and how our government is to serve we the people. And so we set up a representative sample of we the people instructing them to manage over those who have been hired to run the government. We are that jury of citizens and can generally trust them to represent us because they are a sampling of us. When the jury finds Pareto level agreement they speak for we the people. They speak for the people who own the nation, who own its government, and who own our legal system. They are not managed by the hired help or limited by the rules that our employees are bound to obey. They are not limited by the constitutional instructions we issue to public employees. But our sampling of we the people who can generally be trusted to come to agreement on those things where we the people can find like agreement. The grand jury is a convenient tool for we the people to enter into exception management over those who operate our nation and government on our behalf. Now this is empowerment. So who gets selected to be part of such a body? The answer is random selection. It may be limited to competent adults but otherwise is a representative sampling of we the people. Only we the people get to exclude individuals from this body and then only where there is a Pareto level agreement that some member be excluded. The people on the jury are selected at random and can be compelled to be part of that body. It is by the sampling that people are selected and refusal to serve does not relieve the sampled person from being in the sample. They simply represent people who would not voluntarily be a part of that body. That is the nature of sampling. It is like understanding. Nobody gets thrown off the jury except with a Pareto level agreement to that by the whole of the sample by agreement of the jury. Active participation is a different matter as membership on the jury does not include a duty to voluntarily take part. It has to be voluntary participation to represent those who would choose to participate. Selection into such a sample is an opportunity not a duty. Your selection is an opportunity to represent people just as you. What you consider to be important enough to present to the rest of the sample is what people who are like you consider to be important. Acting as part of this sample is the highest possible level of personal empowerment and this is the nature of exception management. Once formed the jury has no assigned duties and responsibilities. They are only limited by the nature of exception management. Their actions only go to government but they are unlimited by law or by authorization. They are the effective voice of we the people who are only limited by referring to the larger body of we the people. What has interest to this body of jurors is presumed to be what has interest to we the people. What the jury requests from public employees is what we the people require of our employees. What the jury directs is what we direct. That is the nature of exception management. It is the voice of the owner stepping in whenever and wherever it seems appropriate to the owner. The second side of this same sampling function is the purpose for there being a government. It was created by we the people to accomplish unity and to provide us with justice and welfare services. We have an ongoing and focused interest in promoting the operations of governance that will deliver these services to us as we the people. Exception management is not just stepping in to do what seems appropriate. It is also abiding interest in assuring the efficiency and effectiveness of our public employees as to their delivery of services to us. Exception managers take action in support of the performance process of governance. Assuring as far as seems reasonable the ongoing generation of value by delivering these services to the public. It is a support service. It is receiving questions from employees and supporting them in their teaming with other employees and meeting other challenges. It is responding to employees who seem to be having difficulties in accomplishing what was assigned to them. It is stepping in to remove obstacles to performance. It is handling distractions and external challenges that would divert public resources from serving us or interfere with their efforts on our behalf. It is even stepping in to handle challenges raised by members of the public that would distract or interfere with public services. Like a foreman on a production line the jury can choose to handle visitors and others who might distract workers from their assigned productive efforts. The general understanding is that we have the work group and foreman as someone who takes ownership of what the work group does. The jury can assume effective ownership over the operation of government supporting and protecting it in its operations that assure public services. And as an even greater challenge if it is not of sufficient interest to the jury that they choose to participate or act it is not sufficient of interest to the public no matter how passionate some segment of the people may be or even if their presentation of some efforts of criminality or unfairness the jury is still the public body and representation not every good cause is going to be pursued nor every wrong writer. The purpose of exception managers is not one of running things but acting on behalf of we the people on those things of such general importance that we would volunteer to act. I do urge looking upon such a sampling for what it accomplishes not for what it does. Sampling is a performance tool and it is a success when it is able to provide the benefits of exception management to those public employees who are hired to run our government for us. As in all tools it is not going to do anything beyond what we the people are intent on doing for ourselves it is just a technical support that allows us to accomplish what we value more efficiently and effectively than we might do as a whole public gathering. The challenge is that of sampling itself. Is it possible to have someone else actually represent you in this fashion doing what you would do if you were there? That is the very purpose of sampling selecting a representative part of some larger group. In our tradition of sampling it is an assurance that at least 95% of the time the sample will actually be representative when it comes to agreement. That was the very purpose of the sampling plan presented. Noting the randomness of our variations we can have a very small sample represent us. Instead of polling half a billion people we can get direct input from less than 50 people with reasonable assurance that someone there will actually make their decisions as we would make them. That is pretty heady stuff and with a potency so incredible that it will likely face almost universal challenge by those public employees who have decided to accept their function as rule. To put it simply no leader can rule when the boss is watching. To get to this point we do have the challenge of coming to agreement that first time to find our public voice and redirect our government to support our sampling system. Our leaders once properly directed are likely to do a very competent job of it as they work in fear of giving power to each other. They are after all a said and done part of we the people and not some ruling class of elite and special people. I would approach establishing the sampling and management system as a long term goal to be mandated when some of the more obvious misrepresentative activities of government have been addressed and the performance of public mandate has been established as a workable product. The reason is practical that this is so sharply counter to our culture as to interfere with voluntary participation of citizens. Finding the voice of the people and harnessing it to enlist our leaders for more focused change actions will make the potential for public mandates in far more real to citizens. In our next adventure we get to be a lot more personal through exercising your potential decisions to enter into management. The division from common culture will be honed into a working tool for your empowerment. Consider the divisive current culture challenge whether we are better off with national government or some one world government. The performance approach recognizes these as a question of which sort of government should rule over you. The appropriate performance answer if we the people are in charge of our government it really doesn't matter.