Intentional Society: Butterfly effects on crew formation
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For subtle/vibey reasons, we approached our "Crew Formation" process a bit differently this season vs last — and I'm looking at some interestingly-complex effects of the process and how that affects what gets generated between us.
Last season we did three straightforward phases:
- Preparation
- Proposals
- Organizing
...and the ideas we started with (for preparing proposals) were scoped to "crewing inside of IS". In this season's process we started with a broader frame on some mapping: Looking at our whole lives, we listed things that we are already doing and that we want to be doing. Then we moved into a round of naming "I am interested in..." ideas with some amount of relevance to IS. Some dot-voting and combination-analysis then led us to discussing the coalescing of crews.
One breakout room topic was on "un-fragmenting the world" after multiple people voiced their interest in the subject of reaching out to others, reaching outside their bubbles, interfacing with those who think very different than them, etc. I think the wider initial frame and softer interest frame supported the emergence of this shared energy, in that I'm not sure the same proposals would have come out of a straightforward "hey what's your idea" seed or if those proposals would have merged together in the proposal round.
Another breakout room topic was called "support in outer work" and this one was the last one to (barely?) be named, after some harder squinting at the interest list and someone abstracted across a few different "I'm interested in doing this thing (in the world)" items. I felt like the structure didn't support this convergence — although it happened, it felt like a jump was made to get there. (And is it what those people really want/need? Dunno yet)
The "I'm interested in [discussing]" prompting left some more traditional activities (e.g. practice groups doing particular practices) with less breakout-room energy. Maybe because they didn't need much discussion to understand? Or maybe the "whole life" initial framing nudged us relatively more toward the outside world a bit more? I'm still making sense of this group process as it happens: We don't have outcomes yet as we'll be making actual proposals at the start of next session.
Which, speaking of, maybe those structural factors will end up bigger than any conceptual framing. Or just the different individuals involved, or the summer effect, or our moods on a particular day. It's quite hard to avoid having so many changing/experimental variables in a human system! When we finally look back from the end of the season on which crews formed, how they felt, what effect they had on us... it'll be hard to prove anything about causal relationships. Too many butterflies flapping, it's not chaos, but it is complex. That feels unsatisfying to say, but each probe (time we try this) does gain us some amount of information about the cause-and-effect web.
Cheers,
James