Intentional Society: Culture compression & signifiers
Happening tomorrow: Click here to register for our next newcomer orientation video call on Friday, November 25th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).
Also, the "How to Handle Anything" video has been posted, of my talk a few days ago presenting the Intentional Society mnemonic of Awareness Acceptance Integrity for personal growth.
Now, to catch you up on this last week, our leaderful culture arc began with touching base with our inner drive, the things we want in our lives that we have the desire to bring about in some way. The inner game precedes the inter(personal) game, with both required for the right-doing of leadership.
That connection of "what do my wants have to do with leading (others)?" was a bit wobbly, or maybe more distracted by parts of the practice structure. There were some great meta-level moments bringing to our awareness the question of "what do we want leading (and following) to look like in our practice space?" What this session highlighted for me the most, though, was the reality once again of the diversity we contain within even this small and cozy IS practice space. We have different backgrounds and experience, we have different reactions to a scenario, we have different lengths of time inside IS and differing connections to the group-shared history of what we've been through in our collective explorations.
So this has me pondering today, not just the cultivation of a thick culture, but the compression of that culture for transmission, learning, and maintenance purposes. Compression in the sense of "shortening the path," so to speak, between "the world lives there mostly" to "and we live over here, kinda far away" in culture-space. The challenge to a recently-arriving person of "oh, how do I make the moves to inhabit this culture" takes a learning journey. Encoding a culture (like, if you were "zipping" a computer file) can speed the transfer... and, awareness (of the cultural differences) seems like a key enabler too.
Because we do this cultural learning unconsciously sometimes, assessing the norms and expectations of a group we enter and shaping our behavior and thinking to mold to fit in that culture without even noticing our subtle shifts. And sometimes we can be (or be made) very aware of the special-ness or different-ness of a space through signifiers: I'm thinking of my experience of Catholic cathedrals, stained glass, candles, incense braziers, holy water, Taizé singing, pipe organs & choirs — if you've been in a place with these forms and practices, you know you can feel the thickness like a blanket. (Whether that's a blanket of sacredness and safety, or a blanket of foreignness and impenetrability, then depends on one's relationship to that culture.)
Signifiers in/of a culture don't necessarily encode or transmit any of the knowing of the culture itself — but they do make clear the difference/apart-ness that is held in that space. I wonder A) what kind of signifiers an online space like IS might create and use, and B) where the "just right amount" of difference-signaling would lay.
Awareness support, plus learning support, equals rapid cultural learning?
Unblocking restraints to exercising leadership, plus integrous connection with source energy/desire, equals leaderful culture?
Cheers,
James