Intentional Society: (Events and) Two kinds of trust
Report on last week: We have a whittled-down version of Case Clinic we call "Mini-Cases". One round runs in about 25 minutes, and it hits an 80/20 sweet spot (80% of the value, 20% of the time and skill required) compared to the original or to our own Edge Case. We ran it for the second time, picked up only slight tweaks, and I think it'll be next on the to-publish list after...
Coming up this week: Crew Formation! As I wrote about a few weeks ago, this is a scaffolding event that invites people to step into leadership or co-creation and pursue what they want to do with a crew. We'll circulate the list internally after the session, but occasional participants may particularly want to attend this Sunday if there's something that you want to see-or-make happen!
And now, a few thoughts on trust and trust-building:
I just finished sending out "Connection Shuffle" pairings to the 22 IS members opted-in for mostly-random 1:1 getting-to-know-you calls. This is the second iteration of this format, and I think we're finding these valuable in weaving the web of connections "behind the rectangles".
As those were going out, I did notice a few pairings where AFAIK those two people haven't even seen each other in a community session before (e.g. a new member has been to two sessions, a returning member missed both those sessions). So despite opting in to the concept, it may take some transitive trust to follow through and reach out to a stranger. Spending time together naturally builds trust (or anti-trust, but that's quite rare inside our community membrane) between two people, but there's also a kind of trust involved here in... the "average" or "type" of person they've experienced in IS? Or perhaps trust in the "structure" of IS such that membership conveys trustable predictions of shared cultural norms.
That gets me thinking a bit about what does and doesn't transfer or scale when it comes to trust. Our trust of a friend-of-a-friend depends on how we trust the friend in-between. Our trust of a fellow national of the same country depends on our own patriotism, and our estimate of the average patriotism level of residents of our country (and is usually pretty low). Our trust of someone in the same religion could be quite high, depending on how strong the ingroup/outgroup effect is built into the superstructure of the religion and its culture. (E.g. strong for Mormons, weak for Universalists) Leaning too much on structure to provide impersonal trust seems like a trait of cults. But if there's too little trust in either way, essential cooperation, openness, and security is lost.
Personal and system-oriented trust seem like an obvious "BOTH+AND" that support each other. If you're in an interest/hobby organization you'll readily trust new folks you meet from other chapters of the org, and deeply trust close folks you've spent lots of time with guided by that interest. IS is sort of near that category, but it's a lot more nebulous than e.g. "We all like to drink beer and run" so I wonder what sort of trust and cooperation we could generate across a future multi-chapter IS? Or between IS and other allied communities across the meta-network? Some things could use new social tech (like Liquid Democracy) to scale, whereas other kinds of coordination would be bound by strong personal trust that doesn't scale or transfer very far.
Cheers,
James