Intentional Society: introducing Adult Development
For a change of pace, our next introductory call will be on Saturday this week: Saturday March 27th at 1pm Pacific (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).
I feel the energy shifting inside our member community. We've had some interesting, engaging, even powerful moments as we focused on relational practices. But this was never the "it" thing of Intentional Society by itself - it was meant as an initial foundation. Now the energy pulls towards the question, what kind of doing does this flow into? What will we build on top of this foundation? My impression is that this calls for greater interdependence and commitment among us, beyond the "interact with whichever faces show up this week" norm so far. Structural reformation of some sort seems to be due.
But first, one more bit of foundation. Last week we began learning (and teaching) Adult Development Theory, the field of mapping personal growth stages and understanding developmental changes. We made it through the first half of Dimitri Glazkov's ADT Primer slide deck, and will be continuing from slide 35 this week. One small-but-accurate theoretical model of Intentional Society is "adult development plus relational practices in a friendship container," and so this seems prerequisite to restructuring the game we're playing. During our member session we discussed:
- "constructive" mental modeling of reality
- the idea of "vertical and horizontal" development
- the now-famous subject-to-object shift
- perspective scopes as mostly-discrete stages
- transcend-and-include layering of growth
Several new(er) folks showed up for our intellectual foray, yet gamely joined in to play with our discomfortable awareness question of the week, sharing "what you don't see about me is..." about the hidden facets of our inter-and-intra-personal diversity. The openness of our sharing was a powerful contrast to our subsequent book learning, at least in my mind, and keeps me very aware that it's not primarily an academic-type intellectualism that is either our solution or our reason for congregating.
This Sunday (March 28th, 1pm Pacific) we'll be exploring the stage-by-stage progression through the major ego development models. Without judgement or "better than," we'll consider the resonance of those perspectives in our own lives. If you want to join after missing part 1, skimming the first 35 slides should mostly catch you up. Reply to this email if you've fallen off the invite list (or come to an intro call if you haven't yet).
Looking out farther, we'll then take Easter Sunday off the following week, which coincedentally happens to be the first week of the new calendar quarter. I'm looking forward to discovering what intentions we pursue in Q2 of IS.
Questions? Thoughts? Reactions? I'm all ears, as always.
Cheers,
James