Intentional Society: Learning from tension
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When is it better to hold tension inside an established frame, and when is it better to break the frame to ease the tension?
We had an emergent time in last Sunday's Community Practice Session; by that I mean it didn't go quite as I expected. I set us up to do Collective Presencing as the realization of a pull towards "longer, larger, deeper" practice after last week's more-structured kickoff. I enjoy that practice, I assumed that was a fit for the group, I explained it and launched into it... and there were some feelings about that!
That's not me using a euphemism to be polite or delicate or conflict-avoidant — it's just a neutral way to say that people had different reactions, different feelings, different desires, in response to the form/frame we had entered. And that's all good! All welcome, all okay... feelings just are what they are, and what good would it do to wish/pretend/coerce ourselves different feelings? So we welcome all feelings, and when feelings arise to the top of our attention, that's the thing to attend to!
Collective Presencing has some deliberately constraining elements. Any practice does — that's what makes a structure a structure. But in CP they can really be felt relative to a normal conversation: a talking stick makes for a slow pace and built-in silences. There's a guiding question that frame the inquiry. Speaking "to/from the center" constrains our ability to respond directly to a single person by addressing them.
Wearing my facilitator hat, I was aware of two things regarding the "now what" after tension arose in the group space. First, CP itself is a frame that can "make a lot of space" for whatever arises, with low reactivity and high integration-orientation. So I wanted to see if we could stay inside the practice to welcome and process the tensions, if the practice could be meta-reflective. Second, though, was that the tension itself was with the frame, and so was kind of coming from outside of the frame.
So now we're back to that question at the top - to break or hold the frame? To ease or hold the tension? There's one moment I'd like to have a redo of last Sunday, and that's where I said, "let's ease the constraint" and was meaning to drop the "speak to the center" constraint, but flubbed the wording and most people thought I meant more-or-all of the CP constraints. But I was wanting to try a minimal relaxation, to ease just enough to make the tension hold-able and find buy-in for which frame we could all meet in.
I'm aware that we, the group, were an "Intentional Society" frame, which was holding inside of it a "we're doing a practice" frame, which was itself then holding our shared behavioral norms in that brief time. So "we" were both inside and outside of the practice, could possibly look at things with interior and/or exterior views. Tension is usually a matter of context conflict: "within this practice I feel constrained and can't do what I want", or "within this group I feel constrained to do this practice", or "within my personal world-frame I feel constrained to be here in this group."
Too many words. Jump to my conclusion. A container/structure/frame can hold what it holds, and there's always an outside. Being able to break some frames while holding other frames seems very useful. (Being able to dip outside a frame while remaining inside, also?) If "I don't like this practice" gets fused to "will Intentional Society hold together at all" in the continuum of fear-of-framebreaking, that can be nervous-system-level scary. Frames can be defused/untangled, so the only thing to fear is fear itself?
Maybe we can play with that. Reminds me of the 4-level breakdown of psychological safety, which I'm not sure I like or agree with to what degree, but the nesting of safeties reminds me of the nesting of frames and the safety to break them. I think I'd like to explore that.
Cheers,
James