Intentional Society: Learning from the kickoff
I'd like these updates to come a little closer to the factual transmission of what we're doing and learning on a weekly basis. I do enjoy a little conceptual exploration now and then, but I think that a steady sense of "what's going on" has been lacking lately and is probably one of the most useful ways to spend these words each week. (Please feel free to reply to this email if you have an opinion on the matter.)
Last Sunday marked the beginning of our 8th (quarter-long) season of Intentional Society. As I confessed to all in attendance, I have some facilitator-performance-anxiety attached to kickoff sessions: I generally try/want to do to much, infodump too much, structure too much, rush, and all those things end up pulling them away from feeling true to the real/normal spirit of these community practice sessions. This time I tried to tune in to two purposes: interpersonal connection and structural orientation. Connecting with each other, and orienting to the big-picture space.
I broke up the orientation bits this time, and interspersing them with interactive segments felt good to me, to lower the informational dose size. I showed the Member Portal doc, which is the one-stop-find-anything-shop for all of our bits. (We don't use a strong platform product like Mighty Networks, so this is the home/anchor.) I showed the Hall of Members, where we can see who else is in the community (upgraded with pictures this time) and what they're interested in. And I showed the Season 8 Calendar doc, which is a 3-months-at-a-glance visual that is meant to anchor the "what/when" question more firmly than the existing weekly emails.
As for connection, I made a whole sequence to facilitate meeting lots of people and ramping up gently with new folks in mind. We did both a check-in and some Social Noting in our opening, then did a few more pair breakouts touching on purpose (i.e. "why I am here") and desires (i.e. "what I want to do"). At that point I had more breakouts planned, but changed it up to keep the group together for longer in the back end of the session.
This direction was already showing up in the mentioned desires, e.g. "longer" and "larger" connection spaces. It also continued through our weekly Meta Meeting into planning to swing the practice pendulum in that direction pretty strongly next week. Looking back as facilitator, I see now that I could have seen that even sooner. Designing a "gentle ramp of connection" can be a good thing, but our group (including a couple first-timers) didn't really seem to need that structure! Which doesn't mean that approach won't ever be useful, but this session's structure could have been selected in-the-moment to be more or less ramp-y and fit to the context even better.
So that's the learning I'll take with me into next season's kickoff: matching structural scaffolding to the needs of the moment. What is, is, of course, and is all contributing to our path. We'll do a collective practice Sunday after our House Party Social on Saturday, and see where things lead from there!
Cheers,
James
Meta P.S. Looking at the above, it's also not quite what I intended when I set out on the "just share what's going on and what we're learning" direction. It's close, but 500 words in it seems like too much detail about facilitating choices specifically; I think it could stand to zoom out a bit and lean a bit more strategic vs tactical.