Intentional Society: Metagaming tenure
Yes we're having an orientation call this Saturday, March 12th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).
Pesky clock-management note: March 12th is the last day before Daylight Savings Time hits the USA, so orientation folks can ignore. Sunday folks, remember on the 13th to A) shift your clocks forward one hour if you are inside it, or else B) move the start time of Intentional Society one hour earlier in your time zone to compensate. (Europeans, the transitory off-by-one will last for 2 weeks this year.)
With a swell of newer folks and absent some older folks lately (last week especially, but it's a trend over 3-4 weeks), the average tenure in the room felt noticeably lower last Sunday. I found myself explaining structural aspects of the Sunday session almost as if it were the start of a new season. The "tenure effect" can swing the opposite direction as well, but I don't think I've bumped into the "too insular" feeling of high tenure yet in IS the last 14 months.
Tenure/experience seems like a organizational dimension with a sweet spot and homeostatic feedback — at least, that's what my corporate-trained OD part says. Focus on retention, or focus on recruitment, to bring the system back into balance. An organization trying to perpetuate itself kind of looks like an infinite game playing-to-keep-playing mode of self-balancing behavior. But there's something outside that trying to get my attention today, with a "but what if we didn't?" provocation. If "dimension" is often just another word for a polarity, what integrations are possible if we don't just automatically swing the other direction when feeling tilted?
Oh, there's a 2-by-2 here with recruitment/retention axes! An organization with...
- low recruitment and low retention is hospice or unwanted
- high recruitment and low retention is like a school/factory
- low recruitment and high retention is like a museum/monastery
- high recruitment and high retention is like a viral movement or cult
Ah, I think I can put my finger on what was nudging me: Avoid assuming that IS is one particular kind of organization that has a set balance point. Not just "where is our point of homeostasis on the chart" but how do we move around the chart? If/when IS is like a school, how do we grow teachers? If/when IS is like a monastery, how do we bring our wisdom back into contact with the world? If/when IS is a movement, how do we do both of those things at the same time? Where are the constraints on "max everything" that bound healthy movement growth?
If systematic perspective here is playing our game well, the meta-systematic perspective is to see and consciously choose which game we're playing, and to what end. And/but then there's the fractal of "we" at different scales: can we create enough freedom inside the system for individuals to play their favorite and best game of the moment while still metagaming at the organizational level? Or just maybe the former enables the latter?
With that, I'll pause and savor the questions. Cheers,
James