Intentional Society: Organizing by Gardening
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Here's what happened in our Crew Formation session this past Sunday!
- 20 people in attendance
- made 13 proposals for potential crews, with
- approximately 7 making "go" decisions,
...to continue to pursue further. And maybe a few of those won't fully launch, as the consolidation and winnowing process concludes — and yet I was still warmly surprised by how much energy seemed to come out towards these collaborative pursuits! I get a little aflutter thinking of the potential value of all these activities and relationships that... just might not have happened outside of this frame that let us find each other in these connections? I feel some personal pride about getting to this moment, that these seeds are sprouting in the soil of our social garden.
However strongly those flowers grow, this definitely looks to become one of our regular rituals structurally. We have a lot to learn as we tend to what our own complex-system wants to teach us — about organizing processes, about our toolkit of awareness supports, possibly even about overextending ourselves. We'll welcome it all in the spirit of Gall's law gardening: evolutionary emergence and intentional cultivation hand-in-hand.
We may spend one more community session on our crewing-and-doing toolkit, especially if we can do it with fun hands-on practice. I'm looking at consent-based decision-making as one crucial pattern for efficient and effective group governance. Also awareness loops are key — like agile retrospectives, but hopefully taking it from passive feedback-gathering to intentional experimentation by setting guiding questions. My (possibly biggest?) hope for these crews is that they can be self-transforming cultures in themselves: not trapped in the proposed structure of the initial call, but evolving themselves for their own ever-evolving purpose(s).
Cheers,
James
P.S. Reply to this email if you'd like to read and give pre-publish feedback on our Crew Formation Event guide for facilitators.