Intentional Society: Season analysis
Next up, Season 11: Orientation for newcomers is on Saturday, July 1st at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). RSVP here! If you miss that one, there will be an orientation on the 8th as well, just before community kickoff on the 9th.
We're in our seasonal "gap week" currently, restarting on July 9th. Last week I shared some bon mots from my personal learning and integration from our 10th season. This week, let's zoom out and look at the season structurally, as well as the evolving meaning and purpose of the season structure.
What guided our "steering" in selecting content/structures/topics week-by-week as the season progressed? For all our community sessions across the last three months, here's the abbreviated "why that" from my facilitator memory:
| Session | Why'd we do that? |
|---|---|
| 04-16 Kickoff | About half-and-half new/experienced folks, getting to know each other |
| 04-23 Mini-Cases | Known good practice, building support and trust |
| 04-30 Crew Formation | Seed doing/collab outside of community sessions |
| 05-07 Social Tooling (decision-making, retros) | Tools for the crews to use for self-management |
| 05-14 Simple Presence | Swing from highly structured to minimal structure, enjoy connecting |
| 05-21 T-Group Fishbowl | Highly rated last season, anchoring "middle" of season |
| 05-28 Revealing Experience | Isolating+exploring in pairs the experience-revealing-feedback component of previous week |
| 06-04 Alively Learning w/ Caroline A | Scheduled special guest, fused with fishbowl structure |
| 06-11 Doing Aliveness | Unstructured exploration rounding out the "aliveness" thread |
| 06-18 Giving & Receiving Practice | 3rd iteration, becoming regular staple, moved near end for max trust |
| 06-25 Season Finale | Seasonal review, then personal appreciation exercise shone brightest (it was kind of like "signing each other's yearbooks" at the end of a school year) |
And here's a rough-and-retroactive "resonance map" from our season finale a few days ago, giving a rough visual on how those weeks felt (high resonance at top, low at bottom, vertically for each session):
A "feeling of resonance" isn't necessarily the only thing we want to optimize for, and memories are fickle, and the data is noisy, but I find this aligns with other verbal and written feedback about the things that have risen to the top of our "greatest hits" list: Giving & Receiving, T-Group Fishbowl, Case work, and unlocking the energy of forming crews.
I also notice something on the "structure and emergence" polarity, perhaps — that activities where we have a known and pre-understood structure appear to be a bit more consistently resonant than our minimally-structured times? Maybe. Yet if we got so "in the groove" that emergence and discovery disappeared, I think that would lose the essence of the overall path.
The arc of a season has one main motif: (re)formation and deepening of the relational social fabric. Welcoming new members, building up connection and trust, and using those relationships to make progress in our [awareness, acceptance, integrity] motions of becoming the people we want to be. That being integrally includes doing, and that has been a rising factor in our last few seasons.
There are future spaces of potential in between "season" and "society" that I want to gesture at here, without over-specifying what will or should fill them. I can imagine feeling, in the future, like the whole of the community sessions cycle feels like, like, like the training dojo at the entryway to a vast temple which seems as a strange and foreign land to outsiders looking in at the wise culture and radical effectiveness so advanced it seems like magic. Don't take that last sentence too literally, but yeah the scope of potential building/strengthening/scaffolding/depth/community/life is vast and it is my earnest intention and prayer that we can find our way into some small fraction of it for the benefit of you, me, us, and all humankind.
Cheers,
James