Intentional Society: Season transition
Want to catch the start of this next season? Our orientation call this Saturday, October 2nd 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC) is your chance to get connected for our Season 4 general session kickoff October 3rd.
After last week's inspiring visions, it's time for a bit of a status review. The focus of our third season was deliberate development - synthesizing a new practice in the process. I've turned the original informal description into a proper Edge Case practice guide now, which is still a bit rough but seems good enough to publish as a 1.0.0 and solicit your feedback to make it better. We worked edge cases, did edge-finding, shared stories of perspective transformation... all around that expanding phenomenon of realizing a bigger viewpoint and gaining the ability to work with a tension that had been working you previously.
We pivoted away from one thing in my original conception of this season as we entered it: we did not repeat the second season's small-group crew experiment. Instead, we found a different groove in a more continuous model -- and this seemed good for raising the communal trust and cohesion levels, even with new folks flowing in regularly. I see it as an effective combination of connection+exploration each week. Some trust-building and some risk-taking, together hand-in-hand. Being in both belonging and becoming (ack, accidental alliteration) -- that seems like a powerful community heartbeat and I don't foresee us moving away from that any time soon.
I do think I see some complex challenges waiting for us this season. These are some of the things I think we'll need to creatively navigate together on this co-creative journey:
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Size transitions: what will we do, and experience, when we're too large for full-group check-in greetings? How will we navigate welcoming, belonging, cohesion, and deep(ish?) connection as we grow the fractal?
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Decentralizing leadership: When will we do the definition, agreements, ownership work to reach the "James takes a random week off" milestone? Actually doing it doesn't seem urgent, but then again experience shows that by the time it's urgent it's too late, and that we should be establishing a continuous growth process in this dimension as well.
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Deepening commitment: Making deeper meaning, change, impact over time is pointing some of us in the direction of "is talking all we do? If we want to do more, how do we navigate that new level of commitment and trust required?" We might look at extending outside the boundary of our Sunday sessions?
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Allies & network weaving: We've created an entity, one that forms a node in a network of other existing (and emerging) aligned groups out there in the space. How can we support each other and create some omni-win outcomes?
I probably haven't said half the things we'll actually spend our attention on in the next three months, and I'll likely turn out wrong in some way about half the things I mentioned. But that's alright, in fact it's very right - I say these are "complex" challenges not because we can't fathom some of the possible outcomes, but because the causes-and-effects will have to be lived out to be understood.
Cheers,
James