Intentional Society: Social chemistry (people mixing)
I'll be doing another orientation for anyone who missed the lead-in to Season 10: Click here to register for Saturday, April 22nd at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).
Hello from the other side of our Season 10 kickoff session last Sunday, where we had a video call screen filled with half new faces and half returning faces. It delights me to have a robust showing of newcomers, including signs that our persistence season after season is producing some amount of inflow momentum in the form of folks who hear about IS and do resonate but it takes some time and/or repetition to reach the tipping point of getting involved. I also love the "core group" (roughly hand-waving, there's no definition/structure of that term) we have coming from Season 9 and the last couple seasons I've really appreciated the increasing tangibility of the "relational field" i.e. the holding and ownership of the space/vibes/norms by the group. So the challenge (in the "good problems to have" category) is, how do we best integrate the two in a way that gives us the best of both?
This session felt like it hit that mark pretty well for at least 75% of attendees. The relational structure was a getting-to-know-you sequence where each breakout group of people together shared:
- "What's alive for you right now?" as a check-in
- "One thing I get excited about is…" for 10 min
- "If you got to know me more, you’d learn…" for 15 min
- 5-minute spotlights of group asking curious questions for 30 min
I'm recording these for posterity/sharing here because they received a bunch of appreciation from both new and returning folks, a general "this worked well, use it again in the future" feedback summary re the progressive revelation/vulnerability depth leading into the open-curiosity capper. My own disclaimers arise: It still might be structurally over-engineered for some groups out there, or uncomfortably fast for other groups, and maybe "excited" could better be "joyful" etc... but, I am remembering to temper my "eh, it's nothing special" default reaction by actually listening to and letting in voices describing the value in their experience.
There's a "percentage of new people in a group" tipping point line that shifts any group from a "same group, same norms, integrating new people into existing" mode to "this is a new team with newly-determined norms." Fuzzy though that line may be, I'm certain it's crossed noticeably before 50%, and even though the cohort balance may naturally slide down a bit by mid-season, this will be a great living experiment for us to see how well the returners can transmit the values, vibes, and norms they care about to the newer folks, and how those newer folks in turn learn and embrace and shift the culture through their integration. I hope we can put that into our visible awareness, i.e. "make that an object" of awareness over the next few weeks.
Cheers,
James