Upcoming events:

• Sunday, July 26: IS Community Call 23.3
• Friday, July 31: Open IS Connection Call

The previous newsletter (two weeks ago) was Loving push back and our Community Call last Sunday was titled "Aloha (Aloh-awe)".

The following is costly pattern-recognition generalized from real personal experience, recently plus many other groups/situations. I hope this description and vocabulary is helpful the next time it's relevant to you.

I've found it very useful to apply the frame "canary in a coal mine" as a metaphor for certain kinds of friction in social groups. It lines up well:

• There's a person (or multiple) signaling something
• because they're more sensitive to something off/wrong/bad
• usually because it affects them personally more than others
• and the thing they're detecting is often invisible to the group
• and it would harm the whole group if ignored

Importantly, this frame makes it clear that the wrongness is in the air, not the canary, helping to avoid shooting the messenger. Is that 100% true 100% of the time, of course not, but in practice I've never met (or been) a canary that wasn't worth seriously and deeply listening to. Canaries are a form of whistleblower, with all of the same structural/systemic disincentives attached, which means their signal has been filtered to be sincere, important, and self-checked before they decide to fight an uphill battle.

People are complex, groups are complex, and sometimes the "wrongness" can be distributed across perception, triggers, storytelling, unquestioned assumptions, lack of empathy/perspective-taking, cultural backgrounds and norms, and more without ever even getting into anyone knowingly or intentionally doing something wrong. Some of those are inevitably in the canary as well, but that doesn't automatically invalidate their signal!

I've been the canary before... and I've been in the "yeah something smells" group, the "I don't smell anything" group, and the team leader listening to all the conflicting reports. Sometimes everything can resolve pretty easily, sometimes it's beyond me/us to fully bridge the gap before the canary and/or the group run out of time, energy, patience, persistence, resource constraints.

When a canary is exhausted and flies away from the environment that they tried to change, the system loses the provider of that signal. It is the group's responsibility at that point to carry that signal with them into the rest of the work they need to do... or lose the signal itself. Rarely, there's no findable wrongness other than the fit between the canary and the group, but that's more rare than it seems, because mostly I've seen 1) the signal reappear in the next canary or 2) the sensitivity to the signal is lost due to an evaporative cooling effect.

Losing a group member inevitably changes the composition of the group, so maybe it's inevitable that a group "cools" out of its hot friction? A group getting clear on "who it's for" could in theory be a good (beneficial for all) version of that cooling. Ah, and I suppose even what I think of as the bad version of evaporative cooling drift could be okay in simple environments that don't care to hold complexity or value diversity of perspectives. The social groups that I value, though, they value perspective-taking greatly and rely on the group's collective sense-making capacity to steer through uncharted territory.

In those cases where the group needs and cares to regain the wisdom they've lost (all-the-while knowing that they don't fully understand that wisdom!), it falls on the group to keep the "shoulder angels" of its flown canaries alive in its awareness, do the work to make their environment more healthy and hospitable for those with that particular sensitivity superpower, and attempt to regrow that capacity with either fresh or refreshed bodies as the validation that the change work has succeeded.

Of course you'll never get the exact same signal twice, as the same man never steps into the same river... and so I think it's still good to be sad at the loss (hopefully they can fly away much more than the actual birds could!) for the sake of the system (beyond the loss of friendship and/or harm to the persons whom you care about). It's hard to say when it's right or best for a canary to fly — trust them of course, but I know it's hard for them to say too. The value of sadness, the value of a wound, is that it's the very thing that can preserve the aliveness of that precious and costly gift delivered by the canary, that wisdom that is known-unknown to the system.

May we all do our best to discern what is wise, stay sensitive to our own and others' wise signals, and honor each person's contributions and humanity — even as we accept the impossibility of perfection in the soup of human interactions.

Cheers,
James