IS: On the sudden swell
Upcoming open events:
- Sunday, Jan 14 — Practice Series, Session #2 - Parts Work
- Monday, Jan 15 — Session #2 Debrief
- Thursday, Jan 18 — New Member Orientation
all start times 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)
In any complex domain, it's often hard to distinguish the impact of a probe/experiment. But then, sometimes 40 people show up for your first Practice Series session, almost doubling your previous maximum gathering size. Wow!
Watching the access requests stream in throughout the week, I had a few days to acclimate and tune my facilitation to match, but when I step back and look at it there's no denying that this is a big difference for IS, and feels like a significant phase change.
Why the strong response? Well, it's still difficult to detangle the complex causality, across:
- going public (and removing an orientation requirement) unleashing pent-up interest and/or referrals
- reframing a bit around post-conventional personal development
- speaking boldly of coming out of R&D mode, leveraging hundreds of hours of participatory research, and aiming to be the best in the world (henceforth "world-class") type of experience
- ...and/or some "right place, right time" and some "gradually, then suddenly" factors in the macro and network-weaving dimensions of the environment
It feels exciting, I think to most of us, though there was definitely also some adjustment like "who are all these people in my living room?" for previous participants. 😅 I'd expect some drop-off in the second week, but also word-of-mouth could keep it spreading! There's so much potential in the wonderful humans we all got to practice with; let's keep learning, dancing, riding and being the wave...
Practice Series update
To recap, Session #1 began the series with our most basic listening-and-reflecting practice, Empathy Circle. Listening well is fundamental to so much else in relating, and noticing the difference between what we're hearing and what we're typically adding or interpreting is the experiential crux of that practice.
This week, Session #2 introduces Parts Work (ala Internal Family Systems) and the parts-aware perspective on self. Loosening the consistent-and-unitary constraint allows us to transform "inner conflict" into a beautiful dance of good intentions. This also unlocks our ability to hold other kinds of multi-perspectival difference in useful superposition/paradox without needing to collapse the contradictions immediately. Come and learn to make peace with the internal defenses and patterns that aren't serving you well!
There will also be a separate Session Debrief call, the next day. We had a similar component of sensing and experience-integrating in past "Meta Meetings", and I missed it this week and want to re-introduce it. It can be quite fruitful for participants to process their own experience and learn from others, and it also creates a robust feedback loop that improves future sessions.
Membership update
I want to be very clear that IS membership is not related to the Practice Series. The Practice Series is a classroom, a dojo, a studio — a place of individual growth with an informal learning community.
Membership, in contrast, is a living room, a sanctuary, a playground, a workshop — a place of collaboratory culture with intentional belonging and higher trust. It's the gated campus out the back door of the practice space, and it still retains most of the "but what is it?" nebulosity that has been integral to the collective explorations of IS thus far.
If you're satisfied with the Practice Series experience, then great! If you're wanting to go deeper, then the activities and connections of the member community may be of interest to you. Here's what I've come up with to convey what membership means:
Membership in Intentional Society signifies your intention to:
- live life with awareness and intentionality
- contribute to the health and thriving of Intentional Society
Becoming a member provides access to:
- activities (crews, pods, squads, events, etc) in member playground space
- mutual visibility of contact information and descriptions
- member meetings serving collective culture coherence
Which are currently supported by…
- a weekly calendar summary email of member activities
- communication tools for asynchronous peer-to-peer communication
- read and write permissions to a shared file folder
Becoming a member of Intentional Society requires:
- participating in at least one public IS call/event
- attending an IS member orientation call
- filling out a form (which this text goes on!)
Cheers,
James