Category: Collective Process

Weeding a community

Definition: For the purposes of this conversation I define ‘community’ (with the understanding that this definition leaves out much if not most of what the term ‘community’ is used to describe now) as:

A number of people interconnected in various ways, who feel a sense of identity with the collective as well as a sense of being known and cared about by the others who consider themselves part-of, and who are interdependent with at least some of the others.

A community is an emergent phenomena. You can’t build a community. You can’t manage a community. Instead, if you are interested in community, you can create the conditions for emergence, including structures that reduce the opportunities for malignance.

What to weed out

Some things that will likely lead to toxicity or a failure to cohere:

1. Over-leadered spaces: a community thrives on egalitarian structures. Leaders emerge rather than appoint themselves. Expertise can be offered but not imposed.

3. Too much enclosure: No community can survive when there’s not progress, which requires new people. Lives change, people leave. Newcomers offer the opportunity to see one’s own evolution through others at different stages, and a sense of ownership that comes from welcoming.

4. Too much openness: There needs to be a threshold, a sense that there is connection, purpose and shared identity. There needs to be a sense of consistency with the people you’re with.

5. Dominance: If one individual has power over others, there are limitations on being, and this has cascading effects for the whole community

6. Unstructured interaction: We come into every space with the shapings of our lived experience, our inherited trauma, and many blind spots. When there’s not enough structure, people can miscommunicate, make assumptions, or play power games like ‘helping’ in ways that feel imposed onto others.

7. Too much identity: belonging is both an action and an experience. We choose to include ourselves, and part of growth is rooting out where we might be excluding parts of who we are. Communities can easily develop anti-patterns in which membership depends on suppression or hiding of parts of who we are. Fitting in the opposite of belonging.

8. Rules or weak norms: again, as an emergence, a community shifts and changes. Strong (articulated) norms allow people to be at different stages of development and to feel into how things work. Rules lead to policing and power games. Weak norms lead to confusion and disintegration.

9. Action before trust: trust takes time and is torpedoed by many things, often interaction that doesn’t accommodate full agency or freedom to be.

10. Not enough deep interaction: an essential part of community and belonging is being seen and known. Parasocial dynamics need to be coupled with actual social connection, but also should be voluntary and fairly unstructured. These are the ‘spaces between’ in community.

11. Under-leadered spaces: communities need structures that keep things happening. Much of this can be ‘automated’ in a way with regular meeting times, a standard format, and fallback options. But communities develop leaders naturally and offer ways for ‘leaders’ to be in service or stewardship without authority. Under-distribution of work leads to burnout.

12. Not enough togetherness: frequent, positive interaction with the same people is the basis for emergence. There may not be such a thing as ‘too frequent’ except insofar as it tends to build trust that is more difficult for newcomers to penetrate.

HOPE – How Our Practice Evolves In Us

Last night I spent some time talking to my step-kid, who is a teenager, about the future. He was wondering if there’s any point to doing things that support the health of the planet because it might already be too late. Looking around at the American kids his age, for every kid who seems interested in justice, climate, or any other kind of activism, there seem to be 10 more who are coveting Jordans, eating hamburgers, and spending hours a day on social media. What does this portend for the future? It’s a self-reinforcing paradox that is not confined to teenagers.

There are radical changes needed to shift things and even the people I am around who are doing deep thinking about these things often manifest what seem like irreconcilable dissonances between their behaviour and thought. We, either as humans or specifically as people who live in this dominance-driven culture, seem to regard self-honesty and taking the actions within our power as impositions, as “what someone else thinks we should do.” For Americans (and Canadians), if ‘doing the right thing’ might involve any level of ‘not doing what I want right now,’ then it becomes a weird political thing, or a way we shame one another.

There’s frequently a big gap between behaviour and viewpoint. Someone says they are very concerned about climate collapse, who even work on green initiatives, but still eats beef or takes frequent flights. There are many folks in my world of ‘healthier tech’ who are posting and scrolling for hours a day. I have found myself among them. I know the challenge in choosing something different, something that may risk me being left out or feeling invisible. (Or not getting my package in two days for free).

This is the state of affairs when we’ve abdicated our freedom- we think that our individual actions “don’t matter” and that it’s all about what politicians or billionaires decide to do.

My experience is that it’s quite the opposite. When I am coming into a situation and feeling into my own complicity, I recognise my agency and can work towards solutions in an embodied way, in a way where I am not living in pure denial and cognitive dissonance. The process of divesting doesn’t happen all at once and I expect to be doing things that are out of alignment for all of this lifetime, but I’m closer to freedom when I see my behaviour and seek to be in more right relation to the earth and to other people. I’m more alive when I am not policing other people or waiting for someone to decide my fate while I consume and pleasure-seek.

This is why communities of practice are essential. Doing this work alone is nearly impossible. A community of practice helps me to feel like I am not alone in holding myself to account, and it also allows me to see into my blind spots, to recognise areas for growth that I was unaware of. In a community of practice, I encounter people who seem stone-cold real with themselves and people who are currently going through inquiries or challenges that I wrestled with in the past and have now worked through. I can see my growth and my opportunity to grow. I am able to feel the love in the practice, to feel the deep and unconditional regard I have for myself and other people as we do our best.

In a community of practice, we can begin to experience what the future might look like when we become forced to recognise out interdependence. Our survival depends on our ability to cooperate and collaborate when we don’t have predetermined hierarchies or state-enforced power. In disasters, people often come together for a time to help, to work toward common goals, to surpass their own idea of what they are capable of. I’ve found something quite similar when people come together to do their own work and to begin to develop relationships that reflect a sense of total inclusion, where we are fully welcome, there by choice, willing to contribute.

The structure of communities of successful communities of practice allows us to experience collective purpose, strong norming, reflection, being witnessed, and witnessing others. It makes everyone a welcomer, even when they are practicing for the first time. Strong structures allow for every person to be there by choice, for there to be no individual who matters more than others, to function even when someone with a role or responsibility isn’t able to participate or doesn’t show up. They function as a reflection of the complete dignity and autonomy of each member while simultaneously creating a container of total belonging and connection.

There are many things we might do to contribute to a future that, as Buckminster Fuller put it, works for ‘100% of humanity.” It’s a collective hallucination to believe some people are more entitled to anything than others, that any of us are not completely responsible for our own roles in creating the future, or that we are required to participate in systems of dominance and extraction. That doesn’t mean it’s as simple as saying ‘no’– but if we’re thinking along these lines, we can start to innovate in powerful ways. The most important thing I have to contribute is my own self-ownership, my own freedom, and a recognition that my honesty, openness, and willingness to practice emerge in collective.

Race & Space

When I enter a space I always notice the whiteness level in the room. This has been true for me ever since college, when I transferred from Columbia in NYC to the University of Victoria (in BC) and was like ‘what is it about this place that feels so weird? Oh, it’s ‘normal’ to be in a public space only populated by white people?’

I am often in ‘personal growth’-related or tech-related spaces with a lot of other white people, including a surprising number of spaces that are 90% or more white. I notice that, no matter how awesome the context is, and often there’s a lot of awesomeness, I feel a little less trusting of the space when it’s so predominantly white.

There’s so much complexity around this topic and even naming it seems to invite all kinds of unconscious reactions to show up.

I am a white-bodied person. When I enter in a space that is more mixed in race, I make it more white. I’ve seen several communities struggle when they began as more non-white and white people came in and began to, if not dominate directly, become the majority.

When I have entered into spaces where I’m the only white person, I have wondered whether I’m just killing the party. Whiteness in the form of me enters and provokes code switching, or just like ‘what is this person going to do?’

Many people I have spoken to who convene predominantly white spaces I’m in have expressed some dissatisfaction with the homogeneity. “How can we get more diversity?” or “we are open and welcoming if non-white people come here.”

But what makes actually ‘diverse’ spaces work? I’ve noticed a few patterns.

First, good collective spaces centre the margins (not just racial margins, but all people who deal with structural marginalisation). They don’t ‘include’ or ‘welcome’ so much as seek to be guided. This mindset can be quite challenging when we’ve been sold the idea that colour-blindness or other assimilation-oriented concepts are the key to getting along with different people. When a collective does the work of centring the margins, that means that everyone in the group looks for ways that all can strive and looks out for ways that default thinking can leave people out or behind. Awareness of inaccessibility, gendered language, or assumptions of common experience can all be gently and lovingly addressed. Governance can include practices of bringing in minority opinion and orient around consent instead of majority rule.

I’ve noticed that collectives with cohesion among many skin tones often have a culture of calling in without policing. Most of us as white people have huge blind spots when it comes to our own assumptions. Realistically, all humans have blind spots, but as a rule, status creates significantly larger zones of blindness, simply because people in lower status roles have to learn to negotiate with the behaviours status engenders. Everyone has their own intersections in terms of status, and each has different areas that become easy to overlook.

In spaces with a lot of white folks I’ve often heard a variation of, ‘how do we ‘fix’ this?” It’s probably worth questioning whether ‘fix’ is the right metaphor but putting that aside, my gut instinct tells me it’s not very easy. Most of them seem to want to change nothing except who is ‘invited.’

I suspect that when a group develops and grows with a supermajority of white people, it’s partly because no one even noticed, so familiar is such an experience for its members. It will be hard in this context to not assume, when people who look different join, that those people should attempt to fit in or conform to group norms, much as other white people have.

The first thing I would be inclined to try, if the community truly is committed to changing its dynamics, is for each member to participate in another community where they are in the racial minority. (Probably all different groups so it wasn’t just colonialization all over again).

Desire for change is also more believable if the community or group is willing to invest resources in facilitated conversations and honest self-assessment.

I feel the dissonance of overwhelming whiteness the most when I am in spaces that are ’embodied’ but never address the effects of racialization on embodiment. White people sometimes seem to have the idea that racialization only impacts embodiment for non-white people, but obviously, people in white bodies have also been racialized. This isn’t a political stance, it’s simply a basic conclusion one can feel immediately by considering our embodied experience as it relates to what we have been taught about race. Each person will have a different experience, but that experience has had effects on our physical health, our trauma response, and our access to different body modalities.

When I am in spaces that are white and unquestioned, my mere presence is not a disruption, but such conditions don’t facilitate easy belonging for anyone with an experience of marginalisation. I am more likely to keep parts of myself protected. I am a neurodivergent, queer, nonbinary person, and also an educated, skilled white professional. The latter identity is more likely to lead in white-dominated spaces.

There are definitely subtleties. What about spaces that are, for example, filled with neurodivergent, queer, nonbinary people and are also exceedingly white? Those are, often, spaces that do question whiteness, but sometimes also do a fair amount of general policing, which purports to be in service of safety but much like other kinds of policing, often just serves domination.

Race is a very toxic invention. There are so many many people who have explained this more effectively than I can, even on TikTok, and if you want to discuss, I will link lots of things at the end of this conversation to ground us.

In some ways, our current American context rests on the power dynamics that occur when stories, totally baseless in many cases, are treated as a kind of fact, or something that demands adherence and faith. Reality is more expansive, more individual, and doesn’t end with the hero’s return.

My purpose is to support communities of practice doing what is necessary to create conditions of belonging. For me, that means collectively asking hard questions, looking inward first to see how what bothers me about other people reflects something about myself, and believing it’s possible to be together. Perhaps this means third spaces, not my house or yours, but somewhere we can co-create and co-hold, starting from scratch, but knowing that those of us with white skin may also tend to design, manage, voluntell, or feel responsible in ways that only we can check.

Resources on the invention of race:

  • Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields
  • Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts
  • Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
  • The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
  • A guy on TikTok

In the Society of Friends

I grew up in a religious household.

From what I hear, my experience was almost the antithesis of what people imply by the term “religious upbringing.” In meeting for worship and Sunday School, I learned to be non-hierarchical, responsible for my own spirituality, and to question materialism and overconsumption. As a small child, I learned about slavery and colonial imperialism. When I was twelve or thirteen, my meeting’s youth group had no problem with me espousing agnostic or humanistic interpretations of our faith. In short, I was raised a Quaker.

As a kid, this meant that we had a place to stay on our travels with a kind of Green Book variation called The Traveling Friend. We lived with refugees, went to marches, and hosted peace activists (and our phone was certainly tapped).

As we think about distributed systems that have stood the test of time, the Quakers might be a good case study. Since 1650, Friends, as the members are known to one another, have sustained a practice that historically eschewed the idea that any one person was “closer to god” or could interpret faith for others. There are no priests or pastors in traditional Quaker meetings, just congregants. Traditional Quakers are pacifists and against state-sanctioned violence. From its earliest inception, the idea of gender equality has been a part of the religion. Quakers were abolitionists and civil war activists.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many contradictions, problematic actions, and splinter branches of Quakerism that are interwoven with the memes of dominant culture. But it’s still instructive to see that for centuries there has been a large, distributed group of Quaker communities who have been able to make collaborative practices work.

Unlike many forms of Christianity, traditional Quakerism doesn’t rely on a convening metaphor of a family with a paternal leader. Instead, it’s naturally more collective in nature.

Some of the components of this that inform how I see good community working:

  • The Meeting for Worship spaces are held in silence. It’s quiet until people are moved by the Spirit to share. Anyone can speak. Typically, silence predominates.
  • Decision-making is based on consensus or “spiritual unity.” All members are invited to voluntarily participate.
  • Meetings can be volunteer-run, though the meetings may choose to pay people to steward, coordinate, or to perform services such as building maintenance.
  • Action emerges through committees acting with trust of the greater meeting.
  • Quakers share a belief that every human is equal and worthy in the eyes of God.
  • There’s no religious doctrine – while Quakerism’s practices are rooted in the principles of early Christianity (such as love thy neighbour and thou shalt not kill) each individual is free to hold whatever beliefs they choose. It’s possible to be a Jewish or Buddhist Quaker, for example.
  • Quakers are called to find the light within, and to engage in their own spiritual journey to find spiritual connection.
  • Large organizations of Quakers and meetings convene to collectively sense-make but do not hold any dominion over or impose authority on individual meetings.
  • Depending on norms, collective beliefs, and practices, individual meetings are typically in groups of “yearly meetings” with a number of other meetings, and there can be many of these yearly meetings in a geographic region.
  • The practice is personal and individual. It’s also inherently non-evangelical; no one is going out preaching the Word.

Since I haven’t been a practicing Quaker for most of my adult life (though I did return for a spell to Vancouver’s meeting in the wake of 9/11), I am not sure of the general state of health of the faith. Because it’s the opposite of an evangelic religion, in a day and age where broadcast and persuasion is the norm, I wonder if the long-skewing-older meetings I’ve attended have dwindled. My parents attend a meeting that has done many things to welcome young families, and that too is an example of how to focus on what needs to be available to be welcoming rather than ‘let’s try and get new people to care and then figure out how to include them.”

Can we all be Friends? That’s not really viable. But if we consider these elements in how we create the containers for our collective process, we might just be on the path to friendship.

Tools for Collaborative Decision-Making?

Most technology that is out there to help facilitate community either mimic social media (posting! commenting! liking!) or seem to be about ‘how to make decisions as a group.’ I’m definitely not a fan of the former category and I also wonder if we are bypassing something fundamental with decision-making tooling.

When we look at our individual decision-making, we can observe that “making a decision” really is a meta-layer on top of something else, usually avoiding an emotion. When we’re agonizing over a decision, it’s usually because there’s something we don’t want to feel. For example, we might not want to feel the grief of giving up on a possibility of some kind of pleasure, we might not want to feel the judgement of other people, we might not want to feel like we’re disappointing someone, we might not want to feel fear or uncertainty, or any number of other things. When we’re not avoiding these feelings, there aren’t so much decisions as choices, there’s not so much of a story about the ‘importance’ of one choice versus another. (h/t Joe Hudson).

It’s always interesting how rare it is in retrospect for something that feels like “a big decision” to actually have the kind of impact I was projecting on the choice, whereas some things that didn’t feel like ‘major decisions’ have turned out to have big impacts later.

When I can open myself to the feelings and trust that I’m able to feel them without losing myself, I no longer find myself worrying about the outcome of a choice.

What I’ve seen with groups is similar.

We start thinking decisions need to made and mitigated by fair systems and technology mostly because we’re operating outside of trust, partly as a function of size and partly as a function of skipping over trust-building. I’m coming to believe that the gold standard for larger group decision making is really about fractal nesting, building trust and structures where trust is delegated up. Working in groups where the trust is embodied, so that representatives are largely in relationship with one another, and there’s nesting of these bodies of trust.

Groups where trust has been built, which tend to start very small and max out around 30-50 people, are typically able to make decisions about their own group without much technology (simple hand-counts are usually sufficient). When there’s a network involved, then groups can designate someone trusted to participate in a trust-building and decision-making body of up to 30 other such trustees, and up the chain it can go. This works without a bunch of zero-knowledge or anonymous votes as long as we centre trust-building and connection.

Trust is integral. As soon as we try to create organizations or networks or movements without beginning small and involving shared witness, we’re not operating collectively. We’re just a bunch of individuals.

Don’t misunderstand- the fundamental idea here is that we ARE individuals. We do come with our own unique experiences, and as soon as we put boundaries on how much of you we want in the space, we’re eroding belonging, we’re eroding a sense of each person’s responsibility for their own experience.

Trust results from spaces in which we are invited to be seen and heard and we’re acknowledging our own tendencies to look for safety or our temptations to help, manage, or solve. And it results from people voluntarily seeking each other out in pairs or smaller groups beyond the held spaces of the group to be in community and fellowship. And it results from clearly recognising and defining a common purpose.

Trust-building isn’t easy, which may be why there are so many people looking for shortcuts. Many people are out of practice when it comes to trusting. I am seeing in myself that when I am out of trust with others, I’m sometimes out of trust with myself, and sometimes I’m just picking up on other people’s lack of self-trust.

We really are swimming in the “water, what’s that?” of the structures necessary to support extraction and suppress freedom, so it’s not surprising that the tools we think we need reflect the idea that decision-making for groups needs bureaucracy. We all know our follower counts and associate our impact with metrics. That way of thinking is true when we’re measuring and comparing and rating. Leaving this water will require evolution and time. It’s not a returning to the past, it’s not trying to live on the land as hunter-gatherers as before the flood. It’s instead being here, being in relationship, practicing, opening ourselves to amphibious mutations.

Process of Freedom

The individual process of freedom is losing everything.

The collective process of freedom is embracing everyone.

How distributed governance actually works

I’ve been reflecting over the past few days about how amazingly unusual it is that for most of my life I’ve been a participant and member of groups that operate within large-scale distributed, anti-dominance systems of governance.

Wow, that’s a mouthful.

I’m feeling like the fish who someone asked, how’s the water? And all of a sudden I’m like holy moly, I am totally wet!

I grew up in the unprogrammed version of Quakerism, found healing in a program for families and friends of alcoholics, and generally have gravitated to groups that hold space rather than impose order.

I’m looking at these different [floundering for the right word- it’s not organizations or communities but it’s in that direction] structures? and realizing there is certainly a pattern, a blueprint if you will, for how humans can successfully come together and find meaning, camaraderie, connection, support, trust, a shared sense of purpose.

The orientation towards anti-dominance underlies the success of these communities.

Stay tuned for a deeper dive into each group/community. Here are the commonalities I see repeating over and over:

  1. Trustbuilding with bounded open sharing. A space where people speak and are witnessed without dialogue or helping. A place to learn empathetic listening and keeping in one’s own experience.
  2. A focus on individual choice and responsibility. Everything is voluntary and each person’s perspective seen within their own experience. There are common themes and recommended practices but not ‘rules.’
  3. Fellowship or more informal kinds of connection that take place outside the “official” time held by the group.
  4. Autonomous smaller groups within the overall organization. Each group has its own norms and decisions through unity-focused, knowledge-based decision-making. However, there are constraints that govern whether such a group is considered to be part of the larger organization.
  5. Leaderlessness at the group level, though work is done by rotating volunteers to support logistics, communication, collection and allocation of resources. These volunteers are known to the group and typically go through some kind of vetting or training process though it can be very informal (voting by acclimation, being paired with a prior volunteer, etc.)
  6. Wide ranges of opportunities to volunteer in the group and beyond-the-group with different levels of commitment or experience needed. Even at the individual group level, there is typically no need for any particular person to be present in order for a meeting to happen.
  7. Delegate-based governance at beyond-the-group levels, where the delegates meet more infrequently and do not make decisions for the groups, rather they act as conduits between the individual groups and the collective-of-groups at large. They do make decisions about their respective layer of the organization, such as allocation of resources, outreach efforts, organizing events and fundraising. These business meetings are typically open to all members even if they are not designated delegates or position-holders.
  8. Trusted committees that are temporary or have rotating-membership to complete projects- these may exist at any layer of the collective/organization.
  9. A collective of collectives at the broadest level, which serves to implement decisions by delegates, keeps track of and communicates resource allocation, creates and disseminates general materials and literature based on the collective purpose and intentions of members in aggregate (the unifying purpose). The service of this kind of body only becomes necessary with bottom-up growth, i.e. there are more groups with delegates than can comfortably participate in decision-making. For the most part, these are regional but in global communities that function online, this might be structured differently.

With these components in mind, it’s quite interesting to consider how we might build tools that support various aspects of the community. I’ve seen a number of technologies specific to governance, but I think the more interesting part is the trust-building and fellowship, which currently takes place online with tools that are not designed for the purpose.

Spoiler alert! I think we can use a broader understanding of the way these communities function to inform what kinds of online containers might serve them more effectively.

To make a great community, join before you build.

In my work with people “building” online communities, it’s been a huge surprise to discover that a fairly large percentage of them are not members of other online communities, or even in-person communities. My mind is consistently blown by the idea that someone might consider themselves the right person to run a community without being a part of a community first.

This reflects a basic misunderstanding of the concept of community, I think. It suggests that one person can be at the center of a community and manage it, when how real community functions is naturally decentralized, more Brownian than linear.

Joining a community is not the same thing as taking a class; following an influencer or brand; or attending an event, though these can be entry points. Joining a community means you’re intending to be interconnected over time with other people who you can relate to and potentially befriend or collaborate with.

As community stewards, our experience of joining a community can help us to empathize and understand people seeking out the community we’re shepherding. What drives us to contribute to a community? What experiences give us a sense of meaning, fellowship, or belonging?

“But,” I hear some hypothetical person saying, “my skills are in convening and bringing people together, so shouldn’t I be the one starting or managing a community, not wasting my time in someone else’s?”

In my experience, contributing to a community offers opportunities to lead and grow in ways trying to start one from scratch can’t match.

Communities that work start small. Communities are built on trust, which takes time and doesn’t scale quickly. It turns out you have more opportunity to make an impact by developing into a leader in an existing community than you do by starting a new one.

When people do start new communities, they can easily destroy necessary trust by exerting too much control, or making it about them or their product and not about what members need or care about. On the flip side, one person trying to serve the needs of a whole community is destined for burnout.

It’s often more effective to find a community, participate, contribute, and support other members’ goals than to start a new community.

Sometimes, there’s no alternative to creating a community because the collaborative goals people have aren’t currently served, but beware that self-serving interests always get in the way of the relationships a community depends on. This is part of why brand communities or community-as-a-business often fail: narcissism and community aren’t great companions. Communities aren’t promotional channels. If you’re a business fostering community, think of it as part of your product, user research, and customer development programs, not sales or marketing.

Sustainability and growth rest on a philosophy of collectivism. In other words, the best communities don’t need a manager, they need stewards who share responsibility and a process within the community that develops more stewards, so nothing depends on just one person or authority.

If you don’t find joining a community compelling, what makes you a good person to bring one to life? As someone working in service to the community, you’re much more effective as a member than as an administrator. Start your journey in community by being a great participant- the best part is, you may find your own sense of community in the process.

Making Space

People often come together to do something, especially when it comes to activism, community work, social justice, or project collaboration. Having a common purpose can help people find each other and motivate them to invest in building relationships.

You might even extrapolate this to people coming together in any kind of democratic context.

The problem is that we often don’t take the time to build the trust necessary to making these situations sustainable.

The result of a failure to build trust can manifest in many ways. In some cases, the whole thing just implodes and people stop showing up, or numbers dwindle down to a core group of people who already had the trust with one another.

In other situations, democracy starts to look more like autocracy, perhaps with a benevolent dictator, perhaps with a shadow group running the show while the illusion of democracy is maintained.

What does trust allow for that allows democracy to function?

First, it means people understand that in a group of people, there are always differences in the level of commitment, understanding, status, and personal liberation for each person in a group.

Second, it means that making a decision can be collaborative and people can share what they really think without fear of reprisal or ostracism.

Third, it means the group is more invested and aligned with a decision because even if they disagree, they believe the choice was made in good faith and that their dissent was recognised and acknowledged.

There’s a bit of a circularity here, but before a group can be effective at making any decisions, they need to build trust. And trust largely comes from getting to know one another, having boundaries and container that allow us to be vulnerable enough to be known, and to practice listening-focused engagement. When those conditions are met, we can move on to conversations that work, and then to decisions.

For many of us who like getting s*** done, it can be uncomfortable to be in the trust-building stage. Let’s just make a decision, let’s see the fruits of our collaboration! We’re wasting time!

The problem is that when groups move quickly without building trust, they inevitably invite dominance into the process. Not everyone feels heard. The loudest voices lead the way. We start creating situations where some people feel uninvested in or confused by decisions, and people begin creating factions or leave the group.

I’m going to skip over what this looks like in nations or large-scale platforms, but in groups where we want to achieve something that requires any level of sustainability and ongoing commitment, we are best served by making sure we’ve spent the time to talk to each other.