Category: Trust

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.

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.

Matters of Trust

How does trust work? It’s multi-faceted.

First, there’s congruence.

You say this is how you are, I see you behaving in ways that reflect that. This isn’t something I want to farm out to technology, it’s too easy to game anything that tried to quantify congruence.

Then, there’s connection.

I can’t trust someone who clearly has indifference or disregard for me. There’s no technology that proxies for this.

Next, we can throw in social context, or transitive trust.

When someone behaves negatively to other people with whom I can identify, I am likely to lose trust. This one is problematic in its nature because sometimes people are stuck in in-group thinking where doing bad things to someone we think of as ‘bad’ may feel correct to us, but I would argue that most of the time, there’s a violence and dominance in that behaviour that also provokes fear, rather than trust. If I see someone punishing someone I don’t like, I may feel like it’s warranted, but I also lose trust in the person performing the action.

We may have become inculturated with a kind of paternalism or patriarchal perspective that leads us to see punishers as protectors. My guess is that at heart, we know punishers are operating by invoking fear. First they came for…

We can also consider whether people we trust also trust other people and use their trust as a basis for our own.

Should we assume trust?

There’s a norm I’ve seen many communities and companies trying to establish of “trust until the trust is broken.” On some level, it’s a good strategy, a game theory that works. But it also feels like an approach developed by people who don’t regularly have to watch out for danger. Who don’t experience trust-breaking frequently, even in places where everyone has the best intentions.

To suggest that trust is about some kind of contractual, verifiable, identity-based thing feels like what is broken in the whole system (meaning the drive to quantify everything and extract its value). The way many technologists are talking today about trust is- basically a paradigm of imperialist, heteronormative, white supremacist patriarchy. (Though I’m not sure those labels are continuing to serve me, they have been a helpful lens).

Of course, trust is hard. Fundamentally, it starts by being able to trust yourself. It might be that a requirement for this kind of self-trust may be to go through the pain and heartbreak of seeing where one is not trustworthy to oneself. To notice how, to speak for myself, I have carried maladaptive lessons from trauma, how I have tried to avoid feeling shame by coming up with justifications, how I have been unwilling to look at my part in the systems I see as broken.

For communities to build trust, we need to start by creating containers that allow people to self-reflect without judgement. Witnessing this in others turns out to be highly trust-building. Offering welcome and checking our judgement builds trust for ourselves and others. It lets us be vulnerable, it lets us notice when we might want to rush to judgement and sit with that impulse, getting curious about what in ourselves we’re running from.