Would I have something to offer?
Would I have something to bring?
What?
You know the deal: You suggest something and someone else fights it. Then other folks notice “oh, if I support this idea, I might receive my share of the fighting”.
Is there another way?
What if, before entering the conversation, everyone “in the room” would have agreed to specific “rules of engagement”?
To benefit from all the potentially useful, but still unexpressed “pieces of the puzzle”, I want to make the environment friendly to expressing thoughts. The basic pattern I use for supporting “swarm intelligence” is to:
- Allow all ideas to be expressed
- Then, invite support and contribution to any idea the patricipants want to support
This way, ideas without support will wither away of their own accord, and ideas with support will evolve.
So what would an opt-in agreement look like in practice?
One opt-in agreement I’ve used when posing questions on Facebook has been:
- No commenting on other people’s answers
- Clarifying questions are ok
- Instead of commenting, bring your own answer to the question.
- When you see something you want to support, use the like-button
When I am safe among people I am protected by rules, principles, culture – and in the last sense – by another person.
Have you ever had someone stand up for you? An encouraging feeling, isn’t it?
I can focus more fully on the task when I have been acknowledged as an equal. This is what so-called check-ins are for.
When building an environment for collaboration, this kind of metaphorical thinking can be helpful.
If you have “been yourself” and I have punished you in any way, next time you might think twice about showing this side …
And my choice is: do I want to live in a humanity (or neighbourhood) that:
a) seems like one I like, with lots of hidden aspects
b) shows itself as it is
?
The price of b) is discomfort while staying curious and might be a muscle I haven’t really exercised much yet … and so helpful are “supportive structures” like principles. Now, if principles are forced upon me, I will want to go away. So we wanna introduce them as an opt-in: “in this place the following principles apply … please weigh them carefully … should you find them acceptable, you are welcome to enter”
Good places to exercise are principle-based events like Burning Man or other “burner events”. Easiest, quickest and cheapest is probably a conference where the venue is prepared and hosted for the participant to bring the programming, i.e. “unconferences” or “open space conferences”.
Think of a carpenter who has lost one leg in an accident years ago. Clearly, he has a deficiency. However, he also has a skill. […] That information can literally build our community.
To be powerful, a community must have people who are producers.
– from “Building Communities from the Inside Out” by John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight.
For example the home-care services for elderly; they’ll clean, they’ll go for grocerys, they’ll give medicines –– and then they leave. We want also social time to count as something important! And that’s when you have to get up to the higher levels [of decision-making] to have that written in, cause then it works.
– Amelia Adamo in Navid Modiri’s podcast “How can we …?” (only in Swedish)
The things that people decide to do for themselves, they are much more likely to take responsibility for. And the things where I’m told to do it – well if I didn’t decide that it’s worth doing, I’m very, very much less invested in it working out well.
So if [you’re my boss and] I come to you and I say: “I really think we should open a new department”, and you say: “Well, if you think that that’s a good idea then you should do it” –– now I am on my metal to make sure that the way I do it fully justifies the argument I made for it.
– Margaret Heffernan in the latest Leadermorphosis podcast
If an organism is made up of people, you have all of the individual intelligences plus what’s possible between any two people – or three, or four.
To the extent the above is true, the fully intelligent organism is one where all “cells” are in unity.
This calls for every cell to know what to aim for and what to yield to at any given crossroads.
Example of what to aim for by home-care company Buurtzorg: “client’s independence”
Example of how to prioritise in the exceptionally thin manual for new employees by American retailer Nordstrom: “Use your best judgement in all situations. There will be no other rules.”
