Building a Meta–Community

July 28, 2020
After six months of running an experimental meta-community, I am thrilled to share that the experiment is not just a success but a testament to the power of community building. Below, I share the valuable insights I have gained from this journey.

In February 2020, I embarked on an experiment in what seems like a different universe. After years of running dinners, salons, and a few Slack groups, I wanted to develop an intentional community where people don't brush off each other but engage. A metaspace is where people can show up with a seed of an idea and know that it will be respected and given space, not put on a shipping line. A place to generate value and not only pass it around, where members can show up as a process and not a product.

Having run gatherings, salons, and, more recently, dinners, I grew to appreciate the transformational value of light facilitation (credit to Priya Parker for opening my eyes to that space).

Out of all these formats, the smaller dinners were the most meaningful. People showed up open and vulnerable, with an idea of how they thought, able to navigate different backgrounds and opinions around the table in a way that resulted in value, new thinking, new tools, and new concepts. Those took place for a year, but I realized they didn't have cumulative value, and there was onboarding that needed to happen every time. There was little overlap in guests, but by large, people were new to each dinner. It made me think about starting a closer-knit circle, a group that commits to creating a space to act on their creative surplus and looking for people who do the same.

By design, members pay $50 a month and must do 10 hours of work, either on themselves or someone else. The logic was more than creating accountability, as in writing groups. It was to create what Shafir and Mullainathan (Scarcity, The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives) call slack in a system.

The idea is that when systems are packed tightly, they become less adaptive. Think of traffic on the road leading to traffic jams;

"Roadways operate best below 70 percent capacity; traffic jams are caused by lack of slack. In principle, if a road is 85 percent full and everybody goes at the same speed, all cars can easily fit with some room between them. But if one driver speeds up just a bit and then needs to brake, those behind her must brake as well.

Now, they've slowed down too much, and, as it turns out, it's easier to reduce a car's speed than to increase it again. This slight shock — someone lightly deviating from the right speed and then touching her brakes — has caused the traffic to slow substantially. A few more shocks and traffic grinds to a halt. At 85 percent, there is enough road but not enough slack to absorb the small shocks."
–Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir. "Scarcity."

In our community, we aim to create 'slack in a system' by encouraging members to commit to having slack in their calendars and their practices. This means opening the walls of their practice and showing up as a process and not a product.

Similarly, I was trying to get people to commit to having slack in their calendar and their practice. Open the walls of their practice, and show up as a process and not a product.

I am pleased and honored to say that the experiment has succeeded. Throughout COVID and global unrest, the space has grown and developed. People left, and more people joined. We had international experts, philosophers, marketers, and academics join to discuss topics of law, tech, the future of work, and social justice.

Activities

The ways we meet evolve. Before COVID, we used to meet for a monthly dinner and a weekly coffee and book exchange. In the early days of COVID, we had two weekly synchronous meetings (one standing and one optional) and a few other regular ones (weekly writing, book writing). As the Zoom fatigue was kicking in, meetings got off the weekends, and we had one weekly standing meeting.

The latest incarnation of our activities is below.

Synchronous Time
- Collective
  - General
    - Weekly Standing Meeting
  - Share–outs
- Specific
  - Writing
  - 1:1 coffees
    - Weekly / assigned on Mondays
    - Time set individually
Asynchronous
- Slack
  - Announcements
    - Updates, meetings, etc
  - General
    - The central place where conversation happens (including asks, clinics, etc.)
  - Weekly Prompt
    - The prompts we will discuss every week
  - Philosophy
    - Philosophy round-table and more
  - People
    - Psychology, Community
  - Design
    - System design, emerging tech, AI, etc
  - Writing
    - Writing weekly and writing a book
  - Reading
    - Topics of interest, discourse around the idea

Standing Meeting

The weekly meetings are where new people are introduced and where we reflect on weekly prompts.

Examples of prompts;

Prompt 3:
We all have to negotiate our commitment to the world with the things we actually end up doing. The first is maintenance, and the latter is transformation.By a simple reply to this thread, what percentage would you spend on maintenance, and what on transformation?
(40% - 60% would mean you spend 40% on maintenance, for example)

Prompt 4: Creative Surplus
Keep a list–a simple bullet point or a more elaborate doc–of all the ideas, thoughts, and creativity left after attending to your duties: job, teaching, clients, etc. It might be handy to set reminders (you can use Slack by typing /remind )
Please note the time of day and what you did when this idea came to you.
It would be great if everyone could have at least three items.

Prompt 8: Box
We all need to fit in a box—a package—to explain ourselves and our work to new people we meet. That box has a label, of course, but like any box, it has six planes.
What is your primary label for yourself? And what are five additional labels for your practice?
We will discuss this during our call on 4/20

Prompt 10: User Manual: Intro
What would be the opening paragraph to a user manual for yourself?
Are you more of a visual thinker, an analytical collaborator, or a deep contemplative thinker? Are you better suggested to or challenged? Do you prefer honesty or sugarcoating?
We will discuss this in person on May 4th, but feel free to comment on this beforehand.

Share-outs

The community invites a weekly guest to join in the conversation. The share-outs could be a traditional talk (an answer) or a question. We had philosophers, marketing executives, legal scholars, community organizers, authors, scientists, and developmental designers during the last six months. A special kind of magic happens once the community understands the space is created and a new person is invited into it. 1:1 Coffees To develop more "diagonal connections" (1:1 as opposed to a circular bonfire), I used a bot that assigns people to grab "coffee" every week. It has been successful in letting the electrons bounce and speak without putting any structure on it.

Principles and Learnings

Process before Product

A culture of (false) cybernetic connectivity is more conducive to passing objects around instead of reflecting on them. In my work on meta-media, I explore the difference between our persona and the person we are. This community is a space to practice that tension without studying it. I can say, with the benefit of hindsight, that those who did not feel vulnerable enough to share their process ended up not fitting in.

Vertical Scaling

Is it better to deliver a 25% value to 10,000 people or a 99% value to 100 people? It depends on your goals. If you're thinking of artifacts, then scaling is a good outcome for the transaction of products. However, system thinking looks at second- and third-order consequences; in this context, it means being generative instead of editorial and pedagogical. Through my work in AI and systems, it became clear that shallow value is abundant and cheap. But vertical scaling, more context rather than more people, is complicated. This community was thriving in generating such scale through thirdness.

Thirdness

In psychoanalysis, the analytic third is the idea that two people have a relationship and they create something new. There is one person, the other person, and in their exchange of openness, ideas, and feelings, they make a new entity that isspecific to their relationship. They grow and can use that developmental value for the rest of their lives. In many ways, I see the community as a collection of 'thirdnesses.' We meet regularly as a group, but a lot of thirdness is created in the 'diagonal connections.' Intellectual discourse, mutual support, sharing of work, and asking for help between people in the group.

Ambiguity

The community is formed by its members. It is not a product looking for a fit and marketed to its segment. It is ambiguous and open-ended — and can't be explained as a territory. I refer to the community as a bonfire, where people show up with their creative surplus and throw it in the fire. The value and learning that is created can then be taken back into our respective spaces. All members of the community had to sign up to walk into a half-lit room as part of its design. In other words, if you need complete understanding, this might not be for you.

A Space for Small Actions

The community is a place for small actions and not one single project to deliver. It is not about writing your book or getting a new job, even though members did work on their books and found employment. The difference is that there is no sense of meeting at the starting line and checking each other's progress. As part of owning the space of ambiguity, there was little in the way of setting goals, checking on those goals, or helping with to–do's. Around the central bonfire, there were smaller, themed groups. In the writing group, for example, people could join weekly with nothing written or with no intention of writing. And use that space to learn, reflect, and develop a desire to write or not. The design is that finding space for ambiguity is good for creativity.

Rehearsal Room for Thinking

The goal is to write and rewrite, to practice and rehearse,
to move from knowledge to wisdom,
to get to know one's context
This should feel like a rehearsal room for people who speak publicly about their opinions and interests.

(From the invitation document)

The community is not a band, but a rehearsal room for solo artists. It is a place where we all travel from our day to day work into the meta, engage with others, and use those learnings and processes back in our context.

Power and Love

I often find myself citing this phrase and book by Adam Kahane. Many people, consciously or unconsciously, make the mistake of choosing one or the other. Finding how heavy-handed the facilitation should be is a constant mode of sense-making. It is reading the person, the group, and the time. There is no set of rules I can write about here; those don't exist. This is why I am passionate about thirdness in communities as a better way to deliver value than formulaic systems.

What happens if you get busy?
You can take a break from synchronous collective meetings, but you are expected to respond to the prompt on Slack.
A simple message on a Monday, opting out of that week.
This might be obvious, but please make sure you use the calendar RSVP to communicate if you can come or not.
This is an intentional community, and you only get as much as you put in; use your intention wisely.
(Taken from our monthly meeting)

Intellectual, Emotional, Visceral

This is a less formulated thought but a taxonomy I want to include. I might be channeling Don Norman, but this model comes close to explaining the majority of the work being done in the community. The work is intellectual in its discourse, emotional in its ambiguity, and visceral in its call for self-leadership. I am tempted to say, based on intuition and no data, that this metacommunity is successful if a member can exist in the outer world on all three dimensions.

The community started off under the non-descriptive name 2020 Community; I am now calling it Thirdness Network. Feel free to register your interest using a message, with an optional piece of writing, or get in touch if you found these learnings to be useful in work.

Read more:

In Process/Library