2024-02-18

Two things prompted this piece:

1. the idea of Deliberately Developmental Spaces¹⁾, via Life Itself — maybe they would even better be called “Intentionally Developmental Spaces”?
2. a request from Andrew to write something for his “3rd Horizon Earth” about what Audrey and I are doing for the Gathering of Tribes (with the oversight of Victor of course).

So here I'm not focusing on longer-term community living, but rather the shorter term events, meetings, conferences, gatherings, residencies, and so on, that seem to be growing in frequency.

Following the “questions first” approach that we are taking for the Gathering of Tribes, I'll start with a question, and the answers will point to new questions.

Here are the main reasons for coming together that occur to me, whatever kind of event it is:

1. enjoying yourself in the presence of other people who enjoy similar things — sharing enjoyment
2. expanding your horizons through interaction with people with new or different ideas, or who are from different backgrounds
3. forging connections, links and bonds which you're going to take with you, follow up on, and do things together.

Let's look for the questions beyond these first answers.

1. For enjoyment, how do you know that the other people will enjoy similar things?
2. Will it feel safe enough to interact with the other kinds of people?
3. What will best enhance the chances of meaningful connection with others?

I guess number 1 is the focus of attention of most event organisers. It's relatively easy to bring people together based on a shared appreciation for certain music or dancing; or a shared academic interest in a subject. An organisation has values; a network focuses on particular interests; and so on. And when the interest is very niche, we get international conferences, gatherings, events. The question for these events is, most simply, what area of common interest is this event focusing around?

For courses or other learning experiences, including the so-called Deliberately Developmental Spaces, we may want to go deeper, and be as clear as possible about the level of prior knowledge or experience among the people we are holding the event for, and what are the objectives or the intended learning outcomes? I wrote earlier this month about the idea of a framework for communities, and maybe at least part of this is relevant also to any event where there is intended to be learning or development going on.

Number 2 seems to be the focus of the increasingly common codes of conduct, or respect, or something similar, that we see at many events these days. Many of these seem to me to have unintended side-effects, but at least the organisers have good intentions. A different kind of question emerges for me here: what is better stated clearly, and what is better left unsaid, in an attempt to ensure a feeling of safety and openness in all participants? Could it be that listing some undesirable but unlikely behaviours simply brings them to mind, actually reducing rather than enhancing the feelings of safety? These are interesting questions, but I'm not dealing with them further on this occasion.

Number 3 is where Audrey and I have been focusing, so let me bring this up as the next main question.

The Gathering of Tribes invites “tribes of the regenerative ecosystem […] to connect for action.” That feels to me the most significant and meaningful form of connection — beyond just connecting to relax, enjoy, or even talk, valuable though those are in their own right. It's intended to be the kind of connection that is made through the gathering, but naturally carries forward to the time that follows. That is so much in contrast to my own frequent experience, of having a stimulating time with people during an event, but simply not following up, and losing touch afterwards. So, how do we facilitate this connecting for action?

Victor had the sound initial idea of setting out topics or themes for the Gathering, and tagging or labelling whatever happens at the Gathering with what he decided to call “spheres” of activity specifically in the space that we think of as ‘regeneration’. This depends on people recognising the meaning of typically around a dozen or so short phrases conveying the meaning of each sphere.

When we looked into this, at what others had done and written, an unclear picture emerged. Several people, or groups, have thought of categorising or classifying this space, and they are all different.²⁾ Here are the pages of a few published on the web (you may have to scroll down the pages!).

• Barbara Marx Hubbard's Wheel of Cocreation diagram
• Gaianet's graphic around Heart-Conscious Co-Creation
• The Regenerative Communities Network's Key Dimensions of Regeneration
• Life Itself's ideas on mapping an emerging ecosystem
• Anna-Marie Swan's Ecological Organisations Framework

Some frameworks offer a much finer subdivisions of topics, for example from

• Low Impact
• Third Horizon Earth

And I put together a table (my personal copy here) to help us interrelate the topics.

One thing was very clear to me. We did not want people coming together just to argue or debate about what was the best way to divide up the regenerative world into topics! So how could we get round this? What could we do instead?

Over the years I've gradually built up a deep respect for questions, from many sources. Anyone who has read Mister God, This Is Anna will recognise Anna's predilection for questions. This then goes right through to Art of Hosting and Collective Presencing, in which Ria refers to a video by Julio Olalla (the link goes to the place where he talks about questions). On the way, notice also Parker Palmer with his “Circles of Trust”. In that practice, the small group supporting the individual seeking guidance contributes only, strictly only, by asking open, honest questions.³⁾. Parker Palmer is also a Quaker, and we have “Advices and Queries”: the official Britain-based one or my composition of English, French and Dutch versions.

My intuition and experience combine here, to recognise that (in general) when presented with answers, people can easily get into arguments about the right answer. When presented with phrases or labels or terms, they can easily disagree about the meaning and significance of the terms. Simple terms are useful, indeed necessary for everyday life, but the more complex the concept is, the more room there is for divergent personal interpretations. In contrast, the beauty of a well-crafted question⁴⁾ is that people can hold it together, explore it together; and each individual can add their own exploration to the common pool. Framing an issue as a question naturally tends to open people's minds in exploration; framing an issue as an answer naturally tends to entrench people in static positions.

I should add, because I do recognise, that there is a vital place for working towards answers. Questions and answers can come in cycles, like the Diamond of Participation, which has a convergent phase — a phase that could well be converging on answers. But in science, as well as in the imagination and in fantasy, with an open mind we quickly find deeper questions behind almost any answer. Answers can certainly be useful; but they are also always provisional. Questions can be unanswerable, and yet still perpetually breaking open, challenging us to go ever deeper.

We had a challenge. We had a list of topics, but they were not phrased as questions, and it was not clear what the fruitful questions would be around those topics. So this is (roughly) what we planned to do, and have started to try out.

1. Do our best to get a first draft of a topic list that makes logical sense to us, trying to minimise overlap and ambiguity.
2. For each of these topics, invite people into some kind of dialogue session, with the intention of harvesting questions that are both alive for the participants, and also widely shared (though not necessarily universally).
3. Take a good look at these questions, and see if there is any natural reframing of the topics that emerges. For instance, if very similar questions come up in two different sessions, rearrange the topics so that the topics have questions that overlap as little as possible.
   • The meaning of each topic is then clarified by the associated questions.
4. Make these topics, together with the associated questions, the basis of the scheme we will use for the actual Gathering of Tribes in September.

The first challenge we have encountered is in focusing on a short list of agreed, live questions. It's relatively easy to note down all the questions that come up during the conversation, but without facilitation people don't seem to spontaneously focus on shared live questions. And the question for us? How can we facilitate the session with a light touch, in a way that still guides people towards these shared live questions?

The questions themselves will not be static, unalterable, cast in stone. They are there to stimulate dialogue. Anyone holding a meeting or event can draw inspiration from the questions, and go on to craft their own question in their own way.

Yes, if any of the questions we come up with are really good, someone may want to use the questions as it is. But that is not the aim. Which questions are alive is going to change along with the world which is alive. And the questions themselves are not designed to appear instead of topics. They are there to illuminate and energise topic titles. So the topics, ‘spheres’ as we are calling them, will keep their names and be used to ‘tag’ events and meetings at the Gathering.

Well now, how about letting people, and tribes, tag themselves with the same ‘sphere’ labels? Good idea! It may be that the helper app that will be built for the Gathering will enable this, so that individuals can more easily find other individuals and tribes who share their sphere of interest. It would be nice to have physical badges, too, indicating interest in the spheres, but I suspect we won't get round to that!

Of course, we could have done all this with any of the lists of topics/themes/spheres. Our hope is that through the “Questioning Regeneration” (virtual) meetings, that we have started and will continue for a few more months, the spheres will have clearer, more distinct names, and of course there will be the associated questions to amplify the meaning of the labels. All that, on top of the valuable input of priming bringing people together.

To bring people together around shared general areas of interest, the sphere labels may be enough — we could also use other well-known categories or lists, like The UN SDGs. But remembering that the Gathering is aiming to help “tribes of the regenerative ecosystem […] to connect for action”, it may be helpful to do more than that. As well as questions about the spheres of regeneration, we will also need questions about what individual people are bringing to the field of action. What skills, what experience, what knowledge, what abilities, what resources, does each person have?

The Gathering will be a self-selected (large!) group of people, which helps with tending towards a shared set of initial values, but what about the bigger picture? This is what RegenCHOICE will be designed to address. Interest lists could be given in more detail, and people could rate their degree of interest in each sphere/field. For RegenCHOICE there is a lot more work to do creating effective questions for personal qualities, attributes, personality characteristics, etc. Then, for each of these questions, we need reliable self-assessment scales. But that's another story…

I see this whole question-based approach as methodology that can be applied to any kind of event. Naturally, each event or developmental space has its own themes or topics, and it may be helpful to have those topics anywhere on the range from a few general ones to many more specific ones. Whichever way it goes, I do see this approach as being applicable and helpful.

After all, it is just about

• being clear about the intention, what is important for the event or space
• doing the vital creative work of finding questions in each of the intended areas, that are alive for and shared between some likely participants
• using those questions as a stimulus for more open, diverse questions, as well as clarifying ways of expressing what is important for the event
• using any of the questions to bring people together in intentional dialogue there.

And it's the dialogue⁵⁾ which can lead on to bringing people together for learning, living, doing, working or just being in harmony.

• Life Itself has republished this on their blog
• You can comment here on LinkedIn if you like. Or write to me, and I can add your comments below!

• intentional community