Sequence Generating

Escaping into Meta?

When I want to take on a task (building a stove, drawing a picture, playing the Shakuhachi) for which I do not have a clear outline (generative process?) I experience a feeling of lostness and a (sometimes subtle, sometimes blunt) desire to bypass the task (even if it "something I want to do"). I look for an escape (in my case typical escapes are: have a cookie or passive TV/video watching).

I want to clarify: escapes are not inherently a problem. Fundamentally (I believe) they are a healthy response to a confusing felt-experience. Sometimes turning my attention away from a problem can lead to passive resolution. Sometimes I turn my attention to a preparation that is necessary in order for me to be able to do what I want to do. An escape can be a problem when I don't recognize that is what I am doing.

I want to bring the notion of escape into something @Toni Blanco wrote here in response to @Josh Fairhead

"Ronen suggested you write about a very abstract and generic issue (contextualized in the crew level AND the meta level), and we just accepted the idea and wanted to go ahead. To find later that was not such a good idea after all."

I have heard Ryan Singer (basecamp strategist) suggest that in many design disciplines designers are unconsciously seeking generative processes. When we don't have a generative process, we fumble around, we become conceptual, we procrastinate.

For example, an experienced graphic designer will have some kind of generative process in designing a visual logo. It will involve things like studying the product, the culture of the company, the market, market placement, core values ... these will feed into a process of shapes and colors ... and by walking her generative path she will arrive at a small number of core designs one of which will hopefully be refined into the logo. The generative process implies a correct sequence of doing these tasks! A less experienced graphic designer will immediately start drawing many options, size variants, color variants ... lots of shooting in the dark ... HOPING to find something that sticks. The difference is experience = failing lots of times until you figure out how to fail less = generative processes.

I feel that our inquiry into making/holding space, so far, has been mostly a series of escapes. Our escapes are elegant (and pleasant?!) because they are usually in the direction of expanded and subtle context. Again, TO CLARIFY, I do not mean to say that enriching context is a bad thing. I do mean to say that it can also be an escape.

The theoretical meta-conversation, I suspect, can continue to diverge ... to be honest ... forever ... "the space was already there" - true .... now what? I felt and still feel that we need to be more concrete. Instead of talking about a theoretical space ... we need to at least simulate the creation of a space. Make a choice, see how it feels, rollback, cancel, adjust and if/when a choice feels right more forward to making another choice. That was my intention is offering a raw/immature/probably wrong seed generative process.

If we are lucky ... we will be able to say in retrospect: a space is what emerges when you follow this generative process.

When I "suggested" Alex and Josh start a thread to address their question:

1. I accepted that my offer to unfold a seed process was defacto not (yet?) embraced by the crew.

2. I embraced the exploration that seemed to be alive for Josh and Alex.

3. I thought that it (starting threads on the subject) was NOT likely to actually happen (for all the reasons we've already discussed).

4. I exhaled deeply and thought "Let's see where this goes."

@Alex Rodriguez one reason I am not so keen to move past the vocabulary of "microsolidarity" is that it is a REAL space. It is something I can witness, experience, partake in. I can sense weaknesses in it and try to "judo-flip" them into opportunities. I can concretely ask what worked in the Microsolidarity Loomio space? What didn't work? How would I make it better? It keeps me grounded and protects me from abstraction. I am counting (and have asked) you all to do the same by relating to the REAL spaces you inhabit, experience, hold.

Generative processes are cunning. They (at least to me) seem simple and obvious and uncomplicated (as if anyone could do it) ... and yet they yield surprisingly rich, complex, and diverse outcomes.

EG: How do you make a space (whether you are "recognizing something thas is already there" or "creating something new") :

1. You give it a name because saying "that space where this and that happens" is tiresome. eg: Microsolidarity

2. You give it a sense of direction or purpose ... a vibe that others can sense, feel into and respond to. eg: Making a living while working on meaningful things with people who care for each other.

3. ?

4. ?

5. ?

There are probably many ways to do this? But a lot of our attempts to do this ... seem ... well ... like there is much room for improvement :) So, is there a generative process (set of processes!) that could lead to more vital and productive spaces?

I don't know :) But sense a potential for something that drastically improves our odds AND I am excited at the notion of exploring this possibility with you because:

1. I feel it is imperative (<-lots of pun intended) that we do better at coordinating and communing?

2. It may enable me (personally) to rebuild bridges towards meaningful work between myself and others in the world.

3. MOSTLY ... because the three of you, who I consider waaaaay more experienced than me in this context, have expressed (with your experience, time, effort, and caring attention) interest in this exploration! Which still surprises me!

I strongly feel we need to find a way to "judo-flip" 🐬 our abstraction-tendencies into specific attempts at concrete processes!

The theoretical meta-conversation, I suspect, can continue to diverge ... to be honest ... forever ... "the space was already there" - true .... now what? I felt and still feel that we need to be more concrete.

This is something very interesting. When I shared expansively my view on something we agreed to dig in I was not expecting to start an ontological debate nor expect convincing you but simply to let you know where I am. And regarding this concrete idea, precisely, because it does not have practical effects!

I would love to hear your opinion on this point: would you rather me sharing my thoughts on the human and the divine as I do now, and use your judgment whether you want to engage only if you feel that that would be generative, or it would be a better option to open a thread entitled "Toni's log" in which I let flow freely my thoughts not as a part of the conversations, but a place you can visit to understand "where Toni is" at this moment in relation to our work together? I would not like to introduce "noise" because of my way of communicating in the group.

I love the idea of you "hosting" a thread here on Loomio that's a place for your thoughts and thinking-out-loud, and where chiming in is welcome but it's also optional. I may do that as well when I have more time to get back into this space.

Let me start with (what I consider) the obvious: Please DO speak your mind and your heart!!! AND ... also hold the question of where/when!? A personal thread is one option, so is a thematic thread ... and sometimes maybe the place IS in context.

I try, when I find myself gravitating towards "abstraction" to ask myself: how does this inform the conversation? Does this enhance discernment? Does this create more subtle context and clearer choices?

To give a blunt example: when I taught systems analysis I built the course around actual projects the students were doing in another course. When everyone handed in their initial project proposals they almost all had something like this in the papers: "The system will be user friendly." So, in front of the whole classroom, I asked "is there anyone here who intends to create a system that is NOT user friendly?" Silence. So the statement "the system will be user friendly" is empty - it doesn't say anything and doesn't commit to anything. It needs more context and specificity: what would make THIS system user friendly ... that would be a promise that means something ... a guiding principle that would help in making decisions as you build the system.

I agree (and I believe I spoke this out during one of our calls) with the meta-notion that we are stepping into existing potentials (spaces) and not really "making them". AND this is a PRECIOUS vibe to acknowledge and inhabit together!

BUT!!! when it comes to establishing a digital space for strangers to discover each other ... when it comes to clicking the "New Subgroup" button on Loomio ... the meta-conversation is, TO ME!!!, a distraction ... an escape from a concrete unknown (a specific tangible choice we need to make - what is the first step in creating a remote-digital-space?) to a meta-known (a comfortable vibe-feeling where we feel coherent, seen and together in the notion that the spaces are already there).

My intention is not to be a "meta party pooper" :) My intention is to signal something like "this feels diverging and I'm not sure that this a good conversational-move right here / right now".

I have a feeling that I may be coming across (especially in async-written format) as more intense than I mean to be ... so QUESTION: how do you feel about me pulling in the "convergent" direction? am I pulling too hard? too soon?

admission: I am DYING to be authoring with you a generative process which has simple steps ... but where our meta-cognition will kick in and say "nope, before you do that you need to do this" or "this is too soon, before you can do this you need to do this" ... I am SOOOO curious to encounter all of your PRACTICAL insights from your ACTUAL experiences holding community spaces (which I DO NOT HAVE!) ... to address questions like Alex's "multiple people holding a space" WITHIN a SPECIFIC!!! generative process ... to allow the meta-insight to bubble into a specific reality ... to allow the specific reality to be informed by the meta and for the two to challenge each other ... SPECIFICALLY ... not ABSTRACTLY!

I have heard Ryan Singer (basecamp strategist) suggest that in many design disciplines designers are unconsciously seeking generative processes. When we don't have a generative process, we fumble around, we become conceptual, we procrastinate.

This feels like a gem to me! I've seen it, it resonates. When we don't have an adequate map, we stumble around and trip over the terrain. It makes me wonder what the fundamental generative processes are, or generative principals. Which schemas should be privileged when dealing with the unknown also arises as a question for me?

If we are lucky ... we will be able to say in retrospect: a space is what emerges when you follow this generative process.

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So, is there a generative process (set of processes!) that could lead to more vital and productive spaces?

Well put, and a pointed exploration. What are the generative processes that create a space? Depending on how deep you want to go, this article has it all from the headings to the references. I'd very much recommend it, Dave always does his homework.

When I shared expansively my view on something we agreed to dig in I was not expecting to start an ontological debate nor expect convincing you but simply to let you know where I am.

@Toni Blanco - I'm slowly building my own site as an experiment to do just this; articulate and express my world view without having to reiterate myself all the time; personal aphorisms or mantras if you will. If you feel inclined, then Loomio is a good a place as any to start iterating; you can just link to "blocks" or comments if you wish to refer to your Ontology at some point.

So the statement "the system will be user friendly" is empty - it doesn't say anything and doesn't commit to anything. It needs more context and specificity: what would make THIS system user friendly

This feels like functional specs. I wonder if theres a computer science parallel with functional programming? I've a friend thats big on that paradigm - he's articulate and extremely precise and lean with his logic also. I feel its a good habit to get into; I've been known to take abstraction to ridiculous levels in search of the meta unknown though trying to ground myself more these days which I feel is getting there - still, old dogs ;)

My intention is not to be a "meta party pooper" :) My intention is to signal something like "this feels diverging and I'm not sure that this a good conversational-move right here / right now".

Poop away matey, as mentioned above I'm trying to get out of the abstraction so please feel welcome to jump in. Actually I think I'd like us all to do shoulder that burden.

so QUESTION: how do you feel about me pulling in the "convergent" direction? am I pulling too hard? too soon?

No, I think we've done divergent enough. I really appreciate this thread, it articulates many things I want to articulate in other groups, and its framed very well. Also regarding how the text conveys itself - I find it pretty neutral bar unnecessary emphasis in capital letters, otherwise its well formulated and clear text thats easy to interpret.

I am DYING to be authoring with you a generative process which has simple steps

Like wise homie. The proposal of grounding ourselves in experience when the meta reflex crops up seems like a concrete proposal. Lets go!

I strongly feel we need to find a way to "judo-flip" 🐬 our abstraction-tendencies into specific attempts at concrete processes!

Agree wholeheartedly! I've been thinking about this and feeling that part of my anxiety arose from thinking that there was going to be the beginning of "actually doing something" (which I remember as @Ronen Hirsch starting a thread to try doing a round of Sociocratic consent related to a proposal that surfaced at our last meeting) and not being able to find any evidence of that either in the HackMD space or the Loomio thread. So either I remembered it wrong or something isn't happening and either way I'm confused! I'm running out of sandbox time for today but I do like how this is starting to shape up as a tangle of things I can enter into (thanks @Josh Fairhead for the music recommendation for this round) and not a wide-open space that feels very confusing.

You're all really beautiful thinkers and it feels very good to drink up the wisdom that you've shared here. Next I'm going to try and respond to Ronen's prompts around work/effort/flow in more depth.

Just a quick update of what I am up to. I revisited all that we have documented so far since the invitation to crew, to have some perspective and refresh my memories (hey, not bad AT ALL!). Then I have been seeing the whole of the generative process, looking for/sensing the weakest as a whole, also through your eyes as much as possible (I found the theoretical digressions and divergences useful for that). I ended up with the idea that while money and care was a weak point (and partially addressed by the answers to this post), the weakest point (in my view) is that we all experience a lack of clarity of what we can offer to the crew to progress into our desired outcome for this cycle.

What I am maturating these days is what kind of intervention would be the right one (maybe the "judo-flip" that I guess we all expect or want to happen at some point), and how to find out, precisely, what each of us could happily contribute to it . Or in other words, how collaborative can be the intervention being, qualitatively at least, a kind of load that @Ronen Hirsch has carried (quite) alone so far? Should I step in as he has done so far? This question, in my view, addresses concretely and practically the inquiry of the definition of space we use and the collective holding of it.

Here are some of my hypotheses I would like to test in an intervention:

1. Every new cycle requires an explicit and written invitation as well drafted as the invitation to crew that Ronen wrote and that successfully brought us to a second cycle (even when it is only addressed to the same participants). It is desirable to reflect as much as possible the practical implications of the retrospective of the previous cycle. The "Seed for Remote Microsoldarity Generative Process" did not work as such.  Task 1: I took as a template the first invitation of @Ronen Hirsch, and I started to draft the new one, keeping all that was still valid in my opinion and upgrading it with practical implications of the retrospective AND the conversations/exchanges we just had after our last face-to-face meeting together*.  

2. As we practiced it, the sociocratic consent triggered theoretical questions that we did not want to address in the sociocratic form because of the cost/benefit we perceived. On the other hand, on the previous cycle we reached complex agreements without the systematic use of the sociocratic pattern, which makes me question the need for it for now (or the precise context in which it would be generative). (Caveat: since we did not used the sociocratic consent, we may differ on or overlook implicit agreements, but that could happen anyway when using the sociocratic consent).  Task 2: initiate the sociocratic consent we agreed to follow to propose putting its use on hold until we feel we are in a situation in which it will be generative. 

3. We are all "making an effort to set aside any considerations of actual implementation of our ideas", but our crew is at the end, somehow, a bootstrapping-kind-of implementation of our ideas. To document it as such would help us to refine our "final" outcome, by considering what part of the implementation (and how) should inform the generative process we are writing (and somehow experiencing) together. For instance, I reread carefully Ronen's proposal of the use of emoticons here and I think that it is incredibly sophisticated. To offer our implemented experience of a remote crew as a companion of the written generative process would be very useful (and alone by itself). Task 3: create the structure and the content of the document that shows in a concise and informative way the practical aspects of our crew.

4. The three hypotheses above sort of leads to a new one: the document "A Generative Process for Remote Microsolidarity" can be substantially enriched/improved with all the lessons learned recently**). Also, I miss some ideas that we seemed to agree on (relating to playfulness, etc.) during the first cycle. I know that it was only a draft and an initial offer of @Ronen Hirsch, but I kind of feel that a) the complexity of the documentation of the process distract us from taking care of the "baby" we have in our hands and 2) that complexity also adds confusion on how to individually contribute to improving it (at least, is clearly my case.  Task 4: figure out the procedure to contribute to improving that document and make a first simple contribution to it, as a test of the procedure, and then see how to do the more complex contributions.

5. We kick ass. We will figure it out. Task 5: show my trust on the crew by hitting the "post comment" button and going to sleep. Now.    

So I need time to figure out which one or ones of the tasks if any (besides number 5, which I will complete in a few minutes) could lead to a good next intervention and If that was a reflection to make alone or collaboratively. Any feedback on this update would be surely appreciated. 

* I also think that would be powerful to add the common assumptions we are challenging or the hypothesis we want to test so we can connect more easily to what makes special this crew and how we can contribute to the definition of the generative process.

** Here I am assuming that we share some "pragmatic believes" (and I am using an expression of @Josh Fairhead) not affected AT ALL by our "theoretical divergences" that make us keep working together, and made us feel last week that we made progress. I had, anyway, some insights that I think could favor alignment in practical terms. 

1. YES. Thank you for offering and holding this.

2. Clarification. I do not believe we've really practiced sociocractic consent and the main reason is that it requires clear proposals. I believe this is one of the most overlooked and critical aspects of sociocracy. There is a gap between meta-flowing-conversations and specific correctly sequenced!) proposals that can be put to consent. We have, from my perspective, NOT yet tried this.

3. Which raises the question: is a stream of proposals (which can be put to consent) a good strategy to collaborating on a generative process together? That was a working assumption in the way I setup cycle2! @Toni Blanco there is another tool (produced in your city of Barcelona) I considered using and did not offer - it may offer a softer flowing experience for collaborating on content. If you would like to do a one-on-one meeting I can introduce you to the tool (and if you would like to its maker) and let you consider if this is something you wish to incorporate. To be clear @Alex Rodriguez and @Josh Fairhead I'm happy to share this with you too ... however I have a feeling it may be better to first "vet" it through Toni and only then bring it to the group.

4. I had to HOLD MYSELF BACK from writing this document the way I would have wanted to BECAUSE I wanted it to be collaborative. Again, this is a specific choice and behind it an assumption (collaborative preference) ... there are other options we can explore here.

I am liking the feeling of leaning back a bit and watching you Toni take the lead and am curious to see where you want to go :) Please let me know If there is anything I can do to help. I am keeping the sandbox time open for Thursday in case you want to use it!.