Celebration and Mourning
A rough retrospective
About two years ago I responded to a Microsolidarity loomio thread where a call to gather was made. A number of participants shimmered for me but ultimately the continuity was pretty poor. By the third call the group had dissipated.
I then answered the Humms offering of a Microsolidarity practice week to learn more about the framework. All in all it was a well facilitated week of sessions sharing a number of useful patterns but nothing particularly special other than the hosts; I was already familiar with many of the practices but there was a good crowd. Among them were some people that had turned up to the unpaid gathering.
After this a few calls to congregate were put out on loomio but coordination was loose. Among them however was one small group with some faces I'd noted from before. I had little interest in 'holding' the group as I was already experimenting with such in other spaces and for the largest part no one was ever holding me! That was one of the refreshing things about this group - somebody was actually taking responsibility!
When I joined there was already a culture establishing itself; the metaphor of a generative process embodied in an exercise where we unfolded a Japanese tea house. This highlighted the importance of sequence; when things were out of order possibilities were greatly reduced. These distortions accumulate and easily become painfully restrictive, much like bureaucracy. This was one of the points of the more official microsolidarity doctrine; just stay small and trust eachother rather than codify.
During the first cycle a pattern established itself; Ronen's active energy drove us forward with Toni in the passenger seat next to him while I and Alex passively rode in the back seat and contributed where there was space. I had pretty much no issue with this setup as it seemed Ronen was a skilled sailor, but later I learn that others had frustrations with the status quo. This was actually quite surprising as I'm usually the rebel; though I did see what I perceived as minor agitations. These disruptions were managed diplomatically and felt like no biggie te me; I was often grateful for this as they felt tangential to the groups work semantics and whatnot.
During the second cycle I believe we started to ask why we were together and what we were doing. A few agendas were offered up but nothing particularly concrete and generally informed by our various backgrounds. Looking back on this moment I'm surprised at how easily we navigated it - often when it comes to this possibility management things get political reeeeal quick. Alas no, we were pretty chill. My self and Alex resonated on his record label idea, and we were all pretty good with the facilitation / consultancy route. I don't recall Ronen or myself actually throwing our hats in the ring. There was a nice atmosphere around at this time and if memory serves (which it rarely does) we made plans to meet on a Greek island at somestage - however we made pretty minimal progress on why we were gathering and what to do (other than starting a culture of some form).
Recalling the third cycle, Ronen began to offer up work to the collective. This was demonstrative action in my opinion; quality work that showed what appropriately sequenced and coherent material looked like. It was unfinished with plenty space to contribute given its modular design. Strong foundations articulating a way of creating wholesome experiences and interactions. I did not desire to contribute to this work for several reasons but primarily because it was whole and additions I was likely to make would distort the structure. Loading the various cards into working memory before contribution was beyond my capacity.
As the fourth cycle began, Ronen had met some people in a starter cultures space who appreciated his work and so convened a meeting to see if we were ready to start onboarding others into the group; we we're generally under prepared and at this point started to go downhill in my opinion. Toni and Jennifer were keen to contribute to Ronens foundation but tensions arose due to his refusal of their submissions. His reasoning was that the additions closed possibilities rather than opened them and so distorted the structures. This resonated with my perspective; in honestly I felt like I could probably have made more coherent additions but chose not to for these reasons. Still I appreciated the attempts; we only learn by doing and by doing so repetitively. Iteration is king.
This cycle was also where things kinda got more political due to lack of trust. Some of the material was on the ever sensitive subject of money/value and ideologies relating to the semantics of this topic started to become contentious. This slowed things down and generally made it unpleasant. In my personal opinion this was about trust. I'd done my part to destabilise that in some loomio responses at the collective level and so these issues pointed at me would have been fair enough, but from my perspective Ronen seemed to become the scape goat and proxy for this and I'm still unclear why given his frugal life away from the trappings of society!
Generally the politics were heating up. Ronens proactivity seemed to be agitating others and which bound us into a catch 22; without his leadership we were essentially lacking directionality and due to the political climate it seems that nobody has been interested to step up in his absence. Who wants to take the podium only to get shot at? Or worse, not have anyone show up for them - the pain! Make a sacrificial offer? Nah conserve the enregy it's scarce ... Ahh, how've fallen from the pinnacle to the pit: from gleefully squirming on the ground together, crawling, some promising first steps and then eating the floor! Guess this time we'll need to pick ourselves up alone, and we have been - while crossing the chasm these last few months we've grown!
Whoever "we" are, we are only two years young. In a years time "we" may be running together - but probably not very well! So yeah at this inflection point I invite you to mourn what we've left behind but celebrate the hell out of the growth we've made alone and under our own efforts! I'm sure we've all faced demons and dragons but I think we made it over the chasm; now onwards! (one baby step at a time)
A sacrificial offering with love,
j
Ronen Hirsch Tue 30 Aug 2022 11:14AM
Thank you @Josh Fairhead for initiating this thread and @Alex Rodriguez for following up.
I have been off Loomio for quite some time and did not receive any notifications so I missed this until now. I also spent most of August dealing with and recovering from Covid and most of my attention and screen time are now occupied by Open Collective.
I appreciate the time and effort you both put into these reflections and I was glad to ingest them. When I look back at what happened I still encounter mostly heart-ache. Intellectually I have come to terms with this, emotionally it seems I have opted to shut it down (since connecting with what was leftover is not a pleasant or desirable experience).
I have had thoughts about reconvening, but those thoughts are quickly followed by a feeling that if I don't initiate something, no one else will (or at least no one has) and I feel clearly disinclined to initiate. I also do not feel inclined to make an effort to reflect back on what happened and to summarize my own impressions. I feel that we left generous documentation in case anyone else may be interested and I don't feel that any one else is really interested. I hope you can receive this with understanding.
Jennifer Damashek Thu 1 Sep 2022 11:08PM
Thank you @Josh Fairhead , @Alex Rodriguez and @Ronen Hirsch for sharing.
I’d like to share a short retrospective.
I met Ronen in the spring of 2021 in an online Offers and Needs Market. He made a few offers that intrigued me, so I followed up with him. One of his offers was related to generative sequencing. Once I got an idea of what he was talking about, I asked him to share with me the generative description of the digital space.
I will always remember the experience of receiving the description. It was an emotional and transformational experience for me. One of the reasons it affected me so powerfully was that in my mind I experienced a community being generated in the digital space. I had the strong sense that this generative process of building community was what was missing in a project my husband Robert and I had been dreaming of for decades. It made our abstract and amorphous idea so tangible to me I almost felt like it was created already. I was also moved because the description seemed deeply loving and caring for the people coming to the space.
Once Ronen completed sharing the generative description, I thanked him and asked how I could help build it. He said I could join the crew working on creating the digital space. I asked if he would share the generative description with Robert. He did share it and Robert also asked to join the crew.
I wanted to make a positive contribution to the work of this crew, but unfortunately I was not able to do so.
After the crew disengaged, I let time pass and allowed my own ideas to emerge. I’m going to start a separate thread for that.
Toni Blanco Sun 4 Sep 2022 4:09PM
Thank you all, and particularly @Josh Fairhead for he showed as the way :)
I just would like to add to what the others said. I will not repeat what I have said already here, Discord, or in our calls; maybe I will stress some of them.
Celebration of what we achieved: a draft of a generative process with no implementation in mind, which was the goal of @Ronen Hirsch 's call. I have a strong feeling of accomplishment in that sense. Also, it has proven to be generative, see what inspired @Jennifer Damashek in this post.
We achieved moral support though the worst days of confinement and pandemic. We shared great ideas and knowledge. We could not move beyond the initial call because the conditions for going together as a crew oriented to money did not exist; the crew worked as a "community of practice".
Ronen insisted in pursuing a collaborative effort for crafting the generative process, but the asymmetry of knowledge and availability of time of the crew didn't help. Alex and Josh "passivity" affected the crew as well in an asymmetric way, because I accepted to work in Ronen proposals, but not the other way around, so I felt alone when holding the stick and Ronen holding back. I still think that understanding our own process as a generative process to identify centers and craft sequences in parallel documentation according to our hits and misses was a good idea that deserved more attention.
My highlights are our first audio-guided experience with Alex, the Tea House with Ronen, the guided explanation of Josh Mandala, the first reading of Ronen's draft of the generative process, and the first encounter with @Jennifer Damashek and @Robert Damashek.
In retrospective, I feel we skipped a couple of things that would have strengthen our crew. The first is the suggested conversation about the wholeness. What wholeness? Just one wholeness? The second, but we did not know then, is leveraging on Josh knowledge on the Enneagram personality typology to confront together our miseries and weaknesses.
Celebration because here we are, and also at Discord, still connecting and sharing .
With no particular goal beyond enjoying our presence together, I would host a conversation with you on the "wholeness", and I would be delighted to participate in an Enneagram activity guided by Josh.
Love
Alex Rodriguez · Thu 28 Jul 2022 3:47PM
Beautiful, Josh---thank you for this offering and getting the ball rolling with some reflections.
I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone else has thoughts to offer the space.
Some things that are up for me right now ... while holding an intention to dive into a narrative reflection like this when I have a bit more space for the feeling energy of that ...
I still feel a lot of tenderness for this group. Whatever we did opened my heart to each of you in a way that I can still connect with, even since our communication has reduced significantly in the past few months.
The teahouse and the generative process were powerful experiences to find our way into. The fact that we were also experimenting with medium (audio-only, for example) and were ahead of the curve on some of those ideas was interesting to me. It seems like many of those insights are still relevant and haven't been figured out even by massive VC-funded projects like Clubhouse.
It felt like we almost got there with a collaborative writing process using GitHub.
The conflict and rupture that was happening in the space during the winter was painful and instructive. In hindsight, I wish that I had been more responsive to holding the pain of unmet needs as it arose in the space. This was a limitation of the "remote" format. Sometimes I felt like I didn't know how to "reach out" and connect skillfully.
It felt like our work together generated shared insight and that was a very deep and nourishing thing to experience. Acting together on shared insights introduced another order of challenge.
There was an inflection point around the time that Ronen connected with Jennifer and Robert and the group-of-four became a group-of-six. In the future, if I'm in similar situations I want to be very attentive to the dynamics of what arises when a "seed group" brings in new members.
We understood the importance of cultivating honesty and shared understanding about our relationships to money---and ultimately, I didn't feel like we were able to hold that skillfully enough to accommodate the different thoughts, feelings, and sensibilities that those discussions evoked. It did provide me with a space to really start to explore this theme more deeply in my own life and I am very grateful for that.