Ripened Fruits

Outside Observers

During my visit here in Israel I've had an opportunity/need to share a bit with a few people about this crew-journey. It can be very challenging to describe because it can sound fantastical. I have found that almost everyone can relate to the challenges of poor communications and work relationships as it manifests in their lives.

During yesterday's gathering, I felt a desire to give people an opportunity to simply bare-witness to the way we work. I had an image of a "surgical gallery" I've seen on TV shows, where surgeons learn by watching other surgeons. It can be so difficult to describe what we do, but the experience of it, I feel, can be eye-opening and inspiring ... to demonstrate to others that THIS may REALLY be possible and that they too can seek it in their lives.

This is a reposting from Discrd on behalf of @Robert Damashek :

Something came to me in the wee hours that I want to share with the crew: What if our crew offered a service to:

1. existing organizations that have become stuck to help them re-invigorate, and thus continue to live well and prosper; or

2. new organizations to design themselves that way from the outset?

Our service could offer to:

1. Examine an organization - it’s mission, values and services

2. Execute and apply the generative process to describe its living centers and sub-centers

3. Propose and visualize roadmaps for how it might reorganize around these foci

I believe this offering would:

1. Build on the incredible talents, oneness and success of our crew itself

2. Contribute significant value to organizations, especially those in Category 1 above that are motivated to try something new

3. Bring in a substantial, commensurate income to the crew

4. Enable us to work together meaningfully to bootstrap our own digital space

What do we need to enable our offering:

1. A clear, concise description - elevator speech

2. A way to identify, assess, approach and qualify prospects

3. A notional set of inputs, products, timeline and pricing

4. An agreed upon plan for valuing individual contributions and distributing the income

Below are a couple of related thoughts:

• One idea for a product would build upon the existing tooling recently contributed by @Josh Fairhead :
  If the Obsidian graph component is open source, we could modify it to help both us and clients visualize and navigate their centers and sub-centers, identify the resonance, and use that to help develop the roadmap

• If desired, a deeper, more extensive subsequent offering could engage in implementing the organizational change by examining people, process and technology

• I think this offering might expand upon @Toni Blanco suggestion for working together

So that's the idea and I'm headed back to bed 😴

Thank you for painting this pictures @Robert Damashek :)

It felt to me like an indirect (though kind of direct!) response to my sharing about the job application I submitted.

The picture you painted sounds beautiful and promising. However, it described a view I can neither see nor imagine from where I am currently standing. Pursuing it triggers in me a faith-practice. I am drawn to what you have described and am willing to put my faith in you, personally Robert, and @Toni Blanco (who has shared similar visions) and the crew as a whole.

I remember attending a rock concert, one of my first, many years ago. I went to the front area and for the first (and maybe only!) time experienced being held and confined by a crowd. I lost my freedom of movement and had to surrender to the collective movement. Any movement the crowd made I had to also make. It was a strange feeling for me. Thinking back about it from the present I also have a sense that I couldn't fall ... there was simply no room for me to fall.

Ingesting your proposal evoked a similar feeling. I felt my sense of footing within the crew shift. This has practical implications that I want to explicitly acknowledge. I feel I can't help initiate much in this direction. I can support and help, but non initiate:

1. I feel scorn towards elevator pitches (but I can help writing good, clear, and concise texts).

2. I have nothing to say about prospects (but I may be able to help to generate clarity about qualifiers and processes).

3. I don't have a tangible sense of offering that I or the crew can make and I am unable to make promises about deliverables and outcomes or naming prices. I believe that anything that feels tangible to you is a product of our collective investment in being together ... and I don't know how that can be packaged and marketed.

4. I intend to initiate some threads of discussion around valuing contributions and distributing equity and income.

I am curious to hear how everyone else in the crew feels about this. I believe that if there is crew-resonance around this and we want to seriously explore this avenue, that we need to make a conscious choice about investing in this and giving it proper priority.

Thank you @Ronen Hirsch for your thoughtful, deep and quick response, and of course, for your clarity in moving this to the correct space for the crew to engage further. I know I can help hold the space, and have contributed in each of these areas as a component of my consulting work. Though I don’t have a lot of depth in pricing, I do have quite a bit in planning engagements and understanding the level of effort involved. I too eagerly await hearing from the rest of the crew about this. Perhaps we can explore an example engagement together if there is interest, to make it more tangible for everyone.

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So I was going to reply (clumsily), but it seems Ronens spoken my mind (clearly). I don't really need to add anything. I didn't want to put it down as its a beautiful vision Robert but it felt distant to me as well. I guess the thing I'd ask is what are the specific behaviours we should be practicing to make it a reality?

It seems like the two crew members that have made their living from organizational consulting for decades think alike in this matter. It is funny also to observe the skeptical reception, in which I think that I smell - among other things - the impostor syndrome. On the other hand, If I interpret the responses correctly, there is some trust in our skills and opinions.

Before you posted this, I was thinking about making an offer to explore this possibility with those interested in it. What do you think, should we make an invitation for an "open conversation", or maybe you @Robert Damashek and I talk together first to design a more focused and concrete invitation in which we can present a preliminary roadmap that addresses the expressed concerns?

Robert posted this idea while I was away and have only just now paid it my full attention. It is not the picture I have in mind of the direction I would personally like to pursue. That's all I will say right now because I will be getting home tomorrow and I will have a conversation with Robert about it before I post more.

PS In case anyone is worried, we have had many conversations like this before. We are good at resolving and integrating differences of perspective...lovingly. 🙂

The constellation of you & Robert being physically together within the crew raises an interesting dynamic. A good rule of thumb (I believe) for remote/distributed teams is to work as if you are continents apart even when you are physically together.

If you and Robert have a converation and you only share with crew a "resolved outcome" then some nuance and perspective that arose in the conversation will never reach the rest of the crew. This may deny the crew as a whole an opportunity to explore things that came up in the context of a private conversation.

In larger constellations (which we may become) this also open the door for unhealthy power dynamics.

This is not intended to deny you and Robert a personal conversation. It is an invitation to:

1. Explore the possibility of conversing here in the space ... the asynchronous quality it may have a interesting effect even if the conversation is just between the two of you.

2. Sharing asynchronously not just the outcomes of a face-to-face conversation but also the nuances of it, ideas that came up, frictions that came up, how resolutions were discovered, what was rejected, etc.

3. Be attentive to developing healthy cultural habits that will allow us to grow well as a distributed team.

I'm interested in exploring this further with you @Toni Blanco and @Robert Damashek. Also, I'm appreciating that we have an opportunity to situate "consulting work" within a more spacious value ecology and that not everyone in the crew needs to be dipping their toes into the consulting pool in order for us to have a coherent sense of how to engage with this as a possible source of revenue to support our activities. What's needed is both the "how we pitch ourselves as consultants" (which Robert articulates well above) and also "what that means in terms of how the crew operates" (which @Ronen Hirsch gets at in his response) as well as "how does this inform the GP" in both of those previous questions. All of this seems squarely within the wheelhouse of what we're thinking for Cycle 4.

Another thing I wanted to bring up not just in the context of this proposal, but THROUGH it is an idea that we touched on lightly in the past in the crew, before Robert & Jennifer joined: we lightly touched, but elected not to act on, the possibility of creating a public-facing online presence for the crew and the work we are doing.

I am bringing this up here because I have witnessed many times people/teams scramble to create some last-minute "corporate websites" when they realize they need visibility. In my opinion, this is the worst way to create an online presence. It evokes a utilitarian attitude towards expressing ideas (publishing in order to sell or convince), it is usually done at the last minute and superficially.

I also don't like broadcasting or receiving self-attributed superlatives. I don't trust when I read an about page that says "we are considerate and rigorous." I much prefer to browse a website/document/contents (whatever) and come to my own conclusion. I prefer to let our actions speak for themselves.

I also believe that taking on a task like publishing on a public website can be good practice for collective self-reflection... for understanding ourselves as a crew ... for realizing what we do, how we perceive ourselves, and how present ourselves.