Monthly Archives: August 2023

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Looking through a microsolidarity lens

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I’ve found Rich Bartlett’s concept of microsolidarity really useful since I saw it a couple of years ago. It’s gotten complex fast, but the basic stuff that “groups of different sizes are good for different things” chimes with my experience of Tuttle and of other social art and community building practices and projects.

I think we are heavily conditioned into thinking a) that any group of less than three people is not a group worth paying attention to and b) that we should be trying to make all our groups as big as possible – that’s what success looks like – really big groups of people – yeah you start small, but when you get bigger, the small groups don’t matter any more, only the big ones do.

There’s a *lot* more to the work Rich is doing (with lots of other cool people) but the five scales of group is what really caught my attention. Older readers will remember the Tuttle Consulting project (14 years ago, damnit!) which played with using different scales of group at different stages of our engagement. We called it “Crowds, Tribes and Teams” but out of respect for groups of Indiginous People around the world, I wouldn’t use the word “tribes” any more and anyway that bit in the middle was always a bit weird – it was really a team that gathered for a specific part of the process and then was reformed into other teams.

Anyway, microsolidarity talks about 5 scales of group to which we ought to pay attention:

  1. The self-as-a-group (yep! if you think you’re a single entity, think again)
  2. The dyad (2 people)
  3. The crew (about 3-5)
  4. The congregation (about 15-150)
  5. The network of congregations

So for that consulting work, we took a “congregation” and worked downwards to define a crew that would further define the work for another set of crews.

Tuttle itself could be seen as a congregation that was initiated by me inviting a bunch of people with whom I had an existing 1:1 relationship – it was a congregation of dyads which led to the formation of new crews, new dyads, new congregations and networks of congregations. And imho quite a few people experienced growth (sometimes consciously, sometimes not so) through being part of the whole thing.

The categorisation by number isn’t, in my view, the important thing, what’s important is what each of these scales is for – and the suggestion as I read it is that paying attention to what sorts of work different scales of group ought to do will help build strong healthy connections between large collections of people. Go read about it if you’re confused by my rambling – there’s a good bunch of explainers on YouTube too.

So what does this have to do with the work I’m doing with Black Elephant? Well one of the questions I have is “What happens outside parades?” ie what can we do to help people interact with each other in other ways than showing up for a meeting or a dinner, because that’s when we’ll start to feel more like a community. And there’s definitely some mileage in looking at this through the lens of those five scales, which raises (at least) these questions to start chewing on:

  • How are we supporting individuals to consciously cultivate connection (and friendliness!) to themselves?
  • Can we (please!) help people to build 1:1 relationships that are more about partnership than domination?
  • What are the purposes of a parade and how can we help them support that purpose in ways that work for everyone?
  • What “crews” (groups that do useful work) might emerge from the trust built up through attending parades regularly?
  • What kind of congregations might be useful and congruent with the overall purpose?

Yeah, all that.

I shall be hosting parades myself soon, once I’ve got my head round the practicalities. If you sign up you should get regular notifications of which parades are open for booking (it’s free!).

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The Black Elephant circles back

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Elephant drinking water
“Elephant drinking water” from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums on Flickr

You might remember a little piece I shared a few weeks ago about the idea of Black Elephants. Well, part of my re-ignited interest was in watching how some folk had taken the idea and the name and made a thing out of it.

And now I’m going to work for them!

First off, I should explain that we’re not creating any new Black Elephants (of the type I originally formulated…) it’s much more about creating communities where we can live better in a world that recognises Black Elephants abound.

So it’s not a straightforward thing to describe (which, as you can imagine, ws a big draw for me!) but it’s a kind of mix of social network and social movement. And the movement bit is the most important – I say that because I see so many people jumping on the “make a movement” bandwagon these days. And I’ve learned quite a lot about making them over the years and it makes be cross when I see people kind of “movement-washing” their essentially extractive and exploitative business. I’m glad to say that Black Elephant (the network/movement) is *not* like that. When they talk about the vision to embrace and encourage *true* diversity as well as to create spaces where people can be themselves and authentically (and safely!) use acts of vulnerability to help build real connection, I believe them – because that’s what I’ve experienced in their meetings.

Over the last year, I’ve been to a few of the meetings (called “parades”) which are gatherings of half-a-dozen or so people (mostly online, but sometimes off-) with a couple of questions set for each parade as the basic structure of the conversation. Turns are taken by passing a virtual baton to each other and there’s no feedback or discussion of what you say, just a place to reflect on something among different folk and hear other points of view. The most noticeable feature to me is that you really do get to meet people you wouldn’t in most other settings. It’s not just for worthy white-folks in Northern Europe or the USA! This piece from Rhyd Wildermuth is a really good summary of what’s going on – I’m not going to try to rewrite it, go and read the whole thing.

And so that’s why I’m going to work on this for a bit. Because I’m up for making spaces like this and I think we can do it well together, while also building something sustainable – a business-like movement, rather than a movement-like business.

So wipe down your RSS reader and look out for heavier elephant-related bloggage as I think aloud a bit more about what I’m doing with them. It isn’t all high-falutin. strategic hand-waving, there’ll be stuff about the practicalities and difficulties of building a new network like this, and scaling globally, without breaking the concept or the people involved. But I can already tell it’s going to be fun and very worthwhile.