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Want to catch the Season 8 Intentional Society kickoff? There’ll be two orientations on Saturday, September 24^th and Saturday, October 1^st for new folks. Existing members will receive a renewal-ritual form tomorrow.

Our area’s summer streak of warm weather (which means 70°F/21°C here) is now over. My kids are back in school as of yesterday, leaving the house quiet and still. That sudden void marks a pronounced transition in my daily routines, as coincidentally this is also the final week of Intentional Society’s season.

We note nature’s seasons for the change that they mark, of life and death and renewal and energy. Yet the underlying rhythm is one of constancy and yearly repetition — the embodiment of that well-known expression, “Change is the only constant in life.” Zoom out far enough on the seasons, and we can see that they are the breath of the earth, inhaling and exhaling through the millennia of the planetary lifecycle.

Why does Intentional Society operate with a seasonal framing? In conversation yesterday I said, “so we never stop reinventing ourselves” and that intention is, to me, something worth grooving deeply into our rituals and rhythms. This borrows from the accumulated wisdom of agile software development, and even further back to and beyond Deming’s iterative cycles. The “step to the outer frame” move, modern or not, differs from just marking time and reflecting like e.g. the fixed traditional liturgical calendar. Bring awareness to the awareness process itself!

Our next newcomer orientation is September 24^th, mark your calendars to catch the start of Season 8 in October.

Today I wrote in a casual social media post that within Intentional Society we aim “to grow our awareness, capacity, and integrity” and I noticed that it felt like another subtle but helpful evolution of the core message that IS stands for.

In December of 2020 I wrote “starts with awareness and intention” as to the “how” of growth in the face of personal, relational, and societal ills. I think “awareness” stuck around very practically while “intention” was better as a broad thematic word that ties together several things (e.g. “accepting and holding” and “fluid non-coercive motion”) that needed more teasing apart.

In September of 2021 I harvested “awareness, acceptance, and authenticity” from a brainstormed list of IS community values (which has lived in the Orientation Call slides since then). It seem accurate to view that shift as a breakdown of “intention” into component parts “acceptance” and “authenticity.”

The first step to getting involved is our orientation video call on Saturday, September 3rd at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Unusual thing for me to say, right? Yeah. You were initially going to get a “working-in-public” newsletter of me today, going from motivation/intent to designed practice. It didn’t coalesce! I have a practice designed already, but I might redesign it if I could clarify the motivations into a more crisp expression. There are so many angles on this particular space, I’m not sure how to tell the story, it feels jumbly. I’ve asked an AR facilitator group for recommendations, to see if those would help isolate the core maneuver.

The thing itself for us to practice this Sunday could be called “dancing with scissors” or “the 3rd layer of okayness” and yet, that demands that the first two layers be explained and it’s the end of the day and I’m out of time. What was it? Well, the core of it starts with society training us to manage other people’s emotions. We learn to predict how other people might react to us, to keep ourselves safe by steering away from triggering any reactions that would come flooding back at us. It works (especially for kids, in low-power situations) but is a suboptimal cultural norm.

But I didn’t find the way in to communicate it, the thread to pull where the words start flowing. So, I can feel some disappointment and embarrassment at myself for failing to produce what I had wanted. And I can also shrug and just be okay with the fact that it didn’t happen. Then, I can imagine you reading this and thinking “what a crappy newsletter, maybe I should unsubscribe.” And I can make contact with this reality and still be okay — I’m gonna be okay even if you unsubscribe. Then, I can predict feeling shame if someone hears my previous sentence as implying “I don’t care about you (or your feelings)” because I decided to ship a crappy newsletter despite knowing that I’ve wasted your time for 350 words now. And that’s not true; I do care about you and your experience. But I’m also okay if trying to express an authentic truth results in being misinterpreted — even if I’m correct about predicting that misinterpretation (which, often, I’m not).

Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, August 27th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Seen this morning:

your child asks you, why are we here? why are we alive?
what do you say? -Tasshin

I flipped the script just now and asked my kids what they thought:
kid1: No idea. I don’t know.
kid2: Uh, because God created us?
kid3: <shrug> … I have no idea. … So, this is my lego car… 😂

Our next orientation video call is next week, Saturday August 27^th

Imagine the great hall of an ancient stone castle, as you swing open the heavy oak doors twice as tall as yourself. The large rectangular room stretches lengthwise in front of you, unoccupied, stone walls well lit by steady flames in sconces at regular intervals. As you walk down the spacious, high-ceilinged hall, you see rows of framed portraits on both sides, honoring the many people who sometimes occupy this space, the denizens of this realm. Next to each frame, you see their own words extending goodwill, as well as their current quest, where they can be found, and even a magic button to summon them. Midway down one side of the room, you find your own frame - a representation of your own presence and shared membership in the society that has built this castle and ranges across this land. Turning in a circle to survey the whole hall, you can feel the care and comradeship that suffuses even the stones themselves, and look forward to the next gathering which will animate this space with laughter and stories and song.

Thus goes the vision of the Hall of Members - a large piece of our new castle (err, excuse me: Member Portal) that anchors our community in persistent virtual space. The vision above is meant to convey the experience, the atmosphere, of our intention in having it. In reality the hall is currently a spreadsheet, and it doesn’t have any fancy VR tech or even pictures yet. The simple aim is a sense of potential and of belonging. Our regular interactions happen via live video, and while we value rich interpersonal relating far more than lower-bandwidth platforms, I think this extension of our relational container fills a gap between and outside of our calls.

The idiosyncratic name is similarly intentional, inviting questions about what it is, what it means, what might be possible in or through this handcrafted “Hall of Members” artifact. We get to co-evolve our understanding of its purpose alongside the iteration of its form and functionality. There are currently 30+ name-frames arrayed in “the hall” and I imagine that seeing it now for the first time will give us a much better sense of what kind of info wants to be there for round two. We’ll be refreshing this each season, part of our regular lifecycle of self-awareness and intention renewal.

Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, August 13th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

This is a “slice of life” update, sharing what’s happening inside the IS umbrella.

Last week we welcomed Seishin from Willow Monastic Academy for a session of open exploration from curiosity. Some of that went toward the life-of-practice of a modern monastic, our respective ecologies of practice, and other topics… and also multiple folks noted and appreciated being impacted by Seishin’s quality of presence and/or energy. I’m glad to grow our group-to-group connection, aligned by similar aims and approaches, and so create another link in the meta-network.

This week we’re coming back around to IFS (Internal Family Systems) to reconnect with its parts-of-self model, vocabulary, and connect to capital-S Self (which then seems linked to personal integrity-aura, personal field feeding relational field). I label it as an “oracle” type practice, because one tends to end up learning things that they didn’t know they knew.

Next orientation call is not this week, but the following week: Saturday, August 13th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Written down in front of me, staring at me from my scratch paper notes, are the words “capacity-building.” This is a crux-y kind of tension and polarity for me, certainly in the context of Intentional Society, but even as an individual looking at today’s world and asking myself how it is best to relate. Like in this quote:

How can we move at the speed of trust… when facing the speed of catastrophe?
-Alexis Goggans, h/t Brian

There are such big challenges facing humanity, which are being felt already and which may batter us harder and sooner than most of us believe. Do we have time to “slow down”? Will anything other than slowing down (to shift who we are and the capacity we have) work? How much time and energy should one put into sharpening their axe before chopping down a tree? This is of course the explore/exploit tradeoff, the donor’s dilemma, several names for it.

In-progress change won’t shut our front door: Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, July 30th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

As we loosen the requirement/commitment boundary to be more inclusive in the definition of Intentional Society membership, the juiciest question floating around our design space has been something like, “Should there be a minimum participation requirement?” for what it means to be in IS. I can’t point to many other split opinions regarding our now-accepted proposal, but it makes perfect sense that the main question about “moving the boundary” might be “to where exactly?”

On the one hand, there’s a “don’t make a rule, rules are dumb” argument — which I’m not poking fun at; I agree! Rules are dumb to the extent that they are hard or inflexible and there’s an inherent flattening of trying to partition a complex space with a single line. The more zig-zags get added to the line to capture nuance, the more you lose the simplicity benefit of having a rule in the first place. Plus, extrinsic motivation/coercion is generally bad because it displaces internal motivation, and we’re all about avoiding coercion as a practice.

On the other hand, there’s a “but it has to mean something” argument - which I also agree with! If you don’t set the bar somewhere, then the bar itself can vanish and with it, the trust that comes from sharing in common some level of commitment. Also “what’s the point?” of wanting to be a member if one is deterred by the prospect of partaking of the access it provides?

Three small vignettes of what is happening, moving, weaving around and in us:

The tangibility of our relational field was present again with us last week, when we contrasted a high-structure activity (the skill-building of Empathy Circling, the communications equivalent of isolating and exercising a few specific muscles) with a complete lack of goal/rules/structure (aside from our standard Interaction Agreements). Inside that freedom, we could still see something happening in the quality of what it’s like to be together. There’s a “we space” active in shared presence, and a connection of every I-to-We along which something energetic/empathic flows, and a web of interpersonal connections and relationships undergirding the relational field/fabric. I feel more gravity in our “us” week by week, anchoring and holding more securely the characteristics of the essence of our we-ness.

We’re trying out a name, “Community Practice Session,” to replace the generic term “General Session” in referring to our weekly calls. This also adds some specificity as we de-center the weekly call sequence in the identity of Intentional Society and make our membership membrane more inclusive. The concrete shifts are small and low-impact, just like this name change, but they add up to a perspectival expansion that will both widen and deepen the spirit of this society we’re growing together.

In our community practice session this week we’re welcoming Mary as friend and featured guest, who will introduce us to a gift economy structure, a circle practice around giving and receiving in community. This has been reified as the Gift Circle practice in one lineage, elsewhere as an Offers and Needs Market, and Mary has learned and iterated this practice in a way that focuses on giving and receiving in an intentional and conscious way.

Second-chance orientation call Saturday, July 16th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” -Blaise Pascal probably

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” -Shakespeare, Hamlet

“why waste time say lot word when few word do trick” -Kevin, The Office

…The meta-level humor here is that I just gave you three quotes where any one of them would suffice. An ironic nod to the difficulty of concision.

Thus follows a next step in the progression of condensing my writing about an identity expansion, also gestured at last week, trying to include more of why this is important:

Orientation registration link for newcomers Saturday, July 9th 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). Season 7 kickoff on Sunday.

< Meta: I am writing to you. One part of me wants to clench (showing up in my diaphragm or nearby muscles) a message of concern, even panic, and tell me “try hard to get it right, this is important!” It doesn’t carry too far amongst my other parts, but I want to honor that care and value for the importance of this work — AND that it’s not about trying harder. >

First, the field. It feels different to me, some difference I’m carrying into this relational field. A sense of potential isn’t unusual as we embark on a new quarterly season of community gatherings, but this feels more significant, a bigger shift — in the self-identity of IS, in the leadership more people can bring forward, and in the integrity of presence and of my self that I can bring to contribute toward anchoring the field. More space, more fluidity, a stronger supportive net of capacity and security. Anchored and grounded while also free and spacious.

Then the membrane dividing in and out, that is in motion also. The field, the fabric, can hold more space, allow for a greater variety of forms for what “being in” Intentional Society looks like. If you feel a kinship with the spirit of what we are doing, I invite you to come in, there is room for you! You’re invited to join us on Sunday to hear more, regardless of whether you’ll be attending weekly this season. Get oriented on Saturday if you haven’t, or else reply to this email to ask for a meeting link if you’ve fallen off the invite list. If you can’t make it this weekend, you’ll hear more once we figure out a few more details.

<Meta status: My personal conviction has solidified directionally in vision-space. Big questions remain. This is an echolocation broadcast, bouncing it outward and seeing what reflects back. Vibe/gut/thought reactions invited!>

Intentional Society is almost ready for an identity shift. A developmental transition, where what it identifies as will shift to something that it has. (This “is a” to “has a” shift is also called the “subject to object shift” in adult development psychology, used in stage theory models for individual development. It doesn’t feel like much of an anthropomorphic stretch to fit the concept of self-identity and “how something conceives of itself” to an organization, thought there’s some transitivity behind the construct.)

Intentional Society currently is, basically, a weekly virtual gathering of relating and exploring in service of self-led personal growth. That will start to become something that IS has, but which does not fully define the identity of IS or what it means to be a member of IS. Its self-identity will grow more expansive, with more complexity and variety of activity held within the bounds of its broadening tent.

Currently:

Click here to sign up for our next orientation video call on Saturday, June 11th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Last Sunday we finished holding a task/process as a practice and consented to a set of facilitation proposals. It felt good to declare completion and celebrate the making of some decisions, and just as strongly if felt good to have slowed down to make compassionate space for relating with our own reactions.

Most proposals were aimed at the 26th (a day run fully without me), but we’re getting started this week. Working in public, I figure I’ll try to generate and lay out here my current working guidance for facilitating an “exploring” segment of an Intentional Society general session.

• Exploring (as an IS session activity) is the breadth pole, complementing the depth pole of relating. The extension, fueling the integration.
• Exploring points to learning, extending, stretching, adventuring, perspective
• The facilitator is a leader, the lead explorer, setting the direction of the expedition
• The ideal leader stance combines both experience\expertise and invitation\questioning
• Storytelling from their unique experience brings understanding, connection, empathy
• Sourcing an invitation brings out the wisdom across the group and focuses it
• Meaning, discovery, transformation — those can’t be forced or given by a facilitator. Relational\emotional resonance is what bridges the gap of transmission, sparking similar perspective across differences. (Net: just be yourself, be real, and let your passion flow through.)
• Exploration can be play, and people are game. Exploring can be combined or coupled with relating.
• Yes, you can pick any kind of structure — and yes, “share for 10 minutes, small groups for 20” is a simple\safe\sane default starting point
• Worries about the impact of an invitation can be brought with and held as a part of the invitation. An invitation shan’t force vulnerability, but shall frame up space to allow it.

Our next orientation video call will be Saturday, June 11^th

Tech note: This email is arriving from newsletter-updates@intentionalsociety.org with hopefully improved deliverability! Please reply if you notice any difference, positive or negative, for your inbox — and do add it to your address book or safe sender list to help train the algorithms.

Hello, friend. I want to share with you about our very interesting last two weeks. But I’m also feeling a bit hesitant and unsure about how to summarize. What if this is relational practice, though — right now? Practicing presence with you imagined in front of me… if I had only a few minutes (or, <500 words) with you, how much of that should I spend on slowing down and attending to our connection?

Slow down. Attend to the field between us, surrounding us. I’m taking that with me from our experience so far in a process on which we’ve spent parts of our past two sessions: selecting those who shall facilitate (the call, the relating, the exploring) a session at the end of June, when I (James) will be absent for the first time in our 1.5-year history.

Click here to sign up for our next orientation video call on Saturday, May 28th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

My desire for you is that you would be the most you that you can be in every moment. On the spectrum of potential you-ness, that you would live as the most alive you, the most spacious, most whole, most coherent, least encumbered you.

I could say “the best you” also, as you then check where your definition of “best” comes from. Does it come from the approval of others? Does it come from your accomplishments? If “best” means the the fullness of who you are and want to be, then I also wish that for you.

I wish you awareness, so that you can hold as object the many parts of your self system as they activate and move moment by moment. I wish you awareness of your awareness, such that you may learn to learn and grow how you grow — so that you can see the making-object process as you perform it.

Still trying to catch an Orientation? Next call this Saturday May 21st, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

Goodhart’s law has become a fairly well-known label for the entanglement of incentives with measurements:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.”

I’ve even heard that effect name verbified as Goodharting — that measures can be Goodharted by focusing pressure upon them, and that some measures are more susceptible or resistant than others to being corrupted thusly. Goodharting is the pressure that creates the incentive to game a system, by linking measurement to reward.

Please indulge me, if you’re reading along here, as I fumble with words today. I wish to locate, coalesce, and attempt to describe an… evolutionary expansion in how I perceive of and relate to Intentional Society.

As a meta preface: The reality of IS, when I can feel the truth of it in my bones, is something I’m uncovering more than creating. It’s already there waiting for us, like dinosaur bones to paleontologists — a configuration of relations within the possibility space of reality. It’s (by definition of purpose) the living system of human awareness and agency, organizing and embodying the attractors constantly bridging from current society to the next. IS is what is possible if we attend to our deepest values and integrate across the whole of our lives.

Now, about that shift in perception. I’ll try saying, “from club to collective” and see if that points at it well enough. It’s a developmental shift, which means going from a “is-a” identity relationship to a “has-a” containment relationship — the ‘ol “transcend and include” move. By using club I mean to connote the tight-knit active social interaction that defines its boundary: the neighborhood tree-house meetup, the after-school drama club. IS has thus far been a club of active explorers, meeting weekly with each other to practice relating to ourselves and each other in awareness-building ways.

IS is that but, now I’m seeing that it is not just that, that it has that and also more than that. In using the word collective I mean to connote a wider variety of self-organized expressions, bounded by an alignment in purpose, goals, perspective, desires. As the “fuzzy cloud” of people around, coming through, and in orbit of Intentional Society (club definition) has increased steadily over the past year, the potential for an expanded collective definition of IS has kept rising.

Newcomers, our next Orientation call is this Saturday May 7th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

We were over 20 people together last Sunday, and while attendance has been gradually increasing (and fluctuates week to week), the last three weeks or so (going back to the final week of last season) has felt to me like traveling over a threshold in terms of facilitation and group-size-feel. To use a human-body analogy, it’s less like “growing pains” in one’s shins/femurs, and more like “oh look how tall you are now, you can reach that cupboard yourself.” Some shifts I’m noticing or doing:

• “Large group” check-ins still require breakout rooms, can’t do full-group check-ins and hear everyone’s voice. (We tend to alternate smaller-or-larger check-in groups)
• No longer practical for me to review random breakout assignments while facilitating. This was minimal (ensuring new folks aren’t clustered alone, occasionally gender balance) and I don’t feel a need to react to regain it now, but would need a role split to a 2nd person to do so.
• I’ve tried keeping the breakout groups steady throughout a session, rather than randomly mixing each time. This forgoes “I have a sense of knowing everyone” in favor of supporting at least some closer connections developing.
• Noticing/Meta time might be changing in feel? I mean, everything always changes, but the question is still open here re how much the dynamic has shifted/is shifting with more of a stage/wall-of-faces presence reducing the intimacy of one’s potentially-vulnerable sharing of awareness.

That “Noticing time” is our last significant full-group open-mic practice, aside from some practice-debrief sharing spots. I do want to keep it that way until scale markedly changes the experience, because that felt sense of “we-space shared consciousness” and group attunement seems quite important to our overall vibe of connectedness. Even that could be split, but we’ll see how to do that whenever it ends up being the next logical step.

It’s not too late (it never is) to join the new season! Orientation call this Saturday April 30th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

The polarity of “being and doing” has danced in my head quite persistently — I was writing about it two years ago, as well as two months ago here. These two different energies, priorities, leans, seem so pivotal in the developmental transition from conventional to post-conventional logics/stages.

But, have you ever repeated a word often enough that it seems to lose all meaning for a minute? I feel a bit like that this week, looking at this relationship so intently that the terms themselves seem to dissolve. Swirling around integrative thoughts like “we’re never not being” and “even choosing to be is a doing” have me questioning what exactly I’ve been meaning with those word-pointers.

Being-ness is stillness, presence, feeling, attuning. Doing-ness is movement, acting, deciding, building. What about other nearby polarities?

New folks need an orientation call before attending general sessions. To catch the start of season 6, join us on Saturday April 2nd, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

I’m feeling excited, supported, and just-the-right-amount of “how will it work out?” nervous to begin our 6^th quarterly season of Intentional Society. Today I’ve reached confidence that this is the right time to begin a big shift in our meta landscape — from “James leads all the stuff” to “this is a capable community effort.” Well, possibly the right time was even earlier, who truly knows, but I’m feeling it in the maturing call structure, the strong core group, the cultural foundation, and the momentum of group size. Now, it would be a big mistake if we didn’t start reducing the bottleneck of my leadership and perspective being so dominant. Instead of the-James-show, we can unleash the ready creativity and capability of other members to contribute their leadership, starting with the facilitation of some sections of our general sessions. Simple, yet very visible.

There are moving parts and fiddly bits to navigate along the way: minimum-viable roles and responsibilities, skill-matching and feedback, coordination, scheduling, nominating-and/or-volunteering, etc. But I’m feeling pretty sanguine towards all that, with a feeling of lightness in my bodymind contemplating the imminence of entering a phase shift that no longer smells like “letting go” (with the connotation of things falling down or given up) but like trusting and grateful interdependence and mutual support. And (reminder to myself of previous learning) I don’t need to shrink myself or my leadership to do it. It’s not a zero-sum game. Maybe “you own this too” should be a mantra for me as we walk this direction. 😆

So that evolution excites me at the meta level. Perhaps integration, of being-and-doing or other polarities, might guide us in our content-level explorations for a bit, as I touched on last week, even while we continue deepening our foundational strengths. I’m stoked, as the kinds probably no-longer even ironically say these days. I will say it sincerely, then, post-ironic sincerity. Let’s go!

This is our quarterly rest week — an in-between time of change and strategy and potential, when I put on my system design hat towards our next season. I was glad to share that hat with other community members in yesterday’s Meta Meeting, and am brimming now with connections between ideas, proposals, and collected wisdom.

The way/dao of Intentional Society is a way of being, the essence of being how-we want-to-be, inhabiting our highest values in self-awareness, spacious presence, and coherent intention…

…as. we. live. Life, everywhere and all the time, not just when we’re together. The pull/call/desire I’m describing is toward integration across outside (of General Sessions) and inside parts. Opening up to more doing-energy, while retaining our priority on being-ness. Opening up to more exterior action, to complement our interior action.

Bringing in more space for increased scope, that allows room for more complete, integrated learning loops to occur in our personal journeys: The inner game (inside ourselves, and inside our community) connects and flows outward to the outer game, which brings new feedback to fuel the inner game, and so forth.

Last orientation call of the season, this Saturday April 9^th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC) — come if you’d like to get involved next season beginning April 24^th

This Sunday will be our seasonal big-picture retrospective-cross-envisioning. Sensing, not just from what’s there, but also from what’s not there. Thinking about this possibility space right here right now by myself, the thing I’d like to confront is the question of whether/how I am holding Intentional Society back.

This is a good question to ask oneself regularly even if nothing at all feels held back, but something “in there” is already calling me to diagnosis. This wouldn’t be the first time: I’ve held IS back in the past by being tentative about my leadership, uncomfortable with the power embodied in my founding role. For better or worse, I currently do and drive a lot of what IS is structurally, and so any limitations of our evolution are probably tangled up in my own shadows or rigidity of direction.

The thing that’s calling to me from outside of the current IS boundary is some kind of “deep yes” resonance, a “know it when I see it” state of systemic rightness, a fitness-to-purpose that’s tangible when a whole system starts humming with the self-reinforcing energy of tipping into a new gravity well/attractor basin. I’ve tasted the potential of truly high-performing teams, and I’ve seen when a plan comes together in a complex domain, when awareness and intentionality and values and purpose all combine to produce a new mode of being-and-doing far beyond conventional capabilities.

Our orientation calls for newcomers continue this Saturday April 2nd, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

“What can I un-know?”

That was the prompt and subject this week in our group practice. I’d been approaching this subject for a couple weeks before we tried the experiment last Sunday, to mixed reviews.

On the structure/container dimension, I tried to leave it minimal and loose, using “abiding in silence and holding divergence” (h/t Lisa Norton) as the main guidance. Full group, not even a talking piece, see what emerges. However, I notice that “using a prompt” itself had a stronger impact than I anticipated, and am taking a note to the effect of “the smaller the amount of structure is, the more concentrated its usage will be.”

If you’d like to experience Intentional Society, start with an orientation call Saturday March 26th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

Looking back at cases

Last Sunday we finished (for now, I think) our multi-week focus on case practices. Case work? Maybe I should say “case presencing,” verbifying “presence” to point at the act of bringing one’s presence deliberately in service of another person and their world. (Tip of the hat to the Presencing Institute for that move and for bringing Case Clinic into our usage.)

Presence could be said to be made up of our attention, our focus, our engagement, and maybe even our attitude. To give it to another person, as we do in our case practices, is a gift. The experience of receiving that gift was called “decadent” and “luxurious” by our case-sharers.

We’ve entered US Daylight Saving time - our orientation call this Saturday March 19th is at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time, which is now 8pm UTC.

Last year I was in the habit of regularly giving, in our Sunday sessions, a weekly reminder that “I don’t know what I’m doing and we’re making this all up as we go along.” I realized recently that I had fallen out of that habit of repeating that saying, and at the lower/practical level of “doing what we do together in a general session” I do think that is correct. We have more now in the way of the rhythms and routines of practicing what we practice together.

But at a higher level, this is and needs to remain true and salient in my awareness. I am reminded of Lisa Norton’s uncertainment practice, framing this as a “negative capability” of abiding in uncertainty. Maybe I could say “inverted” to highlight the complementarity — like digging a hole versus building a tower, something like making space for better foundations.

What will Intentional Society become, where will it lead us, what will we grow into with it? I don’t know. And it’s hard to maintain that openness when my mind wants to make assumptions, wants to plan and control and know, all the good effectiveness practices of systematicity that themselves need to be object-ed and transcended to re-integrate with the complexity of reality that doesn’t fit inside those systems that are small enough to fit inside our brains.

Yes we’re having an orientation call this Saturday, March 12th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Pesky clock-management note: March 12th is the last day before Daylight Savings Time hits the USA, so orientation folks can ignore. Sunday folks, remember on the 13th to A) shift your clocks forward one hour if you are inside it, or else B) move the start time of Intentional Society one hour earlier in your time zone to compensate. (Europeans, the transitory off-by-one will last for 2 weeks this year.)

With a swell of newer folks and absent some older folks lately (last week especially, but it’s a trend over 3-4 weeks), the average tenure in the room felt noticeably lower last Sunday. I found myself explaining structural aspects of the Sunday session almost as if it were the start of a new season. The “tenure effect” can swing the opposite direction as well, but I don’t think I’ve bumped into the “too insular” feeling of high tenure yet in IS the last 14 months.

Tenure/experience seems like a organizational dimension with a sweet spot and homeostatic feedback — at least, that’s what my corporate-trained OD part says. Focus on retention, or focus on recruitment, to bring the system back into balance. An organization trying to perpetuate itself kind of looks like an infinite game playing-to-keep-playing mode of self-balancing behavior. But there’s something outside that trying to get my attention today, with a “but what if we didn’t?” provocation. If “dimension” is often just another word for a polarity, what integrations are possible if we don’t just automatically swing the other direction when feeling tilted?

Our next (large!) orientation call is this Saturday, March 5th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Welcome to all the new subscribers of this little list! About 30 people attended Monday’s Stoa session live, with about 500 subsequent views on YouTube. Here is that recording, which contains a 20 minute presentation plus 35 minutes of Q&A.

With the interest/awareness triggered by the Stoa session, we might have a noticeable jump in our attendance this week. Last Sunday in our meta time, we considered how to respond to a possible surge, with “sure, let a big cohort in!” being favored over “make a waitlist and trickle people in.” So if that’s you, don’t hang back!

Last week I was talking about relational cases, so here’s a brief update. We did take the “What I really want to say” setup and pair that with Circling (more-or-less) as a sort of “relational case” or “case circling” mash-up. (When I say “case,” that concept/word is sourced from Theory U’s Case Clinic practice.) We’re not necessarily done with it, but here are a few observations:

There will be an IS orientation call this Saturday, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

Stoa session on Monday!

Intentional Society is making an appearance on The Stoa! The Stoa is a “digital campfire” in the sensemaking space, appreciated by many IS members for providing access to many interesting and influential thinkers. This session will consist of a 15-20 minute talk, followed by Q&A, then some (non-recorded) relational practices. I’ll be sharing what we’ve learned from our first year of practice, and you are invited to come hear, show support, contribute questions, and play the taster games. Register here for the interactive session on Monday February 28th at 3pm Pacific (6pm Eastern, 11pm UTC).

Last week: Safety and freedom

There will be an orientation call this Saturday, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

Intentional Society is making an appearance on The Stoa on the 28^th! Register here for the (3pm Pacific, 6pm Eastern, 11pm UTC) interactive session.

If I feel a little nervous and averse to writing about something, that’s probably a good signal for me to lean into it, right? Especially if that makes the case in point recursively, because the thing itself is about holding back.

The moment itself was Sunday, while Circling near the end of our latest IS session. The topic of privilege arose within the group, and I could feel myself constrict as my nervous system perked up to the possible dangers. Privilege intersects with very real and personal differences among us — of skin color, of socioeconomic status, and gosh wokeness & DEI is just about the hottest front of the current culture wars. Was it safe to talk about this, in this space, for all present participants? Would diving in push unwanted emotional labor onto non-white participants, maybe further reify the identity-label-based frames that can themselves be charged? Were there “rules” of expression we weren’t conscious of?

This Saturday, Feb 12: Orientation call 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)
This Sunday’s community gathering features: present-moment-expression practice

I have a wondering for you: What balance do you personally hold between “seeking” growth and “letting” growth happen?

In a “seeking” state, you might be trying, practicing, rehearsing, doing certain activities. Going to the gym to exercise your muscles. Practicing your scales to improve your piano playing. Concentration meditation to train your focus. This is the “doing” mode.

In a “letting” state, you might be observing, listening, being with yourself. Listening to the sensations that are alive in your body. Facing and feeling a fear without resisting it. Opening awareness meditation being with but not involved in arising thoughts. This is the “being” mode.

Click here to sign up for our next orientation video call on Saturday, February 5th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

<turns on microphone> *tap tap* ahem:

“Intentional Society is a community of people who want to grow — to develop into be the people we want to be. We create space for growth by communing with each other in relational practices, practicing being and becoming.”

…at least once a week, I’m explaining to someone what Intentional Society is. Wordings condense and smooth out slowly over time, like water wearing down rock. But there are tipping points, too, where the erosion uncovers a new path for a section of the river.

To join us on this path, register for this orientation call Saturday January 29^th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

After the party, we faced a rather open agenda. Where should we head next in our practices? I’m going to use this space here to continue refining the design that we worked up on Monday: Core relational practices plus individual development themes.

This feels like a loop around an evolving spiral, the spiral being something like the essence of Intentional Society. The practices that now feel “core” do so by virtue of their impact on us, the sense of meaning we come away with, which also correlates with our enjoyment. Here’s a new phrase for describing the core: “perceiving, expressing, and sensemaking.” Oh, and I notice that also almost maps to the I/we/world relating scopes — relating to “others, ourselves, and systems.”

The design innovation that’s most alive for me right now is the “theming” frame of bringing a developmental lens to our experience of these practices. We’ve done some explicitly developmental work, and some “pure” practices, but few solid combinations. I’m excited about further integration in a way that helps us give ourselves space to grow. By “space” I mean not pushing or driving ourselves to achieve what we “should,” but instead listening to the pull and call of the contexts that challenge us and stretch us towards greater capacity.

Want to join the party? Get involved first! Saturday orientation call January 22^nd, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

We’re having a… party? Intriguingly, I notice a sense of “uh-oh” when I use that word. There’s a part of me, age 16 or so, that isn’t cool, and knows that “party” parties are held by and for cool people, so obviously it would be a disaster to go fake being cool. Oh, plus there’s usually “bad stuff” happening at parties, right (I had a quite a culturally religious upbringing), so that would make me a bad person to be supportive of that stuff…

Feeling the cringe sensation, hah. Anyone else with that kind of word association? I’ve generally relaxed the fear-of-others parts of me in many contexts, but it’s interesting to notice the almost word-specific trigger here. It’s not even a required word — we could call this a celebration. But that’s such a generic word. More specifically, we’re commemorating one year of weekly General Session meetings of Intentional Society. But that feels a little too solemn. We commemorate fallen soldiers, for example. There needs to be some levity, some fun in the word.

What do I want out of this party? I want to delight in the presence of friends. I want to hear what Intentional Society is or means to different people. I want to hear encouraging words from outside allies. I want to hear appreciations of various people flying around. I want to get a little silly, and laugh multiple times.

Don’t know what Intentional Society really is? Join the orientation call Saturday January 15th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

Disclaimer: I could be off, of course. Don’t rate these thoughts more highly than anyone who has seriously (like, hundred+ hours, versus ten) studied and practiced IFS. But after prepping an intro last week, here are the key characteristics of IFS that I think explain why it helps people:

It requires outside perspective

If you’re experientially on the inside of a feeling, IFS would call that being “blended” with that part. By labeling it as a “part,” it becomes something un-blended — an object distinct from your self. That’s cognitive de-fusion, aka ADT’s subject-object shift, an “I have” relationship rather than “I am.”

Newcomers are invited to an orientation call Saturday January 8th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC) as an onramp to connecting with the community.

Internal Family Systems (henceforth IFS) has come up more and more recently in my world, and the “parts” model seems to be “in the water” in developmental spaces. Several other Intentional Society participants have similar energy/interest, and in this Sunday’s session we will explore this model and play with how it might be useful to us.

The phrase “parts work” seems to have two pieces, to my eye. The first is just that we (our mind/personality/consciousness) are made up of distinguishable parts that can be in conflict with each other. There is something of this in common vernacular: we say “part of me wants X, but another part wants Y” easily and frequently. The second piece embeds a claim that we can mentally model these parts as coherent agents and interrogate them about their values, motivations, and reasoning.

(Hopefully my usage of neutral “pieces” vs mental “parts” there is clean? The originator of IFS, Dr. Richard Schwartz, says “we call them parts because it’s the most user-friendly word. It’s not the best word, in the sense of being descriptive…”)

Orientation call tomorrow for newcomers: Saturday January 1st, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC) RSVP here

Happy New Year as we enter 2022! This marks the start of our 5^th season and 2^nd year of Intentional Society — and this Sunday is less a “kickoff” or “launch” as much as an “easing in” or “(re)connecting”. Not cramming a lot of information into a packed session, but rather relaxing into the vibe of the people and culture of this community. We’ll be warming ourselves up in Zoom House Party style on Jan 2^nd, which uses OST Principles and self-service breakout rooms with names like “Living Room,” “Garage,” and “Broom Closet” to facilitate virtual self-organization.

We’ll resume our rhythm of relational and developmental practices starting Jan 9^th, and we’re also intrigued to begin a new support structure for crewing that’s a “both+and” along with the Sunday sessions. Both independent and integrated, is the thinking of the sub-group that met this week to sketch out that vision.

If you’re looking for a good opportunity to gently check out IS, this seems like a great time. If you’ve attended in the past and disconnected, you’re welcome to pick back up where you left off. (just reply to this email if you’re not on current invite lists) If you see interconnections or opportunities across the Liminal Web or other related webs and ventures, drop us a line. I can’t wait to see what this year will bring us, on the path that we are both discovering and creating.

Intentional Society is on its seasonal rest week - regular activity will begin again on January 1^st.

I wish to point to and share a deep, structural learning that keeps grooving itself deeper into my pattern recognition. The specific form I’ve used for years is, “If something useful hurts, do it more often until it stops hurting.” For example, in software development it’s difficult to “ship high quality software” and if one is having difficulty reaching shippable quality, their natural urge will be to ship less often. However, the much better move is instead to ship much more often, a philosophy called “continuous delivery,” and in doing so the quality-degrading problems must be found and fixed. Increasing that frequency of that friction leads to the dissolution of the sources of friction, with a new and much happier equilibrium on the other side.

There’s a different framing called ugh fields of what I think is the same structure. This shows up in most procrastination - the compounding effect where we spend weeks avoiding an aversive thing that ends up taking only a few minutes when we finally face it. The strategy of avoiding and running away from the hurt only magnifies it, until we turn and see that the way out is through. Sometimes we’re very conscious of this… and then watching out for the “ugh field” can help us spot when we’re hiding our own flinch response from ourselves.

Looking at the new year approaching Intentional Society this last week, I (in community) noticed something similar applied. The useful-but-hard thing I desire is “sharing one’s desires for the future” — and the flinch I could detect was away from doing so myself. My rationalization was equity! To make more space for other voices, I should turn mine down, right? But… then my example encourages a behavioral norm of holding back! And/or a lack of trust that people could hear my desire while still holding on to their desires. Oh my, what a tension to be hiding out underneath that flinch.

Looking through a numbers lens requires a perspectival preamble: What’s our relationship to numbers? Modernity says they are data, hard cold evidence leading us to the capital-T one truth of the way things really are, unclouded by our sentiment and bias. But too often, numbers in this relationship offer us too-simple stories of understanding and of success. A more holistic approach like Warm Data adds the qualitative richness of interrelationships and complexity to the understandings we might attach to numbers.

Quantified self, “hockey stick” graphs, OKRs, GDP growth… when we get attached to numbers as representative of whatever value or success we seek to maximize, then the urge to pump those numbers up means we get bitten by Goodhart’s Law. The number gets detached from the actual value/goal and starts moving independently - and deceptively, if we still believe in its straightforward representationality.

Even when we know the numbers are symbolic indexes pointing at deeper values… it can be hard to avoid transferring attachment. I attended a church long ago that regularly proclaimed “it’s not about the numbers” even while touting, and taking obvious pride in, their number of baptisms/conversions each year and the size of their crowds. It’s tricky because the correlation really can exist there, and we can’t pretend that it’s meaningless to us, even as we try to avoid Goodhart-ing.

Well this is lengthy for a preamble, isn’t it. Okay, the following numbers are tiny little reference points connected to a thick tapestry of life and lives and living. I’d like you to hold that awareness along with me, as we take a peek through this kind of lens. Bigger isn’t better — even if we wish to live in a world where the entirety of human society is radically transformed. There are interesting things to see here — but don’t be fooled into thinking the numbers let you understand them well.

The last orientation call of 2021 is this Saturday December 11th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC). Can you believe we’ve done 33 this year?

Hi friends, we’ve just finished three weeks of Circling (link is a good explainer by Tasshin, check it out if you’re unfamiliar) and I’d like to share about our experience with this relational practice. Circling asks us to inhabit the space of “What’s it like to be this person, in their world?” – and the primacy of this curiosity is IMHO Circling’s primary distinction as compared to T-Group, another practice focused on present-moment-experience. For us, I could feel the compassion and empathy flowing through the tone of these curious questions, questions like “What’s that like? (to say or hear)” and “How do you feel now (having said that)?”

Without preplanning up front, we tried three different styles, in this order:

1. fixed focus (aka “birthday” circling) with one predetermined circlee for X minutes each
2. free-flowing focus (aka “organic”)
3. developmental circling (aka “topical” and in fixed mode)

Our orientation call series resumes this Saturday December 4th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

Looking back at the history page of intentionalsociety.org, I see that it was December 5th of last year when I first published the call to gather like-minded folks under the banner of Intentional Society. That call/manifesto/document doesn’t seem too cringe yet – the problems haven’t changed, and awareness and intention are still great metasystemic skills. The solution description is a little abstruse overall, I’d say. Can I condense it more pithily a year later? I might say something like…

Relational practices with developmental intention to expand our perspectives and become our fullest selves, while building a culture+org that can spread itself.

Not bad… pretty punchy IMHO for a pretty complex strategy. Participants and allies, how would you express or emphasize the essence of IS any differently?

No orientation this week, but you can register for a December 4th call.

A few days ago I thought, “I don’t wanna do a thematic US Thanksgiving letter, no way.” Yet here in it, full of traditional food, family visitors just departed, and social feeds full of expressions of gratitude… it’s alive in this moment, and I’ve found myself with a wish to share today.

My wish for you is, inner freedom – and the contentedness that comes from making peace with the way things truly are while also not ceasing to care for what may yet be.

This is another spiral around the acceptance-and-desire polarity for me: Thanksgiving for the both-attached-and-non-attached. My childhood conception of Thanksgiving was “grateful for this list of good things we have.” The next level is “grateful for unpleasant things too, for the good mixed in with (or because of) the bad.” And the next is “grump, all that gratefulness just increases suffering - either attaching satisfaction to things that can be taken away, or a way to be in denial.”

Our next orientation call is Saturday November 20th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

How free is our will? I like this question much more than the ol' chestnut, "Does free will exist?" Framing it as a binary creates apparent paradox because at the scale of experience the answer is obviously yes and at the scale of physics the answer is obviously no, but debating yes versus no just confuses the frames.

I say that our will is as free as our attention is wide. Here I'm using attention to mean "we are consciously focused on a thing in the present moment" as contrasted with awareness meaning "we have some sense of a thing being present, though our attention can be focused elsewhere." The former is a subset of the latter: We can't pay attention to anything we're not aware of, and we "pay" attention to many fewer things than we have ready-to-hand.

There's also another layer below that, of "there in our senses, but we're not even aware of it". When we pay attention to our awareness itself, we can notice those sensations that we would otherwise filter out or ignore, and bring them into awareness. Once in awareness, they become objects that are possible for us to put our attention on, to use as we choose.

Want to practice together being the selves, friends, and agents we want to be? RSVP for an orientation Saturday November 13th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

“Enough talking about the thing, let’s actually do the thing!”

That’s an embellishment of a sentiment coming out of last Sunday and heading towards this week’s session. In this case the thing is something like “relating to each other” and the meta layer was talking about our conventions and norms for interpersonal outreach and connection outside of the general sessions.

There’s another “thing” though, one like “growing an organization and culture intentionally” – which sure looks and sounds very similar to the meta of the first thing! Does it land differently, framed as its own goal vs as the reflective layer atop another goal? Either way, both are necessary and one shouldn’t displace the other.

Just before our US clocks fall back from Daylight time, there's an orientation call this Saturday! November 6th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC) RSVP here

Is this the right time to journey together? RSVP for the orientation

There will be an orientation call again this week: Saturday October 23rd, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC) RSVP here

If you’d like to connect to the community life of Intentional Society, register for the orientation call this Saturday

We began our season last Sunday! The door is still open, so by all means join the orientation call this Saturday at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC) to get connected.

I think this newsletter space is mostly keeping you informed, dear reader, but sometimes I wonder if I get even more from doing it! In sharing my learning the kickoff session on Sunday, yet another new opportunity emerged right onto this page.

Want to catch the start of this next season? Our orientation call this Saturday, October 2nd

Coming soon – Season 4 starts with an orientation call for newcomers on October 2nd