Crafting Flexible Containers
How to begin when your community dreams are big
I am always trying to expand my liminal comfort zone, a made-up phrase I just created in this very moment to describe the alternative headspace to all-or-nothing, black-or-white thinking.
It could also be called the limbo mind palace or goopy brain. (Please share your own naming ideas below, thank you.)
When feeling the pull of the either/or, this/that, I try to hold the in-between space of and, of a little bit of everything, of purple or green or orange, blends!
I find myself pulling on this skill most in community when creating something new. Especially when that new thing has big dreams. A new recurring gathering. A new working group or project team. A new partnership.
The newness : aspiration ratio is HIGHLY CORRELATED, BABY, because there’s infinite potential in the blank slate.
But those aspirations can sparkle so brightly – like any new beginning – they can throttle us into a more rigid, all-or-nothing state of decisionmaking.
It’s the sort of headspace that stops us from creating flexible containers for community that allow us to learn together, grow at our own pace, and emerge co-creatively over time.
Recently, I participated in a board retreat and couldn’t stop eating handfuls of nonpareil chocolates and stale matzo. We were imagining the future state of the board for our next phase of recruitment. Everyone was blurting out names of dream board members, and it quickly became a thrilling sort of vibe check for the ideal kind of person we might want to ask to join. One of them was a state representative.
Immediately, someone voiced fear around the idea that our (growing + slightly scrappy) board wouldn’t feel formal enough for someone like that. A state representative would expect more established cadences, systems, onboarding. While we have these things in place, we are also still growing, learning a lot, and adjusting from the transition of our founder moving on last year.
This sparked a new spiral: Could we get our processes more robust in time for recruitment? Would we ever be ready to recruit someone of that caliber? Wait a second, would anybody new want to join in the current state we’re in?
This kind of thinking poses a few risks:
We rush to become something we’re not and burn ourselves out in the process
We exclude others (aka future board members) from ideating on this vision with us over time
We miss out on essential lessons that could be learned from moving slower and in a flexible, phased way
Basically, it was an all-or-nothing moment: the proposal of a super legit person made us wonder if we were ready at all.
But the answer – or “an” answer – should be as flexible as our community needs it to be.
What if we think about recruitment in phases, where we think of all of the amazing local leaders who would be excited to join us in this moment of emergence, even if our onboarding happens over bahn mis or karaoke or while introducing them to our cats who bite your hand after you pet them for thirty-five seconds?
What if we’re transparent that we’re looking for folks excited by the opportunity to grow the board experience?
What if getting to a place where a state representative could join us is somewhere we aim for in two or three years, but are just as okay with it never making it to that place at all?
“People benefit from the clarity of a vision,” my colleague Larry Corio said to me the other day while we were talking community design principles as cool, fun people tend to do. But if we don’t start with relationship building or co-discovery, he shared, it can become a non-starter when beginning something new. Where does the aspiration of a vision inspire us, and where can it cramp flexibility?
When community containers start to feel the right sort of flexible to me, it feels expansive. It feels possibilitarian. It feels like something that can be started on right now, built with people who immediately pop into my mind. Like it has built-in potential to learn and get better. It feels like something that isn’t a big stretch or push from a current state of effort – maybe it even reduces effort – which usually means it’s within the capacity of myself and others holding the container. It means that it can actually grow at the pace of the community it exists with.
This thinking doesn’t stop us from moving ahead. It allows us to stay as flexible as the people we’re designing with.
P.S. Welcome to GROUP HUG!!!! I’m so freaking excited about this and hope to share here regularly, hear from you about what these ideas spark for you, and spelunk forever deeper into the elusive human magic that makes community possible. Did this little essay make you think of somebody? Share it with them via the button below, why dontcha!