The Speed of Belonging (Part 2 of 4)

Cultivating Belonging in our Communities

First off, if you haven’t yet, please check out Part 1 of The Speed of Belonging to help frame the Principles 1–4 that are explored below.

But before we move onto those, I’d like to help clarify and define a few terms brought forth in Part 1: The Speed of Belonging, True Belonging, An Act of Belonging, and A Belonging Mindset.

The Speed of Belonging: This is the intentional pace and adaptive steps that lead to the cultivation of true belonging with a community of stakeholders. It is a process and framework that is to be experimented with as a community can works to deepen belonging with all of its stakeholders.

True Belonging: Everyone feels accepted, safe, and supported to be their 100% authentic, vulnerable, courageous self — that means not just fitting in, but also standing up to and standing out by what they believe in. Individuals feel that their differences and uniquenesses are noticed, acknowledged, and celebrated, and that their similarities and commonalities with others are both nurtured and unifying. Every community member feels an empowered agency to co-create and self-organize, take action and participate in the decision-making process, and to lead and follow when and where they feel called to.

An Act of Belonging: An action, process, or structure that naturally creates and embodies a sense of belonging through its enactment. Things like voting, being radically transparent, or trusting people with responsibility.

A Belonging Mindset: A perspective and framework that believes a foundation of belonging is necessary to solve any real problem with a group. Even beyond that, true belonging is a path for all our problems to be solved as well. Through belonging, every individual can have the empowered agency to change the world to whatever calls to their heart. A Belonging Mindset embraces belonging as the means and the ends to transform our world into what is needed tomorrow by each of us leading what are feeling called to today.

Now, onto our first four Principles to move at The Speed of Belonging.

Principle 1: Change the Questions We Are Asking.

As Einstein stated, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Or as Audre Lorde wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allows us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

If we’re working to build a new better world, we have to stop organizing around the same questions that are only perpetuating the status quo. We can’t change the box by thinking in it. Questions like: What problems do we need to fix? How can we scale? How do we market this? How fast can we launch? How can we make money from community? What subject line or title gets the most opens, clicks, or sales? How can we serve the majority? What does the gap analysis say? How will we beat the competition? These are all barriers to belonging.

Our patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalistic culture has trickled down to how we think — how we frame our priorities and the questions that guide them. This has lead to cultural characteristics and norms that create:

• a deep sense of urgency and individualism;
• an illusion of scarcity and the false notion of playing a zero-sum game;
• an ignoring of the needs of those on the margins;
• a subconscious decision-making process guided by implicit biases;
• a measuring of success and progress on quantity and scale, not quality;
• a competitive mindset that assumes, dominates, and extracts;
• and finally, a transition (and sacrifice) of relationships, community support, and reciprocal gifts into monetary exchanges.

We are working to build a new world that comes from new structures, that gets created from new communities, that takes shape from new relationships, that stems from new conversations, that is explored by asking new questions. Change our questions, change our world.

As John Ciardi wrote, “A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed towards the hope of greening the landscape of ideas.”

Shift to asking questions like: How can we elevate the gifts we all bring to our community? How can we empower everyone to solve the problems that call to their heart? How can we foster relationship-building around our mission? How can we include all of our stakeholders in this decision? How can we build the small fractal? How can we serve and elevate the stories of those on the margins? How can we celebrate what makes us different and similar? How are we holding ourselves accountable for belonging in our greater community, especially in regards to race? ”What will be different tomorrow because of our meeting today?” ”How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration?”

“When you’re using language, you can create it, use it to divide people and build walls, or you can turn it into something where we can see each other more clearly, as a bridge.” — Ocean Vuong

Principle 2: Invite Intentionally to Co-Design.

Start with the who, to co-create the why, before designing the how, what, or when. As we are entering this era of living in more diverse communities than ever before, we must grow in our intentionality to empower belonging and co-creation with representative stakeholders and diverse perspectives starting at the earliest stages of defining what a community is, how it lives, and why it functions. We are often socialized to lead and encourage other leaders to state one’s purpose, vision, and strategy, and then work to recruit others to join that effort and create a movement.

For the new community structures we need to emerge, we must keep even the purpose and vision ambiguous, until we have the right people in the right room at the right table. Whether it’s inviting representation across conflicting organizations (a timber company, a Native American tribal band, land trusts, and many other organizations co-creating a land stewardship network) or inviting those “being served” to guide the serving (The Indigenous Peoples Power Project), starting with who the invitation is sent to is paramount. With a deep chasm of broken trust, past traumas, and current pains in between communities of power and those of our marginalized communities of color, the bridge to belonging must be built in the earliest moments of community organizing.

Once you’ve invited the right people, gain commitment for 4–6 Emergent Community Co-Design gatherings. After the laying a foundation of relational trust and connection, pose the question: “with what process do we want to build our community around?” (Two great options are: Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide and Chris Corrigan’s The Chaordic Stepping Stones.) Open the floor to discuss what steps and processes seem best to guide the collective effort from there.

For me, these three goals, three gathering styles, and three rules, all continuous, asynchronous, and reiterative, guide my process.

Three goals:

• Build trust and connect deeply around gifts, passions, and everyone’s stories (celebrating our differences and similarities)
• Align expectations, commitments, and goals; bring forth concerns and dream up possibilities together
• Design community structures and processes together: roles, shared agreements, how we will grow, gather, make decisions, and empower co-creation and self-organization

Three gathering styles:

• Facilitate exercises for connection (authentic relating, collective presencing, story bridge)
• Co-create the agenda as and for the whole group (lean coffee agenda)
• Self-organize into small group breakouts around offered themes (open space)

Three rules:

• Rotate facilitators
• Connect with one new person between every gathering
• Lean in, let go of control, and allow emergence to take shape

‘The single most important factor behind all successful collaborations is trust-based relationships among participants. Many collaborative efforts fail to reach their full potential because they lack a strong relational foundation.’ Our experience in networks is that when trust is present, more perspectives are heard. Power becomes more distributed as individuals feel confident in asserting leadership. And conflict becomes generative, rather than destructive, when individuals trust their perspectives will be heard. For networks and movements, therefore, enduring relationships are not a “nice to have”; they are a “need to have.” The web of relationships that bridges communities, organizations, and clusters of activity is the underlying structure that makes networks and movements work.” — Lindley Mease & David Ehrlichman

Principle 3: Build Systems for “Shared Power” Decision Making.

Starting with the beginning co-design process, the most important decision a group makes is how to make decisions. Power is decision-making. Make participation in that process abundant, accessible, and unifying. It’s essential that all members can contribute easily to guiding the direction of the community. Embrace decentralized, collective decision-making models that empower community members to share their ideas, offer feedback, and provide consent as decisions move through a community’s evolution over time. Whenever possible, transparently collect and use data on relationships, engagement, and perceived agency metrics to guide processes towards deepening participation.

For small communities, here is a potential framework to embody principles of emergence, self-organizing empowerment, and decision making by consent:

• At any time, a member can pose a question and start a project group to solve that community challenge
• The group is open to anyone in the community and self-organizes autonomously
• They create a proposal to be offered to the community for one round of feedback, review, and criticisms
• The group reconvenes, takes whatever they want or doesn’t want from those suggestions, and then offers a proposal to the community (with a set timeline to review)
• The community makes the decision by consent — meaning it’s “good enough for now, safe enough to try” (objections must be both “paramount” and “reasoned”)

For large communities, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Even beyond repairing the deep past harms and current injustices that have plagued our cities and countries since their conception, today, we are also in a compounding crisis of trust. Institutions across every sector (Private, Public, Social, Media) have lost the trust of those they are supposed to be serving. For these large, hierarchical organizations, it’s imperative that they start practicing radical transparency, radical participation, and decentralized decision-making models to rebuild that baseline of trust. Luckily, we are coming to a technological age that can empower democracy on scales only dreamed of before. (Check out: Audrey Tang, Polis, and follow Taiwan’s example with vTaiwan.)

“Unless we all do the work of transcending the endemic either/or paradigm, we will continue to miss out on the exhilarating possibilities to collaborate deeply, to engage with power and learn together, and to give and receive honest and caring feedback across power differences. Feedback will sometimes mean a personal conversation in which we let the people in power know the effects of their actions. Sometimes it will mean putting in place structures that set limits to the harming potential of people in power. And sometimes feedback takes the form of nonviolent resistance, when harm is done and no other way of providing feedback and preventing harm exists. Whichever form it takes, the function is critical for power to be a form of service and stewardship rather than an avenue for personal gain or unilateral visioning at the expense of others.” — Miki Kashtan

Principle 4: Lay the Foundation with Our Commitments.

An organization’s commitments are their principles and values in action. They can be three powerful things at the same time: a beacon to guide value-aligned others to connect with and mobilize around the community; a rallying call and horizon to collectively work towards as a team; and a living, ever-evolving declaration of actions that embody what the community stands for.

It is essential to declare your principles and values as commitments to establish culture. These commitments should embody both your goal of belonging and your community’s purpose.

(On a related sidenote, I always felt declaring a “safe space” was trying to establish something at the beginning that could only be co-created and consented to over time, but this emergent concept of a “brave space” is an inspiring framework to work from.)

Drawing on some takeaways from Lean Coffee’s co-creation agenda and some influences from Open Space’s self-organization philosophy, a strong way of thinking up and gaining consensus on a community’s commitments is to follow this recipe. First, put the question to the entire community to offer up suggestions and then vote on their favorites. The top 4–6 are chosen as the community’s commitments. After that, ask the community to self-organize around the commitments that most call to their heart to gather and collaboratively write up a short, 1–3 sentence action statement to define that commitment for your community. Finally, set a timeline on when the community will reconvene to check-in on those commitments and whether to change any, or none, or start all over.

“Cooperation is far easier and more effective than enforcement. In any gathering of people, there are social agreements in play that allow participants to function together through understanding what constitutes respectful interaction. In many social and business settings, these norms are assumed and unarticulated. Assumption works just fine a lot of the time, but creates misunderstanding and social disaster when it doesn’t work…. When people come into circle, where everything is designed to enhance clear communication, interaction is strengthened and stabilized by crafting articulated agreements for being together. Naming agreements, claiming what is in play in the social field, is a significant part of what shifts us into “held space” and a sense of interpersonal container.” — Christina Baldwin & Ann Linnea

To continue on with The Speed of Belonging, you can find Part 3 here.