I’m taking a guided program with The Hum called Patterns for Decentralised Organizations. It is taught by Nati and Rich, geniuses I’ve been following and crossing paths with for some time. I’ll be keeping notes and reflections as I go along on this tag.
We started out as most online zoom course things do by fiddling around, layout out the map of what’s going to happen. Nati and Rich, henceforth called Natich, did a good job of giving an overview and used Zoom’s chat feature quite well. Having the key points you want people to understand written out and ready to copy/paste into the Zoom chat (with 🥞 emojis) is a pro tip.
There were about 30 people on the call so we didn’t do introductions. Another pro tip: when you are going to have people talk consider how long they will speak on average and multiply it by the number of speakers. Introductions take maybe 2 minutes, with 30 people that’s an hour of speaking time. Instead, we were broken into small groups of 4 and given 15 minutes. So each person got about 3.5 minutes to talk and it only took 15 minutes of the whole group time. That’s double the speaking time for a quarter of the group time!
How do we want to be together?
We answered this question next by going back into breakout groups of 2 people (dyads) which then were combined into groups of 4. Natich did a great job of background education (secretly teaching a skill) by encouraging active listening where each person took a turn to tell a story about a time they have felt connected and good within a group.
This was an expert move. It got us telling stories, which both connects us to the past and each other. Storytelling is powerful magic. The listener then reflected what key things they heard and we put them on a Miro board (digital whiteboard).
The groups were combined and each person shared what their partner had said. This is a fantastic move, doesn’t it feel good to know that someone listened to you? This is how you build relational soil.
We spent the rest of the time moving our sticky notes around and grouping them on our digital whiteboard. I found this task fun because there was discussion going on about different sticky notes but I could play with the whiteboard too. This is like having paper on a meeting table that allows people to doodle while they listen.
Trigger Log
They introduced this little tool as part of how do we want to be together. I think it’s awesome. Awesome to acknowledge that we will probably trigger each other and give a tool that can support that. Here’s a PFD version.
Pods
They also introduced a pattern of joining into pods. I’m really vibing off pods, pods are hot right now. We’ll see how things go! More next time.
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