Going Horizontal — new governance practices towards distributed governance
My attendance at the “Going Horizontal” training in Barcelona was on short notice and definitely not planned. But when @Phoebe Tickell, who I met at Burning Man just one month before asked me to join, I knew I had to go.
Burning Man had attracted me for similar reasons as the training Phoebe was inviting me to . I did not plan to go Burning Man either, but was invited by @GriffGreen during the Ethereum community event Council of Berlin. He had asked if I was interested in participating in the build of camp “DECENTRAL” at the Playa (another word for Burning Man’s Black Rock City, while “DECENTRAL” is the name for the camp I stayed in). Just as with Going Horizontal, I knew I had to go.
What interested me the most in being part of the DECENTRAL builder team was the organisational structure employed. Self-organisation and collaboration creates Block Rock City out of nowhere, in just a week. Exposing myself to the ten principles underlying Burning Man achieved the same thing as doing a deep dive in decentralised power in organisations with Going Horizontal.
It fostered personal growth and gave me experience on how we can coordinate with trust and compassion. First and foremost how to not only count the facts but also ‘take the heart into consideration’. These two events have sparked a search for new practices and how to organize horizontally. I invite you to join me on this path starting with this article.
I’ll share with you insights on how “Going Horizontal” (GH) unfolded. GH was a four day university certified training given by the University of Barcelona during the Autumn of 2018.
In these four days,participants learned and experienced humanistic coordination practices. For me this was another real-world proof that these practices are an essential element to enable new (**old) forms of governance.
I want to share with you the deep learning and insights I have gathered during these days which where only made possible through the trust and compassion we built and shared with over the days.
Going Horizontal
There are probably many words which are interchangeable for the word ‘horizontal’. For example: inclusive, participatory, distributed, decentralized, self-organised, co-organised… and others.
Advanced social protocols
I will refer to advanced social protocols as practices. Practices are things which leverage certain processes and principles to allow for collective intelligence. Think of them as ‘off-chain’ governance functions which have requirements which need to be matched. Those requirements include but are not limited to trust and compassion between participants, as well as strong communication skills . In particular communicating means a willingness to be authentic in voicing your own needs, without compromising yourself or taking an easier path.
To build trust and act compassionately requires a deep personal connection, which can hardly be established by solely online communication.
Day 0 — Arrival (Thursday)
I arrived from Munich on Thursday and took the train to ‘Linars del Vallès’ — a small Catalunyan village to the north about an hour away from Barcelona airport.
The area was covered in rich green forest covered mountains stretching up to 500 meters high. Between those mountains lies an old manor house owned by a wealthy family. A picturesque setting for the GH training, don’t you think?
With its four floors and mixed dormitories the manor house provided ample space for all participants. Faced with a well maintained courtyard, complete with benches and a fountain, the manor even presented with a small tower up top. Therein was just enough room for meditation and a wonderful view, to finish up the positive impression. I remember I felt it was all a bit surreal, as I unpacked my bags in the assigned room I would be sharing with another participant.
After the initial mingling everybody come together to kick-off our training. We gathered at a stone circle close to the manor house and started to introduce ourselves. We started with a personal conversation emphasizing how we feel (emotional / intuition) with respect to our working practices in our daily work, or contexts. I was not used to this focus and misunderstood it as what I think (analytical)— which is a different thing. It was not easy for me, to share feelings in that way with people I didn’t know. But’s a very powerful trust building exercise.
Speaking about feelings in a working context would become one of the most important takeaways of this training. On the last day we would see it in action and how it can create unexpected outcomes.
Open Space
One aspect which made the training a great success was the “open space” sessions, which took place during the morning, early afternoon and evening. They were a space in which participants were invited to do whatever they wanted. In the style of self-organisation it happened that we had many nice sessions, including sessions on blockchain governance, martial arts workout, meditation and communication techniques.
Next to the open sessions we used our gathering to practice changing habits. As you can see the schedule of day 0 includes the point “Dishes” — Everyone does their own!
As the dishes were cleaned by the participants we were invited to experiment with different organisations around the dishes. The first day started with everyone does their own. But interestingly enough this lead to a changing scheme every day.
Day 1 — Starting the practice (Friday)
Day 1 emphasized personal relationships as well as co-managed meetings, aka wise agendas or agile agendas. Wise agenda is a practice I found quite useful, as it is simple but delivers a good format to democratize meetings. By democratize I mean that the meeting is not run, or owned, by one “leader” or dominant individual but by the whole team which is guided by the practice.
Another very valuable session was just before lunch, “Relationships and Conflicts”. It reminded me of something I learned during Vipassena meditation and concerns suffering from strong emotions and/or others people’s mood. If you get angry with somebody else, you will feel the anger. If somebody else treats you unfairly or insults you, then you feel the anger as well. So either way the anger affects you. Realizing my own emotional state, gives me control over that anger. I become able to decide how to react to my feelings, or even if to react at all. Sometimes the most powerful thing to do is to acknowledge anger or stress or strong emotions and express them to the people around you. Alternatively you could breath and observe the emotion: how it arises and then passes away.
However, in a business situation this might not work; this is where a short break usually comes in handy. I have found this useful, as I feel emotional tensions and stress are not the right state to be making decisions from.
Being aware about your feelings is key, it is so an absolute essential part of our being. Especially in a world where the focus is not money but YOU, ME — the human relationship.
Just another reminder from something I learned in 2014 from Barry Katz and Lior Shoham — “It’s all about people.”
Especially when you want to act out of trust and compassion while making decisions about scare resources (e.g. money).
Day 2 — Generative Decision Making, Trigger Log, and The Money Game
The theme of Day 2 was on how to make transparent decisions which are legitimized by the whole group. This process is called “Generative Decision Making”.
The seven step process allows to get everybody in the group on board to make better decisions while taking all perspectives represented through the group in consideration.
I wrote a short how-to on that decision making process to help you to try it out and facilitate it.
The second part of the day was about the Money Game and a Trigger Log to self-reflect on the emotional triggers with the chance to change our reactions to those triggers.
The Money Game was very intense experience for me, super insightful for my own relationship to money and revealing how others see it. Here are the rules of ‘The Money Game’:
Preparation: Everybody puts X amount of Euro’s into their piggy bank which stands in-front of them while the group sits in a circle. For transparency all the piggy banks are clearly visible and accessible, optimal it’s a bowl. Every piggy bank holds it written name on it.
Round 1: You are allowed to walk around in the circle and take money from any piggy bank and put it into your own. You are only allowed to take money and move directly with that money back to your piggy bank. So you can only take from one person at a time.
Round 2: You are allowed to gift money to anybody you like to. Therefore walk around the circle and drop money from your piggy bank into others people piggy bank.
Round 3: You are allowed to ask for money from any person and to negotiate while you should get the money.
Each round is played for 10 minutes, where Round 1 and 2 are played in silence and after Round 3 the game ends. At the end of the game you are left with whatever money is in your piggy bank.
I played “The Money Game” with 150 €. I took a bit more money so I felt invested and that I actually cared emotionally enough to remember that training and take the insights back into my daily business operations. As money is obviously one of the key resources I wanted to see what it actually means for me. Money has a different meaning for everyone and the relationship to money varies from person to person. I learned a lot about my relationship with money, and if given the opportunity to participate in a Money Game, I recommend you take the chance to do it. (and share your learnings!)
However the outcome of this game might be very different depending on the group and the already existing trust level in that group.
Day 3 Radical Transparency on Finances or Deep Learning Climax
As the trust building of the last days and the utilized practices started to settle in. The next logical step, after “The Money Game”, was for the organizers to practice full transparency on the finances of the workshop. This meant showing us the budget and distributing the “salaries” for the organizers.
To facilitate this the organisers asked us to hold them in what is called a fishbowl. Hence the participants formed a circle and within the middle of the circle six cushions were placed where the organizers took their seats, with one seat staying empty for a co-organizer which could not be present. The absent co-organizer would be represented by the other organizers.
After the fixed costs-to-cover for logistics and location were subtracted from the total amount raised it become clear that there was a large gap between the expected salaries and the available money.
After some initial back and forth, every body agreed to follow a protocol proposed by Samantha.
Every organizer would speak up and share their feelings and concerns about how the money should be distributed. For me, as an observer, it was very interested to hear the different perspectives. Nobody was really happy with the original plan on how the money would be distributed. Which was understandable as it was nothing more than a spreadsheet where everybody had added their wished amount. It was not only unfeasible because of the large gap between what was left after expenses and the desired payments, but also because it did not reflect the efforts made by organizers during the training itself.
Like in every project contributions in value and time differ largely between the participants. Sharing payments for the organizers in an “equal split” never really fairly represents the work which was put in. However “equal split” was proposed at a time where the conversation was quite tense. It would have been the easy way out, and it was proposed by one of the organizers for that reason. But I was very happy to see that others in the circle spoke up and explained that this would be unfair. This requires not compromising oneself, which can be difficult when one fears speak up. Yet again again — it requires a space of trust and compassion to have those open conversations.
This space of trust and compassion was present and everybody was authentically voicing their needs and feelings. This was exceptional to see, as it is unusual in working environments or politics, where power plays usually dominate the conversation.
But not in this fishbowl! In this round, with all the participants listening very carefully, there was space for compassion and understanding.
At the end of a grueling one hour and twenty minutes everything has finally been said. Everyone of the organizers had explained where they stood and what should happen with the remaining ~4k € to split between the organizers. That is when the magic happened.
The last step was that every organizer wrote down the number they felt they should receive from the pool. In silence Nil, Sam, Phoebe, Caro and Salvador wrote down their numbers. No renegotiation, no one unsatisfied. The secretly written numbers were magically balanced. Splitting the pool in a way that the total amount of salaries was ~3700. This left a space in the budget of ~5%+ for organizing the next training. Amazingly everybody was satisfied with the result.
For me an very interesting experience to participate in. The learning that we can make money decisions in a circle of trust and compassion is a key learning for me.
At the end of this last day we finished with an open café where we proposed our projects (the one the participants brought in) to identify potential collaboration fields or to help each other to solve problems and identify next steps.
Socializing, a last Dinner and a circle with playing the guitar and sharing our leaving thoughts on a small piece of paper and reading it out to each other.
Some of those quotes: “Learning happens live in the practice.” “The future of a healthy society begins with applying going-horizontal practices in organisations.” “Heal yourself and the world through love and trust. Going Horizontal.” “Together we can hold each other to learn to trust.”
Monday (Leave)
Everybody was leaving early or during the Monday. We started to record some interviews on Monday, with some of those interviews being recorded the night before. Without extending this article further I leave you with two recordings. A video from me and Phoebe as well as one where I documented my own learning and how I feel it is connected to distributed governance and the blockchain space.
YouTube — Going Horizontal — Phoebe and Tim Part 1
YouTube-Going Horizontal — Phoebe and Tim Part 2
YouTube — Tim Bansemer “Impressions Going Horizontal”
Call for action:
This is just the start of my experience with new practices which I like to bring into action in my daily work. Focusing on trust and compassion and the wish.
Many thanks to the organizers Caro Escobar Mejia,
, and especially .Please check out her new book “Going Horizontal” with her long year experience with those practices she shares her deep insights with the world. Thank you Samantha!
Special Thanks also to my friend
and for helping with editing this article. Thank you :)