Microattunement Part 5: Sites of Learning — Larger Gatherings
Part 5 of this essay addresses one of the most neglected and forgotten arts of the modern world: the work of convening and conducting purposeful gatherings of large numbers of people. Indeed modernity has depended on destroying ‘indigenous’ forms of assembly, creating a society of the masses and institutions that address humans as individuals, not as citizens with shared civic participation and accountability, but as separated ‘consumers’ who choose from marketised alternatives often sponsored by a corporatised state.
Productive Encounter: the Work of the Congregation
Entirely new skill challenges arise with a group that’s larger than a Crew. Rich calls the next level — anywhere from twenty or thirty people to one hundred and fifty or thereabouts — a Congregation. (I think the liturgical echo is deliberate.)
There are occasional glimmers of these skills in the modern world. One example comes from the practices of Quaker meetings, where silences are tolerated and shared sense-making is a deliberate art. In recent times, the Art of Hosting movement has developed exemplary forms of gathering and group practice, and these have inspired a wide range of imitators.
The rising incidence of workplace and community retreats — including Enspiral retreats — fits this definition. So do many other groups with a shared purpose and a commitment to sustained effort and the prospect of re-gathering. I think the biggest difference between the work of the small group and this larger one is the importance of the act of encounter — the process of coming together and of gathering itself.
Some clues to the possibilities here come from the established practices of Māori. In Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) time-honoured protocols from an oral tradition that long predates the written word still survive and flourish.
For Māori, gatherings typically take place on a landscape of tradition called the marae. The marae (the tribal village) is specifically designed for encounters at the heart of everyday living. It has places and spaces for each of the tasks in the sequence of activities in the organisation of large groups, from greeting as strangers to invitation and acceptance, to scene-setting, to eating, discussing, sleeping and orienting towards parting in a new spirit.
Marae encounters are between two groups, the tangata whenua (people of that place) and the manuhiri (visitors). So the difference between hosts and guests is explicit and helps to guide the action. The duration of these encounters is not fixed but is never perfunctory. The important thing is to be able to see each other clearly and eventually, in the hongi, to share breath. Māori gatherings are intensely physical and memorable experiences that invite lasting relationships.
They remind us that meeting practices for a Congregation entail an increased level of attentiveness to the challenges of scale. It is work for several people — ideally a Crew. Here are some examples of this work:
1. Some shareable skills
¶ The practice of convening. The first in a potential series of productive working gatherings is never an arbitrary or kneejerk event. It responds to a strongly felt need that arises from a particular time and set of circumstances. So it starts with a vision of what should be the experience of the event. Not so much the results or the ‘outcome’ — these will take care of themselves — but how will people be while they are there. What will the mood be like; how will people feel; how will they relate to one another?
The setting always makes a huge difference. The physical surroundings, and the people of the place, influence the gathering lots of ways. Especially, they induce certain behaviours. Hotel conference rooms induce the expectations of paying guests. Churches and community halls evoke a sense of history and locality. Outdoor living (for example in tents) invokes a pioneering spirit of self-help. The experience of a Māori marae is that of discovering a long-lost extended family.
I have had some convening experiences where the setting played a major role. In one example we were to gather a group of upscale analysts to distil many months of detailed multi-country research into some recognisable themes and insights. A conventional hotel setting would have produced a conventional interpretation. Instead we spent ten days living with Amish families in rural Pennsylvania — starting the event with a barn-raising. By entering a world of largely pedestrian nineteenth century rural gentility, where meals were slow, sex-segregated and silent, people’s conventional frames and assumptions were sufficiently disturbed to invite new interpretations and understandings to emerge from our work together.
In another example, we convened a large group of heath-care professionals, policy-makers, politicians and administrators to share and weave together stories of personal experience. The setting was an oak-panelled committee room of the House of Lords in London: the solemnity of the surroundings and the sense of history they imparted gave substance to the intimacy and honesty of the stories that were told.
¶ The work of arrival. Gatherings on this scale require careful preparation. Everything matters: the purpose of the gathering and the motivation of the hosts; the location and the physical arrangements for each part of the work; the nature of the invitation and how it is made; the step-by-step management of expectations as invitees commit themselves to the process; the sequence of arrival and settling in; the opening up of the agenda to the establishment of relationships; the announcement of and introduction to the work. In a congregation some people will know each other, but many may be virtual strangers. Specific practices of mutual introduction — for example sharing around a large circle, or exchanging simple gifts— can be really helpful as a starting-point. The space and the time allowed must provide for this important work.
Each hosting crew member needs to play a role in the design and execution of the arrival. In Māoridom, these roles are established by custom, and might be pointers towards what is possible here. The Māori experience emphasises that the quality of the beginning establishes how everyone feels, and therefore how the whole meeting is able to unfold.
¶ Orienting to the needs in the room. However careful the preparation, what happens in the gathering must play into the aspirations and the energies of those present. There is a critical skill here: the ability to read and sense the room and respond directly to its deepest yearnings. What makes this task especially difficult is that these needs may not easily be voiced. Techniques like Open Space address this challenge by inviting people to propose a multiplicity of simultaneous conversations. Others can attend the exchanges that most interest them. But there may still be latent needs that touch everyone present, that are best tackled in a plenary session with the Congregation.
This is an opportunity to use the strength of numbers in a Crew to circulate among those present and to gauge the strength of feeling from informal conversations with a number of people. Another possibility is to invite contributions using software that clusters responses and produces a ranking of issues and discussion topics. The aim is to move beyond a pre-determined agenda to create a gathering that is dynamic and responsive, and that takes the concerns of attendees as seriously as possible.
¶ Making room for grieving. Gatherings of people who have some shared history means that they bring this background experience into the room. This experience will naturally colour what happens in the meeting. If it’s something that carries a sense of disappointment, bitterness or regret, such feelings can overflow into the exchanges in the room.
Feelings like these can be pervasive and long-lasting. I worked with a large gathering that included a group of people who had suffered a devastating reorganisation and loss of status ten years earlier. Newer members of this group — who had joined long after the experience of loss — carried the same bitterness as their senior colleagues. Their joined-up anger threatened everyone’s efforts.
The need to grieve can’t be bypassed. If the events of the gathering trigger unhappy memories, it’s healthy to take them seriously and allow them to be re-processed at the meeting. Such reflections can also be opportunities for shared learning, so that hope and optimism may emerge even from sadness and regret.
¶ Employing skilful signalling. In a gathering of many people, there’s a lot of value in non-verbal communication to maintain the flow of experience. Relationships among the members of the hosting crew are important here. As the meeting proceeds, muttered asides and secretive exchanges between those in charge can be quite distracting. But with practice, crew members can direct one another’s attention with tiny gestures or flickers of expression. And signals can be much more efficient than raised voices in a large group. A simple example is a raised hand for silence. The instruction is that if you see a raised hand, raise yours as well. A noisy room can fall silent in two or three seconds.
¶ Methods for harmonising. A great way to synchronise people’s moods and their attunement to each other is through movement and music. Exercises that involve physical activity are useful ice-breakers and energisers. They can be competitive — like the stalker with the empty chair — or joyful, like a threaded dance to high-five every other person. Moving to a rhythmic beat with lots of free expression always relieves tension and lifts the mood. And singing together gets everyone in tune, both in moments of reflection and opportunities for celebration.
2. Some skills of Difference
Again, these are forms of work that tend to come from someone with a particular orientation; a characteristic way of relating to the world that not everyone shares. When a crew is hosting a gathering, it helps if the roles and responsibilities allocated to people take advantage of their most distinctive capabilities. Here are some of these:
¶ Creating trust and reassurance. Some people naturally project an atmosphere of safety and comfort into the room. It’s something that can’t be staged: it’s visible in the the body and audible in the sound of the voice. It works only when it’s spontaneous and genuine. If such a person exists in the convening group, it’s a powerful asset in the work of settling people and laying the ground for an inviting experience.
¶ Eliciting commitment. A marae encounter includes a challenge from the tangata whenua to the manuhiri — a token that is placed on the ground in front of the visitors. The encounter can’t proceed until the token is picked up. Accepting the token entails commitment to the practices of that place: to the rules of engagement, to the sequences of turn-taking, to the honouring of sacred spaces and histories, and so on until the protocols of poroporoaki, or farewell, that close the event.
Except in religious observance, the importance of commitment has been forgotten in the practices of most present-day gatherings. The closest we have is in announcements about safety and building evacuation, toilets and the use of cellphones. But there are also people whose presence and charisma can exert a binding influence on the occasion.
A well-designed gathering creates a sequence of engagement that is strongest and most productive by the end. So a step towards formalising commitment can be to insist that joining the gathering means being there for the whole event. People who arrive late, vanish in the middle or leave early can be distracting, awkward to manage and disturbing to the group’s relational experience.
¶ Uncovering missings. This is a skill of detailed attentiveness that requires an acute awareness for what should be happening, but isn’t:
- The person or group that is physically present but disconnected, distracted or preoccupied elsewhere;
- The observation or utterance that is misunderstood or misinterpreted so that it lands badly;
- The sequence of activity that is missing a crucial step;
- The small signal or gesture that goes unnoticed.
This capability operates in the space between exchanges, in momentary hesitations and sudden silences. It comes from a sensitivity to the overall pattern and flow of things as well as to the gaps and interruptions. It’s like the work of an orchestral conductor or a team coach, tuned to tiny mistakes as well as to the overall sound or movement.
¶ Seizing the moment for pivoting. This is a rare capability: one that has a physical analogue in the martial arts practice of Aikido. In a conversation that has directional force but seems to be headed towards an inevitably sub-optimal outcome, there can be fractional openings for a creative intervention that can swing the energy of the discussion in a new and more productive direction. The Aikido practitioner takes control not by resisting the oncoming force but by intercepting and redirecting the opponent’s force by applying harmonising tactics that merge with that force. In the same way, a skilled conversational practitioner can absorb the intent of the discussion, but introduce a pivot — a “Yes, and” — that opens up a new possibility and draws the energy of the group in a sideways direction.
Like Aikido this is a bodily capability that requires a persuasive tone and skilful timing. I have heard this skill used to convince a group to successfully switch from their habitual bureaucratic mode of operation to something more responsive and immediate, that entailed achieving something together in the present moment — something that they had never previously considered, and had believed to be impossible.
¶ Capturing the story of the gathering. Human encounters are evanescent: each moment disappears to be replaced by the next one. Yet purposeful gatherings can reveal deep truths and hold useful lessons that bear reflection and re-consideration afterwards, for example in preparation for a following event.
Because we typically gather in multi-purpose settings, there is no permanent record of the events in that place. This suits the “Clean the whiteboard, start the world anew each Monday morning” ethos of present-day organisational life. Yet reminders of the past — like the stories of those who previously dwelt in that place — can be important spurs to fresh action. In the Māori wharenui (meeting house) these stories are woven into the tukutuku (flax) panels and into the carved posts and beams that line the meeting house: these provide a sense of experience and continuity that enables the present to seek inspiration from the past.
There is a highly distinctive skill entailed in telling the story of an occasion that brings it to life for those who weren’t present, and also reminds those who were there what they now have to build on. An instrumentalised world is so action-oriented that it’s always rushing towards the new, and doesn’t value the work of the storyteller. The trick is to make space for this task and the person undertaking it from the earliest possible moment, so that it becomes just a normal part of the sequence of activity at the gathering.
¶ Readying for going on together. In a relational world, the outcome of a purposeful gathering is not the thing that is produced there, but the capacity to continue productively afterwards. This, for John Shotter, is the foundational lesson from the work of Wittgenstein:
“His prime concern is to explore the nature of those initial embodied responses and reactions that make it possible for us sensibly, simply to ‘follow’ or to ‘grasp’ the ‘tendencies’ in each other’s conduct, to study those circumstances in which we can ‘go on’ with each other in practice.”
The distinctive skill here is the ability to engage the members of a congregation in developing a practice of continuation after the event. It’s the same skill, at a higher level, as that of inducing rhythm and repetition in the work of a crew. What conditions this effort is the length of time between major gatherings. They may often end on a high for people who then revert to a ‘normal’ pattern of discontinuous distractions and interruptions, in which they lose the thread of the connections that they made and the motivations they developed together.
Like the work of story capture, the work of preparing for going on together afterwards might begin as early as possible — even being anticipated in the original invitation to the event. It will be a communication tactic that can take many forms. So consideration of these forms of continuation, and their relative practicality, could become an important part of the work of the gathering.
Methods for a New Democracy: Mobilising the Wise Crowd
Beyond the congregation in the #Microsolidarity template, there is the Crowd — an indeterminedly larger number of people. Here we are moving into the realm of new forms of democracy: innovative methods of citizen participation that can emerge with the decline of individualism and the rise of relational ubiquity and other practices of belonging.
It’s too soon to know very much about the detailed skills of crowd engagement that will be required in these new democratic forms. They will however entail non-hierarchical organising in ways that are sensitive to, and make practical use of, human difference. Differences of orientation, of culture, of background, of belief and of experience will all be valuable. The only way to deal with the vast array of real-world complexity and nuance will be to share our distinctive observations of the same phenomena, and reach a working synthesis of these observations for collective action. So I think the new era will be a phenomenological one, where we share experiences and interpret them together.
The most encouraging glimpse that I have seen of the form that a new structure of democratic engagement might take comes from present-day Taiwan. There, a mass grass-roots movement of citizens has interpenetrated and merged with the established institutions of government. By installing new technology-based tools that link government data, participatory decision-making, and political accountability, a new kind of everyday activism and institutional responsiveness has become visible. It’s a pattern that deserves to be encouraged and built on more widely.
All of the lengthy foregoing in Parts 1–5 of this essay now sets us up for the final Part 6: An Architecture of Learning for the Next Human Era. Here I hope to weave all of the threads of Microattunement into a luminous educational fabric for a future world.
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