What is more possible now #3
Note 3 of 5 in a mini series of findings from a shared enquiry: Network Vital Signs
As described in our previous lab notes in this mini series (links below), during the Spring and Summer of 2022 the CoLab Dudley team and a constellation of Time Rebels have engaged in a shared enquiry through a range of joyful and searching collective reflection and sensemaking moments. In June 2022 we will reach the end of four years of Reaching Communities National Lottery investment in lab work on Dudley High Street, and we wanted to mark this milestone in our journey so far by asking ‘What is more possible now?’
Not only was this process co-designed with the intention of surfacing, weaving together and celebrating ‘What is more possible now?’ insights, critically, it was also designed to create spaces for Time Rebel collaboration and collective dreaming about the practical next steps for their What If experiments. The whole shared enquiry period has been intentionally framed in active hope.
The shared enquiry process has included:
- group drawing and mapping deep timelines, ripple lakes and possibility points;
- quiet reflection time guided by the Zones of Possibility canvas to enable Time Rebels to dig into what is more possible at a range of levels including self, experiment and place;
- dedicated time with Time Rebel peers exploring reflections to help articulate practical What Next? steps;
- finally, on the 9th June we will all come back together in the lab on Dudley High Street to share insights, express challenges faced, and weave together dreams for the future by further integrating the stories of our individual What Ifs. Part of the purpose of the lab infrastructure is to ensure What If experiments don’t exist in isolation, rather they co-evolve and spark off each other in place.
In this brief series of lab notes we will share straight forward summaries drawn from this collective sensemaking process broken down into sections about:
- Revisiting our Why and What Next?
- Revealing potential
- Network vital signs (below)
- Learning and doing ripples
- Navigating challenges
The main messages and wisdom captured during this sensemaking and shared learning process will be available at the 9th June celebration in the form of our very own ‘What is more possible now?’ zine. Let us know if you would prefer getting to know the insights shared here in zine form and we will pop one in the post to you. Or if you are around Dudley High street and want to visit the magical displays and visual creations that bring these insights to life in full colour then you are most welcome to visit our What Is More Possible Now exhibition at the lab and chat with us over a brew. Pop along between 12pm and 2pm on Thursday 16 June or Thursday 30 June, or get in touch to arrange another time: colabdudley@gmail.com — we’d love to spend time with you.
Lab Note 3 of 5: Network Vital Signs
Before our lab team formed in winter 2016, I had been catalysing clusters of activity across the borough using CoLab Dudley as something which could help hold threads of learning together and offer a sense of connection. This is an early network stage identified by June Holley and Valdis Krebs in Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving. They call this stage scattered fragments. Jeff Mohr, cofounder of Kumu, describes and illustrates this stage in a great post on Building intentional networks that drive impact:
Stage 1, scattered fragments When a network is just coming together (or before it even forms and you’re simply identifying people who may be potential members), you’re often in the scattered fragments stage. Certain people know each other, but there are lots of silos and not much interconnection.
Towards the end of 2018, when our Reaching Communities funding was in place, CoLab Dudley lab team members mapped our network. At that point we were a network of overlapping hubs (lab team members actively weaving), with spokes to clusters of people coming around practical projects which the lab catalysed and/or supported. We were definitely at stage 2 of network development; hub and spoke.
stage 2, hub and spoke: The birth of a network usually requires the effort of some central hub. This is one of the fascinating contradictions of growing a healthy network. A healthy network would very much discourage someone playing such an overly central role, but when you’re in the early stages of building a network, it is essential that someone play this role, connecting across the various fragments. The key is to serve in this role and then move out of the center as quickly as possible.
~ from Building intentional networks that drive impact by Jeff Mohr
Indeed our funding manager challenged us on how much I was holding the work of the lab; the central role described above. In the fantastic book Impact Networks, David Erlichman, cofounder of the Converge network (check out their great resources for network weavers) highlights that in stage 2, over time the hub creates a bottleneck, slowing information flows and limiting spontaneous collaborations.
We developed a plan to bring people together through a series of dinners designed to bring new people into the network and help everyone to grow relationships with each other. We made space for people taking initiative to share their ideas and activities, and encouraged others to join or support their projects. The shared focus of potential activity was to be the challenge of tackling the deteriorating High Street, initially through an open festival, Do Fest Dudley 2019, which we would design together.
The relationships, trust and collaborations which emerged through the dinners and the co-design and hosting of Do Fest Dudley 2019 generated an evolution in the lab team and network. The first lockdown of the pandemic tested our network strength and exposed our vulnerabilities in this phase, leading to a need to once again design a process of convening and network building, drawing new people in again. However by this time our team and network had diversified, with artists, creatives and designers being drawn to our work in 2019, thus extending our network edges.
In autumn 2020 we took the opportunity to craft a much bolder convening call. Drawing on our learning from 2019 that the idea of a collective was a helpful concept to bring people around and feel part of something bigger, we extended invitations to people at our network edges to join a collective of Time Rebels. Instead of dinners we hosted orientation and navigation sessions on Zoom. We set up a Slack workspace to aid communication and facilitate people to come together around ideas or activities they felt passionate about and wanted to collaborate on. Once again we supported co-design of experiments, this time everything was much more visible to the whole network, as we used a Miro board to hold experiment designs and intentions, and Time Rebels hosted online conversations in which they shared early stage ideas for feedback. It became clear that 4 among our lab team of 7 had strong leaning towards network guardian roles, so we organised intentionally around that role, as an inner layer of lab team work.
As we moved into Autumn 2021 our network continued to grow, with BCU students making use of lab support for projects beyond those we had initially developed collaborations around. We started to see multiple hubs of action growing around experiments; such as the Black Creatives Network, Stories of Place, Connect Dudley now being peer-led, Radio Public, a Doughnut Economics learning journey. There is frequent journeying between these hubs; people involved in one activity who hear about and are invited to another often get involved. In addition network guardians and Time Rebels are intentionally weaving more connections and creating opportunities for conversations with people who work, live and learn on and around Dudley High Street.
We had been transitioning to stage 3 of a network:
stage 3, multi-hub: As the network continues to develop, you’re identifying multiple people who can play the role of hub, creating more and more trust-based relationships across the network. Some of these hubs might have formal coordinating roles (network weavers and project managers), while others may be more informal (the natural connectors in your network).
~ from Building intentional networks that drive impact by Jeff Mohr
In our context this is reflected in the fact that Time Rebels and collaborators aren’t reliant on any single individual to stay connected. Network Guardians in the lab team work to support flows between hubs. Our use of collaborative online platforms such as Miro and Slack, which people were more open to trying during lockdowns, have supported spreading of ideas, knowledge and learning.
Vital signs
Some of the vital signs of a healthy network highlighted by June Holley and others that we were noticing through spring and summer 2021 included:
- Appreciation, affirmation and gratitude between people across the collective of Time Rebels.
- People knowing each other (a red flag for us was those who didn’t or weren’t in a position to spend time getting to know each other).
- Collaborations emerging spontaneously.
- Shared understanding that time spent building relationships is part of the work, and associated embracing of rituals which help us to connect to ourselves and each other.
- A diversity of perspectives, knowledges, experiences and ideas.
- Time Rebels leading and taking responsibility for their own creative experiments, while openly inviting each other to add ideas, help prototyping, offer feedback etc.
- Information being shared; this is more visible using online tools such as Slack and Miro.
- An orientation to action ~ though network guardians still needed to coax this.
- Time Rebels being willing to make time to reflect and learn together through shared enquiries, and to make their own learning openly available through lab notes.
- Across our network we have documented signs of different kinds of scaling:
~ scaling deep (cultural change)
~ scaling out (adoption of ideas/ action by others)
~ scree scaling (multiple complimentary innovations co-created)
~ and scaling infrastructure (building the resources, knowledge and networks)
Our network hasn’t been fixated on chasing numbers of people involved.
The lab team have also been convening around the network edges, sharing learning, cultivating collaborations and encouraging more experiments with people from neighbouring communities and organisations.
Holley and Krebs explain that at the fourth stage of network building attention turns toward network maintenance and building bridges to other networks. Network weavers begin to form alliances around new activities and influence. Weavers focus on multi-core projects of large substance that will have major impact on the community.
CoLab Dudley Network Guardians are now leading and weaving the following activities which are increasing the periphery and impact of CoLab Dudley’s network:
- An Engagement Enquiry with Dudley CVS staff using lab tools and strategies, initiated in summer 2021.
- Cultural Strategy and Cultural Compact work invested in by Dudley MBC and the Arts Council since autumn 2021. Through this work we are seeking to grow a network of Cultural Collaborators, our Network Guardian role being one of cultural ecology stewards through this lens.
- Cultural storycatching and learning work with Brierley Hill Cultural Consortium, sharing lab learning and tactics with people leading cultural work on another High Street.
- A Doughnut Economics Learning Journey, which connects us to an astonishingly caring and ambituous network and emerging movement of people working on reimagining economics at neighbourhood scale.
- Social economy work in development with West Midlands Combined Authority.
We continue to weave our multi-hub network though, it still requires enabling infrastructure and has huge potential to diversify. We’re perhaps now dancing between the third and fourth stage of network growth.
stage 4, core/periphery: At this stage you have a dense, interconnected core with multiple hubs overlapping in that core. No one person is playing the central role. In addition to that, you’ve cultivated a periphery that is large (ideally 5x the size of the core) and diverse. This is what June refers to as a “smart” network. The large and diverse periphery serves as a source of new ideas and innovation for the network.
~ from Building intentional networks that drive impact by Jeff Mohr
We’d love to know what you find useful when considering networks you are nurturing. And do let us know if any of the brilliant thinking and resources we’ve linked to are helpful to you. We’re always here for conversations about network weaving 💕
*Building on the insights of Gord Tulloch et al. of InWithForward we have been intentional throughout the last 3 years in paying attention to different areas of scaling to support a kinder, more connected and creative Dudley High Street — aka NOT just seeking bigger numbers of participants. The sixth aspect of scaling, scaling up (policies, and practices) has been elusive despite efforts at borough and regional level.
A note of gratitude: Our thinking and action on networks and network weaving draws heavily on work by June Holley, which is reflected above (in our work and others we reference). We are deeply grateful for her work, encouragement and sharing.
