Ingredients of a Community: Communication
“We realised the difficulties that arise when communication is one-way, versus when everyone has a say in the conversation and the communication is more open and collaborative.”
Right now at The Collective Old Oak, six fellows are taking part in our first ever Community Facilitator Programme. That means they’re on the ground for the coming weeks, supporting our members in making their community amazing, while exploring tools to foster a brilliant community experience. Here, they continue to share their learnings.
So far we’ve found that the fellows enjoy presenting their modules through games and applied learnings… the introductory presentation and subsequent workshops and presentations for the Communication Module were no different.
The introduction was held on the vacant first floor, where Alisa and Petronella had us get into groups of two to play a drawing game. The goal of this drawing game was for each pair to guide each other through the realisation of a simple drawing of a few lines and shapes. There were two steps to this game, the first in which one of the individuals in the pair describes to the other person the shapes and lines they had on their sheet of paper for the other to draw out on their own blank sheet, but the person drawing was not allowed to ask the other any questions about the positioning of the shapes or about anything else.
After this one-way description of the drawing, the pair did the same exercise again with each of the individuals keeping the same roles, but the person drawing was allowed to ask questions this time. The differences in the results were quite drastic for each of the tries, and we realised the difficulties that arise when communication is one-way, versus when everyone has a say in the conversation and the communication is more open and collaborative.
Following this introduction, we participated in the Communications Workshop (held again by Alisa and Petronella), which focused on Nonviolent Communication, Nonverbal Communication, Communication Dynamics and Conflict Resolution. We started off with a Lego construction game, where each of us had a specific role (such as “You need to make sure that the 3rd and 4th layers of the structure are all made of yellow bricks”) in order to complete the construction of a certain Lego structure. We were not allowed to use verbal communication, however, and none of us knew what the roles of the others were either. Although at many times we felt like the roles of each other were working against one another, nobody’s task was actually contradicting any of the other roles, and in the end we were able to build the structure using only nonverbal communication. A similar exercise from alternative business and experience design school Hyper Island can be found here.
The next exercise was a Forum Theatre, a method developed by Brazilian performance artist and dramatist Augusto Boal, “as a means of working popularly in theatre to tackle the overriding problems of the lives of ordinary people”. More recently, Forum Theatre has been used as a training tool to demonstrate behaviours and best practises in different work situations. In this case, we had to act out different scenes that may occur at The Collective Old Oak and place ourselves in situations of potential conflict, in order to act out how we would handle these situations.
Finally, one of the last exercises we did was a lovely Gratitude Shower! This entails everyone standing in a circle and one person going in the middle of the circle for two minutes, while the rest of the group shower them with gratitude and love. This was meant to show what it feels like when positive communication through appreciation and gratitude occurs and it was very humbling and beautiful for each of us.
Acknowledgements and appreciation for one another are important for healthy communication and strengthening group dynamics, as a way of giving feedback and compliments about what we are grateful for from the work and presence of our colleagues.
Some additional resources from this module include tools for communicating and receiving feedback, such as the Radical Candor Model, Salestrong’s REACT feedback and Marshall Rosenberg’s 4-Part Nonviolent Communication Process. These are amazing tools for being able to give constructive feedback and opinions to colleagues, peers and loved ones without ‘obnoxious aggression’ or ‘ruinous empathy’. Respectful communication is crucial for a strong community experience in co-living spaces, and these methods must be learnt by facilitators, on-site staff and community members alike, but it is also important for the rest of The Collective team to embody these techniques in order to flourish as a growing worldwide co-living company. As we are facilitating the conflicts, joys and connections occurring in one of the largest co-living spaces in the world, the Communications Module is certainly one of the most important ones to pin down as we continue our fellowship in Old Oak.
For more on the Community Facilitator Programme read this post.
Words by Matthew Lesniak
