Ingredients for co-creation: reflections on IO Retreat 2017
12 things I noticed that helped create the conditions for co-creation at the second IO Retreat
One of the things that felt most beautiful about IO Retreat 2017 was how we successfully created the conditions for co-creation.
I’ve been reflecting on what caused that and thought others might find it useful if I shared these 12 ingredients that I noticed.
We’ve by no means got it all worked out — we’re on a learning journey and I’d love to hear what ingredients you’d add to the pot!
Some background…
The IO Collective is an entrepreneurial experiment that is evolving to re-imagine how we live and work together in an increasingly complex, interconnected and ever-changing world.
We are a small and growing community — an imaginal organisation (IO) — part of a rising network of networks coalescing around the world— putting into action new principles and new ways of collaborating to create the world we dream of.
Over the course of five days (19–23 June 2017), 14 change-makers came together to connect, play, learn and co-create ways of supporting one another in each of our personal journeys to creating transformation in the world.
One of the experiments we ran was how to integrate the wider global community including another 10 or so people who participated remotely (not easy and only achieved to a tiny fraction of what I had imagined but still felt super valuable!)
Ingredient 1: An invitation to co-create
Perhaps in contrast to the first retreat, we crafted the invitation around a very open question, rather than a mixing in specific projects with open questions. This was our starting question:
How best might we support one another to multiply our efforts in co-creating the powerful transformation that we dream of for a better world?
What worked well:
- A very open question “How best might we…”
- We set a clear intention of co-creation from the start
- How we invited people — following what worked very well last year — was to reach out with individual personal invitations. Each person was invited by someone who they felt a strong and trusting connection to.
- Who we invited — people we knew, trusted and loved who have a high level of autonomy over their life trajectory (mostly freelancers, social entrepreneurs and people at transition points in their life/career)
- Having a group video call two weeks before the retreat to meet one other, share ideas and re-iterate the intention to co-create, including an invitation to bring your ideas for sessions, projects and experiments
What we learned:
- It was a very time-consuming process! We only ended up with about half of the number of people we had intended to have there, and in the end we posted the invite on a number of like-minded Facebook groups as well to try and get more people along. We could have done with 3–4 months to invite people instead of just 1 month!
Ingredient 2: Building subtly on what was before
This was the second IO Retreat, after last summer’s beautiful inaugural gathering of about 40 of us in the spectacular setting of the Candili Estate in Evia, Greece.
The event felt very much imbued with the culture and feeling that arose over that special week last year. This was the first thing I found quite remarkable. Luke Flegg and I were the only “in real life” participants of both events. We explicitly shared very little of the tangible outputs of the first event, and somehow the essence seemed to be carried through via all of our words and actions.
You don’t need to explicitly “on-board” people — if you have a strong culture that is deeply felt, that will seep through in every word and action.
Ingredient 3: An inspiring location connected to nature
Our shared space for the week was the beautiful, tranquil ASHA Centre near the Forest of Dean, about half an hour outside of Gloucester, England.
There’s something about being surrounded by nature — birds singing, bees buzzing, vegetables, herbs and trees growing — that I think contributes a great deal to opening our minds, hearts and souls to deep listening and sensing necessary for co-creation.
Views of the sky, circular meeting spaces, extremely minimal screen time, shoes off feet feeling the ground, and soul-nourishing spaces to reflect, connect, listen, talk, eat, play and practice all made this an ideal location for the retreat.
A couple of fun outdoor excursions gave us ample opportunity to bond and get out of “head space” for more time than I think we usually create for ourselves:
Wild-swimming also felt like a complete escape and wonderful cleansing ritual. There’s something about immersing yourself in fresh outdoor water that sort of “resets” the mind and body. I’m super grateful to Pasco’s parents for joining us and taking us on that experience.
Ingredient 4: A soft landing and settling in to a safe space
Monday was our day for arriving slowly, letting go of what we’d left behind, settling in and starting to get to know one another.
We eased ourself into this new setting, new combination of people and ideas, holding off our opening circle until Tuesday morning.
Feeling out the place together and taking on our first co-creation mission (feeding ourselves for the week) provided great opportunity for people to become comfortable with one another and start collaborating.
I think this is part of what enabled us to share with extreme openness and trust in our opening circle.
Ingredient 5: Sharing offers, needs and intentions
For our opening circle, Luke proposed 3 starting questions:
- Who are you?
- How are you?
- Why are you here?
Then we played a game of one person at a time taking a polaroid snap of the person you know least well, whilst everyone else reflected on and wrote down their Offers, Wants/Needs, Questions, Worries/Fears and Intentions to create our collage:
This worked beautifully and led very naturally into planning what we’d actually do together for the week, in a way that aligned with what everyone wondered, intended, needed and had to offer.
What was super nice about this was that for the people joining later in the week, they could repeat the same exercise + read everyone else’s to get a sense of who was already here.
Ingredient 6: Open space(s)
Luke Flegg, Marcus Pibworth and I are all big fans of Open Space Technology. This is a way of co-creating an agenda together, with individual “hosts” offering sessions they want to run and inviting participants to join them. It’s very flexible, fluid and responsive and has the added bonus of needing minimal pre-planning as the agenda “emerges” from the group:
We introduced four of the principles (we missed out “Wherever it is, is the right place”):
- Whoever comes are the right people
- Whenever it starts, it starts
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
- When it’s over, it’s over
We also introduced the Law of Two Feet: “If at any time, you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go someplace else.”
Something funny happened.
Lots of people wanted to offer an amazing variety of sessions; we had no problem there.
The scheduling was where we hit some tension. It seemed that people wanted to go on the whole journey together, they didn’t want to put sessions in conflict with each other. I think it’s because our group was so small.
So we ended up basically co-creating an agenda with just one session in each time slot:
This aspect of the event was one that seemed to create quite a bit of tension and took quite a lot of time each day re-planning together.
I wonder how we could have made this more efficient? (and if we should have?)
Or… is there a variant of open spaces that’s more suited to a small group?
Ingredient 7: Cooking and eating together
LOVE THIS SO MUCH. Such a scrumptious variety of food — all vegetarian, mostly vegan and always with gluten-free options. It takes up time, but I think it’s well worth it for the bonding benefit you get!
Ingredient 8: Play
Games are a very nice way of us practicing collaboration and understanding one another’s thinking and motivations (and just opening up to the fact that others think differently from us). As well as a couple smaller paper-based games, we played:
- Sardines — hide-and-seek, but only one person hides and when you find that person you join them in their hiding place. Hunting every corner of the ASHA Centre was a great way of us getting to know the space as well as practicing our team-work. Never play this with Luke! :-)
- Ultimate Frisbee — two teams, two end-zones, objective is to throw the frisbee to a team-mate in the end-zone. When you’ve got the frisbee you can’t move. This one really got our hearts pumping!
- The Money Game — this was a VERY interesting game (thanks Marcus Pibworth), revealing our own attitudes about money. You have to come with an amount of money that you’d be uncomfortable losing. I won’t reveal any more, but if you ever get the chance, you should play it!
Ingredient 9: Diverse voices holding multiple aligned purposes
I think something that’s held up IO Collective in past meetings is trying to define a single purpose. This time we took the approach of just allowing things to go up there and as long as they weren’t contradictory, they can co-exist.
This came up in a couple of exercises we tried — in Network/Skills mapping (where some of us wanted to do it person-focused, and others wanted to do it need-focused) and in our exploration of the Why/What/How of IO Collective.
Playing “Yes, and…” instead of “No, but…” helps encourage diverse and quieter voices to speak up.
Ingredient 10: Head, heart, hands
A balance between physical, mental and spiritual seems like a really important aspect of co-creation. It supports people of different working and learning styles, and helps to connect the whole group in those multiple dimensions of experience.
Four activities that moved me out of head-space (where I naturally go) were:
- Morning yoga — a great way to wake up and get focused, thanks to Rachel Mock for facilitating that!
- Circling — something I hadn’t heard of before, it’s basically a set of simple pair exercises, done within a group, that shows us the deep empathy we have for one another. I was amazed at how much I could intuitively tell and feel comfortable sharing with someone I’d only met days before! Peter Skead facilitated this wonderfully.
- Humming in Harmony—an absolute highlight for me, on Thursday night Sergio guided us through a unique blind-folded experience of warming up our vocal cords and lungs and using them to create an emergent soundscape together. The diversity, creativity, harmony and humour that came up in the room as we vocally/musically bounced off one another was nothing short of astonishing!
- Jamming — a couple of late-night soulful singing sessions ended our days with a relaxed vibe thanks to the talented Jess Walker. Beautiful moment singing Heartbeats!
https://open.spotify.com/track/3jQyadhLTxpxadQlkFh2b8
Ingredient 11: Practicing un-planning
I think the variant of open-spaces that might work best for this kind of event is to fill up the whole board (so you have a set of options to work with), then consider everything as editable at the start of each day. So each day, you revise what’s on the plan based on the group’s emerging trajectory.
Peter called this “Practicing un-planning” which I think captures that approach quite well. I don’t think anything started on time or finished on time which caused frustration and I think we could have done better. However, being flexible to adapt to the unfolding journey is definitely a desirable way for a group like this to be.
Ingredient 12: Personal callings for next steps
Before shooting golden arrows of gratitude for one another, the more tangible outcome-focused members of the group rightly wanted to make sure we’d defined some next steps.
Steering clear of making a long and complicated plan, or even a gigantic list of “todos” to probably remain undone, we instead invited one another to share what we were called to offer to do over the next 3 months.
We set a couple of principles and only made post-it notes where someone was committing to doing that thing. So rather than a big list of what we feel “should be done” we’ve got a nice short list of what people are committed to making happen! (tracking on Trello)
To sum up, the 12 ingredients I noticed were:
- An invitation to co-create
- Building subtly on what was before
- An inspiring location connected to nature
- A soft landing and settling in to a safe space
- Sharing offers, needs and intentions
- Open space(s)
- Cooking and eating together
- Play
- Diverse voices holding multiple aligned purposes
- Head, heart, hands
- Practicing un-planning
- Personal callings for next steps
What do you think of these 12 ingredients for co-creation? What’s been your experience of each? Are some more important than others? Is there anything else you would add? Could these be adapted for virtual co-creation?
The unfolding trajectory of IO Collective
I think a couple of important things emerged that feel to me key to the continuing success and growing relevance of IO Collective:
- Continuing to offer, host and participate a diverse mix of in-person and virtual face-to-face meetings and events — as well as an annual Retreat, regular opportunities to connect and continue being, working and playing together
- Becoming really good at using one another’s networks (the “networks of the network”) to make great introductions, find meaningful (and paid!) work and find people with specific skills, experience or connections for projects
If we get really good at both of these, that makes IO Collective feel great to be part of and also makes it really useful to whatever is the main focus of our energies in life.
I believe that creates the ideal conditions for all the other elements of our “What” to fall into place!
We’re on a journey to enhance our own and one another’s capacities to meaningfully transform the world into the place we dream it can be.
Follow the IO Collective Medium publication to stay tuned to our unfolding trajectory and join the Facebook group to participate in experiments.
