Retrospective : Year one in Percolab Coop
The story and learnings from my first year as part of Percolab, told from September 2018
It started in an idyllic location — nine of us sharing an island on Lac Poisson-Blanc for three days, creating our own kingdom for the weekend. I’d come to this retreat with the specific purpose of sinking into the collective and finding my path to the core. To use their metaphor, I’d been ‘dating’ Percolab for long enough and was ready to move in!
The thing I found so remarkable about this gathering was the embodiment of collective hosting, emergence, flow and non-judgement. Everyone was welcomed to bring both their gifts and their concerns to a collaborative tapestry of experience.
Friday was spent canoeing and setting up camp, enjoying the spectacular scenery and sense of adventure.
Then after a long leisurely breakfast, Saturday started with a check-in where we spoke to both what we were feeling grateful for, and what we sensed needed to be attended to that day. No schedule was made, instead we moved into the thing that felt most immediately alive and let the rest of the day flow from there, trusting everything would be attended to. At the end of the day when I looked back at the list I could tick off every single thing we’d named! I’d previously had a sense of the special realm Percolab is to inhabit, but this took my sense of inspiration up another notch. The degree of effortlessness and ease was something I’d never experienced before.
One of the tasks for the weekend was to write compelling new website bios for ourselves. For this exercise we paired up in canoes and shared our reflections of the other person and what their unique gifts were that we could offer to clients. After the nightmare challenge of trying to distill my skills and experience into 100 words, the clarity I got from my canoe ride was glorious. Here’s what I ended up with :
Chloe is fluent in design, project management and human dynamics. She applies her broad skillset to move confidently in complexity, emergence, community activation and inclusion. She understands responsive strategy; applying her creativity and facilitation skills to help groups and clients find new ways to solve move forward. If your project is stuck or the human dynamics full of tension, she’s the person you want to call! Her communication style invites openness, transparency, co-creation and collective ownership. She has experience across world-leading digital, social innovation and place-making projects and is based in Montreal.
Technical skills — visual design, facilitation and hosting, process design, project management, organizational culture and design, communications and strategy.
On that same canoe ride I asked about the next steps of joining the Percolab Coop and made the decision to jump in as soon as I could. The core team I would be joining were such an amazing group of people :-
Sam is the best person you could ever hope to take on a big challenge with. She’s a dynamo with a swift mind, ecstatically holding space for people to step into their own bravery. Her super power is transmuting fear into joyful learning.
Cedric holds the poetic spirit of the earth within him. He’s at once steady and grounding, and fierce in his passion for systemic change. He lives complexity — externally and internally. His super power is the art of subtlety, beautifully illuminating the things that might otherwise be missed.
Paul is the kind of guy that just gets it done without a lot of fuss. Equally at ease in a fabrication workshop, or doing bi-lingual graphic facilitation at an international conference (or performing a canoe rescue mission!). A brilliant designer-of-all-things, his super power is his boyish, playful sensibility.
Elizabeth is a bright light full of sass. She’s like a lake in that her surface radiates light, but contains great depths. She holds a wealth of knowledge of the local Montreal context, and is the ultimate improvisor. Drop her in any group context and she can make it a vibrant and meaningful experience.
Ezra can appear a little unassuming at first, but you soon learn that there is a huge amount of life experience and knowledge contained within this magnificent human. A practicing photographer and wicked storyteller, he’s known for his uncanny ability to reveal beauty and is a beatific addition to any group context.
And me? What do I bring? Definitely a dose of laughter and absurdity. An ability to take the murkiest situation and get to clarity. Fluidity, adaptability and constant momentum (plus the courage this takes). I’m learning I’m also pretty good at being seen.
> > Fast forward a year…
Looking back I realise that my imagination was totally inadequate to project the potential contained in what could be created in Percolab.
I’ve been able to take everything I relished and learned in my previously most-loved project — the Otakaro Orchard — and bring it forth in thrivable ways within this team.
This project, an entirely community-held effort to create an Edible Park and Urban Food Community Centre in the heart of the Christchurch New Zealand, was such a joy to lead in terms of continuously finding innovative ways to invite community to own a piece of the new city centre. A place that embodied what people had asked for in the rebuild of the city from devastating earthquakes. What I’d loved about this project was the creativity of process design, invitations and little touches involved in building community ownership. What had been a huge challenge was the constant fundraising and how incredibly stretched the team was. I was constantly sucked into financial and project management, when I really wanted to be looking after the human dynamics and community capacity-building.
In the past year in Percolab, I’ve been able to play this role so much more fully amongst a team of brilliant people who equally value the human aspects of projects alongside the technical aspects. People who are all systems-thinkers. I’ve been hosted and challenged into co-creating two new initiatives which are dream projects for me :
- Montreal Collaboration Dojo
This launched in the spring of 2018 — the first prototype being an 8-week evening workshop series where a group of 15 people got together each Tuesday to practice their skills in collective sense-making, navigating power dynamics, co-creative decision-making, emotional literacy and inclusion. This was then brought to life for a second edition at the Percolab Future Human Summercamp and now there are two more cohorts running co-currently. There are at least two Percolab-ers at each workshop holding the space through embodying the qualities of generative collaboration. This hasn’t just benefitted the people taking the workshops, but us too through making our practices and ways of doing things much more explicit. The course is supplemented with blog articles about each of the practices which are making ripples around the world. - Privilege for Common Good (the future of civic inclusion)
This second project is just emerging and operates as an inquiry we’re bringing to all the work we do. It’s bringing greater literacy to the use of the privilege we have — having courageous conversations about how privilege can be used generatively rather than denied or apologised for. It’s an extension of the work we’ve been doing the past few years around organisational power dynamics, but taken to the urban societal level. We’re starting to run some exciting experiments around citizen consultation that creates value for everyone involved, and mapping out tactics and structures for participation in civic initiatives with a lens of the positive role privilege can play. It feels incredibly edgy and exciting. Watch this space!
As well as these initiatives that I’ve been leading, I’ve been able to take a supporting role on so many amazing projects within the team that keep the space alive for collective learning and development. One of these pieces of work has been our competency framework for people operating in next-stage organisations and businesses. Our growing reflection and explicit literacy of this is sparking critical conversations both within our international team, and this wider movement out in the world. It’s so exciting to feel at the forefront of describing what kinds of skills and capabilities this next paradigm calls for.
I remember at the retreat in September last year Elizabeth said ‘At the end of each year with Percolab I am a little bit more me’. This idea resonated with me then and the experience of it is deeply felt now. The chance to be creating amongst a group of people who are living their gifts each day has been the ultimate opportunity for me to grow in my uniqueness too. This is a place where in one moment I’m able to be geeking out intellectually on some new framework or concept, then the next sinking deeply into my feeling-space and sensitivity to give attuned presence to a person or group situation. The word ‘fluidity’ which came to me at that retreat has come into more and more meaning in the way I operate.
I’ve learned a huge amount about inclusion and integration through this year as well. Although there are structures and process design that can support inclusion, it can be a very nuanced art. A dance between the environment (inclusion-zone) and the person being integrated. Everyone experiences it differently so it is as much about listening as taking initiative. The process needs to be hosted from both directions — the person stepping up to meet Percolab, and Percolab opening their arms to the person.
A way that I’m learning to start these kinds of processes is to do a map of the needs for inclusion to happen — case by case. This includes :
- Information flows — what do we need to understand about each other? What’s the best way for this to be revealed?
- Emotional / human connection — what do you need to feel welcomed and embedded? What rituals and systems can support this?
- Creative purpose — what could we uniquely create together? What is alive?
From this map a pathway can be generated that fits the ever-evolving context of what is most present in Percolab, plus meeting the person coming in in where they are. The thinking and prototyping is ongoing!
I’m so incredibly grateful to the Montreal team (plus the other international cells I’m getting to know) for this purposeful environment we create together. For the first time in my life I’m not an edge-dweller, but fully embedded and growing like crazy through it. Even my French is getting pretty good! I can participate in team meetings without too much trouble now which feels like a huge win.
I’m already looking forward to what the next year brings.
