Cohorts vs Communities
Comparing containers for shifting power and transforming governance
Over the past couple of years the Transformational Governance Collective have been designing and hosting facilitated structures to support people and organisations to shift power, and to work through the associated governance transitions. This has been a key part of our strategy and funded by Lankelly Chase Foundation.
In 2023 we hosted Power Shift #1, a learning cohort of 8 organisations embarking on governance transitions, with 2 representatives of each organisation. The shared learning journey took place over about 8 months and each organisation received a small grant to enable participation and to support their governance transitions. The emphasis in the cohort was on peer exchange, recognising that each organisations experiences might hold enormous value for others in the group. The learning journey supported this exchange as well as supporting each organisation to make progress in their own context.
In 2024 we’ve been experimenting by hosting Power Shift #2, a ‘Community Value Exchange’ which has brought together 50 people and organisations, either embarking on their own governance transitions, or bringing skills that can support those that are. This is a larger and ‘looser’ group where there is less emphasis on a shared journey that everyone goes on together, and more focus on a range of different activities that can provide value to participants, such as diagnosis sessions, group discussions and action learning sets. There is still a strong emphasis on peer exchange and on supporting and resourcing people to make progress on their own governance transitions, in their own context. We have now allocated £60k of our overall budget, through a participatory decision making process, to members of the community who put forward proposals for shifting power. You can check out all the proposals on Cobudget.
The community will journey together for 9 months in total, continuing until the end of March 2025. We’re still in the midst of this experiment and so it’s too early for a full evaluation or comparison of these containers, but there are plenty of observations that feel useful to start to capture. And even with a full evaluation I doubt my conclusion would ever be that one container is more ‘right’ than another, but that there are particular pros and cons to both which make them more or less suited to supporting a range of different purposes and contexts.
Transformational governance is a very particular context, which feels important to note. When we are working to support people in organisations to shift power or change their governance, invariably they are trying to do this on top of business as usual. Almost no organisations (except perhaps funders?) can hit pause on their core activity whilst they make these changes, and it’s very rare for this work to be resourced. So, it tends to be on top of everything else and extremely squeezed, and this is reflected in the amount of capacity that people who are trying to make these kinds of shifts are able to bring into any supportive container (of any size).
Also perhaps important to note that my background is Huddlecraft, an organisation I started which specialises in ‘Huddles’: peer learning groups of no more than 12 participants who exchange their ideas, skills and energies in order to learn, take action, unlearn, co-create etc. I have developed a livelihood and a methodology around the power of small, bounded groups for learning, action and momentum.
So, it has been fascinating to work on the Community Value Exchange (CVE) which provides a counterpoint. The observations I’m sharing here are incomplete thoughts, captured in motion, as part of our efforts to learn out loud.
Observations
One of the big challenges of a CVE scale community is the proportionality of the potential number of connections within the community, compared to the amount of capacity that people can bring to actually unlock that potential. It is a wildly uneven ratio! There are 1225 potential relationships in a group of 50 people.
Even in a cohort-sized group of 12, where there are 66 potential relationships, my experience has always been that the potential value that could be exchanged is far, far greater than the realistic amount of potential that can be realised, for example within a 6 month learning journey. Even in contexts where people are bringing more capacity on average than in the transformational governance space, this potential always outstrips our ability to unlock it.
This is no bad thing, it speaks to the infinite potential that we each contain and the magical multiplication that can happen when we come together. But part of the role of the facilitator/s is to support the group to navigate this potential and not to feel so overwhelmed that they shut down or drop out so that they can simplify matters.
Even as a steward of the CVE, the potential for people to relate and exchange is so vast that I have struggled to comprehend it, and haven’t had enough capacity myself to approach it in the way I might in a smaller group! ‘Exchange’ is the operative word because of course this wouldn’t be an issue if we were one-directionally delivering an online course to 50 people. But when the emphasis is on the value that can be exchanged between participants, it becomes very multi-directional very quickly. And people need a lot of support to navigate this.
So, with any facilitated container there is a need for the capacity of the participants to match what the process will require of them in order to access some of the value. And if 80% of their capacity is required to navigate complexity, then the design isn’t doing what it needs to facilitate them. When people are overwhelmed by potential, without ways to navigate it, there is a paralyzing dynamic that starts to happen. In the CVE we have been doing everything we can (constrained by our own capacity limitations…) to clearly communicate to people how to navigate the potential, but inherently it’s a just a more complex thing to get your head around than a learning journey - where everyone takes the same route and most people have a frame of reference. So for me, how we support people to navigate would be a key area for development if we were repeating the CVE process.
I also know from experience that when groups get bigger than about 12, the visibility and accountability starts to break down. People can’t remember each individual, they might not notice if someone doesn’t show up, and they might feel comfortable ducking out because they don’t think they’ll be missed, and so on. This glue is one major strength of a cohort approach. We haven’t had this glue in the CVE, so we have created it in smaller sub-groups, within activities like action learning sets or decision making sessions about how we distribute our funds.
Of course there are plenty of very large and effective communities, networks and movements in the world that function without relying on small cohort cohesion, so I’m not saying this is necessarily a problem, but it relates to the expectations you set. Participants of the CVE have said things to us like ‘the funds we’ve received for our project are fantastic, but I don’t have a sense of connection to the whole community’. Perhaps our framing suggests to people that they should feel this connection, when actually they might not need it to benefit from participating? In larger communities of practice that I host, no one feels like they should feel connected to everyone. 50 is an interesting in-between number.
On the other hand, what you do have when you’re not fixed to the idea of travelling all together on a journey, is that you have more possibilities for different types of activities and engagement that might meet more people’s specific needs. In the CVE, we’ve tried a range of different ways that people can engage. In many cases I think this has meant that people have engaged with something relevant and interesting to them, rather than showing up every time because they ‘should’. With 3 months still to go we are planning to offer some further activities that might meet the needs of those who haven’t engaged as much yet, as we know we haven’t reached everyone who joined. But as I write I wonder whether, in the same way that perhaps there isn’t the need for everyone to feel connected to everyone else, there may not be a need within this format for us to engage absolutely every single person.
There’s also something about the CVE which has been interesting in terms of emergence. Because it’s an experiment, and we’re responding to needs as they arise, we’re able to be really transparent about that process. This feels like a valuable thing to be able to demonstrate, and quite different to a process where a journey has been pre-designed to a greater extent. The fact that there’s a lot less clarity actually provides an opportunity to grapple through the UNclarity together. And let’s be honest, what has more universal application and transferability than uncertainty?! Working with uncertainty is such a crucial part of transformational governance. We’ve had quite a lot of appreciation for the way that we’ve been communicating along the way, and asking for input. Of course we don’t get input from everyone, or anything close, but different people respond at different times and in some cases this has truly influenced what we’ve decided to do. For example with the latest ££ distribution process, votes from the community took us in quite a different direction and I think we’ve learnt more from the process as a result.
Another benefit I see to a more emergent process is that we have been able to experiment more, like with the ££ distribution, where the process has been different each time we’ve done it. There has been space in the CVE format for this, so I’ve certainly been learning more as a steward than I would if I were to facilitate another cohort journey (of which I’ve facilitated many). With the ££ distribution in particular I’ve shifted my approach from one of ‘iterate to find the right design’ to ‘iterate because every time we change the dynamics, everyone in the community who participates has the opportunity to reflect and learn’. This experimental opportunity within the CVE model is something that I think could be developed and expanded far more if we were to repeat the process.
There’s another benefit of a small cohort which is coming to mind: the equivalent budget allows you to more meaningfully resource the access needs of those involved. With Power Shift #1 each organisation received £5k automatically. In the CVE this would have blown the budget before we started. And whilst it might have helped some people to engage more deeply, I think the larger group size would still have the same struggles with accountability, even if everyone were resourced in this way. So there’s an unresolved question there about how to meaningfully resource participation in a looser process where the dynamics are more complex. I don’t think we’ve cracked that yet. I also think it could be great in future to have more stewarding capacity for a CVE type process. We had 3 facilitators for Power Shift #1 and 3 stewards for the CVE. There may be some economies of scale, but ultimately transforming governance and navigating peer exchange requires time, capacity, care and skill, and 50 people have more needs collectively than 16.
So, that’s all I have time for right now, because it’s time to down tools for Christmas! These observations might differ from those of other members of the Transformational Governance Collective. And I’m very curious to see what conclusions might be drawn once we have a fuller evaluation of both containers and their potential to support power to shift.
Merry Christmas.
