Thank you so much for that intro and welcome, Val. And it's, lovely to meet all of you here today. I'm gonna start a screen share, and that'll take me just a moment to get settled with that. And yeah. So just as a little introduction to our plan here for today, we'll be taking just a a couple minutes in the chat to maybe do more intros. I see some of those rolling in. Please feel free to keep doing them. And I have a plan to lead us through some introductions to ideas and practices, followed by opportunities to reflect, hopefully, some breakouts. I may have to shave a few minutes off the program so that we end right at one, but but you will have time for q and a at the end. But also if you find yourself, like, with a question right in the middle of this, please feel free to just unmute, jump in, and and ask your question since I won't won't be able to see everything going on in the chat box. Just feel free to unmute and ask ask your question. But so with that, I'd like to have us do a little more checking in via the chat box, your name, where you're from, pronouns if you'd like to, why you came to this seminar, and what you hope to get out of it. When I have a chance, I'll be checking the the chat box and and see if there's anything in particular that I can wrap into to our flow here. But, yeah, just thanks thanks for coming. Thanks for your interest in what it means to share power in ways that are generative, because I think our world desperately needs this. So by way of a little bit of introduction, to how I got here, I'll I'll just say that that I've really, in retrospect, had a lifelong interest in this question of how do how do humans share power or don't rather. And and eventually, you know, got to the point of of digging into to research beyond practice and came to this hypothesis really that at the center of our all of our metacrisis is the misuse of human power. And that, hopefully, perhaps, if we were able to unlock this, we were able to actually more reliably use power in ways that are generative with each other, especially when we have diverging perspectives, that the rest of the crises would solve themselves. And so as such, I've really looked to this this thing at the center as a huge point of leverage that if we could focus our collective attention on, it might really unlock our capacity. So that was that was my my sort of entree into the the field of of understanding, you know, what are we dealing with here? So if that was my hypothesis, I kinda had to start with defining what is power, and I found Tillich's sort of definition, very broad, very, very broad one, helpful. Even though it's so broad, you know, it might be a little too diffuse, what I discovered was that within having a super broad definition of power, we're able to then make certain distinctions about what is healthy power versus what is toxic or destructive power. Whatever term you put on those two sort of poles of of what it means to use power makes it easier to sort of locate those differences if if power is this broad as a as a way of thinking about it. And so within that, I was really curious about this this territory of what happens when we are working together. And I define work super broadly as well, which is anytime we get something done. And so that includes our places of work, that includes our volunteer environments, that includes our homes. That includes everything as ephemeral from a group of friends planning a party together to something as as long lasting as a nation. Right? So work in that way really, you know, makes it makes it easier to sort of understand what's happening when we're working together and sharing power to have an understanding of these four forms of power. And let me take a minute to explain them a little, although, hopefully, they're somewhat self explanatory. So starting with the timeless power, it is the power of any individual entity. So this isn't necessarily just one individual. An entity could be a collective. Right? But an example of that would be a solopreneur choosing their own logo. So that's autonomous power. At the bottom, we have collective power, which is the power of what it sounds like the collective to sort of make decisions, you know, decide how they're gonna, you know, run themselves, organize themselves. Then we have explicit pardon me? Yes. Explicit power facilitators that have been elected, that's a great example. There's lots. You could be the board chair, whatever, that you've explicitly been asked to to do. Typically, these things are written down, but sometimes they're not. They're oral. Either way, it's been articulated as opposed to implicit power, which is the power unarticulable or unarticulated, and there's some great examples there. Furthermore, each of this this map, this matrix splits into the quadrants. So for example, autonomous explicit power would be a financial lead making making some decisions they've been asked to make. Explicit collective power would be something like a board committee. Conversely, implicit collective power, things like how language evolves. There's, you know, great examples of, like, smaller collectives of people sort of trying to get together to influence outcomes in the explicit space. I'm sure we've all had experiences with that, and then in the autonomous implicit, this is where all of those things of, you know, how long you've been around, what your race is, your gender, your class, all of these implicit markers of status and rank show up in the autonomous implicit quadrant. Now this this particular, you know, matrix or lens way of looking at things is is a really helpful map. Right? It's a map. It shows us some of what's happening when we're sharing power and trying to get work done together. But what it doesn't do is give us the tools to navigate the territory. And so I wanna just make a distinction between the maps and then the the vehicles we need to navigate the those maps, and I'll be coming back to this question of what are some of those concrete tools that help us navigate this space. But it's really important to also have a conceptual way of looking at the territory that we're trying to navigate. And so, yeah, I think I think it might be helpful for me to give a concrete example here even. So so one recent example was I I someone reached out to me who's a member of a a board of directors, and they've had some some challenges in their life and had been asking the the board to to make some accommodations, including some simple things like people not interrupting them and, you know, letting them complete their thoughts before someone else starts. And not surprisingly, the board was not interested. They've not been interested at all. And so here we have an example of an implicit sort of consensus from most of the board to use interruption as a means of communication, and this person is using their autonomous power to reach out and explicitly ask to change that pattern to make it more generative for everyone involved. So that's just a very simple example of how one can look at this map and and how things are playing out. We'll dig a little bit deeper as as we go in here, but in particular, I'd like to just pause for a minute and invite you to pick a recent situation that didn't go well. Again, any context is fine. And analyze it a little bit through the lens of the power matrix. Where was the implicit power? Was it autonomous, collective? Was there a little bit of both happening there? What was happening in the explicit dimensions with both autonomous and collective power? And I was gonna do breakouts for this, but I think we'll skip that just to catch up on time. And so just sort of note your own insights to yourself and and hopefully we'll have we'll have time for our breakout a little bit later in our time together. So I'll give us just another three minutes to to do this reflection.

No. That sounds great, actually, Val. Thank you for that suggestion. Cool. That would be perfect.

Good idea. Let's see if I can get this thing to cooperate. There we go. Do you like me to delete the examples or leave them? Guess I'll leave them. Right. Wrap up your thoughts, and, these sharings in the chat are fantastic. Thank you all for these examples. I haven't had a chance to digest them all fully yet, but great, great stuff happening there. Yeah. So I think one of the things I wanna emphasize before I move on to the to the next concept and and and slides is that each of these forms of power is neutral. Like, it's inherently neutral. You know, implicit power isn't inherently negative. Neither is explicit. None of them are inherently bad or toxic. It all depends upon how they're being used in any given situation. And so it enables us to, again, analyze what's happening. And, typically, in that process of analysis, we can identify where do where does the balance need to shift? Like, do we need to lean into a little bit more autonomous power here? Like, that was one of the things that popped out from Val's share in the chat was just like that facilitator stepping in and being like, boom. Here's a question. Unlocked something for everybody. In other situations, more collective power might be necessary. And so there's a way in which when we analyze a situation, we can begin to intuit what needs to shift. And trusting that felt sense in your body of of what is going on is critical as as we'll spend a little bit more time on later in our in our time here together. But to circle back to this idea that this is a map, it is not a vehicle, I found myself critically interested, like, super interested in what are the practical ways that we can do power differently. Like, the ideas were fantastic, but I wanted tools. I wanted things we could use in the moment at the level of interaction. And so I kept digging, and pardon me while I skim through all these examples to get to the next slide. And dug up some work by the the researchers at the Montreal School of Communication that pointed to communication and power as being two two two things that are that are intimately related with each other. And, essentially, we can't work if we don't communicate. And so as such, power flows through communication in a way that represents a tremendous point of of leverage. And in addition, power or communication, essentially, has these three fundamental components. We have the what, the content, the things we're talking about. We have the how we're talking about it. And then we have the how those two things come together and create outputs, items, artifacts from those conversations that are hopefully useful and gonna feed back into the communication at future points. Now one of the unique things that that or interesting things that that shows up from this looking at communication through this lens is that often organizations hyperfocus on the what. It's almost as if the content is all there exists exists when we communicate, and nothing could be further from the truth. Right? But process or the how is often overlooked. Although there are certain communities within which process gets hyper focused on and and and not to good effect either. Right? So there's this this balancing of these two, these I I understanding of their core relationship, what and how, and how they work together to create the outputs that that are what we're actually after anytime we communicate. And these these three components really also highlighted what are you know, or raised the question of what is it that we're communicating about. So if if if power flows through communication, communication is omnipresent, then what are we talking about? And so these seven conversations appear, and I'd love to hear your thoughts if you think one is redundant or I'm missing something here. It's in its attempt to be both comprehensive and minimally sufficient. Articulation of everything that any organization, no matter how small, how big, how transient, how long living it is, has these conversations. So I won't define them. The definitions are on the screen. Hopefully, you can read those easily enough. But what I would like to do is is point out a couple of things. Since since we're here talking about power and governance and assist meta gov, I think it's important to to take a moment and and and ask ourselves, what does what is governance? What is governance? And, you know, one of the things that that I found is that there's two definitions generally in the world out there, that are related but very different from each other when it comes to governance, and one is governance, as you'll see on the screen, which is mostly about who has power to do what, who makes which decisions, how do we, you know, decide our you know, what decision making do we even use, like, what are our policies, what are the, like, nuts and bolts of how we're going to do things, how we're gonna, yeah, move things forward at a pattern level. Right? And the other definition of governance out there is the entire kitten caboodle of what it takes in to communicate to coordinate ourselves as a as a species. And from my perspective and research, governance is one of seven conversations required to actually do that full coordination of ourselves as a species. And yet often, that big concept of governance conflates itself with just the small governance. So I just distinguish those between big g governance and little g governance. Big g governance being that the entire operating system that's required to to actually coordinate ourselves and little g governance being, you know, who has the power to do what within this organization. So, getting clear about those two, getting levels at least, I think is really helpful. And also and what it does is it brings into the room some of these other conversations that are just as important as the governance conversation, but are often left in the implicit. Right? They're left in the dark, and there's a tremendous value in bringing them into the light where we can then have these conversations constructively. So one of the things that that tends to happen with these seven conversations is that often organizations will be really strong in one or two of them, missing out on some of them, or some conversations are being held collaboratively, but others are not. They're happening behind closed doors in ways that are highly implicit and difficult, therefore, for everyone to be engaged in. So committing to or simply leaving room for these conversations to happen as they need to within teams is in itself a way of sharing power better. One of the other cool things that happens from seeing these seven conversations is that often we conflate issues in one with issues in another. Simple example, you know, conflicts often show up as if they're interpersonal, like personality conflicts between people. But when we look a little deeper, we realize, oh, actually, we're not clear whose role it is to do that thing. We're just not clear about it. And so we have different ideas about how it should happen, and we both think we're right and, wah, boom. There we go. Or we lack clarity on what our priorities are. What are we gonna focus on now? I think it should be this. You think it should be that, and we don't agree. And because it's implicit, we can't agree. Until we make it an explicit conversation that we're gonna hold collaboratively, then we can't actually resolve that what appears to be interpersonal conflict. So some neat things emerge from this. And for those of you who are connected to Ostrom's work, I'll just mention that eight all eight of the CDPs map onto map onto these conversations, and, unfortunately, I don't have time to do that mapping articulation with you here today, but I'm I'm happy to follow-up with any of you who are interested in in how that actually plays out. So within this sort of articulation of of conversations, I was very curious about this this possibility of creating a synoptic integration. One of the, you know, hopefully obvious things to all of you in this this space is that there's a tremendous amount of work out there across disciplines to try to address some in at some address a couple of the conversations, some address one. So what would it take to have something that was comprehensive and that came together in a way that actually makes us more effective? And the metaphor I like to use for this is a whole canoe. If you have just a decision making process, you know, the metaphor, just the ors, or you have just a means of of, you know, perhaps managing accountability in a team, We'll say those are the, you know, the the the rudder the rudder for your boat. Like, it's not enough to get you across a lake. Like, you actually have to have enough of the parts that come together in a way to make a whole canoe in order to actually cross cross this lake of the work we're doing in a collaborative way. So with that, I set out to understand what what some of the methodologies are out there that are particularly helpful. Hopefully, all of you recognize that particular one. Profoundly useful insights. And what I'll show you here is just a few of the methodologies integrated into into Colab, which is the body of work that I've produced with others into a simple set of practices, which we'll be talking about here shortly. But basically, each of these methodologies has something vital to contribute, but it's not the whole picture, and it doesn't create that synoptic integration. And so as I dug dug deeper into each of these, that that that potential of coming together into a synoptic integration, a simple set of practices that any team can use that is universal in nature, essentially emerged. And just to give you guys a little bit of an example before we, dig into some further discussion, This isn't one of the tools that we use, which, hopefully, you recognize some basic things that you already use in your teams in your conversations. What's less transparent in this flowchart is that there is a myriad of ways of actually hosting these conversations, which enable power sharing much more reliably. So, for example, in the agenda building there, we actually use attention surfacing process and and also this idea of a single tension holder to move items forward, and that tension holder has a really important role in in that whole process. So if we have time a little later, I'm happy to dig into what some of those details are, but I just wanna give you a flavor of what are the what do I mean by these tools that are essentially universal in nature? And and the standard meeting practices is is an example. Another one is a, you know, a decision making practice that that works in in for for collectives. And one other thing I wanna presence that that really helps with this is that each of the seven conversations are enabled or activated within every scope of work. So when I say scope, think team, but scope is really bounded by work. So it's it shifts our orientation to have each of these conversations being activated for every scope as opposed to what sometimes happens, which is the governance conversations get vacuumed up and and placed at the top. Right? They're placed at the top in the board, and then the board is the only, you know, body that can make governance decisions. And the trouble with that is that the governance decisions are already happening in every scope, and so by not acknowledging and enabling those, we miss a tremendous opportunity for actually being more collaborative, more innovative, and actually sharing power better. And so within this bunch of of content that I've just shared, before we break out here, I wanna just see if there's any I'm gonna pause my screen sharing here for a moment, and we'll come back to this in a second. But I just wanna see if there's any any burning questions at the moment from folks. And feel free to, again, unmute if you got anything. And, yes, I'm I'm totally happy to share the slides. I'll make sure that Val gets those. I like that, Rick. The golden circle of leadership. What what, how, and why. Yeah. Nice. And curious if you have examples of concrete ways to ensure that governance conversations questions don't get siloed into board mission circles, tel groups. Yes. Yes. Sweet. And thank you, Bogdanah, about your question about tension. So let me just touch base briefly about those

things. So the the concrete way to ensure that governance conversations don't get siloed is to host, to have every scope of work. So, again, a scope of work is essentially a team that is articulated by what is the concrete work that team is doing. So for example, a team might have a concrete scope of work to, you know, to conduct the the outreach and communications for an organization. So that that's what the kind of concreteness I'm talking about. And then within that boundary of work, think of the boundary of work as forming a membrane, kinda like a cell. So that that has a membrane to it. And within that, only the people who are doing the work of the scope attend the regular meetings of the scope. And so every scope of work has meetings. They determine their own frequency of meetings. It could be once a month, could be once a week, could be once a day, the scope determines. And then within those meetings, we're using the standard meeting practice, which has the tension surfacing practice, which I'll come back to in a minute. But that tension surfacing mechanism means that every voice in the room is invited to bring forward what's on their heart, what's on their mind, what they're sensing is needed for their team, and often inside those tensions are governance conversations that need to happen. And so if we rely on that tension surfacing and processing mechanism, the governance will naturally unfold, and we don't have to work at it. The only thing we need to do is ensure that teams are clearly bounded by scopes of work and that they're having regular meetings. Did that answer or address that question, Marie, or did you have a follow-up on it? No. That's helpful. Thank you so much. Yeah. You're welcome. So that brings me to this question of what is the importance of tensions, and and let's start by just asking what are what are tensions. So I invite you to ask that question yourself, and I'll say that that from my experience, attention in our culture is often seen as negative, and it can be. But within this context, I'm using a broader understanding is it of it as kinda like a rubber band. It's the difference between where you are and where you wanna be. And so there's something potential is potential is sensed, and that potential could be positive. Hey. I have a great idea for our team. Really like to see this happen. Or it could be negative. Oh my god. There's a problem. There's a conflict happening. What are we gonna do? Any and all of those. But one of the most cool and important parts about it is that it's literally physically sensible. Like, I can sense my tensions. And it doesn't have to be big and splashy. It's just like, oh, there's this thing in me, and I wanna bring it forward. And the value of having our agenda items built on those tensions is that we can then, as we process those tensions using clear and collaborative processes, we can turn back to the tension holder and ask them if it this has moved it forward for them. Because when it's grounded in my body, I can immediately sense, oh oh, yeah. That actually has moved forward. It's it's not perfectly complete, but it's like it's incrementally moved forward for today. And that's what we're looking for, and that's one huge value of tensions, is that that somatic capacity to sense, to feel, to feel the release, and and then to trust that I can come back and keep doing that with my team as often as I need to. One of the huge values also of of having a tension holder is that we turn to the tension holder. And, again, remember, agenda items are built from these tensions, and they have a single tension holder. And their job is to tell us when it has been moved forward. And when it has been moved forward for them, we are done with that agenda item, and we don't move on until we are done with that agenda item. So typically and, again, there's always exceptions to these things. These are guidelines that help us be be much more efficient. You actually get much more efficient if you follow this this practice because we're not talking on endlessly about a topic way past when it's been moved forward. Right? We're we're we're really staying in living relationship to to that that practice of what are my tensions, how do we move them forward, boom, they move forward, we record the output, and we move on. Did that help Bogdanah and and Sent? I see see comments about that.

When you say the tensions, is was that the standard meeting practice or the sub and conversations?

Okay. Great. Give me just a sec. And I'll look that up. Yes. Let's try this. My computer is being a little slow, but, hopefully, you can can you see that now?

Yeah. It was just your your your framework at the beginning about implicit and explicit power, and I I know tactfully said it was neutral. I I would like to add a yes and to that.

Okay.

Power can exist along the continuum. It needs to discernment between immoral, amoral, and moral use and abuses of power. Mhmm. I I understand the the rationale for using a neutral frame, but we get into such a pickle because we don't make those discernments very well.

I 100% agree, Rick. And just to clarify, what I'm saying is that these forms of power are neutral until they're activated in a situation, and then that's when we make the distinctions between moral, amoral, and and various forms of of how it gets expressed in action. So, yes, and I would I would love to follow-up more and connect more with you, Rick, to to to hear, you know, what your sources are on on making those distinctions and because because there may be ways like, one of the fundamental things, I guess, I wanna presence about this framework is that it it looks really nice and neat and put together and everything, but it is under constant evolution. And one of the the major projects that I'm working on right now is to start or launch, convene a governance commons where we can bring more insight to the table around what are these universal patterns, how do they work well, and instantiate those as a set of standards that are more much more accessible for people to to actually use and apply in their their situations, but then it's built from a a much wider range of perspectives and organizations and individuals. So if you're interested, you or anyone else, I'd love to love to follow-up with you.

Just a quick follow-up on that. What what I would add to that is that the the ethical discernment is co constructed so that you have to ask people what they think those distinctions are and why. There's a lot there's a lot of people think they're doing moral work, and some people said immoral. There's lots of people think they're doing amoral work, but it's immoral. And so it really comes to the eye of the beholder and the ethical frameworks that people are using to make those judgments.

Absolutely, Steve. Thank you. I I'm curious if you're aware of the research on sensory processing sensitivity since you're mentioning a neurological basis.

Cool. Nice. Sweet. Val, you had another question.

Maybe just to add to that a little bit of what Steve was saying, and that is Jonathan's height work on the self righteous mind, and and some of these differences and perceptions come from our value structures. And so we perceive things differently based upon our underlying differences and priorities, our value structure as to whether we think this is better or worse or whatever. And that's why there's such a a a political conundrum because we're so polarized in our in our rigid value structures that we pass judgment far too easily.

Mhmm. Yeah. Boy, it's a

Dawson Hyde's work.

Okay. Sweet. So we have about ten minutes left. I'm, I guess, I'm inclined to perhaps not do the breakouts at this point, just because we are we only have about ten minutes left. But I did want to invite you all to to reflect on some of these these questions that might I'm just gonna drop them into the chat box here. Yeah. So what are some of the helpful examples of power sharing practices you use in your teams and, and, you know, which of the seven conversations might be able to to help with some of those? If you feel like drawn to any of those questions, feel I'm happy to hear your your questions or comments about them. And in the meantime, Val, you had a question about an example of attention. And then is attention holder a human, and are they self prescribed attention holders? So, yes, attention holders are human, and every single member of a team is attention holder. So if you're on a team, that is one of your core responsibilities is to sense, to do this work of sensing what's needed, to bring it forward, to help process it, and to just keep doing that. And one of the cool things that comes out of this is that we're able to actually dynamically steer a lot more quickly. We're we're because we're we're listening to what the diversity of perspectives is consents as opposed to what often happens, which is just one or two people who are in, quote, unquote, explicit or implicit leadership roles, their attentions get surfaced and processed. This is a a fantastic way of of making that a distributed practice, throughout a team. And it it it it, it really helps to have a clear, process for doing that, that surfacing of those tensions and the processing of them, collectively. And an example an example of attention. Let's see. Yeah. I'll give you a really simple one from from a meeting I just had, which is we've we've been asked by a student if we had a a template that that fit in Asana, and I, you know, I wasn't I wasn't sure. It's a great idea if there's a meeting template that could go into Asana. So I put that up on the agenda to see if, a, you know, could we make one? What would it take to to put one create one in in Asana? And that we moved forward pretty rapidly to a next action, and that moved it forward for me. And the next action was for this person to go and go create and or update the one that we had. Yeah. Do you do you have an example, Val, or anyone else of of attention if you wanna just sort of throw it out there for practice? Or

And and and, Val, your your points are touching right on a comment from Michael in the chat about group membership, and it's absolutely intrinsic to the notion of power, is is what is what is a group? How do we know we have a group that's intact enough to even be surfacing these tensions for? And what's you know, I'm not sure, you know, based on your experience with DAOs, like, exactly, you know, what related to that, but my experience is that DAOs are have a very their membranes are are way too big or way too porous. And and until we have a clearer membranes that have those mechanisms for information to go inside and outside, the capacity for a a group to actually self organize requires that those membranes to be intact to really know who is part of that group. And, again, within this framework, we define the who is only people who are actually doing concrete work for that team. So folks who are outside of the team, who are looking in and not doing work can offer input, but they don't have decision making power. And I think that that is a super critical move to getting that engagement, to getting that participation, to having that clarity. Yeah. I'm curious how that that lands for you or anyone else because I know that's a departure from how DAOs operate. And I think it could solve some of their their problems, but it would be a pretty good choice. Example if you want? Please.

Yeah. Thank you. Is is do you pronounce it Aiki?

That's Aiki. Aiki. Aiki. Thank Thank you. Thank you so much for those examples. They're fantastic, and they really point to a number of sort of those nuances I was mentioning in the meeting practice. For example, we use the the tension sensing and and processing mechanism to articulate clear roles. So roles are not a new concept, but one of the ways that we use it in that regard is that we have collectively created and consented to what the roles are and then elected people to those roles. And so it's immediately obvious to anybody in the team. They've participated in that decision of articulating what is your role, Ikea. And and and so within that, it's articulated. I have the final decision as to what happens with the with the UI, for example. And but also mention that I find using a consent decision making process far more effective than democratic voting yes or no, because with the democratic voting yes and no, you always end up with disgruntled people who may actually have really good input, but they can't get integrated if all we're doing is, you know, a blanket yes or no. And using the consent process, then we can take whatever objections Autumn might have and integrate them without necessary and in a way that doesn't cause harm to the collective. Right? But at that point, then Autumn has had her chance to say what she needed to and and the has participated in that consent decision making and is much more likely to buy in then to that decision than if she had to vote and say voted no, and then she's like, no. I didn't I didn't want that. Right? So why should I, like, participate? So there's there's a few other, like, mechanisms in there that really support that. Yeah. But we are almost out of time. So this has been such a rich, rich conversation with you all. I wanted to let you know that we actually have an upcoming free webinar on April 4 where we're gonna dig into this tension sensing and processing mechanism more. And so if you're curious to learn more, the link is in the chat box there, and I'd love to see you there. And and we'll we'll have a little more, yeah, little more to say about it and and chance to experience. So, yeah, thank you all for being here. It's been delightful. And, yeah, I guess if any of you wanna reach out to me directly, here's my email. I'm also on Slack. Speaking of Slack, So I'm Medigolf Slack, so feel free to reach out find me there and reach out. Yeah. I'm I'm happy to discuss further, explore further, experiment further, and just thank you. Thank you for being interested in this.

you. Thank you.

thank you. Awesome. Balloons.