Noise

Every now and then the right book comes along just as I'm ready to benefit from its message. That happened last month when I consumed Noise, by Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow), Oliver Sibony, and Cass Sunstein.

This book came out last year and explores the concept of bad decisions and why people make them, distinguishing between bias and randomness. With bias, things are slanted in a particular direction (consciously or unconsciously). With noise, the range of responses is randomly diffused—the more noise, the wider the diffusion. Things you'd prefer be consistent, turn out not to be. Examples include the sentences judges give people convicted of the same offense, insurance rates that adjusters set for the same coverage, the wide range of agreement among evaluators in assessing personnel candidates.

It turns out that wherever judgment is involved, there is noise—and more of it than most realize. Worse, it's not just found in differences between people. It also occurs when the same person faces the same situation, but at a different time of day, or on a different day of the week, or after the local sports team won over the weekend.  

Decision Hygiene

The authors have a number of specific suggestions for how to approach decision-making to reduce noise.

• Delay discussing solutions (potential decisions) until you've first agreed on the criteria you'll use to assess the evaluate candidate proposals. Further, allow people an opportunity to think about what they believe the criteria should be by themselves before discussing it collectively, as groups tend to be strongly influenced by the first couple of people who speak, and ideas are less likely to be lost if they have been written down ahead of time.

• To the extent possible, consider focusing attention on how the candidates rate, one criteria at a time, delaying a discussion of the whole until the end.

• Evaluation will be less noisy if you ask different people or teams to assess candidates in different criteria (the idea being that the wisdom of the group is typically better than the wisdom of an individual).

• In expressing where a candidate proposal stands with respect to each criteria, it's generally better to rank them comparatively rather than on an absolute scale, as there tends to be much tighter agreement about comparative standing than what is meant by an arbitrary numerical scale.

Impact of Noise in Cooperative Groups

While this was not a lens through which the authors of Noise looked, it occurs to me that this book has some things to say about how cooperative groups might enhance their decision-making. To wit:

—Matching the process investment to the stakes. The above outline for how to reduce noise needs to be in some reasonable proportion to consequences. When the outcome matters a lot, you can justify being more careful. When the impact is low, it may not be worth it.

—In cooperative groups, how a decision is made typically matters as much as what decision gets made. With that in mind, there can be a large value placed on inclusivity (the lowest possible barrier for someone's relevant input to be expressed and considered), and it behooves groups to be especially mindful of how default open discussion and rounds tend to inadvertently favor the quick, and those who are comfortable speaking in front of the group. Or, in situations where the group is unskilled at working with disagreement or with the expression of strong feelings, how those with thick skin or a loud voice can have more sway—independent of whether they have better discernment.

—Delegating to a manager or team may be expedient and efficient, but it probably means more noise. It might be useful to reflect on that tradeoff before blithely embracing it.

Who knew that paying attention to noise could be so productive?

The Gift of Good Process—All Delivered Before Xmas Morning

I'll be conducting a variety of courses from now through the end of the year, and I'm laying them out here—both because one or more may interest you, or people you know (and I'd be pleased to have your help banging the drum).

I. Facilitation Training

This is my signature two-year course, which I've been doing since 2003 and have delivered 15 times, reaching about 175 students. It will be conducted via Zoom (which I've experimented with the last two years and feel solid about, based on having conducted 15 training weekends and facilitated multiple group meetings via that medium).

The class meets for eight 3-day weekends (from Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon), spaced approximately three months apart. No prior facilitation experience is required—you just need a positive attitude, an open mind, and a reliable modem. In addition to teaching the basics, the course will cover considerable nuance about group dynamics in a cooperative setting—all of which applies just as well to leadership in cooperative culture.

In addition to receiving approximately 50 handouts, there will be a principal teaching theme for each weekend:

• Working Content
• Formats
• Conflict
• Consensus
• Power & Leadership
• Organizational Structure
• Delegation 
• Challenging Personalities

Half of each weekend is devoted to preparing for, delivering, and debriefing live meetings facilitated by students—as it's my belief that lessons are better grounded when facing live ammunition. The trainers (there will be three of us) will hold your hand throughout and be a safety net as you learn to fly.

Most students come affiliated with an intentional community, but that isn't a requirement, so long as you understand we are teaching you to operate collaboratively and inclusively.

While I am open to students from any situation and with any background, I want to make you aware of the potential this training provides when multiple people participate from the same group—it is much easier to digest and bring home the learnings when you have buddies, and much more possible to shift the culture and practices of your group when the inspiration comes from more than one voice. The benefits are geometric (that is, your group gets four times the boost when you double the number of students).

This is the most fun thing I do, passing along what I've distilled from four decades in the field. At a minimum, this course will make you a better facilitator or help you understand better what good facilitation is. At its best, it will change your life.

The new course is penciled in as follows:

Weekend I          Sept 22-25, 2022

Weekend II         Jan 12-15, 2023

Weekend III        Mar 30-April 2, 2023

Weekend IV       June 22-25, 2023
Weekend V        Sept 7-10, 2023
Weekend VI       Dec 7-10, 2023
Weekend VII      Mar 7-10, 2024
Weekend VIII     June 6-9, 2024

There is still room in this course for more students (we accept a maximum of 18). If we don't reach critical mass (12 students is the minimum) by next month, we'll postpone the start until January, bump back all the weekends and add a new date for Weekend VIII.

The cost is $450/weekend for full students (discounts are available if you pay up front) and $300/weekend for auditors. While both full students and auditors are welcome in all classroom sessions, only full students get to facilitate live meetings during class weekends, and receive detailed written comments about their facilitation. 

If you have questions or want additional details reach me via email: laird@ic.org

II. National Cohousing Conference • Aug 25-28 • Madison WI

Coming right up (next week!), I'll be traveling for work for the first time since March 2000—ending a drought of 29 months. (I used to travel once a month for work—my how times have changed.)

—Aug 25 (Thursday) • I am teaching an all-day (6-hour) intensive styled Consensus 301, aimed at helping groups who are struggling with consensus, to better understand how they might untangle and be get better results. I have been working with secular consensus for 45 years and have a deep understanding of both the problems and potential solutions. In six hours there will be plenty of time to get responses to individual questions.

Click here for details and the possibility of a one-day pass for this offering alone. I believe you can participate either in-person (best) or via Zoom (next best).

—Aug 27 (Sat) • I am offering a 90-min workshop entitled Consensus 101 (9-10:30 am), covering the basics of what you'll need to get off to the right start.

—Aug 27 (Sat) • I am offering a 90-min workshop entitled Participation (1:30-3 pm), unpacking the morass of issues that arise around non-monetary member contributions to the maintenance and well-being of the community. This topic is the single most requested that clients ask me to help with, because of its complexity. I'll lay out the key questions groups need to address in order to clear the fog.

Again, you'll have the choice of registering for just the workshops, or the whole megillah. Click here for your options.

III. FIC Webinars

Continuing an ambitious program of 10-hour online courses sponsored by the Foundation of Intentional Community, all of which have been offered once already this year, here are the ones being repeated in the months ahead. Each course will be comprised of 2-hour Zoom sessions, held at the same time of day and on the same day of the week for five consecutive weeks. For details and registration for each course, please click on the titles, which are hyperlinked to FIC.

—Facilitation (Tuesdays) • Sept 13-Oct 11

—Consensus 101 (Thursdays) • Sept 15-Oct 13

—Conflict (Tuesdays) • Oct 25-Nov 22

—Aging Gracefully in Community (Wednesdays) • Oct 26-Nov 23 (for this course only, I am part of a team of presenters, and I am only leading the first session)

—Membership (Thursdays) • Oct 27-Nov 23 (note that the last class will held on Wed, to avoid Thanksgiving—the rest will be on Thursdays)

In addition to the main entrées listed above, here are a couple of 1-hour appetizers offered free of charge:

• Facilitating Your Group Through Anything • Aug 23 • 2:30-3:30 pm Eastern

In this session I'll walk through how to handle the nasty stuff: topics that are complex and/or volatile. This is a teaser for the 10-hour Facilitation course listed above.

• Understanding How Consensus Works in Cooperative Groups • Aug 23 • 6-7 pm Eastern

The key focus here will be on essential communication skills needed to make consensus sing. This is a teaser for the 10-hour Consensus 101 course listed above.

I hope to see some of your smiling faces soon.

Remembering Lina

My friend and mentor, Caroline Estes, died July 13, passing peacefully after four months in hospice. She was 94 and had lived a full and impactful life that touched me deeply.

We first met in the spring of 1987. I had taken Amtrak's Empire Builder from Chicago to Oregon, fresh from the first board meeting of the newly reconstituted Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) at Stelle IL. I caught up with Caroline for a cup of coffee at Alpha-Bit, the magical bookstore/cafe/art gallery that her community, Alpha Farm, operated in Mapleton—a wide spot in the road between Eugene and Florence, on the sinuous banks of the Siuslaw River (of Once a Great Notion fame). 

I had set up the rendezvous both to put a face to the name, and to fill her in on what had happened at the seminal FIC gathering. She had a reputation as a tour de force as a community networker in the Pacific Northwest, and I aspired to strengthen connections with communities on the West Coast. As an added incentive, Alpha Farm was an income-sharing community—just like my community, Sandhill Farm—and there weren't many of us around with whom to talk shop.

We clicked immediately, nattering nonstop for a couple of hours, pausing only to inhale and to refill our coffee cups. (I knew right away that I was in the right place because Alpha-Bit served half-and-half in a small pitcher.)

She spent her early childhood in a privileged family in Texas, before moving to California at the age of 10. As an adult she became a Quaker, which was the grounding for her understanding of consensus. Her nickname as a child was Lina, and I am invoking that term of endearment in this remembrance.

Caroline as Grandmother of Secular Consensus

We didn't meet face-to-face until she was 57, and already well established at Alpha (15 years after she'd helped found the community in 1972). By then she'd already worked to adapt consensus as a religious practice to meet the needs of decision-making in community settings. In response to requests to share her methods, Caroline had developed a five-day consensus & facilitation training, and I eagerly signed up for the next round. It came at just the right time for me. I knew enough about cooperative group dynamics to have a slew of questions, but wasn't so settled in my ways that I couldn't shift my thinking or practice.

Together with her protégé, Lysbeth Borie (also a long-time Alpha member), the two comprised Alpha Institute, a subsidiary of the community that offered consensus training and professional facilitation. In addition to steady work in cooperative groups throughout Ecotopia, for a number of years they were the consensus trainers of choice among Waldorf schools across the breadth of North America.

The occasion of Caroline's passing weaves together a number of threads for me. Lysbeth was the person who broke the news to me, and I have a fond memory of my first gig as an outside facilitator in December, 1987, when Lysbeth and I partnered to assist Appletree, a fledgling income-sharing community on Cottage Grove OR. Caroline helped us plan the engagement—even pulling out a packet of precious frozen blueberries from Alpha's larder, so that we could offer Appletree members a memorable dessert as part of our time together. For Caroline, good food and good dynamics went hand in hand, and it was a signature element of her penchant for interweaving engagement and conviviality.

Caroline as Mentor

Caroline was both a friend and a Friend, who was able to retain the spirit of Quaker consensus without necessarily defining it as a pathway to knowing the divine. Under her deft touch, it was also developed as a pathway to divine what was best for the group, which was the field in which she and I walked together.

Among the lessons I absorbed from Caroline was the preciousness of facilitator neutrality, without lapsing into passivity. It is an art knowing when you've heard enough from the group to be able to float a proposal that might balance the whole, and facilitators need to be brave as well as disinterested.

Caroline taught me how to read a meeting—which is a subtle combination of listening deeply to statements, while at the same time tracking the energy that lay beneath and around the words. (Neither of which, BTW, is enhanced by today's increasing reliance on social media, which has significantly degraded both attention spans and the ability of people to hear accurately. Impatience and consensus don't play well together.)

As a master facilitator she was a rock. When managing large groups (100+), which she did on a number of occasions at the height of her career, she had legendary stamina (and erect posture), and was able to redirect obstreperous behavior simply through her presence, the judicious use of silence, and a raised eyebrow. When the number of participants exceeded her capacity to track each person, she learned to scan sections of the group for discordant energy, following that up with individual scrutiny as needed.

She taught me how to toggle one's attention when facilitating, alternately lightly between what was being said (and how that applied to the topic at hand), and where the energy was trending—two things that are not always aligned, yet need to be to reach the promised land.

Based on her genteel upbringing, it was hard for Caroline to express or to work directly with strong emotions—especially negative ones—which is something I've come to view as an essential skill as a consultant/facilitator working with cooperative groups. To be sure, she understood fully when feelings were in play, but considered it unpleasant, invasive, or ill-bred to expose them in group. Thus, she was never comfortable sailing close to the winds of distress.

Caroline's gifts were overwhelmingly offered orally and in person. She left behind a paucity of written material—very few articles or reports. If she wanted to communicate, she would dictate an email, pick up the phone, or write a letter (remember when people used to do that?). To my knowledge, she didn't participate in social media at all, which, as you might imagine, contributed significantly to her disappearing from the radar of folks in need of what she had to offer the last couple decades.

While it's my sense that there is every bit as much need today as there ever was for what Caroline could teach, in the 21st century she had essentially outlived the ability to attract clients, given the limitations of how she functioned. Contemporary marketing had left her behind—making it all the more important for me to honor my professional debt to her in this eulogy.

For two decades (1988-2008) Caroline was a regular participant in FIC, which met semi-annually for three-to-four days at a time to discuss strategies and reset the gyroscope. Caroline was at the center of the wheel and a significant voice in how the organization evolved. For many years, the two of us made a point of carving out one evening at each gathering to go out to a local restaurant for dinner. For three hours it would just be the two of us—catching up, musing, laughing, and strategizing about the road ahead.

Caroline as Communitarian

I consider Alpha to be one of the most beautifully sited communities I've ever seen, nestled into a finger valley of Oregon's Coast Range. Bordered on two sides by BLM land and Forest Service property, it even features a babbling stream that feeds into Deadwood Creek and is home to spawning salmon. 

Many years before the community landed there, Alpha was the site of an early post office, when European settlers first populated the Willamette Valley. Interestingly, operating a rural mail route has been a mainstay of Alpha's balance sheet, offering dependable income in an otherwise uncertain backwater economy. (While Alpha-Bit was a solid success when it came to local relations, it was never a profit center.)

Caroline was devoted to Jim, her husband of many years. He grew up in Mississippi and shared her sharp intellect, political savvy, progressive outlook, love of language, and the discipline of speaking with a civil tongue (a diminishing art these days). He worked as a newspaperman, and would recreationally edit menus while awaiting service at restaurants. When possible, they'd attend live theater and symphony concerts, especially the annual Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene. He predeceased her by nine years.

In 2008, while Jim was still with us, I took the train to Oregon following my niece's wedding in San Antonio to attend Lina's 80th birthday bash at Alpha Farm. It was a joy to witness firsthand the appreciation of so many people whose lives she had touched—both in the community and among the Deadwood neighborhood. (I don't believe I've ever cooked so much fresh asparagus in my life.)

Caroline was also stubborn—especially when it came to Alpha. She cared deeply about her vision that the community be a sanctuary of sanity and a beacon of light in times of darkness. She was loath to delegate significant authority without her oversight. She insisted on a complex olio of social justice, hospitality, environmental consciousness, and graciousness—all of which was both inspiring and exasperating for those who sometimes wanted to balance things differently… especially the budget. 

Impressively, Caroline lived to celebrate Alpha's golden anniversary. She was there for every one of the past 50 years, and it's a monumental testament to dedication and service that few can claim.

Goodbye Lina, my mentor and friend. Please know that I will continue my grieving by baking a cherry pie, with Montmorencies harvested from a neighbor's backyard, topped with locally churned vanilla ice cream (nothing low fat about it)—all of which I know would make you smile.

Teaching the Rest of the Year—An Updated Menu

Back in December I posted a sneak preview of courses I'd be offering 2022 (Teaching in the Year Ahead).

While quite a bit of that has come to pass, some things have become more defined, and new things have gelled. So I'm inspired to offer this revised list of offerings for the remainder of the year.

Facilitation Training

As planned, I completed two rounds of my two-year training in recent months (I had been conducting three concurrently), which has made room on my dance card to launch another round. I have the teaching group lined up—all I need is students. Our hope is to start Sept 22-25.

If this interests you or your group, drop me an email (laird@ic.org) and I'll send you a flyer that lays it all out.

FIC Webinars

In addition to what's posted in Teaching in the Year Ahead I will be part of the faculty for a new offering, Aging Gracefully in Community, which will be offered for five consecutive Tuesdays (each session two hours long), starting June 21. To prime the pump there will be a free introductory gathering, May 31, that will last for 90 minutes. Click here for information about the teaser.

Workshops at the National Cohousing Conference • Aug 25-28

I'll be offering three things: 

• An all-day pre-conference intensive styled Consensus 301: Rx for Groups Struggling with Making It Work Well. This will happen Thursday, Aug 25.

Plus these two in-conference workshops (90-min each) occurring during the main event (exact times TBA):

• Participation: Issues in Member Contributions

• Consensus 101: Understanding the Basics

Podcasts

In the last month I've been interviewed for two different podcasts—which is a new platform for me:

Rebecca Mesritz put one together for FIC about Skilled Facilitation, and is available now.

Sen Zahn interviewed me this week as part of a segment on Conflict that she'll be editing for Peace Talks Radio, a program syndicated to 60 public radio stations in the US, and others abroad. As of today, no date has been set for when this podcast will be available.

Fortunately, I like being busy.

Property Rights & Social Contracts

A number of intentional communities struggle with the concept of a member's rights in relation to the community's rights, and I want to focus on a particular aspect of it that shows up when there's a vacancy.

It's relatively common for forming communities (this is particularly the case with cohousing groups) to promise prospective members that they'll have a free hand if they decide to sell. Understandably, this sweetens the pot for people on the fence about whether to buy a unit—helping the group to cross the finish line in selling out, which helps contain costs for early adopters.

The downside is that it's a questionable practice allowing a departing member to be in charge of selecting their replacement. While I don't want to be alarmist and this often works OK, the seller is generally more concerned with a quick sale at a good price, while the community's priority is a good fit—and those two objectives don't always align.

Worse, what if the seller is departing on less than good terms? Uh oh. They may not be motivated to care that much about how well the new buyer will blend with the community, or be completely forthcoming about the responsibilities and commitments that community members are expected to accept.

Key to sorting this out is understanding that an owner's property rights are distinct from a person's social contract as a member of the community. They are not the same thing. While it's very much in the community's interest to have property owners be members, the two do not automatically coincide.

While the property owner may have legal control over who they sell their property to (it depends on applicable laws and how things have been set up with the community), they do not have the right to unilaterally bless the buyer as a member of the community—which right rests solely with the community.

When these two concepts are conflated, mischief ensues.

The Power of Proactive Marketing

Because you want property ownership and community membership to go together, it is very much in the community's interest to play an active role in recruiting suitable buyers. In the ideal, the community will develop and maintain a waiting list of people you already have screened for suitability (value alignment, adequate financial means, and whatever else is on your wish list—maybe you're looking for a cellist for the chamber music ensemble, or a gourmet cook who can turn out elegant meals for 40), so that the exiting member will have an easy time selling and the community will be happy with the new member.

In one of the more creative versions of this, I know of a group where members have agreed to use the community as the real estate broker. In exchange for lining up a buyer (which the community has already determined it wants as a new member) it earns a commission on the deal, with the earnings going into a community improvement fund, thereby taking pressure off HOA dues. Nice.

However, if the group takes a passive, or hands-off approach in selecting the new buyer (which I don't recommend) it needs to step forward to assert its rights with respect to the social contract—establishing how the rights of membership in the community are tied to social behavior, not to property rights.

Misunderstanding Fair Housing Laws

Since 1968, it is US federal law that property owners cannot discriminate in who they rent or sell housing to on the basis of seven things: race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status. (There are parallel strata laws in Canada, but I am not as cognizant of the details.) Many communities mistakenly interpret this to mean that they are obliged to accept as a member anyone who applies and can meet the financial requirements. Not so! In fact, it's legal to be selective on the basis of any criteria other than the seven protected classes. Of course, it's a nuanced question what qualities you may want to screen for—I'm only making the case that communities are not legally prohibited from doing so.

While communities may be constrained about who buys and rents real property, they have considerable leeway about who is a member of the community—and therefore eligible to enjoy the rights and privileges thereof. 

Make sure your group doesn't miss the boat on this.

What the F Can Happen with Conflict

I've been conducting workshops and trainings that focus on conflict in cooperative groups for three decades. For many years I titled a 90-minute presentation, "Conflict: Fight, Flight, or Opportunity?"

Over the years I've come to realize that the range of responses to conflict is far wider than fight or flight, and today I want to delve more deeply into that richness—and at the same time indulge my fondness for alliteration.

Framing the Field

I define conflict as the dynamic where at least two people are in disagreement, and at least one is experiencing nontrivial distress. Thus, it isn't "conflict" unless emotional reactivity is a component. Largely because most of us weren't raised to acknowledge or work with feelings as a regular human response, most groups tend to struggle with how to respond when strong feelings arise. Often people are left on their own in such situations (that is, the group has never discussed how to handle those moments, there is no agreed upon way to respond, nor is anyone authorized to enter that dynamic). The challenge is compounded by most of us having few (or no) examples of engaging with fulminating upset leading to anything but trauma and relationship damage. So engagement seems fraught with danger.

For some reason, it turns out that many of the ways that people respond when conflict emerges can be cleverly characterized by words beginning with the letter F. (Who knew?) Let me enumerate…

—Fight

When someone is in distress, one the ways that can be expressed is with anger, or even rage. Triggered by something another person did or said, the person in reaction comes out swinging. Often, this will result in counterpunching in return, and an exchange of salvos ensues.

—Flight

Another common impulse when triggered is to run away. Perhaps to get away from the event or person that's the trigger; perhaps to avoid saying or doing something you might regret later. You may be uncomfortable in reaction (whether yours or others) and want to remove yourself from that dynamic posthaste. This may also be the response when another person is upset and you're afraid of being caught in their crosshairs. Sometimes the flight response is traceable to childhood efforts to escape the wrath of an abusive parent or guardian.

—Freeze

This is a deer-in-the-headlights response. Sometimes people will shut down when in reaction and glaze over. More commonly though, you'll see this as an attempt to be safe when someone else is upset and you're afraid of drawing their attention—because you might suddenly be the target of their invective. As with flight, this might be a coping mechanism arising from being raised in a family with an angry parent—perhaps one with a drinking problem. 

When you feel unsafe, your amygdala takes over and you do whatever you believe necessary to survive. While the situation may not truly be life-or-death, it may be feel that way in the moment.

—Flail

While you don't see this response much, it's when someone ramps up their response, which may be either honest or strategic, in an attempt to distract the upset person, as well as the group. In essence, they become the center of attention in their distress, drawing the spotlight away from the person originally triggered. (Oh, woe is me.)

—Fawn

This is an attempt to placate the upset person—trying to calm them down through appeasement, in the theory that their fire (anger) will die back if deprived of fuel.

—Finesse

This has considerable subtlety. Fearing the aggressive things the upset person might do, you carefully frame what you say or do in language calculated to be less likely to feed the beast. It's more engaging than fawning, yet often fails because the upset person feels managed rather than heard. Like you're following a script rather than your heart.

—Fuggedaboutit

This is walking away—not running away (flight). It's deciding it's not worth it (or too scary) to engage with the upset, and acting is if nothing of significance has occurred energetically. (Let's not make a mountain out of a mole hill.)

—Feel into it

Ultimately, all of the choices above are forms of conflict avoidance or conflict management. What about conflict engagement? That, I believe is where the money is. 

My sense is that nothing works better than turning toward the upset and acknowledging it—to the speaker's satisfaction—making sure to connect with their emotional experience, the trigger point, and its impact on the person in reaction. While not so easily done in the chaotic moment, the principles are not difficult to lay out. Just use plain words and speak from the heart. If you get it wrong, don't worry—the speaker will let you know.

Forewarnings

The three most common pitfalls when engaging with conflict are:

• Going into reaction yourself—it's not easy to stay centered or to focus on the speaker when you need help yourself.

• Giving a response instead of a reflection. The priority here is to make sure that the speaker feels heard before attempting anything else. There will be time for responses later.

• Offering a critique or reprimand about the speaker's delivery. If they are in reaction, this will most likely land as gas on the fire and won't be constructive. Even if their delivery was provocative or aggressive, you cannot reasonable ask an upset person to reflect on that while they're desperate to be heard. You may be able to speak with them about their poor choice of delivery later—but not at first.

Final Fillip

The bad news is that this work can be scary and there's no guarantee that it will go well. The good news is that it can be done well—and is urgently needed. My closing admonition is to take a deep breath and give conflict engagement—feeling into it—a try. What the F? It's unlikely to be worse than what you're getting with any other approach.

The Intersection of Discretion, Transparency, and Trust

One of the prime challenges of community living is developing and maintaining trust among members. Groups will invariably be comprised of diverse people: different communication styles, a variety of personalities, a range of social and recreational proclivities, extroverts and introverts, fast and slow thinkers, risk averse and risk tolerant, young parents and septuagenarians, drinkers and teetotalers… people who can't stand garlic, and those who hate dogs. You pretty much have to use all the crayons in the box to draw the full picture.

It is naive to project harmony and laminar flow on groups simply because they align around vision and common values. The question is the extent to which groups are aware of this rich diversity and work to understand it—rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach (setting things up to work well for an idealized "normal" person, while everyone with divergent characteristics has to adapt or accept being left behind).

When groups fail to understand the above (a fairly common blind spot in my experience), there can be considerable friction when styles clash, and this will tend to undermine trust unless the friction is attended to. As we tend to not trust what we don't understand, it matters a great deal whether members make a genuine effort to get to know how each member is different, how they process information, what matters to them, etc.

While all groups desire trust among members, you don't achieve it or sustain it simply by stating a desire for it. You can't get it delivered by Amazon Prime, or by redeeming green stamps; you have to roll up your sleeves and work at it. An important principle in that regard is the relationship between trust and the flow of information. Simply put, when information is constricted, so is trust.

This gets complicated in community because most of us are used to living more private lives, where what happens in a household is shared only among close friends and family. Now it's not so clear. Private boundaries still exist, yet they have shrunk in two regards:

First, some kinds of decisions impact more than one's household to the extent that everyone gets a says in policy—it is no longer just a matter of each household acting on its own. You still have complete discretion over what you eat for dinner, yet it's the group's business whether your dog poops on the path or is aggressive around children. 

Second, there is a more subtle level of this, where the group does not expect to have a say in household decisions, yet is impacted by them. Take the example of intimate partners. Few groups expect members to consult before making such a decision, yet there may be ramifications of your choice that impact your neighbors. Let's say Dale is a long-term community member and starts up a new relationship with Chris, who is new to the community. A host of questions can emerge:

—Is Chris automatically a group member, or must they go through a membership process just like anyone else?

—If Chris behaves in ways that are problematic to members, how should that be handled? Is Dale responsible for Chris' behavior? Is it OK with Dale that other community members give Chris direct feedback about how they're behaving on campus?

—Is it reasonable to expect Chris to understand and abide by communication standards adopted by the community?

To muddy the waters further, suppose Chris is not new to the community, but had been living in the community in a relationship with Pat, and has now switched partners. Oh boy. (And don't tell me that that won't happen.) While the decision to make this switch is not subject to community review, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will impact the group socially. Can this be discussed (other than in the parking lot)?

Absent an awareness of the need and a willingness to have tender conversations, they are likely avoided. As a result, people are left in the dark and trust is degraded. Not because people want that result, but because they're afraid that the sharing will be awkward, embarrassing, or condemning.

In any given situation—not just in community—there is dynamic tension between discretion and transparency. What information is inappropriate to share, and what should be shared? What are the perceived costs and benefits?

I want to make the case that in community—where the lives of members has been purposefully interwoven to a greater degree than in the mainstream—groups are better off pushing the balance point more toward transparency than they are habituated to, because trust (dependent on information flow) is such a precious commodity. Yes, this calls for developing the skills needed to speak about personal matters cleanly (by which I mean non-judgmentally) and honestly, as well as the maturity needed to treat personal information with care and compassion.

But isn't this what you came to community hoping to find? Every time you shy away from sharing, it's a statement about the limit of how much you trust your fellow community members. Ouch!

To be clear, I am not talking about "gory details" or titillating he said/she said gossip. I'm not asking you to view community as a soap opera. I'm talking about letting the group know that two people had a flare up, this is what it was about, and this was the resolution. At the end of the day, it's my sense that there are very few situations that justify withholding information—at least in summary form—from your fellow community mates. What is held back in the name of discretion is often just avoidance, or a dearth of skill or will. 

Trust, unfortunately, is the collateral damage.