Good things come in threes. Though I usually overlook anniversaries, I noticed one this morning. The first peer conference I convened and designed was held June 3 – 5, 1992 at Marlboro College, Vermont. So, as of today, the community of practice that eventually became edACCESS has enjoyed 27 years of peer conferences. [That’s 3 x 3 x 3. I told you good things come in threes.]
Twenty-three people came to the inaugural conference. At the time, I had no idea that what I instinctively put together for a gathering of people who barely knew each other would lead to:
a global design and facilitation consulting practice;
over 500 posts on this blog, which has now become, to the best of my knowledge, the most-visited website on meeting design and facilitation;
three books (almost!) on participant-driven, participation-rich meeting design; and
plentiful ongoing opportunities to fulfill my mission to facilitate connection between people.
However, none of this happened overnight. For many years, designing and facilitating meetings was a vocation rather than a profession, usually unpaid. Furthermore, it was an infrequent adjunct to my “real” jobs at the time: information technology consulting, and teaching computer science.
27 years of peer conferences. From little acorns, mighty oaks. I would never have predicted the path I’ve traveled — and continue to look forward to the journey yet to come. Above all, thank you everyone who has made it possible. I can’t adequately express the gratitude you are due.
Legendary Apple designer Jony Ive explains how learning in community helped Apple make the iPhone:
“When we genuinely look at a problem it’s an opportunity to learn together, and we discover something together. We know that learning in community is powerful. It feeds and supports momentum which in turn encourages a familiarity and an acceptance of challenges associated with doing difficult things. And I’ve come to learn that I think a desire to learn makes doing something new just a little less scary.” ——Jony Ive, Apple designer Jony Ive explains how ‘teetering towards the absurd’ helped him make the iPhone
Building and supporting a community of practice
And second, learning in community is an ideal way to build and strengthen a conference’s community of practice. Peer conference process provides the opportunity for anyone to contribute, thus encouraging and supporting meaningful connection. Learning in community fosters cooperation and collaboration, creating a community of practice bridge between these two core forms of connection.
How could/do you support and encourage learning in community at your events? Share your ideas and experiences in the comments below!
Today, communities of practice — groups of people who share a common interest, profession, or passion and actively engage around what they have in common — have become essential sources for productive learning, because they provide crucial bridges for social learning between our work community and our external social networks.
Here are four tools for creating, supporting, and enriching communities of practice.
Listservs are an old but still surprisingly useful technology. They manage a list of subscribers and allow any member to send email to the list. The listserv then sends the message to the other list subscribers. Listserv software is available on multiple platforms and is free for up to ten lists of up to five hundred subscribers which should be sufficient for most communities of practice. Yes, it’s true that numerous commercial alternatives exist. But self-hosted listservs don’t rely on commercial providers who may close down or change services with little notice or recourse.
Slack
Slack can be used free for basic support of communities of practice (up to 10,000 messages), though many useful functions are only available in paid versions ($87+ per person annually). All Slack content is searchable. The product, initially targeted at organizations, has been evolving into a community platform. Because of its cost, Slack is probably most useful for communities whose members already have corporate access.
Zoom
The ability to converse with community members via audio/video/chat on a scheduled or ad hoc basis is an important tool for maintaining and growing community connections online. For many years the free Google Hangouts was my go-to tool for this purpose, but the service has become almost impossible to use on an ad hoc basis and Zoom is the most popular replacement. For short meetings (up to a maximum of 100 participants for 40 minutes) the free Zoom Basic will suffice, but most communities will be well served by Zoom Pro (unlimited duration and participants; $149.90/year). Any community member who has a paid Zoom plan can host a video/web conference. So this tool can be a cost-effective way for communities of practice to keep in touch.
Do you use other tools to create, support, and enrich your communities of practice? If so, share them in the comments below!
Can meetings where no one says a word exhibit significantly different interpersonal dynamics? After completing my third Vipassana silent meditation retreat (this one at the headquarters of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts), I’m gonna say: yes they can!
If you haven’t experienced a Vipassana retreat, here’s the program flow:
Registration, with some time for participants to meet and talk.
Housekeeping announcements, an introduction to the teachers, and format.
Enter “Noble Silence”. During the silence, which continues until almost the end of the retreat, participants avoid direct eye contact, reading, or writing and do not speak or communicate non-verbally.
Many sets of 45-minute seated, silent, focused awareness meditation, followed by 30-minute walking meditation.
Communal on-site meals eaten in silence.
“Yogi jobs” that support the retreat center, approximately 45 minutes per day. Typically these involve cleaning or food preparation. (I am now quite familiar with washing and drying procedures in commercial kitchens!) When necessary, minimal talking is allowed during your job.
Retreat teachers give talks / guided meditation / Q&A sessions, and may meet with participants individually or in small groups. When relevant, participants may talk during these activities.
Closing ceremony and the end of Noble Silence. Participants can then converse with each other. At longer retreats, Silence may be ended for the evening of the last full day, and reentered for the last few hours of the retreat.
Interpersonal dynamics
As you can imagine, opportunities for interpersonal interaction are pretty limited during these retreats. That’s how it should be, as the focus is on personal inner work free from the distractions and commitments of everyday life. I’ve written about the value of my first retreat experience here, and plan to continue to attend retreats for my own benefit rather than to connect with other participants.
Nevertheless, as a meeting designer, I noticed some interesting differences in the quantity and quality of interpersonal dynamics at the three retreats I’ve attended to date. Here are some relevant statistics:
As you can see, I judged that Vallecitos participants became quite highly connected over the 5-day retreat, even though we only had a few hours at the beginning and end to meet and talk. In comparison, I rated my 3-day Barre retreat at a very low level of connection, despite a comparable amount of potential connection time. And even though the Easthampton retreat was short — no yogi job, one non-communal lunch, and perhaps 30 minutes of non-silence together — I think that slightly more connection occurred there than at Barre.
Why these differences? Here are four factors I believe are involved:
1 — Frequency of random contact
Vallecitos has a single small main building (formerly a hunting lodge) with a meditation hall and dining room large enough for 50 people. We roomed in tiny nearby individual cabins or tents. Over our five days together, we saw each other frequently, eating meals together, and passing during daily activities.
Barre is a sprawling facility of multiple buildings joined by enclosed connecting hallways. My wife was on retreat with me, and we barely saw each other during the three days.
In Easthampton, 25 of us sat in a single small room. Except for lunchtime, we were all together the entire day.
Although during any retreat there is no conventional contact, one is indirectly aware of neighbors, and that awareness becomes a form of connection that increases with time and opportunity. The limited number of chance encounters at Barre, due to the layout of the facility, minimized this form of indirect connection. (This, of course, is a plus if you really want to concentrate on your own work for an extended period of time without distraction, but that’s not what I’m focusing on here.)
2 — Size of group versus time together
A small group of strangers is potentially more intimate than a crowd of strangers. The time spent together increases the indirect intimacy but, in my experience, the sense of personal connection fades rapidly with an increase in group size — I’d guess as the square of the number of people in the group. So our Easthampton retreat, though time was short, felt intimate because the 25 of us were all together most of the time, and Vallecitos was long enough for the 40 of us to recognize each other. At Barre, on the other hand, I barely registered most of the 100 participants and the sense of being part of a community was absent.
3 — Number of leaders
At Easthampton, our single teacher, Jesse, created a more intimate environment that felt more informal and intimate than at the other retreats. Jesse sat close to us in a small room and was easy to hear at a conventional voice level. At Vallecitos and Barre, the teaching felt more formal (Jesse was one of the 2 teachers at Barre). Barre required sound reinforcement because of the size of the room. The more teachers at the retreat, the more context switches we had when they were speaking. A compensating factor was that at Vallecitos we had an opportunity to meet in small groups with each of our 3 teachers, which improved our individual connection with them. This did not occur at Barre, where our teachers, though friendly with the large group were not seen outside the meditation hall.
4 — Meals
At Easthampton, the meditation center is situated in a large former factory, converted into a set of stores and businesses. We were free to have lunch separately somewhere in the facility.
The Barre dining facility felt sterile. The weather was beautiful so many people took their meals outside on the grounds. Surprisingly to me, there were few places outdoors for small groups to sit together. Consequently, I ate all of my meals by myself, with no one else around.
At Vallecitos it was sometimes too cold to eat outdoors, so we ate in silence in the dining room. I’ve described the remarkable effect this had on me in this earlier post. Even when the (stunningly beautiful) outdoors beckoned, chairs and rocks were arranged so people gravitated to sitting near each other, eating together in silence.
Conclusions
It may seem strange to be thinking about the level of interpersonal dynamics developed at retreats whose core purpose is to allow participants the environment, structure, and process to explore and experience themselves. But if meditation was easy, we wouldn’t need to create group retreats to support individual work; we’d just learn to do it by ourselves. Sustaining this work requires a community of spiritual practice (called sangha in the Vipassana tradition). Formal retreats like the ones I’ve described are a key opportunity to develop such communities.
At Vallecitos, I had some wonderful conversations at the end of the retreat. When I go there again I hope to meet some of the friends I made during that short period. So, though building community through the development of intimacy and connection at silent retreats is not a core goal, it’s important to the growth of the practice. I offer these observations in the spirit of supporting a practice that is important to an increasing number of people.
Then in 1966, a man named Dee Hock had the vision, determination, resources, and a little luck to break this logjam. Dee described his journey in a fascinating book he wrote after his retirement in 1984, intriguingly titled: Birth of The Chaordic Age. Dee was the first CEO of what became the mammoth multinational financial services corporation VISA, a company with a current market capitalization of over $200B.
What has this to do with associations? Well, VISA has never issued cards, extended credit, or set rates and fees for consumers. The company is, in structure if not in capitalist terms, an association of tens of thousands of member banks. They offer VISA-branded credit, debit, prepaid, and cash-access programs to their hundreds of millions of customers. While competing with each other for customers, these banks agree to honor each other’s trillions of dollars in transactions annually across borders and currencies.
A set of agreements
At its core, VISA is a set of agreements between its members. The company’s value to its owners and customers is created from its members’ mutual agreements. Without those agreements, VISA would not exist. We would return to the pre-VISA world when every financial entity needed its own system of offering customer credit.
VISA is an atypical kind of for-profit organization. However, its core purpose is essentially identical to that of trade and professional associations. Associations are society’s instantiations of communities of practice, groups of people who share a common interest, profession, or passion and agree to actively engage around what they have in common. That leads us to Dee Hock’s (and my) view of organizations like VISA and associations:
“…organizations exist only in the mind; they are no more than the conceptual embodiments of the ancient idea of community.” —Dee Hock, Birth of The Chaordic Age
When associations go astray
This perspective is extremely important because it’s easy for associations to forget their initial and continued reasons for existence. Every association is created when at some moment in time a group of people with something in common wants to further a particular profession and/or the interests of those engaged in a profession and/or the public interest. Typically, the community already exists informally. Its “members” want to create a formal, legal structure to support, deepen, and widen its reach.
Associations can, however, lose sight of this primal and ongoing purpose. When this happens, they concentrate on self-perpetuation and/or expansion at the expense of supporting the community of practice for which they were created. Remembering that an association is, at its core, a set of agreements in people’s minds about the instantiation of a community that is important to them is key to keeping the association relevant to the community it serves.
So remember that associations exist only in the mind. Keeping an association’s purpose foremost is critical to maintaining its community of practice’s core reasons for being.
The Thirty-Minute Rule: Another issue of an occasional series—Dear Adrian—in which I answer questions about event design, elementary particle physics, solar hot water systems, and anything else I might conceivably know something about. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, please write to me (don’t worry, I won’t publish anything without your permission).
How much “free” consulting should a consultant offer during initial discussions with a client before requesting pay for services?
What happens during an initial consultant/client meeting?
When consultant and client meet for the first time there’s naturally a certain amount of sizing-up going on.
A potential client is looking for a solution to a problem. He wonders if the consultant can help him, whether he can trust what she says, how much she costs, and when she will be available. All these considerations and more determine whether to engage her services.
A client is hoping to find the help they need as quickly as possible but wants to feel confident that the chosen consultant can help effectively for an acceptable price. They may believe that their problem can be fixed easily by someone with the right expertise, and be hoping (or expecting) to get their problem solved quickly, perhaps at no charge.
A consultant is wondering:
what she needs to learn about the client;
whether she’s capable of helping the client;
what the client thinks the problem is;
what the problem might actually be;
whether she can get paid;
what she’d like to get paid;
whether she’s going to have the time, resources, and inclination to work with the client in a timely fashion;
and so on.
From a consultant’s point of view, time spent working to get an initial sense of a client’s needs, determine that he is a fit for her expertise and abilities, and convey enough of her capabilities to reassure the client that she is the right person for the work is non-billable. Too much non-billable time and a consultant starts to have problems paying her own bills.
Naturally, these client and consultant concerns take time to resolve, leading to the above-mentioned Dilemma.
What to do?
I have been consulting for over thirty years and have participated in hundreds of initial client-consultant dances. I like to think of them as dances: mysterious, exciting, full of the possibility of creating something great together, and sometimes disappointing. In my experience, a contracting minuet can take as little as ten minutes or…well, let’s just say far too long. The client or consultant can trip over any of the obstacles I’ve already listed and decide to walk away.
So, what’s a consultant to do?
David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame, coined the Two Minute Rule to determine whether a task that interrupts current activity should be handled on the spot—answer: yes, but only if it can be completed in less than two minutes—or captured to be performed later. I doubt he chose 120 seconds based on some deep scientific analysis, it’s his rule of thumb (which I’ve found to be useful), presumably based on years of experience.
My Thirty-Minute Rule
In a similar vein, I offer my Thirty-Minute Rule for resolving the Consultant’s Dilemma.
I told Tony that I’ll talk to any potential paying client for up to thirty minutes for free. At that point, if the client is still looking for free advice I’ll gently explore options to transition to a paid consultation. Sometimes, of course, it’s clear that we’re not going to move forward. No blame, it just happens. Otherwise, I’ll generally have enough information to propose next steps. Also, if my client doesn’t have sufficient trust in me after thirty minutes? I’ve found it’s unlikely I’m going to change his mind by staying on the call.
The Thirty Minute Rule doesn’t include the time required for creating a contracting agreement or proposal. So if I judge that we have a good chance of creating a win-win consulting arrangement I’ll create a short document and send it to the client for approval. This rarely takes more than an additional thirty minutes. If the document requires significant client-specific research I’ll ask for appropriate compensation to create it.
The Thirty Minute Rule is my reasonable compromise between the competing needs of consultant and client. If you’re a consultant reading this, what do you think? Do you have your own “free consulting time” rule? Feel free to share yours in the comments!
Good things come in threes. Though I usually overlook anniversaries, I noticed one this morning. The first peer conference I convened and designed was held June 3 – 5, 1992 at Marlboro College, Vermont. So, as of today, the community of practice that eventually became edACCESS has enjoyed 27 years of peer conferences. [That’s 3 x 3 x 3. I told you good things come in threes.]
Legendary Apple designer 
Can meetings where no one says a word exhibit significantly different interpersonal dynamics? After completing my third 
Professional, trade, and public interest associations are significant businesses. In the United States alone, 
The Thirty-Minute Rule: Another issue of an occasional series—