Use this Map to Self-Evaluate your Level of Agency

A map for measuring your collaborative leadership capacity

I drew this diagram to illustrate a lot of related insights about agency, hosting, community-building, collaborative leadership & social change.

It’s all coming out in a bit of a rush so I’m going to spray out a bunch of bullet points and see what resonates.

• You can use this map to self-evaluate your level of agency, by reflecting on what types of group experiences you feel comfortable to host. Where you are currently? What activities feel very doable? What would feel like a tolerable stretch? What would be overwhelming even to attempt?
  

• I think of this as “agency” but you can also think of it as your collaborative leadership capacity. The further up and to the right, the more agency you have, or the more capacity you have for collaborative leadership. This comes with more responsibility, more ability to mobilise resources, more commitment, more risk, and more impact.
  

• The steps are roughly continuous. If you’re comfortable running a 60-minute workshop for 15 people, maybe a natural next step in your development would be to attempt a 3-hour workshop, or design for 50 people next time. If you’re comfortable hosting a 1-day workshop, next time you could try running a 3-day retreat.
  

• A healthy developmental context includes peers, mentors & apprentices. If you want to stretch to the next level: who do you know who is already competent at that level? Are they willing to support your learning process?
  

• One way to stretch your capacity is to find apprentices. E.g. after running a few iterations of the Microsolidarity Practice Program, it no longer felt challenging to Nati & I, so we trained our replacements, forcing me to reflect on my implicit knowledge and make it explicit. The training process made me confront my own leadership traits: how willing am I to let go of control? where do I need to be firm and where can I be flexible?
  

• Never host alone. The more responsibility you have, the more urgent it is to share it. Abuse & corruption stem from excessive power disparity. Community burnout stems from too much weight on too few shoulders.
  

• Development happens spontaneously in the right social context. The vertical axis starts at 5 people. It intentionally does not start at 1, because individualistic self-development is a scam. Oh, you’re going to use your self, to improve your self? Good luck with that. Everything that lives, grows inside something else. If you want to change yourself, change what you’re inside of. Your self will change when you change who you spend time with and how you spend that time with them.
  

• You can estimate the quality of someone’s opinions about large-scale social systems by evaluating their experience as an organiser at the small and medium scale. If you don't know how to create harmonious relationships in a collective of 15 people, why should I trust your opinion about policing, governance, or social policy?
  

• Skipping the micro scale is a mega problem. If you can organise a 20,000 person conference but you don’t know how to design for small-scale conviviality, the vibes will be off. Your event will massively fail to deliver on its potential. If you have micro-scale sensitivity then you will attend to the little details that support people to have an excellent experience, maximising meaningful connections. (You don’t have to be good at everything; collaborators can compensate for your shortcomings.)
  

• It’s easy to mistake the large & serious challenges facing humanity with infinitely severe, apocalyptic challenges. We need people who are active, awake and contributing to positive change. But they need to be sober and optimistic. We need rational hope: neither utopian “good vibes only”, nor apocalyptic “the world is ending”. The world is not ending, but the stakes are very high, we need all hands on deck.
  

• Apocalyptic thinking stems from psychological pain. The consequence of this pain is epistemic confusion: fear causes you to mistake probabilities for certainties. The cure for this pain is good company. Courage comes from encouragement. If you are not getting enough encouragement from peers & mentors, you will feel desperately alone, powerless, paralysed in the face of tectonic social changes.
  

• The cure for loneliness is abundant hosting. Someone with charisma, resources and generosity can host a good party, make introductions, and lubricate the formation of social networks. The best way to meet the love of your life is at your friend's dinner party. Good culture is made from good families. Good families come from good neighbourhoods.
  

• Belonging & meaningful work are two sides of the same coin. If you want a good life: you need a place & people to belong to, and you need to contribute to their wellbeing. Accountant, gardener, artist, fitness instructor... it doesn’t matter. What matters is you make a significant contribution to something you feel proud of. The key to a happy retirement is to be of some use to others.
  

• The Microsolidarity Network is an agency pump, operating at fractal scales, reciprocating between individual + collective transformation. We’re learning & we’re teaching each other: how do you create a social context? What levers can we pull on? What can be engineered, and what needs to be left up to emergence?
  

• My mission for the Microsolidarity Network is to find, recruit, train, encourage, support, and inspire 150×150’s. I mean, 150 people who each have the capacity and willingness to make a long term commitment to host a community of at least 150 people. “Host a community” can be interpreted in many ways. It could be an online meditation community that meets once a week, or a co-living community where everyone lives in the same neighbourhood, or an annual festival where people make life-changing friendships. The precise numbers don’t matter. What matters is we’re identifying the hosts and incrementally ratcheting their capacity.
  

• Each step up the ladder of scale creates a developmental container for the previous. Your personal development proceeds more smoothly when you have a crew. it’s easier to find a crew when you’re in a congregation. congregations learn from each other in a network.