16 Comments
Jan 3Liked by Richard D. Bartlett

I like this, and felt the limits of my communal agency when glancing further along the axes.

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author

what would make a difference to that?

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Jan 4Liked by Richard D. Bartlett

I find the bullet points clear, elegant, true and beautiful, and I find the diagram confusing -- while I understand why it is tempting to make nice and simple diagrams (I do that too, sometimes). Nice try, but too neat if you ask me :)

Of course, maybe I'm misunderstanding it, or I see what I'm able to see, or what I want to see in it...

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it is just a 2-dimensional slice of an N-dimensional landscape but hopefully useful despite that limitation

my intention is to give people a development roadmap, if you want to get to “there”, you could start “here” and go in “that direction”

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Jan 6Liked by Richard D. Bartlett

Still feeling very unsure about the diagram and reflecting on it with some part of my attention... :) In permaculture we "design from patterns to details" so with that perspective of making some patterns visible, it is less confusing... and maybe some other patterns are more prominent for me, hence confusion.

Anyway, it's a useful resource and I'm going to use it -- thank you.

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Jan 5Liked by Richard D. Bartlett

I have a sense of like "starting a country" as being mappable on the chart as well, although it's also "off the chart"!

in general it seems like there's a tradeoff being made in the modeling here, where by focusing on things that are kind of one size per instance (mostly "events") we lose out on being able to map someone who grows a company from 1 person to 30 or from 30 to 1000. although that could be drawn as an line/arrow on the map I suppose.

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Feb 20Liked by Richard D. Bartlett

Hey Richard, thanks so much for this! It inpired my thinking in a lot of different directions. I am writing an article about my community building work at the moment and would love to cite you, is it ok to use your graph inside my article - obviously, crediting you for it?

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author

yes of course, use it how you like. let me know when you publish!

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Feb 21Liked by Richard D. Bartlett

Yay, thank you! I will do for sure <3

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Hey Richard - so I published this piece now that features your graph. If you like it, please consider sharing with your network! <3

https://connectionhub.substack.com/p/how-to-ease-yourself-into-being-a

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This is so helpful thank you for these insights!

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author

I’m glad it helps! Where are you applying this sort of thinking?

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Jan 5Liked by Richard D. Bartlett

Thanks! This helps sharpen my thinking substantially.

This made me think of my clowning skills, where I'm just budding at doing a street performance to 3-8 ppl for 10 min., and want to work up to larger crowds for longer duration.

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author

perfect example, thanks: )

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Practice and knowledge in those domains, and addressing internal hesitations to be such a leader. Or maybe just joining Microsolidarity. I would like to build up to the 150 same neighbour capacity.

Also, I can see people being skilled at something in the upper right area, like organizing a festival, but not skilled at something in the lower left, aka running a workshop. I imagine there are transferable skills throughout, but each has their own set of challenges. I am curious how you see this communal agentic skill progression ideally develops compared to how it currently develops in most people.

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some things more or less transferable. maybe a T model, where breadth in the progression is important to properly grow capacity, but depth in a single area too, such as emotional complexity in medicine work, or logistical complexity in festival operations is valid and more singular.

this piece really emphasizes scale, but ofc there’s a whole world of depth at every scale. I don’t think being able to hold 150 people should necessarily be the universal goal (although it’s an awesome specific one for this org!). If you’re a world class small group facilaitor that’s pretty awesome too and doesn’t necessitate growing into bigger groups

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