On We-Spaces
One of my special interests right now is we-spaces (for lack of a better term).
Or perhaps, more simply: We’s.
I’ve been interested in these ever since I first heard of them, encountered them for myself. I stumbled into this territory, consciously and explicitly anyway, in the context of circling.
I wish I’d written more about it at the time, what the actual phenomena I was encountering was, what my experiences actually were.
In any case, I very strongly experienced we-spaces and collective intelligence with groups of other people. It was undeniable to me, a direct experience I couldn’t argue away even if it wasn’t widely understood or discussed or accepted in contemporary Western culture, even if it defied my notions of atomic, individual experience.
And it wasn’t a one-off fluke, either. Once I noticed that flavor in one context, I began to notice it in others, also. As I accessed it once, it became easier to access it again. And again. And again.
“Around Here We Take Our Phenomenology Seriously.” And I did!
NNTD and Mating Dances
Another one of my interests in recent months has been trust and distrust, particularly in the context of my friend Malcolm Ocean’s Non-Naive Trust Dance, or NNTD.
Interestingly, the experience of what I’ve referred to here as we-spaces has been a guiding instigator of Malcolm’s work. As I understand it, he encountered this territory, and wondered why it wasn’t stable, why efforts to make it permanent wouldn’t work, despite the best intentions of the groups he was working with. He refers to this experience as The Synergic Mode. I’ve found this piece in particular a very helpful entry point into his work, which clarifies his Why, his motivation for being so interested in trust and distrust—for getting a sense of what is possible, what is at stake.
Another concept I encountered in the context of Malcolm’s work is what he calls a mating dance. The process of finding a life partner was an especially salient and important application of his ideas, and helped Malcolm to understand the challenges and gifts of his own life better. “Everyone has a mating dance: respect yours & theirs,” Malcolm says.
He lists a number of different steps that might be in someone’s hypothetical mating dance. He acknowledges that they are likely sequenced in an order that seems sensible to someone. For example, I would personally want to kiss someone before getting married to them, or to go out to dinner with them before dancing with them.
My sequencing may be different from yours, though! One person’s mating dance may include steps which differ from those of their potential mate!
To some extent, in some cases, these disparities are reconcilable—but in some cases, they are irreconcilable, and a strong signal of fundamental incompatibility.
Mating Dances for Dyads
Although Malcolm wrote about mating dances in the context of romantic relationships, and finding a life partner, the general idea applies in other contexts, and even at other scales, also.
I’ve been thinking about many possible mating dances, in several contexts I care about.
One particular version of this question that’s been on my mind: what’s the mating dance for a dyad?
A pair or a we-space that is not necessarily romantic, or a life partnership, but just a friendship? A strong friendship that gives rise to collective intelligence, that engenders the synergic mode?
Here are some steps that I have thought of, in an initial ordering that makes sense to me:
- Encountering we-spaces and the Synergic Mode implicitly, typically in a nonverbal context
- Talking about we-spaces and the Synergic Mode, explicitly
- Discussing shared interests
- Discuss energies that are being exchanged
- Speaking with the words “we” and “us”
- Clearly, verbally delineating instances of what is “me” and “mine,” “U” and “yours” from “us” and “ours”
- Giving the dyad a name
- Discussing shared values
- Discussing shared boundaries
- Discussing shared goals
- Discussing who is junior/senior, senpai and kohai, in which respects, for mutual support, growth, and flourishing
- Discussing visions for shared futures
Of course, as with romantic mating dances, my dyad mating dance may look very different from yours, in ways that are compatible or incompatible, surmountable or insurmountable.
Presumably, these would apply at higher scales, also: to triads and tetrads, pentads and hexads, heptads and octads and enneads and decads.
I wrote previously about the topic of we-spaces in several places, including Speaking of We and Collective Intelligence and We-Spaces.