The Third Space helps members stay creative, productive, and generative in solitude.
We Could not See This Coming; we were unprepared. How could we? We built our lives and worked with the ability to move around and serendipitously bump into people and ideas. That simple fact is so foundational there was no way we could have expected this forced, but at–times welcomed slowdown. Once safe, we quickly got all home offices in order, digitized our teams and their processes, waiting for the phone to ring. Luckily it did, and our clients still needed us. We were busy, sometimes busier than ever. As we were trying to find our grounding we spent countless hours on Zoom, looking for team productivity apps, or collected ice-breakers for our weekly team ‘happy hours’
We realized that was not the end of it, something was still missing. We can’t just walk over for a ‘check-in,’ ask for a quick team huddle, or factor in the energy in a room when making a decision. It is like we were stuck in a to-do mode, and were not able to go above Maslow-state-of-mind, to create and inspire our teams.
How might we stay creative and optimistic about the future with a foundation that is continually changing?
It is as if we were in a no-gravity zone. By the time we reach an understanding of the situation at hand, the circumstances might already be changing.
This new reality needs more than just traditional outward-facing strategy and tactics. It asks for a constant reflection–and-projection type of thinking. It asks us to show up and meet on the intellectual, emotional, and visceral.
We need to give space to the people around us to self-lead while being supported from afar. We need to build protocols but know when to look across them. The best thing we can do in times of uncertainty is to be work with liminality. And ultimately to consider how we might enable the agency of those around us, without telling them what to do.
The work environments we existed in are on hold at the moment. That pod, or a creativity wall are not useful until we can all confidently go back to working in the same space. That temporary office we set ourselves is likely to be our company-of-one until the end of the year, if not longer. And the same is true for everyone else in our orbit.
We are all freelancers and entrepreneurs now, while bound with the companies we’re in, and having to toggle a blurring line between personal and professional life. Relying on the persona we used to be, in a world we hope would go back to normal, might cause more frustration than value. Instead, we might consider who we are as a person, and show up as that person: all this time juggling fluctuating moods, personal circumstances, household commitments, and energy levels.
We are in that crucial moment realizing our sprint has become a marathon. The Third Space Network is a circle to study, support, and nourish the new skills needed for this reality. What is it? The Third Space is a circle for proactive thinkers, those who read all of the essays and thought pieces, but are looking for action through study, support, and conversation. It is for those looking to generate a creative mindset and inspire their teams to the same.
It is a ‘place’ for those ready to switch from emergency protocol to a longer-term plan, to move from dealing with fires to giving their teams generative solutions to move ahead. It is a place to find new tools for leadership, creativity, inspiration, compounding unknowing-ness and perpetual risk with intention.
The Third Space is a joint venture between Nitzan Hermon and Jodi Larson.
Jodi has been coaching and training coaches and other leaders for over 19 years. She authored three textbooks on coaching and was a member of the Certification Team for the ICF (International Coach Federation).
Nitzan is an innovation consultant, researcher, and educator focused on system thinking, complexity, and creativity. Axios and The Economist covered his 2018 report with Ken Goldberg at UC Berkeley on AI, Future of Work, and Cognitive Diversity.
We would love to hear from you, and share more about The Third Space. You can book time with Nitzan, or contact us here
I have been running an experimental meta community for six months now, the experiment is succeeding, and here are my learnings.
In February 2020, in what seems like a different universe, I decided to embark on an experiment. After years of running dinners, salons, and a few Slack groups, I wanted to develop an intentional community. A place where people don’t brush off each other, but engage. A meta-space where people can show up with a seed of an idea and know that it will be respected and given a space, not put on a shipping line. A place where value is generated, and not only passed around, where members can show up as a process and not a product.
Having run gatherings, salons, and more recently dinners, I grew to appreciate the transformational value of light facilitation (credit due to Priya Parker for opening my eyes to that space).
Out of all these formats, the smaller dinners were the most semantic. People showed up open and vulnerable, with an idea of how they thought, navigated different backgrounds and opinions around the table in a way that resulted in value, new thinking, new tools, and new concepts. Those took place for a year, but I realized they didn’t have accumulative value, and that there was onboarding that needed to happen every time. There was little overlap in guests, but by large people were new to each dinner. It made me think about starting a closer-knit circle, a group that commits to creating a space to act on their creative surplus, and looking for people who do the same. By design, I came up with the idea of setting a core principle. A paid membership in exchange for 2.5 hours of work per week. That work is either on themselves or someone else. The logic was more than creating accountability, as is the case in writing groups. It was to develop what Shafir and Mullainathan call slack in a system. The idea that when systems are packed tightly, they become less adaptive.
Think of traffic of road leading to traffic jams;
“Roadways operate best below 70 percent capacity; traffic jams are caused by lack of slack. In principle, if a road is 85 percent full and everybody goes at the same speed, all cars can easily fit with some room between them. But if one driver speeds up just a bit and then needs to brake, those behind her must brake as well. Now they’ve slowed down too much, and, as it turns out, it’s easier to reduce a car’s speed than to increase it again. This small shock — someone lightly deviating from the right speed and then touching her brakes — has caused the traffic to slow substantially. A few more shocks, and traffic grinds to a halt. At 85 percent there is enough road but not enough slack to absorb the small shocks.”
–Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir. “Scarcity.”
Similarly, I was trying to get people to commit to having slack in their calendar and their practice. Open the walls of their practice, and show up as a process and not a product. I am pleased and honored to say that the experiment has succeeded. Throughout COVID and global unrest, the space has grown and developed. People left, and more people joined. We had international experts, philosophers, marketers, and academics join to discuss law, tech, future of work, and social justice.
The weekly meetings are where new people are introduced, and where we reflect on weekly prompts, examples to follow.
Prompt 3: Maintenance and Transformation. We all have to negotiate our commitment in the world with the things we end up doing. The first might be thought of as maintenance, and the latter as transformation. By a simple reply to this thread, what percentage would you say you spend on maintenance, and what on transformation? (40% - 60% would mean you spend 40% on maintenance for example)
Prompt 4: Creative Surplus. Keep a list–a simple bullet point, or more elaborate doc–of all of the ideas, thoughts, and creativity left after you have attended to your duties: job, teaching, clients etc. It might be handy to set reminders (you can Slack’s by typing /remind ) If you remember, please note the time of day and what you were doing when this idea came to you. It would be great if everyone can have at least three items.
Prompt 8: Box. We all need to fit in a box :package: to explain ourselves and our work to new people we meet. That box has a label, of course – but like any box, it has six planes. What is your primary label for yourself? And what are an additional five labels for your practice?
The community invites a weekly guest to join in the conversation. The share-outs could be a traditional talk-present a topic take q&a–a question–working through an idea and airing it out for feedback–or a mix of the two. We had philosophers, marketing executives, legal scholars, community organizers, authors, scientists, and developmental designers during the last six months. There is a special kind of magic that happens once the community understands the space is created, and a new person is invited into it.
To develop more “diagonal connections” (1:1 as opposed to a circular bonfire), I used a bot which assigns people to grab “coffee” every week. It has been successful in letting the electrons bounce, sort of speak, without putting any structure on it.
Process before Product A culture of (false) cybernetic connectivity is more conducive to passing objects around instead of reflecting on them. In my work on meta medium, I explore the difference between the persona we occupy and the person we are. This community is a space to practice that tension without studying it. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that those who did not feel vulnerable enough to share their process ended up not fitting in.
Is it better to deliver a 25% value to 10,000 people or 99% value to 100 people? It depends on your goals. If you’re thinking in artifacts, then scaling is a good outcome, the transaction of products. But system thinking looks at second and third-order consequences, in this context it means being generative instead of editorial, and pedagogical. Through my work in AI and systems, it became clear that shallow value is abundant and cheap. But vertical scaling: more context, rather than more people, is incredibly difficult. This community was thriving in generating such scale, through thirdness.
In psychoanalysis, the analytic third is the idea when two people have a relationship, they create something new. There is one person, the other person, and in their exchange, openness, ideas, and feelings, they create a new entity, which is specific to their relationship. They grow and can use that developmental value for the rest of their lives. In many ways, I see the community as a collection of ‘thirdness.’ We meet regularly as a group, but a lot of creation of thirdness happens in the ‘diagonal connections.’ Intellectual discourse, mutual support, sharing of work, asking for help between people in the group.
The community is formed by its members. It is not a product looking for a fit, and marketed to its segment. It is ambiguous, and open-ended — and can’t be explained in as a territory. I refer to the community as a bonfire, where people show up with their creative surplus and throw it in the fire. The value and learning that is created can then be taken back into our respective spaces. All members of the community had to sign up to walk into a half-lit room, as part of its design. In other words, if you need full understanding, this might not be for you.
The community is a place for small actions and not one single project to deliver. It is not about writing your book, or getting a new job: even though members did work on their books, and found employment. The difference is that there is no sense of meeting at the starting line and checking each other’s progress. As part of owning the space of ambiguity, there was little in the way of setting goals, checking on those goals, or helping with to–do’s. Around the main bonfire, there were smaller, themed groups. In the writing group, for example, people could join weekly with nothing written, or with no intention of writing. And use that space to learn, reflect, develop a desire to write or not. The design is that finding space for ambiguity is good for creativity.
The goal is to write and rewrite, to practice and rehearse, to move from knowledge to wisdom, to get to know one’s context This should feel like a rehearsal room for people who speak publicly about their opinions and interests.
The community is not a band, but a rehearsal room for solo artists. It is a place where we all travel from our day to day work into the meta, engage with others, and use those learnings and processes back in our context.
–Nitzan
Read more the full piece: Building a Meta Community and the follow up: Communities to Circles.