The Third Space is a place to supercharge your creativity, a space to integrate your creative surplus.
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 something news, 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.
Read more the full story on how Thirdness came to being: Building a Meta Community
“Nitzan has an innate talent for facilitating thought-provoking discussions, by bringing people across a wide spectrum of interests and backgrounds together around the common goal of reflection, intention and community. Collaborating with Nitzan is like entering an orbit of creativity and motivation.”
“Nitzan has an incredible capacity for facilitating groups of creative leaders to grow, create, imagine, and collaborate in unexpected and exciting ways. I am always inspired and surprised by his facilitation formats, by his ability to go granular and then go holistic, go theoretical and then practical, and communicate in the mediums of design, music, writing, and conversation facilitate these capacities in others. When I first started working with Nitzan as part of the thirdness, I had a very particular idea of what I wanted to do. What I did, and co-created, was far beyond my imagination, and I am very grateful for that.”
“It is a wild, wonderful garden in a time of utter flatness. It moved beyond that monoculture feeling of every other Slack and Discord group, hammering on the same idea from industry experts. Instead, Nitzan built this beautiful permaculture, allowing us all to grow and contribute at our own pace. In the right way, I felt slightly out of place, encountering voices and perspectives from wild and different fields. I got my hands as dirty as they could be in quarantine, after all the useful links, research papers, books, and talks shared from this generative group.”
“In a serendipity starved world, Thirdness is a ray of light. Every encounter I have with the community is like bumping into your smartest friend after ten years, moments after they’ve just finished a major project they want to tell everyone about. It’s open, energising, thought-provoking and entirely necessary in the world we find ourselves in right now.”
“Nitzan has a knack for bringing together uniquely creative people and sparking conversations that are energizing and deeply inspiring. Working in product-focused tech for several years, I didn’t realize how long it had been since my mind was opened in the way it was after a discussion on speculative epistemology in our breakout session. Hungry to keep learning, I bought five books immediately afterwards on recommendation from the group.”
“The Thirdness Network is a place that allowed me, as a creative professional, to share moments of liminality with peers. Working in Innovation, often times I feel pressured to know what direction to take for solving complex challenges. The Thirdness network, instead, allows to pause and reflect, exploring questions instead or chasing answers.”