Liminal Space Agency

Pointing at the shift / mindset pairs / ways of being

• The below was written in 2019, when I was at Liminal Space Agency, as a sort of internal collection of things that at least somewhat mapped onto the main thing that we were on about.

June 17th, 2023

• ...definitely some part of me that is guarded towards Jean-as-teacher, being on this stoa call with Liminal Space Agency folks

Cointelligence R&D Lab Proposal

• Some of these are related to blindspots or confusions that were blocking things at Liminal Space Agency from 2012-2020, that my non-naive trust dance framework solves:
  • trying to do it counteractively, for instance
  • not slowing down & integrating oscillations
  • / rushing peoples' learning processes
  • etc etc etc

• Jean Robertson, wisdom anchor of Liminal Space Agency

Podcast summaries

• Keywords: Eric Chisholm Sarah McManus Conversation As Medium blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) ottergroup fishbowl frame dialogue frame blindspot Circling Liminal Space Agency NNTD upward spiral fuel the upward spiral nobody is to blame What is Blame? building trust out of distrust trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions Game A Game B Circling NVC NNTD has let me see how certain attempts towards trust-building will fail to build non-naive trust obvious

• 47:07 - 1:08:42 - Interesting moments from my personal history. Earliest introduction to meditation. Getting started with LSA, rationality and Trust dancing. Mark Lippmann's meditation protocol Liminal Space Agency The Stoa Game B
  • 56:52 - M > And, I guess the other thing I could say was that I've long had a fascination with interfaces. And I mean that in very abstract sense, not just like computer interfaces, and not just the interface of designed objects in general, like this handle is an interface with this mug. So, of course, is the lip of the mug, don't forget, that's a necessary interface for drinking. But interfaces between people as well, and like what kinds of interactions between people yield mutually satisfying, 'upward spiral' type dynamics? And what kinds of interactions between people lead to disappointment and despair and frustration and challenges and so forth? Well challenges, you're always going to get challenges, but difficulty in like the psychological sense, strain? And, from the get-go, it was just really clear that these folks had a model of human relating, and thus human interfacing, and that was more sophisticated than anything I'd ever seen. And remained more sophisticated than anything else I would come to see over the following eight years. You know, there's been important key pieces that we've incorporated from other places, and things that I've found, you know, like missing or like necessary elements of various things. But it remains the case that the basic framework being pointed at there is one of the best things I've ever seen in the world for pointing at different human dynamics. And it was outlining kind of, you know, "Here are the basic things that lead to the upward spiral, and here are the basic things that lead to the downward spiral." And having seen that, as clearly as I had, in terms of like, 'what was I trying to accomplish there?' In the most general sense, it's like, "Get the upward spiral going more upwardly and spirally. And, you know, bigger and with more people in it, and more consistency," and whatever else, I mean. Which is pretty general, and I think the generality is something that I've been revisiting recently and sort of feeling into, "Do I want to have more specific targets? Or is that even possible or wise given that part of the nature of things is that you don't know what's possible until you make it possible? And like, you don't want to like constrain yourself too early? And there's this kind of dynamic tension between planning and improv or other dimensions like that. [pause]. Yeah, I think part of what's interesting -in terms of like, "What was I trying to accomplish there?", and I've been reflecting more about this recently- is that in some sense... so, as you know -and it has sorta implicitly been hinted at by how I've been talking about this group versus what I'm doing now as distinct- I left Waterloo and I left that scene in late 2020. And I was reflecting to Eric, recently. We were talking about home and I said, "This feels like it could be home." And he asked, "Was Waterloo home?" And I said, "Ah, hmm." And he and he said... or maybe he asked, like "Waterloo could be home," or something like that. And I said, "No, Waterloo was home. Waterloo never was 'could be home'". And there was something really valuable about getting in touch with how the whole time I've been living in Waterloo, I'd never intended to live there indefinitely. Like, I was there as a university student, who are notoriously transient, right? Although, I mean, a substantial fraction of university students end up living, indefinitely, wherever they do University, it's one of the main things that gets people moving, and so on. But, you know, for the years that I was visiting the Bay Area, I kind of always assumed that sooner or later, I would move there. And, you know, [there were] various factors, including social dynamics and also the fires, as well as other things that led me to sort of feel less inclined to try to move to the bay. But there was something meaningful in recognizing, "Yeah, I haven't been treating Waterloo, like the place I'm intending to live for the rest of my life. Like, I'm mostly just friends with the small group doing this culture incubator thing here." And most of my other friends just measured in terms of like, number of people I know, who know me and know each other kind of thing, are in the bay. And I wasn't bothering to try to make friends in Waterloo for the most part. So, there was a way in which I kind of was recognizing, oh, yeah, I was... I feel like I'm answering one of your questions right now, but I've forgotten which one.

• 1:23:45 - 1:33:48 - Is NNTD and upgraded version of Upstart's ideals and methods? Liminal Space Agency trust-dancing Game A Game B CirclingNVC
  • 1:26:43 - M > Yeah, it it very much feels that way to me because, yeah, that's that's kind of how it emerged. And there's a profound amount of historical contingency to all of this. Like, the name 'Non Naive Trust Dance,' has a lot of rich elements to it, and it's not a coincidence that it's named that. But there's also a way in which like... and I may do things about this over the coming years, or months even, but like one of the things that's currently a little funny is that like, in some sense, Non Naive Trust Dance refers to a thing that people are always doing to greater and lesser degrees of skill and workability and effectiveness. Like, you know, any conversation that people have is them navigating, effectively or not, the trust landscape between them and building trust and building distrust, or having gaps in trust. Like, that's, that's always happening, right? And so in some sense, the Non Naive trust Dance is just a way of talking about a thing that's already happening. But it's already happening, and I didn't invent it in that sense of it, right? And that's part of why I talk about discovering the Non Naive Trust Dance, because it feels in some ways more like a discovery than like an invention. Having said that, it's a discovery that produces a set of kinda obvious implications for how one might go about trust dancing in ways that work in the same way that -and this is an analogy I use often- [in] learning thermodynamics and aerodynamics, it's like, you, you get an immediate sense of like, "Okay, yeah, you can build faster-than-light aircraft, but they need to have some way of lifting themselves," and there's sort of like, three or four-ish, I don't know, I mean, some expert in this could talk about it, but, you know, there's sort of a few ways to do that lifting thing, and, you know, pushing off against the ground can't do it, because you can't do that when you're in the air. Like, just some of these basic principles. And, you know, knowing thermodynamics, you'd also know that you can't build a perpetual motion machine. Like there's limits of entropy that prevent that from being possible. But you can build a superconductor, which is kind of cool. And so there's something where I feel like I've unlocked a very basic couple of fundamental truths about how trust building ever works, when it works. Like, it always follows these principles, but the principles themselves are really hard to put into words. They're like this sort of... I mean, in part because they sound almost tautological, like, they're just like, "you can't trust what you don't trust". But, if you really take that seriously, and you and you look for instances where you're trying to get someone to trust you when they don't, without actually changing what's available to them as information or just salient features that would allow them to trust you, instead of not trusting you, you notice that this is happening constantly with, with things that people say and do and so forth. So even though it's kind of obvious when stated that, like, "you can't trust what you don't trust," that's not actually how people operate most of the time. Anyway, I'm getting a little sidetracked from the the core thrust of your question, which was like, in what sense is the Non Naive Trust Dance an upgrade on what Upstart has been doing this whole time, right? So, in one sense, it just straightforwardly is, and, in some sense, even almost too much so, in that, as I was differentiating myself from that... from just being like, "the main way I have of understanding this collaborative culture thing is how we've been talking about it here, and, in particular, the way that Jean has been talking about it - Jean being the main founder of upstart and that whole project. As I was differentiating myself from her thinking, there was a way in which like, any difference that I had, between how she was seeing things and how I was seeing things that felt central, as opposed to just aesthetic or something got kind of put in the Non Naive Trust Dance. And in that sense, I'm not sure it's one thing. Like, it's in some ways a placeholder for Malcolm having his own thoughts about stuff, which I hadn't previously felt like I had space to do until I sort of started having this new framework. But in a different sense, it all feels really related. So I hope it's an upgrade. It is, at minimum, a critique, and I do have concerns that it's possible that I've missed one or two key pieces of the original, that Jean still understands that I don't. And that, in that sense, it might be a critique that's not actually viable in the sense that I might be missing some basic components. And it might be that I know I see things that ge doesn't see, because I've seen them and I've tested them and they do they do something. But it may be that I'm still missing some key pieces and that's part of why, over the coming years, part of what I want to do is find ways to bridge the thinking that I've developed back with Upstart's thinking which I was already starting to do while I was there - to some success. But I think it's gonna be really helpful for us to have had the space that we've already had, and the further space of me being out here. Which I'm just gonna mention for the recording, because if you're out in British Columbia, particularly on the coast or Vancouver Island area, I would be interested in talking with you, like nebulous podcast listener, people.
  • 1:32:35 - M > Right. And it's funny that you're using the metaphor too, because we've been using the operating system metaphor going all the way back. You know, from the very point that I joined, we were talking about the upward spiral as being humanity 3.0. Which is like the previous two operating systems being the kinda 'Hunter Gatherer pre Game A' one, and then the kind of various forms of much more serious hierarchy that humanity's had, that are also known as Game A. So the operating system metaphor goes deep, and we've even, you know, been reading some open source texts, like the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric S. Raymond. And we've been talking about the Non Naive Trust Dance as something of like a fork of the OS, I guess - a fork of the code of the cultural kernel that Jean has been stewarding for years. And, I mean, maybe one way to point at that a little bit there is, is NNTD the whole fork? Or is it just the changes that I've made on top of the fork, right? Like, is it just the patch? There is a way in which part of what's going on with the NNTD is very much designed to mediate between cultures and assumptions and protocols, kinda wherever they're at. And so, I think that similar patches might be able to be created from the same sort of font of inspiration that I've been drawing from, for other communities, other groups, other practices. You know, like various ways in which circling could benefit from a similar patch, or nonviolent communication or like other similar things. And that, that would make them all more able to talk with each other because of this basic assumption of like, "If something's not working for us, such that you don't trust me, then well, you can't trust me. Like that's how it is and that's the ground from which we need to start." And that needs to somehow be okay, in the sense that like, otherwise, you have to throw out the universe and get a new one.

Roam

• a Liminal Space Agency team roam

defensiveness = protectiveness

• (this feels less significant in 2023 than it did in 2020 when I felt a need to point out that some of what we were calling protectiveness at Liminal Space Agency seemed to be just a special version of defensiveness, and we weren't treating it as such)

leadlag learning system

• There are also probably unexplained things below, since it was originally written as an internal doc for Liminal Space Agency.

Better email

• I have a separate pseudo-inbox (just a filter+label) for emails from Liminal Space Agency (the group I work & live with), since those are often longer and I want to digest them more slowly rather than in zero-inbox mode, but also I want to be notified when they come in

recording management systems

• Liminal Space Agency records almost all of its conversations.
  • This sort of thing is becoming more common, especially with
    • Zoom having a built-in recording feature
    • apps like Otter that can make automatic transcripts

Conversation App Design ("slack but good")

• Then... hm. I'm thinking about how Liminal Space Agency years ago (before it was "LSA") didn't have a slack and we operated using a journal on the dashboard in the common space, and how that worked. And also how we hold all interactions that happen with the entire ecosystem as being part of a larger conversation.
  • eg someone doing the dishes also functions as a conversational move (although interpreting what it means is complex and requires much more context)

What would a fluid or meta-systematic team coordination app look like?

• So one level to look at this on is "what question(s) does Liminal Space Agency have that a tool could answer?" (With Complice the question is something like "how can I make consistent progress towards my long-term goals?")

• I like the create+notice+leverage concept. All three of those are important, and they get at the importance of information flow. Honestly, if I were to try to build a piece of software to make Liminal Space Agency more effective, I'm not sure that it wouldn't just be an recording management systems. With all of the features I described to Connor Turland.

• One thought is... in the context of Liminal Space Agency, there are these ongoing threads of people, ecosystems, lenses, projects, etc. And these pop up now and then, and some fall away, etc. If there was a slack integration that listened to all messages and noticed what was being talked about and used that to generate more systems-awareness, that would be cool.

• Actually, one thing that would be awesome for Liminal Space Agency is simply a more fluid chat app... which could be similar to the kind of thing I wanted to build on top of twitter (like feedhero). It would be a solution for the phenomenon where we keep making small group chats on slack. Even a better way to manage those would be good.

Context Meditation

• In any case, I shall briefly describe a kind of meditation that emerged for me summer 2019, in the petri dish at Liminal Space Agency. We've been experimenting with doing 3-minute meditations before many of our conversations, both formal-ish group conversations and 2-person sync-ups. During that 3-minutes, I found myself doing something that basically goes as follows:
  • Context Meditation Steps:
    • On each in-breath, clear your mind
      • Method not vital here. Can be deliberately trying to not think or can be more like allowing thoughts to do their thing.
    • Just prior to each out-breath, focus your attention on a person that is present
      • You totally count as a person, though typically I do myself last if at all.
      • Also the person doesn't have to be physically present. For instance, if it's a group that usually has 5 people in it, and one is absent, then their absence might be just as conspicuously present as the physical presence of the other person. Or if you know that someone physically present just got out of a conversation with someone else, that person is in a sense present.
      • More generally, you can also consider a relationship or a subgroup of the whole group, and do this with them as the focus.
    • During the out-breath, stream-of-consciousness braindump on everything you are aware of what you know about what is so for them right now, as well as what you are aware of not knowing.
      • I sometimes do this in a pretty verbal subvocalizey way, but also sometimes it manifests as more of a rich visuospatial gestalt.
      • If I have enough time to do multiple out-breaths per person, I might aim for the first such breath to be more verbal/linear, and for the second to be more of a bigger-picture all-at-once shape.

Table of Contents

• Spheres of Feedback (written mostly for internal use at Liminal Space Agency)

October 21st, 2019

• Edited, printed & shared Spheres of Feedback internally within Liminal Space Agency

Spheres of Feedback

• We recently did an experiment at the Liminal Space Agency where we tried not asking any questions for a week, and instead to focus on proactively sharing information. The reason why we did this is complex but suffice it to say for now that we're not doing it because we think questions are bad, but instead to increase our awareness of the role that they play.