NVC

Pointing at the shift / mindset pairs / ways of being

• by Henry Wai, based on NVC (Jean probably has a physical copy that could be scanned nicer)
  • 

August 16th, 2024

• NVC, meta-protocol
  • x.com/animalologist/status/1820916879747141948

June 20th, 2024

• analogue to NVC's strategies vs needs

February 25th, 2023

• NVC
  • my threads on twitter about NVC - although I later note the metaphor is misleading
    • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1628867886910676992
  • > NVC is wrong: there is a distinct embodied feeling of being ripped off, or left out, or misunderstood, or any other number of complex relational phenomena
    
    (but NVC is right: it can be helpful to decouple relational stories from first person individual experiences)
    • twitter.com/RichDecibels/status/1619666661740777473

February 22nd, 2022

• NVC - see A case study: NVC as a great specific protocol and a terrible meta-protocol
  • in meta-protocol doc
    
  • from convo with Michael "Valentine" Smith

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

• 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.

• 1:33:50 - 1:37:33 - Cultural gaps between the various methods for thinking about and navigating trust dancing. Circling NVC NNTD
  • 1:35:17 - M > Yeah, and the cultural gaps are overtly greater between NVC and Circling, say, than between my understanding of -from a couple of years ago- how to do collaborative culture and Jean's understanding, from a couple of years ago, [of] how to do collaborative culture, such that we were having some tension and friction between us. Like, it's more overt, the difference between circling and NVC, but the basic breakdown that occurs is kind of the same. And, in either case, it's like something about how I'm understanding everything, and something about how you're understanding everything is having trouble talking right now. And we're both bringing our best understandings of what effective communication looks like but because we have different assumptions in different aspects of how we're seeing the world, we're having trouble meeting each other. And so that's like a general description that applies to all scales. And...
  • T > Both within oneself and between groups, you're saying? Or just between different cultures or something like that? That there can be the same similarly shaped problem at different scales?
  • M > Right, so I guess it's actually two scale dimensions. So like scale dimension number one, is within a person versus between two people versus between two groups. With scale dimension number two, it's like the scale of the apparent difference in model. Are we both trying to circle and we even have the same lineage of circling, but we have some tiny basic assumption that's getting in all up in the gears and that is in our mutual blind spot? Because it's a blind spot that circling has that is the source of the problem that we're having, and so we're having trouble debugging it with the system that we have because of its blind spot? That's like, you know... no two people can have the exact same understanding of an interpersonal framework, because it's necessarily going to build on all of your life experiences and nobody has the same life experiences.

September 8th, 2021

• some uncommon takes about Circling, NVC, etc., here
  • > > Stages of Emotional Liberation:
    1. We believe we are responsible for the feelings of others (keep everyone happy)
    2. We no longer want to be responsible for the feelings of others (anger at our own unmet needs)
    3. We take responsibility for our actions, respond to the needs of others out of compassion
    
  • > This handy little pocket card will indeed “liberate” you from any and all relationships. The connection to the universal acid of leftism is obvious. This ideology is so deadly that not only does it attack the family, here you see it attacking the entire idea of love. Marriage is just another domino that needs to fall on the way to making it impossible to even have boyfriends and girlfriends.
    
    This is a manual for treating love like friendship. Indeed you are not responsible for the feelings of your friends—when your friends get weird, or you perceive them as getting weird, it’s completely normal and healthy to just disengage from them a bit. Or if they have “needs,” you may “respond” to them out of “compassion”—for the same reason you’d give a bum a five-dollar bill.
  • > I don't want anyone to respond to my need not to be kicked out of their compassion. Like, you've kicked me in the head three times—now you're not going to kick me again, out of compassion? For my “unmet need” to not be kicked?
    
    I need to know that you understand that it hurts that you kicked me, that you feel bad about having kicked me, and hear that you get it and will at least try not to kick me again. None of this has anything to do with WHY you kicked me—even if it was just by accident.
    • Yeah the WHY is only relevant when it comes to really complex stuff.
  • > Like I said in the post, the next stage after basic consideration is shared perspective. The NVC dogma is that if I know how you feel (or say you feel), and you know how I feel (or say I feel), everything is fine.
    • Shared perspective, boom.
    • To the extent this is the NVC position, I'm way less impressed with NVC.

Home

• NVC has stuff on this re "needs" vs "strategies"
  • that can probably be usefully incorporated into this stuff
  • but needs a larger meta-frame like the NNTD to hold it
    • otherwise in some low-trust situations it devolves into frame battles that can't easily be talked about within the frame of NVC

March 8th, 2021

• re NVC - thread on its shortcomings
  • twitter.com/thinkagainer/status/1364797838400618497

February 20th, 2021

• I was thinking about NVC last night and how it relates to Bio-Emotive and NNTD...
  • and had a sense of like, yeah, in the context of trying to do observation-feeling-need-request, there's value in having the feeling be relatively meaning-neutral (eg "sad" rather than eg "abandoned") because it's a kind of weak frame and thus avoids a frame battle in the context of trying to get to the satisfying resolution of the request.
  • it's very important however to be able to explore and unpack those meaning-laden feeling-words
    • both
      • internally (doing eg Bio-Emotive)
      • interpersonally
    • re interpersonally
      • sometimes you notice that there seem to be meanings attached to words even if they're words like "angry"
        • like maybe I or my partner have a concept of anger that says "if I'm angry, someone did something wrong"