November 13, 2024

Okay, so what I put in the chat is a suggestion for how to structure these types of conversations. If this is only just this small group now, we can decide how to go forward. So that’s pretty cool. We just have a few people and we get to decide now. But I think this structure makes a lot of sense.

- Why are we here / agenda / What is needed from participants - 5min - Sharing of a story based on the 5 prompts - 10min - Discussion of the story - 10min - Break in joint silence - 5min - Sharing of a story based on the 5 prompts - 10min - Discussion of the story - 10min - Wrap up: What is present for you now? What impact did that have on your understanding of the joy of not needing to be someone? - 10min

Going forward from the assumption that we’re going to, I’m pretty clear about this now, we’re going to have some sort of a stop to this version of what we’re doing. We’re going to rebrand. We’re going to write down or have a clear onboarding procedure for people who join. And we’re going to open it up to the world again. So, considering it’s mid-November, maybe from next year, we’re going to have a clear, this is the group for doing this. You are welcome to join if you do this A, B, C, D. This is what we do. These are the type of meetings we have. This is the structure.

And it could be something like this version, which is just very simple, a facilitated version of the story is shared. There’s a discussion about it. It’s facilitated. We do that two times. And then we have an overall discussion. I think that just for the basic structure of it works fine.

It’s just a suggestion. We can refine it, of course. Yes. And depending on how long we’re going to have these meetings, like when we have them, I don’t know, bigger direct experience slams. So we already have the acronym of DES. So it’s the joy of DES. But I imagine that we could even do this if it grows, we could even do it in breakouts. So we could host like a slam. People bring their stories or spend time writing their stories together. Then they share them, discuss, go back to writing in this online event. The bigger it gets, the more we can do it in breakouts or in smaller groups.

So there are all sorts of directions we can go with this. I’m sure you’ve heard of something called Working Out Loud. But what I understand from it is that it’s a very simple concept. The idea behind it is in a large organization, don’t just sit there behind your little computer doing your work, but share with colleagues what it is that you’re going through. And this is just a simple structure for how to do that. So it’s a meeting format really, where people come together in large organizations and share what they’re working on.

And it’s, sort of the same thing. They share their case, their story, they discuss it, everybody gives some input, Q &A, and it increases the joy of work. This is a hugely simple concept that caught on really big. So there are now working out loud circles, there’s a workbook.

If we’re thinking about this in terms of a way of sharing the direct experience of no self or freedom from the self or non-dual understanding, this could be a whole shift in how this spreads. If we can make it so simple in this way that it’s just a direct experience post. So I think there’s so much power in the sharing of it in this way that we can promote and distribute through this work.

I think we need to clean up the onboarding. I think that’s very important. We should put some barriers and some friction actually. So whether that means you need to do some tasks or you need to like even put financial, I don’t know if that’s necessary, but we should put some friction into the process for the onboarding and make it easier, like probably fun. Or even watch a video from some session we record. It should be inviting, but there should be a certain level of friction. So I think that would be really key in the quality and who we get. I think that gateway is the first step to really keeping a good conversation going on and something interesting.

And then, we can incorporate once we figure that out, even when they log in, we can incorporate probably a sequence of emails with things that they can do on the platform. Like we can play with those things if we want to, but we need to define it. And it could be like step one, step two, step three. If you miss all of those three steps, just to create some level of consistency, even spread it over time. Say you don’t get instantaneous, one, two, three week, there is still interest, come join. Because I feel we will dilute it very quickly if we don’t end up with meaningful engagement.

Not that we expect everyone to show up every time, but for people to understand that there is a value here and that you want that value. What I keep saying these days is like, people need to pull, not us to push. So if we don’t feel there is enough pull, then I think that will be not great. And then that will impact the community as a whole. which wouldn’t be nice.

Yes, steps they have to go through. And if they jump through all three hoops, then they’re in. But they do have to do that.

What comes to mind now on those is, you know, we want them to write a story. That should be one of them. Like what we expect of them. Probably watch a short video and do a voice where you share. Share and a voice memo. And we don’t need to have access and listen to them, but as long as they check the boxes and do them like a two minute, three minutes, we don’t need to evaluate if it’s good or not, honestly.

But we just need to see, okay, they’re doing it, and then spread it over time. I think that’s as well valuable if we spread it over three weeks. We delay it a bit, create a lag. That lag will showcase interest, will showcase stamina on the consistency. That’s important as well. Almost an application kind of thing. It’s like an application where we evaluate that, okay, you’re ready to go in and then later once in, you can follow the structure. But now the onboarding I think is key.

Yes. And there’s this aspect that we were discussing, about what is required of you to be in this conversation. So the letting go of the need to know things, to be right, to have an opinion. It’s almost like a checklist of things to address before you come into this conversation.

But you know, that might be it exactly. Everything they share in those three steps will become public anonymously. The gateway through whatever you wrote will be anonymously available. Whatever you say, but with your voice or whatever, will be there. Probably the voice one just within the community and the text one completely open. We can play with those parameters because that’s what we want people to be comfortable with when they come into this. They’re able to speak, they’re able to write. And then there should be one more thing. I just don’t know what it is because everything needs to be in threes. So we should throw one more test.

Well, maybe that’s three different things. It’s watch some informational thing. It’s write and speak. And it’s go through this divesting yourself of checklist. And so assuming that everybody goes through this, then they’re in.

And do you also see this as less frequent, but bigger events? So I’m imagining they would be maybe 90 minutes and monthly. So more of this slam idea, come together online and then the stories are created. But now that I’m saying this, I’m thinking that the,writing of the story can be in parallel to the event. So it can be both, some people are writing, some people are speaking, some people are discussing, and it kind of rotates.

I would definitely recommend to do that during the meeting. Yeah. So, I mean, people are usually heavily involved in their daily tasks. For example, if I hadn’t done that directly after our meeting last week, nothing would have been there today. And so if you directly take the energy from that meeting, then my experience at least is it works much better. So that could also be a recommendation to people. Use the energy and directly jump into this, because from experience, if you do it later, it will get lost. Nothing will exist then.

But so, we could integrate the writing of the stories into the event itself. So for example, writing in joint silence. Why not?

And I think, that was brought up last time, the sessions gave a boost to write. And I think they are quite powerful in that sense. I don’t know on the cadence, if it’s one a month or every other week, I think it depends as well on how big and how many we are. Because if you miss one every month, that’s a lot. If there are two sessions and you miss one of them, it’s still easy because we can assume like people have conflicts.At least that’s my feeling is if it’s only one and you miss a month, it’s a long time period. Weekly, I think it’s a bit too much as well if we want people to write.

So if we want people to write, even if most people are writing just after, they want the weekend, that’s where they do their writing. I think we should skip a week. So probably what I’m trying to say is start with every other week and then extend it to once a month.

What I want to get rid of is the pre and the afterwork from my side as well. So I want it to be like an automatic flow. The stories are captured. And what people want to share from the meeting is also captured. But there’s no transcribing the transcript, doing all of that. It has to be like an automated flow that what needs to be captured is just part of it.

I think that’s just a matter of refining the tooling. Because we can integrate automatic transcriptions, we use Riverside or something else, they transcribe automatically. And then those can be easily hooked in. So we can build some of those things on the backend of it. So it doesn’t require our attention.

I think that for me would also be required for a next step and making it bigger.

I think both of you didn’t say people would actually write the stories during the event itself. Do you not see that happening?

You said in the five minute silent break. Yeah. I mean, we can even extend it to 10 minutes. Or see how long people need. But when I did that last week on Wednesday, it took me 15 minutes. There’s an advantage to having a time box because it creates the pressure, and you have to press enter. People shouldn’t think about what they write. If it flows, it’s just what we need.

Yeah, so there is something to coming online and doing a round of writing and then having the event. And that’s almost also like the pre-event event.

I don’t know about that 100%, at least I think there is value in the writing. I think there’s too many factors of engagement that are necessary in the sessions between the writing and the dialogue. Like what I know about myself, there are different modes, like when I write and then I edit and then I engage in the conversations and the dialogue. And if I’m doing one, like tension drifts over to the other. And I know we said there are 15 minutes where we say silence, but sometimes for people to break from one mode to the other , it’s not instant. It takes sa little bit to close one channel and open another one. But we can test it out and see if it’s effective. It might be good enough and probably at first it might not work very well, but then, create the habit of it, people becoms more used to it.

I mean, the question which just popped up is, do we get people into those meetings who still have an issue with perfectionism or do we filter them out?

A rhetorical question.

So I think it can work. I think you’re both right. There are people who want to do this on their own time, in their own mood. And it’s both possible. So you can write your stories in between sessions. You can write them whenever you want. And we can also build in dedicated writing time so that the people who need to have like the Zen stick and need a moment to do that now in the meeting, why not? And then the people who already have a story, they can join later. If we start with that, for example, we can say, yeah, we can say, look, there’s an event. The first 20 minutes are dedicated to writing. If you have your story ready, you just join after 20 minutes.

And so it should be more like an invitation.

So I have this thought, I was talking to someone about conferences and virtual conferences and stuff, and they had this idea where the time set for the conference was one and then it had the soft ending and the real ending. And I think we can play with this a little bit here too, because the problem is I don’t think it’s a good idea to make them more longer than an hour. Then we have an hour real meeting and we have a 15 minute pre meeting writing slots and a 15 minute post meeting writing slot that is optional. But you know, if you stick around, we’ll write together. If you come early, we’ll also write together.

So yeah, I think that’s a good idea. If we do pre post and then the actual thing is still one hour. So people, if they don’t want to do pre post and they prepare after or before, like do it on your own time, whenever you want. And the session is one hour still. But you can only attend if you bring a story. So if you don’t have a story, you have to attend the pre meeting and write one.

So we talked about onboarding, we need to talk about offboarding.

You’re right. What are the parameters and what does that look like? Because we talked about phasing people in, we should talk about phasing people out. What keeps this valuable? Like a certain level of attendance, a certain level of engagement, if it drops what do we need to do. It doesn’t need to be fully figured out, because ome of us are invested more than others. So what does that look like for us too?

Yeah. So it’s, it’s, I think this is exactly like building agile software or whatever. We have no idea what we’re building. we don’t know what the product is, but we’ll know it when we see it. So I feel like this is the next phase and we’re moving towards something that we then can scale in a different way. So now we’re scaling it from this mini group to something that hopefully can be part of an event where people keep joining in. And I guess the next deliverable would be something like Working Out Loud, so a framework concept that can spread itself, that can be spread as a concept.

Now that’s interesting. So are we still saying that the product is a book or no?

I don’t know. It could be both. It can be a book of stories. Yeah. So we keep the database, obviously, of stories and we keep what we produce. So that’s one track. But in parallel, we might also have the track where we create sort of the meta product, which is an experience and a way of coming together and sharing direct experiences that produces this egoless trust collaboration.

I really like that idea of creating the experience.

Yeah, well, it will be both. I think there’s value in the stories themselves, a huge amount of value, even as a repository for coaches, for example. And there’s value in the methodology of it, of how we do this. And almost a different use for storytelling or direct experience sharing above just the pure entertainment. I mean, all the things I’ve seen about direct experience, storytelling, the purpose of that is to entertain or to market or bring people together, but this goes further. So I think this is something that’s going to come. This will develop as we go along or not.

So I think what was interesting in the first pass is that we had the idea as an outcome as a book. And in this pass, I can see the value in like a library of stories, right? And I can see the value in possibly a book. I think that’s valuable. And the synthesization of a concept or something around direct experience. But I do believe that to some extent there needs to be something that creates a bit of a structure. Unless again, this is another round of the practice, which is fine. Then we can define it as such. This is round two of the experimentation with a little bit more structure, but not fully defined. And that could be it.

Because I think even if that’s the case, we should put some kind of structure. We see the values of the stories. We see the value of the trust and how quickly that happened, like right in the scope of six to seven sessions. Now we replicate this direct experience and then we build from there. I think that probably as well is valuable. Because it’s very hard to pitch direct experience as is. I think in a way, unless someone knows what we’re talking about, it’s very hard to know what we’re talking about. When we said book, people know what a book is. People already had a preconception of a book, even if they had no clue what a living book is or creating in a community book would look like. But there was something they know and they hook onto that.

I think we need something else now or it could stay a book and say this is round two of the living augmented books and creating in a community focused on the stories and that could be fine. And this is what you need to onboard and then we go from there. That’s okay.

As an outcome, that could be the library of stories. That’s what we’re producing. Even if eventually we don’t use it for that. I’m not saying that we can’t change as we learn, we figure out what that looks like. But as a way to invite people into the conversation, it helps to define something, right? So it’s a library of stories for example, instead of living augmented books. We can frame that concept and then put that as an anchor for people to kind of invite against.

Do you know this Australian Aboriginal concept of the dreamtime? So their whole Aboriginal history and concepts and thinking is transmitted through, through stories. It’s like also a library of knowledge. I don’t know where I’m going with that, but it’s something like a living book. The book of their people, the book of the knowledge of their people is in storytelling.

How about we keep it living augmented books for now? This is round two and this is more structured in round two where we are saying these stories are a bigger piece. Because that’s what we’re saying. So it’s still a living augmented book. It’s still this accumulation. We’re just saying in this stage, the composition of it is less dialogue. Dialogue is important, but the stories in the dialogue or the stories in written format are more of a core pillar.

It’s contribute your direct experience story to the Living Augmented Book.

Yeah. So that’s kind of one optimization level up from where we started. And then the outcome is still the same. We just changed the rules of the game based on what we learned. And there’s a good chance we will change those after we learned more.

Yes. And this is still completely in line with at least how the thinking is going here because again, from this perspective that the amount of theory and scripture and abstract philosophy on this subject is endless and we can fill tankers with the books on that. But the amount of books, living or dead, filled with direct experience, as I keep saying, I only know one of them.

Okay. I think that’s very good. At least for now, I think we have some things to work on both on the structure for the onboarding, what the story of what we’re trying to achieve, and the structure of the meetings themselves with the pre-post, etcetera. We might need to figure out probably a little bit on the off-boarding. And it will get a certain level of tension of why you need to still participate. It creates friction, not for leaving, retention basically.

I guess we will need to define what direct experience is. So the danger I see still is that you fill in the five prompts with theory. We have some candidates who would be able to do that, I think, or who would default to doing that.

But then again, do we have to define the offboarding beforehand or can we just do that when it starts to be necessary?

So I think it shouldn’t be tied to the content or the things that we are testing out. The offboarding could simply be, you don’t show up for four, you don’t contribute for four consecutive sessions, then you will need to onboard again. It could be as simple as that. We still we have a lot of things we don’t know. But just as it took you three weeks to onboard, we create that pain to wait for three weeks to get back into it. If you miss three consecutive weeks you don’t contribute in text or presence, you will have to do another three weeks onboarding. I think that’s fair.

And it’s not that you’re blocked from something. It’s just a way of us keeping a little bit of pressure. If you miss too much, you still can get back in, just a little bit delayed. So in some way, I think it’s a good compromise. And again, we can play with these things, but for now, I think it’s a good enough barrier to entry and as well kind of something to hold you back.

Yeah, the thing that we can also put structure around is the types of questions we have for the discussion after the story. So we have the five prompts, people share the story, and then we can have like a set of questions to spark the discussion. And these can all be tying it back into the joy of not needing to be a someone. So we can make the set of allowed questions in the discussion, we can limit that and structure that. I mean, even then people go off topic maybe and there are other things and that’s fine. But that sort of narrows it down to the so what of the story, that we keep that tight, and it’s not, now I’m going to tell you another story in the discussion or we’re going to go off into something totally different.

I don’t know what that looks like, actually. I don’t know what that means.

We’ll see. We’ll see, because that’s the content part and we can figure that out. There will be some kind of time box discussion about the story. And that can be very free, but if we notice that the very freedom of it leads to it not being about the book anymore depending on who we onboard.

So I think that part needs to be loose where the facilitation and the meeting itself, need to kind of manage somewhat. I think there is always going to be the pull to drift into the theories, the pull to drift into the teaching in those sessions. And that’s where really the moderation comes into play or facilitation. Because even in the dialogue, there will be a sharing of the direct experience, right? That’s the whole point. So we just probably need to tweak it on the go. I don’t know, at least that’s what for me looks like at this point from what we’ve done so far.

Yeah, that’s because my ideal is that it is self-directed. So just as this working out loud, that you can put people into a breakout room and they discuss the story and remain on topic and don’t go off into teaching or into theory due to the type of questions that are asked in the discussion and they don’t all have to be moderated. So it’s self-moderated discussion.

I don’t want to add too many rules. That doesn’t make sense. It’s also not so much about adding rules or things like that, but it’s almost self-regulating. So either we do that because we do the onboarding so well, it is self-regulated, or we just give up on that and facilitate everything.

I think this is a really good idea. ISo we’re trying to do self-driven teaching, for example, in simulation. So there is a lot of value in having self-driven stuff because self-driven scales and everything else doesn’t scale. So I think we should probably in the next iteration work on that aspect.

Because there are options we can play with now, right? We can have timers, can have AI listening and chiming in. We can have different things and it doesn’t really need to understand, but it can look for certain cues. But that might be one of the focus areas and probably the next approach is how it can be more self-driven. What do we need to make it so?

Because that I think is a really critical piece for scalability. And to make it accessible for everyone, because then anyone, any group of people can engage in it as they go forward.

Yeah. So the type of questions that are asked in the discussion need to keep focusing it back to the direct experience.

And we talked about some of them in ome of the retrospective, where we come back always to the same question and try not to summarize or reflect back on other things, right? Come fresh and clean every single time. And there could be something along those lines, like, right. And possibly, like dump everything out before and then come into the conversation after the dump. After you kind of clear out all of that in the way.

And the onboarding, definitely that’s part of the process. In the onboarding we’re getting removed. But I think there needs to be a reminder too, because we talked about it last, that it needs to be repeated every single time. And that might be part of the ritual of how the meeting starts. Not necessarily what the questions are, but how the meeting starts and the meeting ends.

Yes, yes. And ritual is really good because it’s the ritual that is going to reframe it for everyone. So the ritual has to be something with, I hereby declare to only discuss direct experience. I hereby declare to leave my ego at the door.

So those things are really powerful, by the way, because I remember in one of the interviews I had one of the guys, he still remembers he was in this like military cadet school and they had one of those that stuck with him so much throughout his life. So finding, starting, stopping with one of those things to repeat.

Yeah, we can make that fun.

I think we have a lot of pieces in place. Let’s put some of those in and then see how, where we go from there. We’re going to have to do marketing around this, that once it is clear what it is that we’re doing, what the rules are, what the concept is, it’s not just going to be me posting a couple of nice pink posts on LinkedIn with Joy. So we’ll create materials for that. We need materials, maybe even a page like a branding package for stuff that they can download and use.

Yeah, so that all of you can also post about it and invite people and point them to the onboarding. So people who regularly post about topics like this, there will be definitely people interested in this because it’s a low barrier entry point. Yes, but they’re also the dangerous people because they’re the teachers and the explainers.

We have to do that in the onboarding. We have to filter for teaching. One of the steps needs to be filtering teaching.

I think a feedback loop mechanism of three, four questions after sessions might not be a bad idea. Whether in validation or reaffirming or whether in capturing input to tune and modify. Actually that’s probably something we can do too. So, we had the anonymous chat room, but it could be a survey thing, anonymous too, doesn’t matter. It’s more of the aggregation of things.

As long as it doesn’t cause me manual labor. The whole point is to automate everything. Then it’s okay. Otherwise it’s just a whole bunch of work.

So that means this is now work for you and I, unless you say, you you who are in the room want to contribute something specific. And even just the thinking process and the contribution to all these dialogues is of course the value.

Okay, so I think we have direction clear that means we’re going to stop these weekly meetings for now until we have all of that set up. We’re going to create a new invitation to a new page to a new onboarding, which we all have to go through. So I will see you again on the other side of that.

So unfortunately the rest is not here to hear that, but it’s been really good so far. We’ve done really, really cool stuff. We’ve discovered some very interesting things and we’re going to build on that going forward. So I declare this a total success to be continued.