Reflections on Microsolidarity
and what helps people to collaborate better.
This newsletter has been on a bit of unintended extended hiatus but I am bringing it back! You’ll notice that focus is shifting so slightly in the directions of solutions - my semi-shaped learnings on how we can be together, hear each other better, bring more ideas to the table, collaborate, feel less lonely and be able to accomplish more - all in the presence of differences in this insane world. Welcome if you are new.
My first post is on the framework for building communities/sense of belonging in groups that I got introduced to via a short course back in 2021 and have been exploring since - Microsolidarity.
Microsolidarity is “a methodology for community building, focused on peer-to-peer support and mutual aid”. It was developed by Richard Bartlett and is super-well documented in the website. On one hand, it’s a throve of practices for smooth functioning of groups of all sizes and on the other, it’s a theory on patterns and scales of belonging - from self to everyone and back to self. Like so:
Microsolidarity is also a community of community-builders that is evolving the theory and practice with retreats, meetups and courses.
I came across it via a course back in the back end of Covid isolation of 2021 and then joined a retreat near Berlin last summer and again this winter. And that’s where I got to experience what Microsolidarity feels like. And it feels really good. I came to a week-long summer camp gathering with 70+ strangers where I knew one person. And it was probably the easiest and most comfortable gathering I’d ever joined.
What’s behind the magic? Is it about being good at practices, such as non-violent communications, open space technology approach to meetings, or liberating structures way for running things ? Is it about the people who self-choose to be in this community and who value community and horizontal relationships? Is it about clever, experienced hosts who know how to design gatherings generously?
All of the above is part of it. But there is a distinct component of Microsolidarity that makes the wheels of belongings spin - the concept of a crew.
The crew
What is a crew? A crew is a group of 3-6 people that engages in repeated, reciprocal interactions that builds a fabric of trust between while being a united for a purpose of a task or another shared intention.
And indeed, on the front page of Microsolidarity website is this quote:
“The crew is the main site of activity in microsolidarity communities”, the main unit in which the magic of belonging and solidarity-building happens.
A crew is like a team. But it’s also not a team, because it’s a lot less role-based than that, less formal, but more self-organised around a shared intent, and it also has a concept of reciprocity within it. In the crew as much attention is paid to the task (what) as to how (collaboratively). And this is the secret I think.
The first two ingredients of crews are their intentionality and easy opt-in and opt-out. There is no expectation of this being tight, or for life, or the need to fail or succeed in this. It is held lightly around a joint intention or a task and there is self-agency in the decision to join. And the third is the sense of reciprocity as an explicit value within it.
Here are three examples:
At Microsolidarity retreat, people are assigned to a crew of three people that meets daily for an hour or so to process day’s events. Sometimes there is a guiding question/topic but not necessarily. There is usually a check-in where people share what’s going on from them. There is some reflection on topics that are offered and emerge organically. From inside, it feels like you get given a group of friends to hang out with, and also a gentle rule book - you hear each other out and support each other. You are nudged to behave more intimately than you would in “cold” or topic-centred conversations at a gathering.
My other exposure to crews was during the Microsolidarity practice course. There people are taught peer-coaching formats such as Troika Consulting and Case Clinic for each other - learning the power of peer-based learning and reciprocity. These are powerful practices and in repeated context of crews they quickly build common context and the idea that we can be helpful and generative to each other, and our differences make it more so. Microsolidarity crews are often formed with intent to practice these formats or, if they are formed for also for some external purpose, they are often familiar with these techniques.
Crews also serve as building blocks of larger groups. At retreats there is a cooking crew, cleaning crew, welcoming crew, empathy crew, documentation crew, facilitation crew, you name it. All self-selected, some more easily, other requiring some closer relational context. Joining a crew to take on a responsibility is a less intimidating way to step up. And stepping up in a group to some group-serving purpose is a turbo fast ticket to building a sense of belonging.
The concept of a crew is something clearly fundamental to emergence of the sense of belonging, and it also clearly works in a fractal kind of way. But how exactly it works and how it does this was also a bit fuzzy to me, until it hit me.
A crew can be thought of a systemic solution to the problem of belonging, because it works like a restaurant spindle (more on this just below). In other words, the crew is an incredible conflict-resolution technology that helps to keep groups on a generative, cooperative level, despite tensions that continuously arise.
A spindle?
Let me explain. American psychologist, sociologist and cyberneticist Elias Porter described the concept of a restaurant spindle on which waiters place orders for cooks to prepare as a systemic solution - a solution that caters to recurring systemic conflicts seen in restaurant business.
One of Porter’s most famous works is called “The Parable of the Spindle”. In this 12-page paper he tells a fable about human relations, how they manifest in predictable fashion and how they can be managed with systemic interventions.
A quick recap: an owner of a restaurant chain owner comes to a conference on “Human Relations in Business” in search for answers for the big problem that plagues his business - a terrible employee churn. Bad tempers, waiters in tears, cooks walking off jobs, managers summarily firing waiters on the spot. A sociologist, psychologist and anthropologist get summoned to do their investigations and report back. They find different reasons for conflict - the sociologist sees the reason for clashes in status relations, where lower status waiters give orders to higher status cooks; the psychologist says that ego structures and archetypal gender-specific behaviours are responsible for conflicts; while the. anthropologist identifies divergent values and incentives as the cause.
But they all also notice one same thing. Most conflict happens in rush hours when people are under pressure. And it is this face-to-face conflict between waiters and cooks that causes all the trouble. The answer was found and it’s this - a restaurant spindle. A systemic intervention that has been so successful that it quickly spread all over and has only been replaced by souped up versions in the shape of apps. Spindle took away the need of interacting face-to-face when things are heated up and created an order hierarchy that was verifiable, impersonal, and functional.
The insight here is systemic. Conflict always feels individual but it is intrinsic to the relations in the system that breaks down under the condition of stress. The solution is not better people or better-defined roles, but simply better ways of managing these moments of stress. The logic is that people do want to collaborate as a basic premise but what prevents them from doing that is when the system comes under stress - and these are the situations that need coordination.
From restaurants to groups
Of course, in groups and communities, where things are fluid, there are no easy mechanistic solutions, like the spindle. And when it comes to Microsolidarity the crew of 3-5 people works like that spindle - mitigating conflict both inward and outward. If spindle is a conflict prevention method for a highly structured interaction, then crew is a conflict prevention method for a highly fluid interaction.
As with restaurants, the real questions with groups of people is not what’s wrong with these people. It’s not even how we align them better. The question becomes how can we handle moments where tension is too much. How do we work in the service of relational fluidity, flexibility and coherence without changing anyone?
I feel that this is the question Microsolidarity asks, and then answers, with a crew. And crew becomes a fractal of collaboration.
How does it happen? If we look from inside the crew, these are the ways I can see in which it helps to keep things at collaborative level and to prevent conflict:
It resolves friction between crew members and helps to normalise conflict resolution. A crew is a less stable system than a group of just two - a dyad. It has a built-in variability and difference. I have seen a few times people get confrontational, only for the third person to step in and say - well I kind of agree with your both, or voice a totally different opinion. It helps to remind everyone that we are, well, quite different, and there is no need to get that offended. Two people can spiral in some unconscious dynamics - the 3rd, 4th and 5th person dilute the intensity and all continuously provide space for things to surface and be processed. More formally, I think that a crew helps to metabolise conflict due to its heterogeneity and perspective diversity in just the right dosage.
It resolves friction between individual and the large group. To me, it feels like a crew is a spindle for the friction point between individual’s inner system and the external system of the larger group. People bring their triggers to the crew and it works as a sifting and processing mechanism - is this an issue that needs to be escalated or is this my personal trigger and projection? How can I get a wider perspective on other ways of seeing this? Can this problem that I am experiencing be turned into hypothesis for possible solution? Tension experienced by one is often the blindspot of a larger system, and being able to integrate it back into the system is a very skilful action, that a crews help to develop.
A crew is effective in tackling tasks and it thus creates a feedback loop supporting collaboration as an ongoing choice. A crew contains a different mix of skills and many of them are complementary. What is hard for someone can be easy for another. A crew becomes an upleveller and an activator. A crew allows you to do more things better and more quickly. A crew allows for more consistent action because people can step in for each other which also creates positive momentum. If someone can’t step up, others will do it for them for a bit. It becomes a feedback loop showing positives of collaboration.
It creates an internal culture of reciprocity and fluidity that externalises into the larger group. Another benefit of having a crew is that it becomes an organism that can act in the world in a much more skilled way. Firstly, each agent within it acts in the service of the group, and, secondly, usually the crew itself has a purpose bigger than self. By being seeped into energy of doing things for others, it propels this pattern into the wider group. The crew kind of becomes a particle of collaboration that is able to project the same culture beyond its boundaries into the larger whole.
And finally, I think a crew works well when people in a crew “get” each other. There is that special sauce that makes a crew want to come together. I think that’s probably the hardest thing to define. Usually just random people put together won’t work. That’s why crew formation takes a little while. On some agentic level, the crew needs to be a logical choice for individuals involved. Maybe it’s around a common interest or a task, but maybe it is around some other attractor. Having met this basic condition though, a crew can become an organism without a deep level of individual knowing, which organically occurs while tasks are being performed instead.
When crews are part of the larger whole, they usually need need some kind of loose coordination levels on top of that. There needs to be some mechanism for repair of breakages on the level beyond the size of the crew - usually also done by a crew. And when it comes to a larger group, a congregation in the parlance of Microsolidarity, it is about solving coordination problems where all tasks have a home in crews, there are mechanisms in place to resolve tension if crews cannot manage it and other coordination protocols for decisions that cannot be handled by crews - and there are surprisingly few of those if tasks are well-assigned.
And the strange thing is, once you’ve been doing crews for a while, crew-making alchemises the way you “do relations”. Three years after being exposed to the concept, I am noticing that I am surrounded by crews - crews I organised, crews I participate in and groups where I injected a bit of spirit of crews, maybe for myself but maybe for others too.
So this is a quick list of crews that I’ve formed recently:
I trained to facilitate a discussion format called Warm Data Labs and spent a couple of months scratching my head thinking how should I go about starting practicing in Berlin. Instead, I (accidentally) co-started a crew of three and now four, that meets regularly and organically finds ways to originate facilitation at events, constantly shifting roles and stepping in for each other.
I have been building my skills in conflict resolution largely by joining groups of people keen to stay on and practice in small groups of three to six, meeting on regular basis to practice what we learned. I’ve been making these groups more horizontal, rotating the facilitator role, iterating on topics and making sure we learn about things that are directly relevant to members of these groups.
I volunteered to do a newsletter for Microsolidarity, and done in this fashion, it is also a small crew, which has stepped in the times I could not deliver in a way that felt organic and non-transactional.
In many ways, I feel that three years after being introduced to the concept of Microsolidarity, while feeling not much as “a community builder”, but more of “a community-seeker”, I am starting to see myself as one. Maybe I am seeing myself as a fractal equipped with small-scale community building skills. Community is not necessarily about physical aspects of it, such as communal living and communal working. It can mean having a collaborative stance more generally, whatever your communal preferences and circumstances are.
A nice thing about Microsolidarity is that the practice community is meta-reflective on all these processes, and this is where a lot of learning and reinforcement takes place. In a call last week, someone said after their recent camp experience: “it renewed my openness in general, I am a bit more open to strangers in the world, more able to drop my defences a little bit sooner, more trusting.” In the words of Jocelyn Ames, one of the key facilitators in the community - Microsolidarity becomes a posture.
And this brings me to the final point. I think the ability to catalyse collaboration is a skill that is much needed today. It is a starting point of relational wellbeing in our atomised culture. Adopting this collaborative posture can happen wherever you are, and preferably right where you are. Turning near-strangers into crew-mates to start these effective units of collaboration is one practical way of doing this.
An extensive list of crewing practices is here and regular courses appear here. And there is a summer camp at the end of August in Austria to explore all this!