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The project uses the word collaboration quite a bit. Born out of a recent juicy conversation, i got to look at this word with fresh eyes. Here i explore where collaboration fits into the AR landscape, and what it means for our practice life.

The limits of AR practice

I have heard numerous people express some version of the following story: "Ive done the AR training and worked a ton with various practice communities, and while it was a great stepping stone, at some point i came to this place where i started to notice that the nature of these relationships i was having was somehow superficial, non-committal and short lived. Rather like those found on social media".

Sometimes i would also hear these 'communities' compared to sweet food, nice at the time but not really satisfying nutritionally. So what was missing? Deeper relational bonds? Physical contact? Relationships capable of surviving difficult conversations? Or instead of just practicing listening and speaking, actually doing some meaningful things together? Maybe all of these things.

Why practice?

In AR the value of practice is fairly well established. Building our capacity to communicate and managing the emotion that arises while relating is not something you learn from a book or a one-off course. Instead it is something that requires lots and lots of practice and repetition, incrementally bumping up against our edges, fractally deepening our new habits of relating and being with each other.

Like sugar, AR practice can also be addictive in the sense that it brings us into connection, (of sorts), as an antidote to isolation, briefly, with lots of new and interesting people. But it can for sure have a quality of short term gratification about it.

Ok so, if we want to fix all these things, how might we approach this? Well, the project probably hasn't done a great job of explaining this, but quietly embedded in our culture is the idea that, if we are interested in growth, as well as practicing AR we need to also practice collaboration.

Lets look closer at this. In AR we dont show up at practice already perfect at it. We show up slightly afraid, because of either lack of experience or a wariness born of prior bad formative experiences (aka trauma). And so we muddle along experimentally, making tons of mistakes at first, and eventually we build confidence and ability. This kind of practice resides in the personal development realm, extending into the relational development realm. As we relate we get better at relating.

Collaborative practice

But what if we took this one step further? Then we could see collaboration, not as some abstract, scary and unfamiliar tool set, but as being about organizational development per se. If we apply that same practice idea, discussed above, to our groups and communities, then collaboration becomes organizational practice. We collaborate to get better at collaborating. At first we show up afraid and without capacity. Lets face it the world is hierarchically non-collaborative through and through. But by tentatively embarking on working together on actual projects, writing a shared vision, collectively creating and implementing plans and processes, and celebrating both successes and learnings that occur along the way, then we have this much more nutritional kind of relating practice. One that leverages everything we learned in AR.

Is this the the next step in our practice life? But lets be clear. At first we show up sucking at this. That's why we want to avoid the work of it in the first place. We sense our incompetence, and humans neurobiologically like to do things that we are good at. That's serotonin at work. But we dont suck at it for long. Indeed, i've witnessed this radical dechrysalisation of whole groups of people during several projects, and each time there is this sense of wow, we've quite quickly got really good at this, and now look at the things we achieved together. Things that none of us could have achieved working alone (on our personal development).

And so, maybe this is the essence of what pod life in the project is all about.