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The phrase, "So long and thanks for all the fish", is of course from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur Dent has to leave his home (and planet) to make room for an intergalactic expressway.

I find myself at a similarly dramatic juncture. With every passing day of practice, i have found myself increasingly at odds with the term AR. That word authentic, that presumes to take pride of place, is not even close to the three other words that i regard lay better claim to that position. If you haven't done so already see here where i deconstruct authenticity. OK, you can probably already guess what those candidates might be: practice, regulation and safety.

So as of today i am hereby officially walking away from the term AR. At 15 years old, it has had a good run, and for me it is time for something else to step up.

This weeks blog post is an extract from some writing collaboration the project is doing with Relational Dojo. For me it serves as an important reminder why we practice in the sense of seat time, and the value the project places on practicing from a place of regulation.

Practice, practice, practice, as our why

Practice comes in so many forms. Where relating is learned by relating. Where we emotionally organize by having emotional experiences. Where facilitation is learned by facilitating. Where experimentation is learned by experimenting. Where collaboration is learned by collaborating. And the juicy and recursive, practicing the art of building practice spaces.

In the relating community, I think it is clear that we appreciate the value of practice. I don't expect to learn to relate by reading a book, or going to a seminar. Instead it's an iterative journey of discovery whilst immersed in feedback rich environments.

This first section attempts to make a case for, or at least remind ourselves of, the value of deliberate repeated practice in structured experiential learning sessions.

But first, lets just make sure we are on the same page, regarding what we mean by 'practice'. In particular, the verb 'to practice' has at least two important meanings.

One definition of practice says that, as someone with some capacity, I further develop that capacity simply by the doing of it. As a pianist, each concert I perform helps me develop capacity in a very 'flow state' 10,000 hours kind of way. My development occurs as a product of practicing my craft.

This definition honors the iterative nature of learning by doing. If there is a downside, it might be that repeating my bad habits does little to escape their grasp.

Another definition of practice is: the deliberate repetition of exercises in a specially constructed practice environment. This is the way NASA trains astronauts, and it involves mentors, learning, unlearning, and muscle memory. This definition speaks to the idea of relational practice as a sort of hero's journey, of stepping outside of my regular day to day world, to go find a orchestra with a strong rehearsal ethic, to practice drills and scales, and mastering new pieces by playing them over and over.

This is interesting, because it seems to point to the idea of neuroplasticity. This is where neural connections, once formed, are difficult to change, and doing so requires a special set of conditions, among them repetition, structure, positive emotion, focus, dedication and support.

So now we can go ahead and look at some features we might build into our practice. If this model says that the heart of practice is that it is intentionally regular, then the current literature offers a number of explanations for this.

Firstly, old patterns are stubborn and it seems to take many, many repetitions of new behaviors to overwrite the old ones. In the same way that I don't expect to just go to the gym just once or twice, the discipline of regular practice is more likely to bear fruit.

Secondly, short sessions seem to be more effective than long sessions. Multiple one hour practice sessions spread out, seem to better integrate or 'stick' compared to the same amount of hours in one intensive block. The theory is that learning gets embedded through a number of sleep cycles. And that, change is neurally disruptive, so too much at once risks an overwhelm that impedes learning. In the therapy world this is known as titration. We lean into our edge, to near the point of muscle failure, then rest, and repeat.

To wrap up, here is the bullet point version. An agenda that supports deliberate repeated practice might call for the following:

• understanding both the value of practice, and titrating that practice
• supporting our growth mindsets with scheduling discipline
• doing what we can to reduce access barriers to practice, such as cost, location, and timezone
• exploring complimentary alternatives to expert training, and the finiteness of training resources as a limiting factor
• consolidating capacity for difficult conversations, where grass roots collaboration is a limiting factor.

Practice requires holding shadows lightly

For better and worse, one of the challenges we face when trying to build more leaderless / leaderful practice organizations involves the legacy narratives we each bring along with us. For better, because they motivate us to try to reinvent, to heal, and to harvest the gifts of 'post traumatic growth'. For worse, because these residues can be stubborn, such is the profound neural impact of things we learn in the formative months of life.

A second related challenge which peer led practice groups potentially face is what I call the belonging paradox. Being an evolving mammal we are subject to the same drive to belong that all mammals are. Oxytocin and endorphins urge us into the fold of family, clan and tribal groupings. While once an evolutionary defense against predators, it now brings hazards to groups. Like, what if my desire to be held shows up before my capacity to hold others, or myself? What if my primal 'need' to belong risks drowning out the primacy of our practice agenda?

This is some of the context. Now I want to go ahead and consider a path forward. For a start we can benefit by having an understanding of secure attachment and the social nervous system. These models bring the idea of establishing a safe haven to do our developmental work from. And, when we undertake change focused co-inquiry work, realizing that it is emotional regulation that is our primary limiting resource.

A secure base is being able to 'hold our identities lightly', 'sharing what we can hold', and having an ability to hold our emotional experience at arms length. These practices not only resource 'leaning into our edge', but more fundamentally, they permit us to be in the room together in the first place. Let's be clear, the circle of safety is not agreement, niceness, or absence of conflict. It's a shared sense that vulnerability is OK, that mistakes and relational ruptures are survivable.

Some of the specific ideas for practice are, to not assume capacity. Early on, practice core group skills, in particular the big three: expressing desire, giving feedback, and difficult conversations. Prioritize regulation. Honor start and end times. Set time limits for practices. Alternate practice and harvest. Let the group know if I can't make it. This is all part of creating a predictable home base. Fail early and often. At the start there will be fumbles and missteps, use these to inform your design. Reducing expectations makes it easier to laugh at ourselves.

Now that we have a stable base to carry out our collective endeavours and co-inquiries, then can start to inquire into the shadow side of attachment: group think, in-group bias etc. An examination here has potential for a new and more capable relationality. Conversely, attachment's partisan nature risks us building AR fiefdoms, so the circle of safety seems to serves more as a bridge.

Collaborating to create practice spaces

I'm guessing that most of us have spent our lives pickled in hierarchical institutions of one kind or another, starting with our families of origin. Who among us was taught how to function in self-managing collectives, where each person's special gifts, differences and values are held and celebrated?

Humanity has invested, quite justifiably, the last 80 years cultivating capacity for autonomy, personal agency, and individual expression. And, there are some things that can not be done either alone or using hierarchical linear systems.

Curiously, at this exact moment in history, we also happen to find ourselves faced with an extraordinary set of immense overlapping technological and environmental challenges. Daniel Schmachtenberger and others call this the polycrisis or metacrisis.

In response there is this view emerging that new forms of collective intelligence and self-managing groups may be better suited to navigate such complexity and uncertainty. And, what if the very skills that relational practice builds are literally the foundation of such high-functioning team work?

Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations makes the case that self-managing, collaborative structures are not wishful thinking, but are spreading at scale in the business community. Take for instance the 7000 strong Buurtzorg nursing collective in the Netherlands.

There's a second driver here, and that is the so-called loneliness epidemic, and the rise of single person households. It's possible there is opportunity here to gain secondary benefits from our pioneering attempts at coming together to work in new forms of socially supportive grassroots organisations. These deeper, more bonded, task-sharing relationships may be what actually helps address these important belonging, purpose, and contribution needs.

Thirdly, while self-managing peer collectives certainly do important work together, it's also interesting to view their collaboration as more than just a means to an end. From the point of view of western materialism, sometimes what I get out of it may not be immediately apparent. The vision is that collective self-management is the one thing that ultimately builds capacity for collective self-management.

In this sense we envisage a three pronged progression, from personal development, to relational development, and then organizational development. All three seem equally juicy layers to the process of sustained change, and missing one risks missing all.

Casual, drop-in style AR, can tend to be a bit like a social media experience, tasty, but not necessarily nutritional. On the other hand, being part of ongoing groups, and showing up with more commitment (read: bonding and safety cues), not only has the potential to cultivate new friendships, and to learn important communication skills. But as a bonus, we also get to work through and quietly rewrite any legacy messaging we might have around group relating not being safe, or my voice not having a space or whatever, in a relatively low stakes environment.

I want to wrap up this section by sharing a few key points for aspiring new peer led groups to pay attention to.

• Be clear about your purpose and contexts from the start, because it's much harder to define such contexts with a bigger group that doesn't yet have group decision making seat time. Figure out what the absolute minimum shared alignment looks like, and then be prepared to experiment from there.
• Be clear about your induction process, and how decisions will be made. These two central processes are two peas in a pod.
• Be clear about what the minimum viable relational capacity looks like for your group. It has been our experience that the ability to hold difficult conversations is paramount. If participants can't repair their is no path to resolve the inevitable ruptures.
• Know and expect that there will be friction and messiness, as groups settle in. Be prepared to lose people. It's all part of the learning journey.
• As with anything that is occasionally hard, find every excuse to celebrate and appreciate each other. These are the multivitamins that will keep you out of the emergency room.

Conclusion

I want to end here by acknowledging the fragility of new life, and to try to normalize the struggle. To me its a miracle that something as vulnerable as a newborn baby is able to navigate the vicissitudes of this life. So when it comes to peer led platform development, there is no right way or wrong way to do this. There are no easy answers, no tried and tested formulae. Today's fledgling initiatives face the usual innovation challenges where time and money are finite, and where we are yet to gain the critical mass that would otherwise bring diversity, redundancy, and resilience. Language deficits mean few in the wider community even know what relational practice is, never mind asking them to help build practice communities. For us as early adopters wanting to build radical peer inspired and supported practice spaces, this is all just our particular cross to bear.

But that we are doing it, together, bravely, without experts, without money, without even a particularly clear road map, is all rather a marvel, and something worth taking a minute to celebrate.