Community Mastery

Three of my close friends and I have just moved into a flat together for 6 months in Berlin. While we’re still unpacking boxes and finding ways to make the space cosy and comfortable, I’m also wondering…

“How do we want to be together?”

This 6-month period is about more than just ‘finding a convenient way to share the rent’; it’s a practice lab for co-living in a Crew-sized group, and our shared dream to explore our friendships at a deeper level of interdependence¹.

During a different co-living experiment in Andalusia this winter, I picked up a bunch of new insights and tools for hosting co-living residencies. I wasn’t the main host there, but watching how Rich and Nati hosted the space has given me some helpful input to practice expanding my own agency and hosting capacity as I step into this experiment in Berlin.

I’m going to be sharing some insights from our journey along the way, in the hope that it can inspire others with a similar mission.

The Community Mastery – Kanban Board

One practice that I would be particularly keen to copy-paste-tweak from our time in Andalusia, is a version of the Community Mastery Board which I learnt from Drew, my collaborator at The Hum. It’s an easy way for a group to surface and visually represent what’s working, what’s not, and what we’re going to adjust. It’s about actively shaping our culture and norms through regular iterative cycles of trial-and-error. The Kanban part is a visual representation of what needs doing and who’s going to do it, and celebrating who’s done it. For the rest of this blog I’m going to share the principles behind this system, and how and why I’m imagining we could set it up for our co-living Crew.

Here’s how I think our board could look:

Meeting Rhythm
In our house, I’m imagining we could run 20-minute Community Mastery meetings on a weekly cycle on Sunday evenings after dinner. This is when most of us will be home, and it tags on nicely to the Sunday house dinners we’re intending to do. A regular weekly or monthly meeting rhythm is helpful for number of reasons:

• Short iterative learning and reflection cycles reduce the likelihood of a build up of large tensions.
• People are more open to trying out new ways of doing things if they know that there will be a dedicated moment in the near future to reflect, adjust or stop doing it altogether if it’s not working.
• Learning from regular smaller interventions which are either reversible, or have manageable levels of negative impact if they don’t work out, makes the need for larger riskier interventions less frequent and necessary.
• Addressing small tensions regularly together builds our collective capacity and courage to address larger ones when/if they arise. We learn that tensions are opportunities for learning and exploring new possibilities for being together.

Awareness
An Awareness is a problem or opportunity within the community. It may be a practical and household related topic like “WiFi doesn’t work well when we’re all on Zoom calls”, or “There’s a membership discount at the local organic grocery store if we register”, or something more personal or interpersonal like “I feel overwhelmed when people try to have conversation with me when I’ve just gotten out of bed”.

I’ve found that framing an Awareness as a specific observation, like: “Noise from kitchen conversations travels through to bedrooms” makes for a more effective starting point than a more vague concern, such as “I’m not sleeping well here”.

Test
A Test is a strategy we’re going to try out to address the Awareness. A good Test strategy is one that is easiest and quickest to implement and try out, not necessarily the ‘best’ one. If it doesn’t work, we’ll scrap, change or build upon it at the next meeting. The idea is to keep the group flexible and agile, finding solutions relevant to our group’s needs at the moment, and developing them as we go. This also reduces the risk of meeting ‘bore-out’ from spending lots of time nit-picking over ‘perfect’ solutions, and resistance against an overload of pre-emptive rules and structures to adhere to.

Mastery
Mastery means it’s happening naturally enough that it’s become part of our community’s habitual culture. It’s integrated in how we do things without much need for reminders. Go us!

Tasks
Tasks can be cyclical tasks which need doing on a regular basis, e.g. cooking dinner or cleaning the bathroom, or linear tasks that just need doing once, e.g. buying a slack-line for the garden or letting the neighbours know we’re going to have a party on Friday. We might add or remove Tasks from this list as we run new Tests and evolve our way of being together.

Homies
This is a list of who’s at home over the coming week cycle. Note that it’s not necessarily limited to ‘people who live here permanently’. This is important for us, as we have two other people in our co-living Crew who don’t actually live with us (we didn’t yet find a house big enough for everyone). They live 20 minutes away, but are very much part of our shared dream for exploring more interdependence in our friendships. So at our house they have a resident toothbrush, some shelving space, and an open door policy to come and go as they like. They’ll probably stay over at least once a week and we want to include them, where appropriate, in our home structures and processes. So they’ll be on the board too.

One of our main intentions for this time together is to embody a spirit of hospitality – making people feel welcome and at home when they walk through the door. In my experience, the way to support someone to feel a sense of at-homeness and belonging to a group, is to give them a simple way to contribute. Connection is built through an exchange of giving and receiving. The beauty of this board is that it makes it super easy for a guest to slip in and know how they can take part in our daily rhythm and living, even if they’re only with us for a few nights. So guests could also be welcome, if they wish, to put their name in this list, take on a Task, collect Awarenesses with us and come up with Tests to try out.

To Do
During a meeting, we go through which Tasks need doing over the next cycle, and who is going to take responsibility for them. We stick Tasks in this column next to that person’s name in the Homies list. If they realise later in the week that they can’t do that Task, they try to find someone else to do it instead, or put it in the Known Void box (read on below). When the Task has been completed, it can be moved to the Done column! Hoorah!

Known Void
If there are Tasks to be done but no one has the capacity or enthusiasm for them this cycle, we can put them in the Known Void box. It may be that someone feels like picking it up later in the week, but even if not, it’s helpful to know, for example, that no one is cooking for a shared meal on Thursday evening, so we each sort dinner out for ourselves on that day.

If a Task like ‘cleaning the bathroom’ or ‘cooking Monday dinner’ regularly ends up in the Known Void box but we still want to maintain a level of hygiene and shared meals in the house, we can shift it to an Awareness. Rather than overextending ourselves and becoming bitter trying to maintain a system that’s not aligned with our capacity or joy, we can look for other strategies to meet our needs. Do we want to run a Test of hiring a cleaner for a few cycles? Do we order a takeaway dinner on Mondays? A successful sustainable community system is one that’s designed to adapt to the true capacity of the individuals in the group, not one that’s tied to crossing off a rigidly fixed checklist.

Done
Celebration leads to Success! I like how the Done list makes visible and acknowledges what everyone has contributed towards the life of the community over the last cycle. In Andalusia we started our meetings off by reading through this list to rounds of applause and “yay!”. It sets a great tone when you start a meeting by appreciating each other! It’s important to include all the cyclical Tasks that people have done here too, as they’re particularly prone to remaining underappreciated.

What if a Task didn’t get done? Obviously there will be some Tasks left on the ‘To Do’ list because they need more than one cycle to complete. However, if there are Tasks which seem to linger around this list longer than expected, is there an Awareness to be surfaced? Do we want to Test out a different approach to this Task? How’s the person responsible for the Task doing? Do they need some help? Analyse the system before blaming the individual.

Facilitating the Meeting
It’s helpful to have someone to guide the group through the meeting. Rotating the facilitator gives everyone a chance to practice hosting a short group process. Going through the board in the same way every time means people who are less familiar with facilitating will find it easier to emulate and step in. I’d suggest going through the meeting in this order:

1. Celebrate the ‘Done’ list!
2. Review Tests from the last cycle
   • Not working? -> Come up with a different Test to try out for the upcoming cycle
   • Working well? -> Keep testing it until it feels fully integrated
   • Has it become fully integrated? -> Move it to the Mastery list!
3. Invite new Awarenesses
   • Include any Tasks which have repeatedly ended up in the Known Voids box
4. For each new Awareness, come up with a Test for the upcoming cycle
5. Go through the Tasks for the upcoming cycle and allocate them to Homies in the To Do list
6. Put any of this cycle’s unclaimed Tasks in the Known Void box

Questions for the Road
If we end up trying this out, I’d be curious to pay attention to…

• How well will this work to include our two satellite co-living Crew members and give them a sense of being part of the house?
• To what extent will this structure encourage us to surface more interpersonal needs, requests and possibilities, such as a wish for empathic support, advice, feedback or group process time. Is it predominantly geared towards household practicalities?
• To what extent do we want to write down and document our Mastery points? Some people love documenting this stuff to refer back to. But how much can we lean into embodied habitualisation of the strategies and solutions we’ve Mastered into our way of being? This would somehow feel more satisfying for me. If the solution doesn’t ‘stick’ and we need reminding of it, is it actually effective? It shouldn’t feel like too much of an effort to change how we do things if it’s relevant to our group’s needs.
• We live among many families in our neighbourhood, which makes me wonder – could this system be adapted to a (nuclear) family home? How would it affect the parent-child power hierarchy to have a structured way for kids to get involved in how we live, grow and meet our needs together as a family?

P.s. If you want to develop your community-building skills, join me for the upcoming Microsolidarity online course (starting April 16th) and/or Make It Rain, an 8 week group coaching program for community builders and social change facilitators (starting April 2nd). I’d love to see you there!

1. Related to this, I really enjoyed Michael Ashcroft’s recent blog post about co-living with friends. Worth a read! ↩︎