1min Snip
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(highlight:: Joshua Weil: How He Started Enspiral
Key takeaways:
• The grand experiment was originated by Joshua Weil, an engineer and programmer.
• Joshua realized that he had around 80,000 hours of productive life remaining.
• He concluded that mobilizing a community of people working on systems change is more effective than individual efforts.
• The goal is to prototype new systems that align with their desired future.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So, that's the grand experiment. And it basically came out of this guy, Joshua Weil. He's a deep dude, another one that you might want to interview one day. And he just had this experience of trying to, he's an engineer and a programmer. So, he's got quite an analytical brain. And he came to the conclusion one day that he had something like, I forget the numbers. I think he said he had 80,000 hours of, he could expect roughly 80,000 hours of productive life in him. And he'd already used up some fraction of that doing his programming work. And then he did some sort of modeling of like, what's the most positive impact that I can have in the world with the remainder of those hours? And he, in the modeling, became very obvious that one man working as hard as he likes on any project is not going to get very far compared to mobilizing a community of people that are all Working on stuff. And so, he set his mind to, yeah, how do we recruit a collective of people that are all working on systems change? And how do we do that in a way that's actually prototyping the new systems that we want to live in from the start? Very cool.)
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(highlight:: The Diad of Relationshops: Domination & Partnership
Key takeaways:
• Rian Eisler's work on the partnership domination lens is useful in analyzing relationships.
• The partnership domination lens evaluates relationships on the polarity of partnership or domination.
• Inspiral aims to create a community where people relate to each other in a spirit of partnership.
• Practicing partnership dynamics in one-on-one relationships is a great way to learn.
• Noticing and correcting when moving from partnership to domination is crucial.
• Domination and submission are both part of the equation in relationships.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think it's useful to borrow from Rian Eisler's work on what she calls the partnership domination lens. And she's brilliant. Maybe it would be useful to read her book, Nurturing Our Humanity or another one, The Chellis and The Blade. And her frame is looking at world history but then also looking at family dynamics and societies and so on and evaluating them on this polarity that she's named, the partnership domination Lens. So are we relating to each other more as partners where we are too equally important but different people or are we relating to each other in the spirit of domination where one person Is trying to exert their, will over the other one is trying to exert their subjectivity over the other. And I think that's a really useful heuristic, a really useful lens for looking at all kinds of relationships. And the way that I understand what we've been doing with Inspiral is we're trying to learn how can we get a few hundred people together and have them all relate to each other in a spirit Of partnership. And the reason that I call out this diad is because that's a great place to practice. You know what it's like to be in relationship with one person and have a conversation with them where it feels like they're equal. Not the same, they're different but that you're relating to each other horizontally. That you're not trying to dominate me or tell me what's the right way to think and I'm not trying to do that to you too. I'm just, I'm witnessing you, I'm listening to you and I'm serving and we're in this exchange. People know what that feels like and so that's part of the practice is just learn how to notice when you are coming out of partnership into a domination posture and see what you can do to Come back into partnership. And I should also say, you know, domination is the, is only half the story because the other half is submission, right? It's domination and submission. That's like two player game and it doesn't matter which side of the equation you're on. There's still maneuvers that you can take to get you closer to partnership.)
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(highlight:: Finding Your Crew: The Power of Small Groups in Changing the World
Key takeaways:
• The power of a small group to change the world should not be underestimated.
• To create meaningful change, individuals should seek to be part of a small group of committed citizens.
• Working in a small, talented group can lead to significant impact and productivity.
• Beyond a certain size, larger groups require more explicit structure and governance, leading to inefficiency and potential conflict.
• Developing excellent small groups and supporting each other's strengths can move the world in the right direction.
• Practicing and learning from failures is essential when working with teams.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Margaret Mead has got this very often overused quote about never, never doubt the power of a small group to change the world. Indeed, it's the, it's the only thing that ever has. We hear that quote quite frequently, but I wonder if people really take that to heart. That the only thing that's going to change the world is a small group of committed citizens. And therefore to me, our job is to learn how to be one of those small groups of committed citizens. Like that should be for anyone that wants to do some kind of change in the world. Your first principle should be, okay, where's the small group that I'm going to work with? And that means it's not just about me with my heroic ideas, but it's the little crew. It's the four or five of us that are really going to take on some serious work. So you mentioned Lumio, that was my first crew, I think, where we started that with six people and we raised, I don't know, we raised a couple of million dollars in ethical financing and We've built a piece of technology that's been used by a few hundred thousand people and it's like, I don't think it's this amazing change the world project, but I think it's made a useful Contribution to the world. And it's definitely orders of magnitude more of an impact than I could have ever had on my own. You know, there's this real sweet spot where you can achieve a lot with a small, talented group with people that all have skill, that they all have trust, that they all know how to collaborate With each other and they've all got different superpowers. You can really just get a huge amount of work done in that group. And the reason I focus on the small bit is because once you get beyond 8, 9, 10 people, you're going to need a whole bunch of architecture to hold that group together. You're going to have to start making a lot of stuff explicit and having like, yeah, you're getting to the difficult stuff of governance, you know, like you need to have a lot of agreements About what's happening and conflict management systems and checks and balances and all these kind of things. Whereas if you're doing it at the small scale, you can move a lot on, you can develop a kind of shared context with five or six people using not much more than dialogue, you know, just having Having a call once a week or something where you sync up with each other. That can be enough of an organizational structure, but once you go beyond that scale, then you need to put all this architecture in that tends to tends towards inefficiency. You know, it tends towards drama, tends towards debate. And so I'm really focused on how do we produce a world full of really excellent crews, really excellent small groups of people doing meaningful stuff, supporting each other to play To their strengths and move the world in the right direction. And so for most people getting into this, that means you need to practice because you're not going to get it right the first time, you know, the people that the first time that you bring A team together and you try and do your project, you're probably going to fall out.)
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(highlight:: The Resilience of Role-Based Management and Competency Networks
Key takeaways:
• In ape cultures, there is often someone who emerges as a problem solver in deadlocks.
• Hunter-gatherer societies practiced role-based management to prevent formal hierarchies from forming.
• Competency networks allow for flexible consensus and trust in different topics.
• Organizing as a network instead of a formal structure promotes resilience and efficiency.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Yep. Even in ape culture, we know, right? One of my favorite guests is done on a show a couple of times, Jessica Flack. She's written a lot about policing in ape cultures and to some degree monkey cultures. And yeah, there's always somebody who when there's a deadlock figures things out. But perhaps that's emergent and doesn't have to be the same person. If you go back and look at hunter-gatherer governance, very, very good book called Hierarchy in the Forest by Chris Bohem. It actually should have been called anti- hierarchy in the forest because it talks about how hunter-gatherer people kept formal hierarchies from forming. And they had a concept called role-based management. Obviously they didn't have management consultants to give them a nice fancy name like that. I don't think. But in reality, that's what they practice, which is they sort of knew who to look to for what. So maybe it was Ugg for hunting questions. And it was Ma for gathering questions. And it was Zoo for weaving questions. And if there was a deadlock amongst the community about one of those three domains, everybody quote unquote knew that these were the best thinkers on those three topics. And so the role-based leader would typically step forward in that domain and break the deadlock.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I totally buy that model with that. Sometimes we call that a competency network. And the joy of that network is that there will be a rough consensus about who is the best at weaving. But it's not a formal consensus. You can actually have an overlap. Everyone has their own terrain of who they trust on which topic. And there's a bit of wiggle room in that terrain and a little bit of messiness, which is actually really resilient and really productive. And as opposed to when you have the formal structure where you have departments and everything's very clearly, this is the person that you report to and this person is the smartest one On this topic. If you can organize as a network, you're much more resilient and efficient, I think.)
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The Importance of Small-Scale Communities ("Congregations" in Large-Scale Change
Key takeaways:
• A group larger than 150 people is less likely to have personal connections and support.
• In some businesses, a congregation of around 300 people is considered ideal.
• The Dunbar number suggests that a group of 100-300 people is responsible for certain tasks and commitments.
• Once a group exceeds a certain scale, anonymity becomes the norm.
• The focus should be on developing excellent relationships at a smaller scale.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The congregation of say 150 people, if we want to choose an average, is a lot smaller than most of the groups that people are working in. So if you think about Burning Man and all those related participatory community slash festivals that are happening around the world that people get really excited about, they usually Have thousands and thousands of people in them. And it feels good for a short time to do that. And people go to those things because they feel like they belong. They feel like they've found the others. But the fact is like a group of that scale, most of the people are going to be anonymous to each other. They might have an imagined community where they sense like, ah, you're one of those people and I'm one of those people. But if you're in a group that's larger than 150 people, you can't actually count on anyone to know you and you can't count on anyone to be in a group. And so to actually care about you when you get sick, say, or like when you have some real needs, you can't really count on those people to come through for you. And so again, it's like, it's a smaller scale than most people are used to thinking about organizing it.
Speaker 2
I was going to expand your concept of the congregation a little bit. And this, again, comes from my own business career where we can think of the congregation not only as a dating service for crews, but also there are some problems and some opportunities That take a lot more than a crew to solve, right? There are some businesses you just can't build without 100, 200, 300 people. And it was something we discovered at the Thompson Corporation, big $8 billion at the time multinational. But I worked there in the 90s now, Thompson Reuters. And we tried hard, couldn't do it in all of our businesses. But in many of our businesses, we had identified a size of about 300. That is the most people we wanted to have at one facility. And so even if a business unit itself was bigger than that, we tried to not have more than 300 of them at one street address. And those 300 people acted together as a coherent congregation. They had their Christmas party together. They had order pizzas. They'd have quarterly addresses from whoever the leader of that congregation was. In fact, I jokingly, my wife helped me with this. We jokingly named all the ranks in Thompson from Pope on down, right? So you had cardinals in our bishops and bishops and mon seniors and priests and deacons and all this sort of stuff. And so typically a group of 300 would have been about the equivalent of a bishop. And there would be, you know, four or five priests below that with groups around 100 between 50 and 100. So the congregation, and we discovered it to be 300. And I think that was in the context of a relatively highly networked world with lots of email, lots of voicemail. Video conferencing didn't really work very well in those days. But anyway, it's, you know, the Dunbar number plus or minus. You know, in the game B world, we talk about a group called a Dunbar, which is, you know, somewhere between 100 and 300 with a mean, maybe of 150, that might be responsible for a certain Set of things, for instance, housing, making sure that nobody in a game B Dunbar is ever homeless under any circumstance, which means if you vote somebody into your Dunbar and they somehow Lose their home, they're going to be sleeping on somebody's couch because that's a commitment we make at the level of the Dunbar. It seems to me an appropriate commitment to make at that level. So anyway, that's just a ruddy in expansion of your concept, which I think is, you know, sort of bang on. And I think we've all, you know, learned a little bit from Robin Dunbar and his work, but we're all a little skeptical that, you know, we don't think 150 is a magic number, but something In that range is saying something important. So now beyond the congregation, what do we have?
Speaker 1
Well, beyond that, I just call it the crowd because the point is once you get beyond that scale, you have an expectation about anonymity. And it doesn't matter if it's 500 or if it's 5 million, like, you're just, most people are not going to know most people in that context. And I've just decided not to have too many opinions at that scale. There's plenty of people that are really motivated about this, you know, how are we going to change the world or how are we going to change this country? Or, you know, thinking in terms of millions of people at once. And I'm happy to leave them to it. And I'm much more interested in how do we develop relationships of excellence at a scale that's done by a lower and that's my area to focus on.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I would agree. If we don't solve the lower problems, we won't solve the higher problems correctly.)
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(highlight:: Ray De Leo's Principles: What Category of Scenario are We In and What Did We Do Last Time?
Key takeaways:
• Ray De Leo has a coherent framework for decision making and responding to novelty.
• Ray De Leo's framework involves categorizing scenarios and drawing from past experiences.
• The use of principles like transparency, honesty, and inclusion is not valued by the speaker.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I do like principles that the way that Ray De Leo uses them, you know, which is think, what category of scenario are we in in this moment? Have we seen this type of scenario before and what did we do last time? Like he's got a very coherent framework for thinking about decision making and thinking about how to respond to novelty. And I think that's really, really useful. But the use of the principles as in like, we love transparency and honesty and inclusion. It's like, give me a break.)
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(highlight:: Two Principles for Organizations: Intellectual Honesty and Pushing Authority Down as Far As Possible
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I found that they've worked for me over the years. Because I said the number one principle in all my companies, intellectual honesty, right? And we actually point to it, you know, you never shoot the message and you're right. You never steal credit. You know, you always bring forward that which is important to the company. Even if it's embarrassing to you or your work team. I have found that one principle in particular to be extraordinarily useful. The other one was our Thompson principle, which we would articulate as you should push responsibility down as far as you feel comfortable. And then one level lower. And while I will say that there was, of course, lots of hypocrisy about that because humans love to aggregate power. But we would call that one out if we saw people who were not pushing authority down. And I still recall at a company meeting, which we'd have every year with the top.)
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(highlight:: Balancing Intellectual Exploration and Action
Key takeaways:
• There is an anti-pattern in certain podcasts that overemphasizes intellect and underemphasizes action.
• Consuming knowledge from brilliant people can be stimulating, but it may lead to overthinking and under-practicing.
• It is important to balance intellectual comprehension with taking action, initiating projects, and practicing.
• Encouraging agency, initiative, entrepreneurship, and proactive energy is crucial.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
One piece of the puzzle, I think, is that there's an anti-pattern of podcasts, especially in the game, B space and related sort of sense making intellectual philosophical spaces, Which is I'm concerned about an overdoing the intellect and an underdoing the action. You know, there's all of the people that you interview on your show. They're brilliant people. You know, and it's like, every time I can get a new episode of my favorite podcast and listen to this person and be like, wow, they're so smart. And it's really stimulating to listen to these smart people that can communicate really clearly. And the concern that I have is that people get into a habit of just consuming knowledge, just listening to more and more different people and assembling this sort of like pristine map Of how they think reality works. And maybe they start a little bit to think about how they might initiate some kind of community or some project or something that they're interested in, but still they do this thing of Like way over engineering and overthinking it and under practicing, under experimenting. And so my energy is to try and interfere with that tendency and push people more towards their agency, more towards their initiative, their entrepreneurship, their get up and do it Kind of energy.)
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- experimentation, action, community building, bias towards action, social change,

(highlight:: The Balance Between Action and Reflection in Bringing About Social Change
Key takeaways:
• Action-oriented individuals should focus on building organizations rather than just talking or reflecting on ideas.
• Finding a balance between taking action and engaging in reflective learning is crucial for activists.
• Implementing a rhythm of retrospection and reflection can enhance the learning process.
• Regularly pausing to reflect on actions will help identify valuable lessons and inform future actions.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
And I do think that those of us who are action oriented, and I see you as a person who's very action oriented, need to make sure that we kind of level up these radical change organizations Away from being talk shops or naval gazing and get on with building the goddamn thing.
Speaker 1
I have to add the other side of that polarity though, because I'm also connected to a lot of activists, which I will sometimes call actionists, that are just obsessed with doing action And actually don't have the process of learning engaged is not a process of reflection. And so there has to be a balance between those things. And that's why I'm always emphasizing this institute some kind of rhythm of retrospective of reflection of learning, like make those learning loops really explicit and say, every Week or every month, but I think that's what I'm saying. Every week or every month, we have this moment where we stop and we reflect on the action that we've done. So that you'd certainly most of your energy is going into acting because that's the way that you learn the most, but you also have to stop for a second, stop doing for a second to look around And go, what did we learn from that? And then move again.)
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