Things less obvious from the official website

What I've understood better about Microsolidarity from the Winter 2024 Gathering

Last weekend I travelled to Spain to attend a winter gathering for the Microsolidarity network. We were very cosy inside amidst the wind and rain outside (I must have brought over the Northern European weather with me, alas) and I got to see a phenomenal number of olive trees. I deepened my understanding of Microsolidarity in a few ways over the gathering, and I thought I'd recap some of it here.

The car climb up to get here was adventurous

ONE - MORE ON WHY

Church, family, and marriage - it seems these were the places we as a society used to go to for refuge. We centred ourselves around these institutions and relationships. They were sources of belonging. We cared for people on the basis of them, we received care through them, and we committed to them. What's happened somewhat recently is that church, family, and marriage are things we now question. They're breaking down, people don't rely on them that much. The picture that is often painted is that we're now more like individual atoms floating around, impersonally hosted by a distant apathetic state.

When I think about how Microsolidarity is about "creating structures for belonging" this has increasingly been the context I've been thinking about it in. I struggle to relate with my family, I don't believe in God in the conventional sense, and most of the people I've encountered in dating find marriage quite a weird idea.

I've been seeing Microsolidarity as a tool that aims to build new sources of belonging - this time between friends, peers, and perhaps partners. Some of us already do that quite intuitively. But it's certainly not universal. There's an art to doing it.

TWO - A NETWORK, A LAUNCHPAD

The common myth is that collaboration is easy, it's intuitive, and you just get on with it. That might be the case if you don't mind having any old collaboration dynamic - ones that don't necessarily build belonging, ones where conflict may be building up underneath the carpet, or ones we simply replicate painful dynamics from painful childhoods. In my experience, good collaboration, and the type of collaboration that cultivates the belonging we want - this stuff is intentional, it takes thinking, nuance, and it's very much accelerated when we can learn from mistakes of the past, and from standing on the shoulders of giants.

That brings me to second thing I've been understanding better about Microsolidarity. It's a network of people supporting each other for you to then go find or build your own community. A friend at the gathering highlighted to me that while it can feel pernickety, definitions can really help set clear expectations - and therefore lessen the potential for the confusion of expectations not being met. Something I think both of us came to understand better at this gathering is that Microsolidarity itself is not a community. A community in this case being defined as a group of people where caring and relationships between individuals are central rather than incidental.

There's a degree of professionalism to Microsolidarity events. While there is space to exchange and receive care at gatherings and there is culture of hospitality and warmth, that's not the aim of the gathering, or the network itself - the network exists to support you to go and create or find that community for yourself. That might be with people who happen to be active in the network, though I get the sense that the assumption is that it'd more likely be with people who are not already familiar with the network, especially since it's not that big and likely not active in your particular city or country (well, except Berlin at the time of writing). Microsolidarity is a source of advice to help you navigate community-building and make good collaboration happen.

THREE - OPEN AND FIRM

In a sense Microsolidarity is quite an open framework. It doesn't tell you what type of community to build. It could be for work, it could be for personal development, and so on. It seems part of Microsolidarity practice to draw on and collate different theories and bodies of practice that have useful things to say about good collaboration - for example, liberating structures, theory U, and the art of hosting are facilitation methodologies that have been drawn on at Microsolidarity events, in addition to things like nonviolent communication and internal family systems.

There are a few things that the Microsolidarity framework itself contributes more uniquely and is kind of firm about - the two stand out things that come to mind are (1) SCALE - paying attention to it, how everything grows within another thing, types of group sizes having names, and knowing how each type of group size is good for some activities and absolutely terrible for other activities, and (2) TRUST - the role of invitation, emotional intimacy before economic intimacy, building at the speed of trust, accepting hierarchy where helpful because it's not about hierarchy it's about power, weaving social fabric before everything else. I rediscovered things about the TRUST aspect at the gathering.

FOUR - THE ROLE OF TRUST

One of the things that drew me to wanting to learn more about Microsolidarity was something Rich said on a podcast where he proposed a different approach to the broad inclusivity that I'd been used to from working in small anti-hierarchy co-operatives. I was reminded of this on the third day of the gathering.

In the co-ops I had been in, it was standard fare that some people wanted the co-op to be inclusive. This inclusivity was roughly defined as a sense that it was important the average person should be able to join the co-op, people with marginalised backgrounds should be especially welcomed to join the co-op, participating in any aspect of the co-op should be accessible to everyone, and we should use consensus or sociocracy decision-making across the whole group for all decisions because this is the most inclusive of everyone, and more voices inherently lead to better outcomes.

While there were important things I agreed with in this definition of inclusivity, over time something has felt a bit off for me, and my head was being done in when it came to putting it into practice. I didn't want to collaborate with just any person when it came to things like my own housing or doing work. People with difficult backgrounds often need a lot of support to operate in a co-op and I wasn't interested in personally volunteering to run a rehabilitation centre. Consensus decision-making can be beautiful when done between people care about you and care about the process, and it can feel like a painfully grating slog when done in a larger group and between people who don't care and don't understand the process. It was also frustrating at times to feel like I had a lot of the responsibility of making sure certain things were happening but little of the formal control to do so. Over the long term it feels unsatisfying to me to keep sharing resources of an intimacy (that people usually reserve for romantic partners) with people I gradually learn whose values are contrary to my own and have no interest in active mutual compromise.

So on the third day of the gathering, there was a "fishbowl" exercise where the three people most central to the Microsolidarity network's organising sat in the centre of the room, while the rest of us sat around them in groups of three, silently observing the central group having a conversation about how they work.

One of the things that came out of the central group's conversation was the importance of personal connection. The two people who were not-Rich had built a personal connection with Rich over time and then felt more able to volunteer or propose ideas for the network. Earlier Rich had drawn up a sort of "permissions chart", where on one side of the spectrum line there was "anyone can do it" and on the other there was "by invitation". This experience gave me a felt sense of what building high-trust communities, and building at the speed of trust, could look like.

It's interesting to me that building at the speed of trust seems contrary to the type of broad and fast inclusion that co-ops I have been a part of seem to adopt. It strikes me that there is space for broad inclusion when it comes to being involved in the Microsolidarity network, in the sense that there are many things one can do at the "anyone can do it" side of the spectrum (e.g. join a course, start a crew, etc), and that all of the core theoretical material of Microsolidarity is available freely online and is open to use, interpretation, and remixing. It's just that going deeper in getting involved in the network is slower. There's social skills to exercise, unwritten implicit norms to navigate, specific people to get to know and talk to. And they can say no - they're not obliged to say yes because you walked through the door.

I do have some questions around checks, around how precisely this is different from an analogy where it's like one person owns the land and the others are economically dependent on them to build their project on it, but they're not burning questions for me at the moment.

I find myself more curious and energised around the question of what a co-living group or company may look like with this gradual building of trust. I have felt certain tools like NVC and consensus and so on feel quite mechanistic and don't work their magic if there isn't a good base of trust, care, and alignment. I have often theorised that more formalised projects where there is a continuous turnover of stewards that come in and out of the group are not conducive to high-trust community. UNLESS recruitment was deliberately designed for gradual depths of engagement, for high trust and alignment, and can accept that there will be exclusivity involved, just like choosing your romantic partner is an exclusive process. The group would need to actively value this or somehow swim in a collaboration culture where this is the norm.

I'm sure there's clearer ways of communicating what I mean. I would welcome signposting to helpful resources or vocabulary.

WHERE NEXT?

It was energising to meet up with so many fellow engaged community builders. I enjoyed the sense of possibility I got from the gathering. What if I explored crewing with a few friends who I think could be good co-living matches? Wouldn't it be funny if I started a troika consulting sprint in my city with a few other co-operators? Money is more of a priority for me over this year and I'm curious how to develop in my work, given my current role as a finance and governance lead in a worker co-op. I'm also exploring how I might get more involved in the Microsolidarity newsletter or developing the network's practice library. I'm particularly curious about developing a personal wiki or practice library of my own. Given my existing tangle of communities, I have limited energy and time, and have been wondering how to strategise.

Thank you to all the lovely hosts and attendees of the Microsolidarity Winter Gathering. Thank you to Tasshin who encouraged me to write this post.

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