What is community?
“We: Co-Working Style” By Kurt Johnson, President FIONS
It’s interesting that almost the entire founding group of this iteration of FIONS, are still together (aside from a person or two no longer residing in the area). We think that the answer is not as simple as the fact that we’ll all leader-type people, good speakers, and creative event planners. The real reason we think goes back to our original reason for gathering. We had all experienced the downsides of competitive, egoic, or single-leader organizational cultures. All being dedicated spiritual practitioners we were also aware of the general emergent understanding that the old paradigm of “I” was fading away and being replaced a deep new sense of “We”.
It became apparent to us that such an organizational culture only works well when everyone had bought into this “convergent” way of working. We came to identify these kinds of persons as “convergent players”. “We” is easy for them. It’s what they want, and thrive on. If, on the other hand, there are still players more directed to their own desires and agency—what we came to call “parallel” players. So, it has been an interesting experiment.
Parallel players usually just drifted off to where they could be in single-leader style leadership again, while convergent players just tended to naturally stay together. If you examine that a little more, it’s probably because there is a great sense of fulfillment that comes from the “We: co-working style.