Patterns on mixmix

Relationship Retros

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2015 I was working in a social enterprise space, and some friends started porting some of our business tools to their personal relationships.

It started with Chelsea and Ants deciding to date… by running a series of time-bound experiments. - commit to dating for 1 week, then pause, reflect, decide whether to continue. Same again for 2, 4, 8 weeks. We laughed at them , but in short order several of us were doing periodic “retrospectives” on our relationships. My partner wrote a blog about our process – Running Agile Scrum on our Relationship (2016).

The Multiamory podcast iterated on our recipe, releasing RADAR. We were stoked to hear other people enjoying this pattern. RADAR is a great resource, though it’s a lot heavier that we can afford to run with small kids. The following is our current light-weight process.

A Primer on Iteration

TL;DR – continual improvement beats “perfect planning”

Businesses (and relationships) are complex systems in that they have a lot of moving, deeply inter-related parts, and are embedded in ecosystems. Navigating complex systems can be really challenging. There are a bunch of tools that can help, but my favourate is the “feedback loop”.

If you imagine navigating possibility space like wayfinding over an unknown terrain, your feedback loop is take a bearing (where are we now?), set a course (what should we move towards?), travel a bit, repeat:

Take a bearing, set a course, sail for a bit -- repeat. The far peak never moves; you just keep planting the next flag.

This doesn’t preclude having a long term goal / desired destination, but it does acknowledge that you’re moving with a certain amount of “unknown”, and complex interactions may mean you find yourself “off-course” and need adjustments. What I really want to emphasise is that we discard the impossible ideal of “a perfect course to desired end” and replace it with “an ongoing journey of improvement”.

In software development we often use Scrum / Agile as a feedback loop to grow the code… but we ALSO apply the feedback loop to our team process (it’s part of the building, so why not?)

	Software dev.	Team process
1. Take a bearing	What have we just built?	How we feeling about that last round?
2. Set a course	What should we build next?	What should the team do different next round?
3. Do a bit	Write software	Run team processes
4. repeat

In the context of a journey, this would be like a party evolving their roles/ protocols/ processes e.g. “hey the cook is sick… how about we each take a turn cooking for the next week?”.

Retrospective just means “look back”, but it’s often used as a short hand for the process where we get together and “Take a bearing” and “Set a course”. In an Agile/ Scrum context, there’s usually a time/ energy constraint – once again, the goal is not perfection, it is to use feedback loops to incrementally improve over time. As long as you trend in a good direction you’re winning. This means things like:

we may surface 10 issues… but we don’t expect to “solve” them all, as long as we progress 1 of them in the next sprint, that’s progress
we don’t know the the perfect solution to this issue… but we can “try something” and see how the system responds (and repeat).

Our Current Process

We run relationship retrospectives ~ once a month, and set aside 90 minutes uninterupted time for our process. This is a ritual which draws a bunch of energy, so I’d strongly advise not going over 90 minutes - it can burn you out. This was especially true once we had kids.

Here are the phases of our current process:

10-15m

1. Load Context

Check-in by sharing how we’re currently feeling, what we’re arriving with e.g. I have a didn’t sleep well last night; I have a headache. Remember the last month, review our calendars, and speak out loud the important landmarks. e.g. We were all sick for a week; You finished your government contract; I finally got back to my exercise routine; We had that fight.

Why – In checking in and remembering the last month, we’re aligning our contexts. Knowing I have a headache helps us communicate better by improving your model of my current state. Being reminded of what we each found important helps prime us for things we might discuss, and factors that are going to feed into those conversations.

Notes – Try to avoid “processing” things here, as if you start processing here you may blow all your time on something that’s not the most important. Take the approach of a “reporter naming the facts” with a side of “smile/ laugh at the good bits”.

2. Possible Agenda

We write a bullet point list of things would could talk about. e.g. Anxiety about summer plans; How we’re sharing house-hunting labour; That fight we had.

Notes – Avoid “processing” here too

1-2m

3. Prioritise

We decide the top 2-3 things we want to discuss today. We tend to ask ourselves

are there any quick wins here?
are any of these urgent?
which of these are most important?

Why – It can be tempting to try and cover everything. Invariably if you do this, you end up either rushing / pressurising conversations that would have benefitted from the reverse (spaciousness / time), or you just run out of time and find you’ve discussed some bike-shed (superficial) topic while something really important was missed.

Notes – Prioritisation is personal, decide together. We like to tick a couple small / easy things off first, then process maybe 1-2 chunkier topics. If you feel like there’s not enough space / time for a topic (good noticing!), name it and perhaps ask “can we plan to dicsuss that another time?”.

~60m

4. Discuss

We move through prioritised topics one at a time. The aim is to

share some context on the topic
listen and be curious together about what’s going on
ask ourselves “what could we try different?”
write down what we agreed to as the final step in discussing a topic

Notes – We keep notes of “actions” (agreed things someone is gonna do, or changes in role/ process) in a shared Signal chat. We check the time and energy before launching into another topic – sometimes changing the priorities to fit what’s emerged as needed

⚠️ Alanna tells me this section deserves a LOT more detail. I stalled out publishing this… so maybe it’s enough for now to say you need to figure out what good processing looks like for your relationship - paying attention to optimizing for coherencem, connection, and sustainability.

5. Appreciation

We pause, take a breath, then share a bunch of things we appreciate – about our partner, our relationship, our life together. One person goes first and runs for a couple minutes while the other listens, then we switch. We finish with a hug.

Why – This whole process can be quite “problem-solving” heavy, and emotionally charged. I usually feel great about the connection and problem-solving, but this ensures we finish on a really sweet high.

What Retrospectives Miss

…loading

Icecream Licence

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Origin

Child : How come you get to eat icecream on the couch?
Mix : Because I have my Icecream Licence!"

This was intended as a joke but lead to me outlining the key competencies you have to demonstrate to access this licence:

You don’t spill icecream on the couch
If you do, you notice it
You know how to clean spills
You actually clean those spills

As of writing this, my oldest has the licence, my youngest has decided they’re not ready for the responsibility yet, and happily eat at the table.

Why? I was exhausted by repeat queries, and while “because I said so” is sometimes appropriate, it’s more often a lazy response which doesn’t support learning.

Reflections

The Icecream Licence was bootstrapped directly off the Drivers Licence. In the case of the car we want people to have agency in their life, and to balance that freedom with the safety of other citizens. In the case of the icecream, I want my kids to relax and have fun, AND I want a harmonious house (one where I’m not yelling STICKY FINGERS ARGGHH!!!! nor resentfully sponging dairy out of soft furnishings).

My ultimate goal is for my kids to be fully autonomous, self-actualizing, socially integrated humans. There are lot of places freedom is dangerous (to self and/or others). The “Licence” is a really clear way to support people to grow into that freedom.

This is very similar to an education context, which works in “qualifications”, often defined by “key competencies” which need to be demonstrated in some way. Qualifications are usually used to boundary access to additional course/ programmes/ jobs. Licences are a sort of qualification which often boundary something dangerous to an individual / group / system.

Qualifications and Licences are both awarded by “authorities” - entities we’ve invested with the right to author, and to authorise (extend authorship/ autonomy). There’s a clear power dynamic in here, which needs some attention and care. While I still often hold the ultimate authority, the shift has been towards defining access to power, and supporting my kids to access that safely.

It feels great to shift from “No, because I said so”, to “Yes, when you can demonstrate X,Y,Z, are you ready?”

Creating Licences

Not everything should be a Licence. However we’ve found it a very succinct way to communicate with our kids:
a) There is something adult or dangerous here 🔥
b) There is a pathway, I’m here to support you ❤️

Here’s some reflective questions to support you explore Licences:

Why are you really blocking your child?

You’ve probably been giving your child “some reason(s)”, but it’s likely truncated because you lacked the time, and your child lacks context. Pause and unpack it more fully. This provides hints about what your child might need to learn / master.

e.g. icecream isn’t directly dangerous, but it can attract animals, breed microbes, damage relationships

What does doing this well look like?

You are likely unaware of how many points of context + skills are involved with some domains. Happily, you can probably imagine a lot of ways your child would fail. Use these as pointers to mapping our explicitly the pieces of knowledge and skills required.

How do you “fail well” here?

Just because adults “know how to do something” does not mean they nail it every time. A key aspect of mastery is knowing how to adapt when failure occurs - often this involves sensing failure early, and knowing how to gently correct.

what does this look like when it goes wrong?
what are the best options for recovering/ mitigating damage?

Could this Licence have levels?

How can we practice basics and succeed before adding more context/ complexity/ skills?

e.g. ice-cream in a bowl, in a cone, with/ without chocolate sauce (see Dangerous Goods Licence)

Licence revocation?

In our house you can definitely lose your Icecream Licence. Sounds kinda punitive perhaps, but we’ve found having clear expectations about what’s involved with a Licence makes it really easy to outline outcomes.

It’s totally ok to not want to have responsibility for everything all the time! If you want to pause on some of those responsibilities, it just means that some of your freedom/ autonomy may be curtailed. We align power with responsibility <3

Cybernetic Signal

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Origins 💀 🌱

These patterns were born of the death of a friendship. TL;DR we muddled personal and work comms to the point where communication got confused, and trust broke down. We managed to name the problem, but too late to be able to recover. I was gutted – I was naive, complicit, and had lost a dear friend. My response was to start partitioning my comms, obsessively asking:

What is the best space to relay this message into?

Over time this query has evolved how I think and relate. Please enjoy a sampler of how I use Signal, presented as an explorable simulacrum – click in to read more about those you’re curious about.

❤️

Work Chats

These were the first. In Signal I started creating dedicated 1:1 chats to protect against this mistake. Here’s how that looks:

😀

Ben

If I write something in here it’s me writing to Ben as a friend. He doesn’t need to worry I’m coming at him with some work request, this is about us connecting as friends.

💼

Ben/ Mix work

Work coordination. If it’s out-of-office hours, this can wait.

ℹ️ click to expand

Family Chats

Another reason I shifted hard into more exobrain use is also that having babies turned my endobrain into mush. Gotta record everything or it’s gone. Here are some chat groups that are just me and my partner – our collective memory, sense-making, and futuring.

🏡

Family Admin

Boring but necessary house + kid stuff. I got scared that this would dominate all my communication with my partner. Like the “work” chat above it allows us to protect our relationship (somewhat) from the onslaught of logistics.

Family Health Stuff

A memory augmenting channel. Dumping observations that are maybe insignificant, but could be vital as part of a bigger arc is an easy win. Our whole family health is in here, but to give you an idea, here’s a slice of one pattern we spotted that lead to an escalation in care:

Time	Message
Sep 24, 11pm	<Daughter> right ear pain → paracetamol
Nov 07, 8pm	<Daughter> right ear sore, stopped then started.
Feb 19, 10am	<Daughter> doctor says ear looks ok, referring to ENT
Mar 12, 2am	<Daughter> woke with ear pain (left only) - gave half paracetamol - may have had some liquid come out (swimming, or burst drum?)
Mar 25, 8pm	<Daughter> ear seemed to clear “everything is so loud”

We dump details about night wake-ups (invaluable for handing over care context), medicine administered, readings (height/ weight/ blood pressure/ temperature), questions for doctors, appointment times, notes from doctors visit.

Format – name + topic/ body area + info
Makes patterns easy to search. Timestamps are essential, but auto-added by chat.

🌈

Read/ Watch

A record of books / films / series that we’ve encountered and would like to queue up. Raw titles alone means you lose the context for why this caught your attention, so I’d recommend a format like:

title + genre + link? + why?

🎉

Family Dreams

Origin – My friend Richard and his partner have a bowl of cards, and on the cards are written fun activities. When they’re bored they pull a card from the bowl, and they’re off on adventure. I copied that. When my partner or I come across a recommended location, fun kids activity, or upcoming event, they get dumped into this chat.

Evolution – It’s like a shared memory space… but for for possible futures. This chat has increased our capacity for bringing dreams into the world. We started at simple (Real Fruit Ice-cream), and have grown in scale (International trip with another family), and depth (Take a night-class to explore this shy aspect of myself).

I cannot recommend this pattern enough.

💬 😅

Family Quotes

Origin – We have two young kids and wanted to remember some of the crack-up things they’ve said.

Time	Message
Jan 14	Son : I have the opposite program to most people. I have my dreams while I’m awake instead of while I’m sleeping.
Apr 19	Daughter : I feel bad, like I hurt someone… but it’s just that I fell in love with tacos
Apr 21	Daughter : hey I’m following you, you’re the role model Grandma: don’t follow me – I don’t know where I’m going!

Evolution – One of the greatest gift kids offer is the chance to see the world afresh. Their observations are uncoloured by idioms, uncluttered by… ‘grown up’ context? Their questions side-step social norms and drive (unknowing or sensing?) into the heart of things. We’re invited to reflect on our assumptions, our knowledge, what we really values, and to summarise those thoughts in under 2mins in simple terms.

🥵

Only Fans

(not lewd)

Origin – started as a joke chat. I added my partner and posted a couple cute selfies.

Time	Message
Jan 24	This chat is being repurposed frow sfw duckface selfies to things I love about our life and want to remember to share with you
Mar 2	mix : “remind me about leadership call”?! partner : thanks! I scheduled that message 5 days ago, you’re like my meatware in this situation mix : I am your meatware, that’s what we signed up for partner : awww

Evolution – reflecting on what having a “premium subscription” might mean, I noticed this channel was a perfect place to post post celebrations of beauty we see unfolding in our lives, appreciation of one another, and the occasional insights from therapy.

T_T

Emotional Damage

Origin – Inspired by this comedy video, this started as a high-context, high-trust channel for my partner and I to vent about those cringe or painful moments in life.

Evolution – Laughing together at a predicament is a quick way to affirm shared values and step away from any fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. If it’s not funny, then we can move into more careful support of each other. Whatever the path, stabilisation/ alignment/ destressing make it easier to engage curiosity, name the kernel of any conflict, explore upstream solutions, etc.

❤️

Relationship Retro

My partner and I run monthly relationship retrospectives. You can read about that pattern here, and evolutions of our process on the Multiamory podcast [1] [2] !

This is a simple shared memory archive. When we decide on an iteration of something we’d like to try out, we record it here. This helps us loop back to reflect on how experiments have gone. Later this will likely enable us to reflect on what we continue to struggle with, how far we’ve come, and what our relationship is.

Community Chats

Here’s a collection of groups I’ve participated in. Each of them has it’s own dynamics regards the flows of information, the pattern of relating, and what they brought more into the world.

🌅

Pōneke Toddler Wranglers

A support group for a group of 18 parents who were friends and happend to have kids around the same time. This group has covered planning playdates, re-sharing cool event, shared summer holidays for the past 4 years, hand-me-downs, baby-sitting, emergency support, etc.

I deliberately added sharing of vulnerability to this group. I role-modelled not knowing, I asked for help. I was met with support, and observing safety and care, others followed suit. I think this deepened relationships, increased resilience, and turbo-charged our collective sense-making.

🐚

Social Labryinth

I met a nice guy at Dweb Camp, and said “we should keep in touch!”. He dropped me into a Signal chat with 23 people called “Social Labryinth” with zero context. Turns out this was a group of people that were mostly friends of his at the conference, along with a handful of seemingly aligned odd-bods.

I have never seen such sustained and rich discourse beyond a conference. I attribute this to the lovely host, their great taste in friends, and our alignment in interests (all at a radical tech conference). This group went on to birth another parallel group, an online conference, and many of the people I met are now trusted peers and collaborators.

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🤡

Clown Capitalism

The origin of this group are somewhat shrouded in mystery. It seems like I made it as a joke in 2023 and then forgot about it, only to stumble across it a year later while searching my chat for clowns.

Over the past year this chat has evolved into a critical discourse on clowning, their role as bridges between possible realities, and has been slowly gathering real clowns who are now helping shape the conversation. Was I always a clown, or am I becoming one?

♻️

Knowledge Ecology

I met an Ecologist at a conference, and really wanted to learn more about the systems thinking lenses of Ecology, and how this person had been applying them to groups. We are both short on time, so started a chat group as a way to share learning through dialogue. Along the way we’ve been adding resources and people that match the theme.

We could have just kept this as a DM chat, but opening this to trusted friends we were able to share learning more widely while also building trust as we observe mutual friends interacting.

🚴

Spare cycles for commons

This is an off-shoot from a chain of collaborations between myself and nonlinear. We share a passion for building human-centred digital commons. A major challenge is there are so many open-source projects / tools that auditing and testing them as an individual is overwhelming.

The focus of this group is then “do you have a spare 30 mins to kick the tyres on a project?”. We post links to things that have crossed our radar “anyone seen this?”, and either someone has or maybe we co-ordinate a small scouting party to go test it out and report back. Cheerleading is also welcome. This is gentle volunteering.

Functionally we are surfacing aligned tools, extending our capacity to sense, progressing common-good, and making friends.

Cybernetic Sovereignty

Not sure how many are familiar with Cybernetics. As a primer for those who things it’s just about cyborgs:

The central theme in cybernetics is feedback. Feedback is a process where the observed outcomes of actions are taken as inputs for further action in ways that support the pursuit, maintenance, or disruption of particular conditions, forming a circular causal relationship.

I’m very interested in the feedback loops present in our information systems. In the above sections you see me externalising and collectivising large parts of my memory, sense-making, and future dreaming. Concretely, Signal is now a core part of my cybernetic feedback loop – I take actions which effect a system, and then I sense the reaction(s) of that system, which stimulated further actions.

It’s Signal, because the accessibility and activation cost is very low, and because Signal give a shit about privacy/ security. I would have to be in a bad place to be doing this on a platform that reads the content (see Meta, Google), or in any way shapes my feedback loops. To be crystal clear, feedback manipulation you should watch for is any place algorithms are being tuned to decide the relevance your posts/ events… based on the advertising goals or political agendas of the host corporation. DEI no longer in vogue? How do you feel about you your discourse and event organising being tuned down, gradually disappeared?

While Signal is great, I am not happy about how fragile Signal is to disruption. It’s feasible that someone dragging an anchor could cripple New Zealand’s internet, severing me from my communities (and exobrain). If there was a fantastic p2p replacement that had the right security trade-offs, and accessible UX, I would jump.

Forecasts ⛈️ ☀️

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Although this pattern emerged through the challenges of parenting, I still find it really useful wherever there is high variability / unknowns in coordination.

Planning with kids chaos

When I had kids, organising hang-outs went from pretty simple to something much more unstable. For example “let’s meet at the zoo at 2pm”… sounds easy enough, but then toddlers don’t necessarily sleep on an exact schedule, and there is a greater than zero chance someone could spew in the car on the way there. Multiply these unknowns by the number of participants and it can be pretty easy for plans to only semi-align, or totally bomb.

This can generate feelings that range from mild stess (am I waiting for X to arrive before we go into the zoo?) through to total bummer (I was really looking forward to an adult conversation). A particularly painful failure mode is the “after bedtime han-gout” where no children are present (read: this is my time off), where some kid need arises, you are wrenched back into duty, and your plans are cancelled. Deep expectation-reality whiplash.

If your plans involved other people with limited resources, you’re probably also carrying the cost to the group in mind e.g. their expectation-reality whiplash, and the cost of having the try to re-schedule a hang out.

Decomposing the problem

I noticed the crux of the pain for me was the sharp divergence of reality from expectation. Why was this happening? I think because my internal narrative was too binary, that is only had two modes:

hangin out ⇒ 😄
no hangs ⇒ 😭.

What if we told a story which was more nuanced… reduce the surprise of the flip between these states. Could we take in all the variables, name and acknowledged the uncertainty, and build our story on that? Sounds like it might be too complex, but you’ve seen this pattern before ⇒ weather forecasts!

So I started experimenting with a friend I play Magic with. Our conversations shifted from being more of a roller-coaster:

Mix : How are things looking for a game tonight?
Eric : 👍 Yeah I’m on! See you at 8pm
…
Mix : 😕 you coming?
Eric : 👀 yep, just running a little late…
…
Eric : 😔 Look I’m really sorry, I gotta cancel, child spewing
Mix : 😭 oh no! good luck

To a really smooth expectation ride:

Mix : How are things looking for a game tonight?
Eric : ☔ 30%, my youngest has a cold, stay tuned!
Mix : ❤️‍🩹 No pressure this end
Mix : ✨ Let me know if the stars align! Otherwise catch you another night

Updated forecast

One of the joys of this is that just like a weather forecast, your forecast of the likelihood of a date working out can evolve over time:

⛈️ 40% we have quite a few lemons on deck
☁️ 60% grandma said she can take a kid!
☀️ 85% sick child is asleep 🙌🤞

If you want you can front-load a little context about the lemons (complexity/ challenges) that are introducing uncertainty, then subsequent updates can be really brief, even just “20%”.

Contrast this with trying to protect people from complexity (not wanting to prematurely complicate or worry), but then feeling pressure to offer apologies, AND explanation, AND in the exact moment of some disaster unfolding 👎.

Commitment + Context

One thing I immediately noticed was that communicating this way separated our commitment to the relationship from the challenges of our context.

In the past I feel like generally people wanted to make a plan work – to honour the organising + time people have contributed, the relationship – and that to cancel plans felt like some damage that needed acknowledgement and repair.

Now I it’s really easy for me to say:

❤️ I would love to hang out with you! (commitment)
⛈️ 60%, here’s what I’m working with (context)

My commitment + context can now be expressed orthogonally 🤓. It feels like it unlocks a lot more compassion / kindness, which is especially helpful for anyone navigating relationships intersecting with complexity, be that kids, mental health challenges, disability etc.

Lemons 🍋🍋🍋

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published on Scuttlebutt in 2018. Additional section added with updated learnings.

When I was a teacher I worked with this guy Pete Brailsford, who taught mountaineering. He’d take students up into the snow and build snow caves to sleep in overnight, cross rivers, stuff like that. A major part of the learning in that context was about managing risks. The idea is that you can’t control everything, but you can keep an eye on the probability field you’re standing in.

He talked about it like a slot machine - those ones where you pull the handle and then the options spin and then they lock in like:

🍒 🍋 🍒 🍒 🍏

Normally if you get all cherries or something, it’s a jackpot, but in this story, if you get a row of lemons, that’s bad, like “you got hypothermia and no-one knows where you are” bad.

So you can’t control all the slots, but you can watch where you’re at. Say you set out on our adventure, the slots are spinning, and you know what, someone in our group forgot their jacket BOOM the first slot just came up

🍋 ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜

Ok it’s a lemon, but no big deal, it’s sunny as. You stop and have lunch, there’s some clouds on the horizon, but it’s so warm. Guess what you just missed a hint, and as you continue to walk it starts to rain and a wind picks up (being a small island in a massive ocean, weather can change very quickly in nz) … now you’ve got 2 lemons

🍋 🍋 ⬜ ⬜ ⬜

Again this is not that big a deal… except you already have that 1 lemon, so now you’ve got someone in your group who’s getting cold. I guess you can see the trend. Any one of these things is no big deal, but a series of little misfortunes have a cumulative effect in terms of the odds you’re playing with. So if you’re in this position

🍋 🍋 🍋 🍋 ⬜

You’re now playing a very high stakes games, where one more little lemon, like a sprained ankle can tip you over into disaster.

How to manage lemons

Lemons aren’t always avoidable, but you can often plan ahead and consider what the odds of lemons are based on different paths. Further, you can reflect as situtations evolve, asking yourself:

How many lemons are we currently at?

Just having this self-reflective question in your toolbelt can change how you think and see. It can be really hard to spot them because they can often be innocuous in the context where they first present … it’s just in concert that the the real trouble manifests. Asking this question out loud to yourself and your questing party can help you spot more of them early, as well as increase the liklihood you’ll keep them in working memory (most humans suck at remembering many small factors).

If you spot yourself crossing 3-4 lemons, you should probably be starting to significantly re-asses your plans. Things like:

abort: ask yourself if your initial plan is still safe
simplify: consider cutting non-vital parts of your plan
alert: increase new-lemon vigilance, prepare to escalate responses faster

But mix, I’m not a mountaineer

This is relevant to anyone on any adventure (solo, or as a team). You could be voyaging into literal mountains, or sailing to Great Barrier Island, or you could be a distributed team building FOSS tools on a limited / no budget.

Some lemons that have fucked up quests I’ve been on:

having no retrospectives (process for iterating, adaptation)
just trusting that everyone remembers the agreement we made (contracts, pay, expectations)
forgetting to ask how people are feeling
“figuring it out later” for on-boarding / off-boarding / holidays / sick leave
not telling each other vital quest-changing info (assuming mind-reading or avoiding conflict)
being unclear on who’s doing what
using too many different tools for communication / coordination
being unclear about ownership / responsibility
saying “this is a flat structure, everyone is equal” (but not actually doing anything to actively distribute power)
forgetting to account for how disruptive travel can be

Sometimes the course you take has known lemons. Like it’s hard to set up holiday pay processes when you’re a small company and you know everyone and you’re doing it for love and there are so many things to do. You just need to acknowledge (and remember) that you’re carrying a lemon, and if you then try to onboard someone new, you need to adjust your plan by either stopping to build that missing stuff (unloading the lemon), or communicating to the new person clearly about the known lemon.

Lemons in family systems

UPDATE: I’ve added this section because it’s how I’ve most used this personally, and why I reference this pattern so often.

When I say “family system”, I mean any group of people very strongly committed to supporting one another, such that the wellbeing of any one person in the system strongly effects the wellbeing of the system as a whole.

Examples of family systems I’ve seen that this is relevant for:

parent(s) with kid(s)
partners where at least one has a disability
partners where at least one has mental health challenges

You know if you’re in such a family system when e.g. one of you gets sick, and the experience is like the family is sick. The arc of recovery is often slower too, because of the complex interactions involved in one person getting taken out.

Noticing lemons

We don’t track lemons all the time in our family. Lemons in themselves are not bad … unattended compounding lemons tend towards disaster though. Typically we start engaging this pattern when we notice ourselves generally “unreasonably stressed”, “a bit overwhelmed”, or even just “unproductive”.

The next step is to pause and name the lemons we can spot. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed today, so here’s an example:

🍋 work – my work is in transition, lots of uncertainty
🍋 community – my school picnic got quagmired, lots of painful learning
🍋 health – I’ve had a low level cold for 2 weeks, have had a few nights of bad sleep
…

Okeee, so we’re at 3 lemons already, and that’s only counting the complexities I’m holding… No wonder I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed!

Compassion

Even noticing that you’ve carrying a bunch of lemons can be transformative. My first step is usually to laugh a little, and feel a little bit of relief – I’m not useless, we have a lot on! 😅

Having some compassion for ourselves can immediately unload shame / guilt / pressure, which is very strategic, because:

you just cut a meta-lemon (wasting brain cycles beating yourself up)
you likely have less of a white-knuckle death-grip on your initial plans, making it easier to adapt to your actual reality

Complexity capacity 🍋 🥄

Another pattern we use in our family is Spoon Theory. The core idea is that if you’re living with some disability you may have very limited capacity, and that we could model how much capacity people have with units of capacity, spoons 🥄 say. A person with very limited capacity might start the day with 8 spoons, and then have to ration their spoons over the day e.g. shower costs 1 spoon, commute to work costs 2 spoons etc). If you run out of spoons… maybe you cannot get home, maybe you can but end up in massive spoon-debt (goodbye tmrw).

Expanding spoons from the individual (to collective capacity) and blending in the lemons pattern, we can start to say things like “today we only have capacity for 2 lemons”. Lemons here represent complexity which will incur spoons (capacity) cost.

This feels kind because it acknowledges our current capacity, and helps us bound expectations of how much complexity we can perhaps carry.

Concretely, while going to a kids birthday in the morning followed by a friends bbq in the afternoon may seem easy, if we only have 4 spoons, and this plan takes us to 0 spoon exactly… that leaves no capacity for unforeseen lemons, which world put us in spoon deficit. Better to plan one just the one activity and have spare capacity for curveballs and still be within safe operating bounds.

This concept is also useful in the context of startups. Startups are typically operating with very limited resources (spoons). Basic operations cost capacity (spoons), and innovation tends to cost in unforeseen complexity (lemons). To that end it’s important not to innovate on too many fronts simultaneously. Examples of things which incur complexity cost:

🍋 “fancy” legal structures - e.g. coop, foundation + for-profit symbiosis, ….
🍋 novel technologies - e.g. encrypted replicatable database
🍋 ethical investment mechanisms - e.g. non-voting shares, redeemable preference shares, …
🍋 world-spanning teams - e.g. NZ, EU, USA

Deploying wards for you & those you love

Sat, 04 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This article was first published on Scuttlebutt, republished here with a couple edits.

What do you mean warding?

In the context of magic, a ward is a charm or enchantment, usually cast on a place and set up to bar evil from entering, while letting the good pass freely. I’m not sure where I picked this concept up, it’s quite likely playing Magic the Gathering (which ironically enough is itself a ward).

One time a friend of mine threw a P-party (not the drug, like the letter P). Being a contratrian who enjoys squirreling out edges cases, I went as a Pterodactyl. My costume was hastily put together - I made a large cardboard mask (masks and identity are another fascinating thread, but for another time), didn’t have time for wings, so put on a suit, and tied a tie to my belt as a tail. Come monday, my belt still had the tail, and I decided to skip figuring out the knot and wear it to work (I was a highschool teacher at the time).

This was motivated by: laziness, enjoying attention, opportunity to systematically break peoples models of me, and role modeling it being fine to be a weirdo. I got reactions similar to what you experience if you’ve ever shaved your head or similar - some people making a big deal of it, some people ignoring it.

But there were nuances in there which were super instructive. Some people were super judgey “why are you wearing a tail?” (said with a frown and concern). Wow, that was an incredibly quick shortcut to learning you’re closed minded! Getting to skip a bunch of pre-amble and have a conversation about what we really value in people and society was super great. Or if the context wasn’t right, to just laugh and walk the fuck away. For some people it surfaced insecurity. The principle of the school (a 60 year old kinda old fashioned but kindly white dude) approached me after a meeting one day and said in an embarassed aside:

“Huhuh, Mix I notice there are only two of us wearing ties, and I’m wearing mine around my neck and you’re wearing yours around your arse… I can’t help wondering if you’re mocking me!”.

“Huhuh, yeah”, I said ambiguously.

I also attracted allies. One of the students who chose me as a mentor wore bunny slippers everywhere (she was way ahead of me on being a delightful weirdo). At one time we had a teddybear onsie which people casually wore around. One of my parents turned up to a meeting - “I was at a fabric store the other day and they had these fluffly offcuts, and I thought of you”, she said, holding up a furry strip of fabric. So my tie tail got upgraded to a full on furry tail… why not I guess?

Fucking with gender as a ward

Living in an age where gender roles are really prescriptive really sucks. It’s been really great to explore what not being what dominant culture might call manly. What’s it like to be able to be vulnerable, try to understand your feelings, and integrate that into your relationships? Pretty fucking great.

What’s it like to notice that all the mens clothes in a shop are boring, and buy something ‘made for women’ which you feel great in? Excellent.

My friends and I are into really open communication, nail painting, and wearing whatever. Mikey looks gorgeous in a dress. Here’s me rocking a gold lamé top I found at my mother in laws place… I’m giving a talk at a JS conf in New Zealand.

Nerddom as a ward

I play Magic the gathering. People have feelings and thoughts about this. Same about Science Fiction. (Oh boy don’t get me started on talking to people who enjoy ‘literature’ as higher form of writing and look down on sci-fi)

Solarpunk? Are you willing to engage with a genre which is optimistic and not yet clearly defined?

Wear your nerddom like a badge, loudly, with pride. Great asshole detector, and you’d be surprised how many nerds there are out there lurking.

Magic/ mysticism as a ward

You might have seen some of the language of magic swirling around the scuttleverse. I deliberatly discuss rituals, which I think of as ‘known repeatable patterns which invite awareness, and weave bonds amongst us’. Christian culture may have baked a distrust of ritual into your psyche, which is pretty funny given how littered with ritual the church is. To be clear, Thanksgiving, Mothers day, Birthday Parties, Show and tell, Checkin rounds, Retrospectives are all powerful everyday rituals.

BUT, using more pagan language is a great ward, and it’s flavourful and fun!

Other magic to watch out for : #invocation, smudging, crystals, alchemy, sun and moon apps, wizards (I told Piet’s wedding he was a wizard - which I define as a socially AND technically talented humyn)

This isn’t an accident. I find magic really deeply evocative and playful. And a super effective ward - Zach! has a fantastic story I’d love to invite him to share about running his Solarpunk Magic gatherings.

Invoking a warding strategy

‘Ward’ might not be a perfect title because it more strongly represents guarding than welcoming, which is a shame. Nevertheless I am inviting you to cast off and ignore normative culture and proudly wear your marginalised culture, whatever it is.

By making things which are purple, and have rainbows, by being cute, or nerdy, a little bit magical, or a little bit dirty because you’re building a boat with your hands, you’re representing that which you love.

If other people don’t think that’s scaleable, GOOD. Scaling is normative capitalistic mindset and warding against that is a gift. It also means we’ll spend more time meeting beautiful colourful humans who are curious and care about others.