Gather Together

By William Matheson

Gather Together is a book for people who convene, facilitate, and participate in group work and processes of collective transformation. The book is a guide to 'hosting the extra-ordinary' and is written to support you to pay attention to the subtle and causal aspects of group work.

There are three parts to the book:

• Part one is called "Atmospheres" and describes the metaphysical space that makes group work possible and transformational.
• Part two is called "Foundations" and it describes the six foundations of social process that can help make your experience of group work more stable, resilient, and coherent.
• Part three is called "Voices" and it describes the conversations that groups need to have together as they participate in rituals of cultural renewal.

While Gather Together is written for group work practitioners, it will be of interest to anyone who is leading or working with groups, teams, communities, and organisations. I hope you find the ideas contained in this book encouraging, nurturing, challenging, and stimulating for you and for your practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: EXP Ltd
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9780473650018

William Matheson

William Matheson is a Pākehā New Zealander of English, Irish, and Scottish descent. He lives in Ōtautahi / Christchurch and works as a self-employed consultant, mainly with non-profit and purpose-based organisations.

Book preview

Rituals of Cultural Renewal

Human conversation is the most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change – personal change, community change, organisational change, planetary change. If we can sit together and talk about what’s important to us, we begin to come alive. We share what we see, what we feel, and we listen to what others see and feel. For as long as we’ve been around as humans, as wandering bands of nomads, or as cave dwellers, we have sat together and shared experiences. We’ve painted images on rock walls, recounted dreams and visions, told stories of the day, and generally felt comforted to be in the world together. When the world became fearsome we came together. When the world called us to explore its edges, we journeyed together. Whatever we did, we did it together.

Meg Wheatley (2002)

Greetings, and welcome. Thank you for being here.

This book is based on twenty years’ experience hosting and facilitating groups, mostly in Aotearoa New Zealand. Over that time I’ve had the privilege of spending time with some amazing groups, communities, and organisations. I’ve participated in some unique social processes and community rituals that are at the edge of what most people ever get to encounter. These people and these experiences are my gold, and this book is a way for me to share that gold with you.

Three years ago I made the choice to slow down and take some time to reflect on my experience of group work and my practice as a convener and facilitator. I wanted to better understand the essence of ‘this work’. Since then I’ve been travelling, writing, and participating in conversations about the craft of bringing people together in ways that support collective transformation. I’ve been sifting through the debris of my journey as a practitioner, and have sought the support of kind and generous colleagues to help me make sense of these experiences. The outcome of that sabbatical is this book and the ideas and possibilities it describes.

I have written this book primarily for people who bring people together for a living, so it assumes you have a professional practice to reflect on as you read. For those of you who are already deeply in the practice of group work, I salute you. This is not easy work to do. I greet you as a peer and welcome you as a fellow traveller.

However this is not a book for experts. This is a book for adventurers. When it comes to the unknown, we’re all beginners here. Hopefully the ideas contained in these pages are of interest to anyone who works in an organisation, lives in a community, is raising a family, or participates in circles of friendship and intimate relationship.

I don’t consider myself a perfect facilitator by any means, but I have done my ‘ten thousand hours’ and have learned a few things along the way about how groups work and don’t work. Whatever your level of experience and confidence, I hope you find the ideas contained in this book encouraging, nurturing, challenging, and stimulating for you and for your practice.

In writing this book I’ve made a deliberate effort to use simple and direct language to describe what I think makes collective transformation possible. The topic of group work is esoteric enough without any additional jargon and obfuscation on my part. As much as possible I have sought to demystify our work and to make the experience of group work as accessible, as straightforward, and as powerful as possible. Where necessary I have simply named the mystery for what it is.

After many years of professional practice I have come to the conclusion that we are only scratching the surface of what is possible when we gather together.

Our human capacity for connection, collaboration, and intersubjective communication continues to amaze me. As someone who grew up in a society where the dominant cultural narrative is that people are individuals who live separate and autonomous lives, I am excited about creating experiences of profound connection and collaboration. More than this, I am committed to supporting people to collaborate not only with each other, but with something larger than the group. Something extra-ordinary that we might call a ‘force for growth’.

This book describes what it takes to have a very different kind of human encounter and a very different quality of collective conversation: conversations that actively work with emergence and paradox and mystery. I want to share how I see this process working in the hope that you will find these ideas useful when you host your own groups, workshops, and gatherings. The world needs more people with the awareness and expertise to help mend our social fabric and support communities and organisations to reconnect with their sense of identity and purpose.

The good news is that our ancestors have been having these extra-ordinary conversations with one another for thousands of years. We are natural communicators. It’s part of who we are. What we need to do is remind each other that the metaphysical world exists, and we need to practice working in a transformational ritual context once again. The impulse towards the ‘sacred’ and the ‘spiritual’ is as old as we are. This book is as much about remembering something we seem to have forgotten as it is about creating anything new and innovative.

Whenever we bring people together and support them to rediscover the gift of authentic and transformational conversation, we are hosting a ritual of cultural renewal. We need to learn to trust in our innate human capacity for creativity, hospitality and generosity. Each time we gather together we have the opportunity to re-story and re-make the world. Hosting groups in this way is therefore both a profoundly conservative and nurturing act, and a profoundly radical and counter-cultural act. This paradox is just one of many that we will explore together in the coming pages.

Convening, facilitating, and participating in group work is not always an easy or comfortable experience. We have to learn how to show up and really engage, and this takes time and patience and attention. It also takes a deep commitment to learning how to cultivate and focus purpose, will, and intention. This means taking personal responsibility for the kinds of experiences we want to have and the outcomes that these desires create in our lives. When a group of people learns how to work with attention and intention, extra-ordinary things can and do happen.

I’ve written this book to clarify what I see as the essence of the group experience, and to describe the social processes we use when we gather together. The ideas and frameworks described in this book are like a compass to help you notice the most powerful and the most useful aspects of group work. Then you can guide yourself and your group to where you need to be and you can find your way home again if you get lost.

Ultimately ours is a practice of raising awareness and promoting a new kind of consciousness. We do this by helping people to notice things that were previously outside of their awareness and to take responsibility for aspects of their experience that they currently think are outside of their control. After years of doing this work, what I notice is that now I simply have access to more information than I used to. I can see and hear and feel what is happening in the group more than someone who is just starting out. But I still get it wrong all the time.

When I was a young person learning to make things out of wood, my father would often ask me, ‘what is the grain doing?’ I just saw a solid block of uniform substance. He saw a swirling collection of fibres. Once I could see the underlying structure I could ‘work with the grain’ and it all became easier and more enjoyable (and I got less splinters). So to help with this process of seeing the underlying structure of the group, I need to support you to pay attention to what is going on under the surface of the groups you are part of, and to notice what the grain is doing.

Once you can see the underlying structure of the group experience, new doorways and pathways for action become available. To help with this process of awareness raising the book describes a number of conceptual models, frameworks, and metaphors. These will help you navigate some of the more unknown – even unknowable – aspects of group work and transformational experience.

One of my favourite conceptual models was created by Stewart Brand and shared in his 1999 book The Clock of the Long Now. It tells a story about how different aspects of our experience happen at different ‘time scales’ or ‘speeds’. According to this model fashion is the fastest layer, it comes and goes like the seasons. To produce and deliver all this fashionable stuff we need commerce, which is slower because it is responding and adapting to what’s going on in the market. Then comes infrastructure, which is slower again because we have to get planning permission and build roads and lay cables and collect taxes. Next comes governance, which is even slower because we have to try and steer all this activity through policies and laws and elections. The kind of governance we have reflects our culture and our values and our sense of identity, which changes at a generational speed. Then comes nature which moves at ecological and geological time.

Diagram headed “Pace Layering” showing a section of six concentric circles

I am sharing this particular conceptual model right at the beginning of the book to describe where I see group work and collective transformation operating.

Most of my professional work – facilitating meetings and hosting workshops – happens up in the commerce, infrastructure, and governance layers. I enjoy this work, I think it’s good work to be doing, and it’s the kind of transactional group work that our current economy supports. However the kind of transformational group work that this book is about – participating in retreats and gatherings – happens deeper down, at the level of culture and nature, and at the interface between them.

Most groups and organisations cannot engage in this deeper kind of group experience because they just don’t have the time for it. In my experience this kind of group work is slower, stranger, and takes place largely outside of our current economic system. It is resourced by small groups of passionate and committed practitioners who are willing and able to step out of the world of business and busyness and work together to explore the deep places of human experience.

The other reason that groups and organisations avoid transformational group work is because authentic change threatens existing power relationships. It might be fashionable to talk about innovation and transformation, but few of us actually want to risk being different. That would require doing the hard work of culture-change ourselves. It’s those ‘other’ people over there that need to be different, right? When we participate in group work, we have to start from the premise that any meaningful change is going to start with us. I am not talking about personal growth for individuals. I am talking about collective and systemic changes to our organisational culture and our cultural worldview.

My own cultural lineage is European, however none of my ancestors have lived in Europe for over a century. I was born and raised in a beautiful land in the South Pacific called Aotearoa New Zealand. My ancestors came here as part of the English colonisation of the world in the 19th century. They were farmers and priests and surveyors and teachers and soldiers and mothers and fathers. And they brought to this land a whole set of assumptions about the world and what life is about.

A hundred years later I’m writing this book as someone who identifies as coming from a European cultural lineage. And I am largely writing this book for other people who, like me, also come from a modern European cultural context. I say this not from a desire to be exclusive but to acknowledge who I am and what my cultural biases are likely to be. I don’t claim that the ideas expressed in this book represent any sort of universal human truth. The story that I am telling here is specific to my place and time and culture of origin.

At its heart this is a book about how people who identify as coming from a European cultural lineage, or who identify as living in a modern or ‘metropolitan’ cultural paradigm, can step out of an unconscious relationship with the dominant culture and step into a more culturally self-aware experience of life. One that is more accountable and enabling.

One of the most powerful aspects of this modern cultural worldview is the idea that each of us is, or has, a ‘self’. This individual self is, or should be, constant, rational, autonomous, and separate. Participating in group work is transformative for modern people because it offers a first hand experience of a relational self that is dynamic, intuitive, collaborative, and connected. When we gather together we get to step out of a culturally constructed subjective consciousness and rediscover the intersubjective consciousness called the group.

Being part of a coherent collective awareness can feel like coming home. When we feel that we belong to a group or that we are part of a team, we are participating in an experience that is much closer to the collective social context that our ancestors evolved in over tens of thousands of years. The intersubjective consciousness of the group is simply more real for us than the relatively recent cultural narratives of ‘the self’ or ‘the society’ that we’ve been living with for a few hundred years.

When we gather together we have an opportunity to talk about and learn about and reinvent these dominant cultural narratives. When we do this together, the world and the meaning of the world becomes malleable. We get to renew our sense of who we are and what our life purpose is, and we get to do this at a scale and pace that is appropriate to our psychology and our physiology.

Participating in workshops and retreats and gatherings is how we remember and reclaim an intersubjective consciousness. As we remember how to create and recreate and inhabit our own unique collective identity, we begin to find our place in the world. We can sit down on the ground with humility as one relatively young cultural lineage amongst our cultural elders.

In describing this work I don’t claim to be an expert, just someone blessed with remarkable friends and mentors and elders. I’ve been fortunate enough to have taken some interesting journeys and had some powerful experiences. I’ve had the luxury of learning by doing, and the benefit of making lots of mistakes.

Growing up and living in Aotearoa New Zealand I have also had the great privilege of being influenced and nurtured by the indigenous Māori culture of this land. Māori people and Māori culture have had a profound impact on many aspects of my life and work. The ancestral wisdom of this vibrant, innovative, and sovereign people really is a taonga (treasure) beyond words. The traditional kawa (processes and practices) for gathering and the spirit of manaakitanga (hospitality and generosity) inform much of the cultural life, for those lucky enough to live here in Aotearoa New Zealand. These cultural practices are not mine to share, but I want to express gratitude to those friends, teachers, and mentors who have been so generous with their knowledge and who continue to care for the ongoing evolution of that wisdom today. Ngā mihi nui kia koutou katoa.

I was twelve years old when I attended my first gathering. I remember quite a lot about the flying fox and the playground equipment, and not much about the social process that was used, but I do remember people sitting in circle, and I do remember that it was 1984 and the group was talking about how they could influence the new government to make our country nuclear free. I also remember being intrigued about the venue which was a relatively new and purpose built retreat centre. It felt a bit institutional like a school, but it also felt different. More intentional. More relaxed. More possible.

My first adult experience of gathering was in 1995 when I participated in an event called the Heart Politics Summer Gathering. I became a regular participant in these events and for a few years served as coordinator. These retreats were held twice a year over five days, and when I was involved we used Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology as a social process. But these retreats also had years of lineage behind them which brought together traditional Māori ways of gathering, new age spirituality, organisational and community development practices, as well as people with amazing skills in group work, facilitation, counselling, and social work. This was a profound learning environment for me right through my thirties.

A group from this community established a parallel process that became known as the Stewardship Learning Community, inspired by Peter Block’s writing. We gathered for a week-long retreat every year using David Bohm’s Dialogue as a social process. I was actively involved in this group for eight years and have encountered only a few practice fields like it since. The experiences at that time were powerful for many reasons: the people involved, the design of the events, the venue, and so on. But what made them transformational was the quality of ‘space’ that we held together. In many ways, writing this book has been an opportunity for me to make sense of these formative experiences.

This book is a guide to hosting the extra-ordinary. It is not a book about personal development or individual psychology, although it touches on both. Neither is it a book about sociology or societal change, although those are often the desired outcomes of group work. It is about how we host spaces of deep connection and possibility for people, so they can experience collective transformation and intersubjective consciousness. Being together and talking to each other is the simplest and most human of activities, yet we’ve forgotten how special that gift is and how powerful it can be.

The gift of symbolic language is that it changes our mind. The more conscious and aware and intelligent we become, the more sophisticated our use of language and symbols and communication gets. This is the virtuous cycle, this is the gift. But now communication is ubiquitous and we are so very busy and the gift is everywhere (and therefore nowhere). We’re so focused on the content of our communication and getting what we want as an outcome, that we’ve forgotten the deeper process of transformational conversation that becomes possible when we gather together.

The shadow of our genius for symbolic language is all around us. Rather than people using stories and symbols to liberate and empower each other, the stories and symbols from our popular culture and political culture seem to proscribe and prescribe our experiences and increasingly define our reality. We’re prisoners of our fictions and fantasies and ideologies and worldviews. Nowadays we even have alternative facts and fake news.

I don’t know how this story will end. We may stay on our current trajectory and become more and more busy, more and more enmeshed in stories of apocalypse and the end of days. Perhaps we’ll continue to feed ourselves this toxic narrative until, sure enough, that future becomes a reality. Or perhaps we’ll remember the gift and how to use it. We might even figure out how to use it with skill and care and love. Love for each other and everything that lives, and even for the gift itself.

When a group approaches a gathering with the right quality of attention and intention, we can not only connect with each other, but with something deeper and more interesting that some authors have called ‘source’. Anyone who has been part of a high-functioning sports team or musical group or workplace knows the feeling of participating in this kind of shared ‘flow state’. These experiences are more like life itself, expressing itself, through the group.

Given the right conditions, groups of people can create extra-ordinary experiences of profound depth, power, and connection. More than just being capable of this, I believe we naturally tend towards doing so. We are self-transforming and self-transcending beings. There’s something in our physiology, in our cultural memory, and in language itself, that we might call a ‘force for growth’. It moves us, and even guides us, towards intimacy with each other and with the whole. This book is about how we create those conditions for ourselves and for each other. It is about the practice of hosting rituals of cultural renewal.

So, welcome to this book. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that it challenges you and provokes you and offers you clarity and possibility. I hope it encourages and supports you in your practice of convening, facilitating, and participating in group work and collective transformation. Most of all, I hope it leads you to new adventures, and to many strange and wonderful experiences.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise.

Emily Dickinson (c.1860)

Orientation

Circles of Practice

The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?

Peter Block (2008)

If we were gathering in person, this might be called an orientation session. We would go through the programme, talk about how we wanted to work together, deal with any logistics, set some guidelines for how we wanted to treat each other, and so on. This is harder to do in a book, but at least I can share some of the thinking about how the book is structured and how you might like to engage with it.

This book offers a comprehensive guide to hosting transformational group work and rituals of cultural renewal. To do this it describes a conceptual structure or a theory of knowledge in Part One, a methodological process or a theory of practice in Part Two, and an explanation of the content of transformational group work, or a theory of action and experience in Part Three. Together these three dimensions add up to a coherent way of being that I think is the essence of transformational group work.

I see the three parts of this book as a series of concentric circles. Rather than moving through them one after the other, I invite you to imagine stepping further and further into an experience. Each part of the book is contained by the previous part and opens onto the next. In this way I hope we might get to ‘the heart of the matter’ together before we run out of pages and reach the end of the book. This is a journey to the centre.

Obviously we will move through the pages of the book one after the other, because that’s how time and language and the written word work. However you are of course welcome to just drop in and out of this book at random, and make your own sequence and sense from it. It’s not so linear that you cannot treat it this way too. However you approach it, I hope you find it stimulating and enriching.

This is very much a book of ideas. And it’s pretty ‘rich’ in that many big ideas are introduced in each chapter. So I suggest that you read the book in small doses, maybe one chapter or even one section at a time. And rather than trying to track all the various influences and contributors, I suggest that you let the ideas wash over you and just follow those threads that feel most relevant to you and your work.

To help us better understand and navigate the potential of group work, we need to start paying more attention to our interactions with one another than is required of us in everyday life and work. This transition is going to require a lot of conceptual scaffolding, which will mainly take the form of distinctions. A distinction is a fancy way of saying this, not that. Until we can distinguish one aspect of the group experience from another, it is hard for us to notice either aspect, let alone work intentionally with them to enhance the experience of the group.

Our first distinction should be between the theory of how a ‘perfect group’ is supposed to behave, and the actual messy, lived experience of being part of a group of warm, breathing, imperfect human beings who are making it up as they go along. I’m a big fan of frameworks and you’ll encounter many of them if you persist with reading this book. But a map is not reality; it’s a simplified and codified representation of reality. That’s what makes maps so useful – they remove the complexity so we can focus on those details that are most interesting and important to us.

This is not a book about how to host the perfect gathering. It is a book about how to have authentic and transformative experiences together. It is a book about getting messy. However, ‘messy’ is one thing but ‘completely lost’ is another. We want to be able to move into the unknown in a way that makes these new experiences as positive as possible. To do that we need some structure and some process to help guide us through all the content.

Each of the three parts, or circles, is based on a key distinction in the practice of group work:

Part one of this book is called ‘Atmospheres’ and describes the relational field or metaphysical space that we create when we gather with sufficient attention and intention. For me this metaphysical space provides the structure that makes transformational group work possible. As a convenor it is not just the logistics and the physical requirements of the group that I need to have in mind. I also have to make this metaphysical structure available to the group. Part one is