The Conversation Phase represents the foundational group-phase of development within decentralized networks, characterized by open exploration, idea generation, and relationship building. During this phase, potential collaborators gather around areas of shared interest to explore possibilities before formal structures or commitments are established. The primary goal is to establish shared context, build relationships, and develop a collective vision that can inspire and guide future collaboration.
When the conversation phase is complete, a group is ready to move on to the formation phase.
Key Characteristics
- Shared Vision Formation: Conversations gradually crystallize around a common understanding of purpose, creating the foundation for purpose alignment that will guide the group’s evolution through subsequent phases.
- Relationship Building: This phase prioritizes building trust, understanding diverse perspectives, and establishing the social foundations upon which more structured collaboration can later emerge.
- Team Self-Selection This phase is an opportunity for people to self-select themselves as conversational participants. As the conversation phase progresses people with interest, capabilities, and capacity can start to shape the group that will take an idea forward.
- Informal Processes: Processes are typically informal and adaptable. The emphasis is on flexibility and responsiveness to emerging ideas and insights. The group may identify as a squad or some other informal group type.
- Emergent Direction: Rather than following predetermined paths, groups in this phase allow direction to emerge organically through dialogue, discovering areas of resonance and energy within the collective.
- Cognitive Diversity: The conversation phase benefits from diverse perspectives, allowing for a richer exploration of possibilities and the identification of approaches that might not be visible from any single viewpoint. <<<<<<< HEAD
- Permissionless Exploration: Participants engage without requiring formal authority or approval, embodying the concept of minimum viable permissionless-ness where anyone can identify an opportunity and begin working on it. =======
- Permissionless Exploration: Participants engage without requiring formal authority or approval, embodying the concept of minimum viable permissionless-ness where anyone can identify an opportunity and begin working on it.
4152b0269c40331be2a5ff23ee4126dc2b3e8c6d
Functional Elements
Activities
- Collective Sense-making: Participants work together to understand contexts, challenges, and opportunities from multiple perspectives, creating a richer understanding of the problem or opportunity space.
- Idea Generation: Open brainstorming and divergent thinking generate a broad range of possibilities before convergence on specific directions.
- Lightweight Experimentation: Small, low-commitment tests to explore the viability of ideas or approaches provide learning without requiring formal structure.
- Network Weaving: Identifying and connecting relevant skills, experiences, and resources that might contribute to the emerging purpose.
Navigating Challenges
- Maintaining Momentum: Keeping engagement without formal structure requires intentional facilitation and regular touchpoints.
- Balancing Divergence and Convergence: Groups must navigate between exploring new possibilities and focusing enough to make progress.
- Addressing Power Dynamics: Even in early, informal stages, power imbalances can shape who speaks, what ideas gain traction, and how the group orients.
- Overcoming Coordination Barriers: Cultural differences, geographic distribution, and varying levels of context can create friction in establishing shared understanding.
- Overcoming Legacy Organizational Thinking: Members can often habitually defer to higher authority in the organizational structure.
- Challenging Conflict Avoidance: As a conversation phase group starts to define its purpose, group members can avoid reconciling differences in perspective and approach in an effort to maintain group harmony. This leads to a failure to make decisions, poor strategy and future (more harmful) conflict.
- Failure to close down conversation that are not progressing: Groups can have a tendency not “call it” when an idea is not progressing. This leads to wasted time and energy that could be re-directed to ideas that have more potential.
Signs of Readiness for Evolution
A conversation phase group may be ready to evolve to a more structured formation phase when:
- Clear energy and commitment emerge around specific well defined directions or ideas
- Participants express readiness to make concrete contributions toward shared goals
- The need for more defined roles and processes becomes apparent to enable effective coordination
- Resources or other forms of coordination are required that entail making a proposal to the wider community, that will require group formalization.
Tools and Practices
Communication Infrastructure
No specific communication infrastructure is necessary but utilizing platforms that offer different modes of communication is recommended.
- Synchronous Dialogue Spaces: Regular video calls or in-person gatherings create high-bandwidth connection points for relationship building and complex ideation.
- Asynchronous Discussion Forums: Platforms that enable ongoing, time-shifted conversation allow for participation across time zones and schedules and also create an easy way for members of the community to discover conversation phase projects to contribute to.
- Collaborative Document Editing: Shared workspaces where multiple participants can contribute to evolving ideas and maintain a collective memory.
- Visual Collaboration Tools: Digital whiteboards and mapping software that help visualize relationships between ideas and identify patterns.
Group Facilitation Approaches
- Generative Facilitation: Approaches that help draw out diverse perspectives and build upon each other’s ideas rather than creating debate dynamics. Some potential approaches can be found in sense-making-facilitation-tools
- Check-in Practices: Regular reflection points for participants to share their current thinking, energy, and capacity to engage.
- Documentation Rituals: Light-weight practices for capturing key insights, decisions, and open questions to maintain collective memory.
- Diverge-Converge Cycles: Alternating between expansive thinking (generating options) and focusing (making sense of what’s emerging).
- Progress sharing: Using tools like AI meeting summary bots and then posting meeting notes in public channels help community members to see what progress is being made and where they might be able to contribute to a group’s progress.
- Utilizing formal processes: Documents like experiment-facilitation-framework can support a conversation phase team to move an idea forward from broad starting point, to something that can be formally proposed and moved forward.
Success Indicators
A conversation phase has been successful when:
- Shared Purpose: A clear, compelling articulation of shared purpose has emerged that resonates with participants
- Trust Foundation: Relationships characterized by trust and mutual understanding have been established
- Collective Knowledge: Diverse perspectives have been integrated into a richer understanding of the context and possibilities
- Natural Next Steps: Clear energy and direction for moving forward becomes apparent without forced consensus
- Emerging Agreements: Initial lightweight agreements about how the group will work together start to form
The conversation phase is not merely a preliminary step but a vital foundation for authentic, purpose-aligned collective action. When done well, it establishes the conditions for groups to evolve organically into more structured forms while maintaining the alignment, relationships, and generative energy that gives decentralized networks their unique advantages.