Experiential night in Brixton

the start
so the day came. there were 3 maybes (sonia ali, alex balerdi and alex n), and one definite - mamading.
in the end there was myself, alex n, alex b, mamading and hannah.
hannah had been at the hive and found out it was happening and asked if she could join. we welcomed her and briefly shared the idea of it. she said that she would only put the £20 in if she felt motivated to. we accepted that as she had only just found out about the night. so there we sat in the meeting room at the hive and £80 sitting on the table. was a funny experience in itself.

half an hour
it was 7.15 now and we gave ourselves half an hour, with a 15 min buffer time to decide something. alex b suggested we start by putting forward our assumptions about the night. This was good, as people were clearer about what they were here for and how they might like to spend the money.
alex b wanted to do something meaningful - and perhaps initiate something that could continue after this night. he said that for him that networks often just seem to be very -in the moment - and nothing builds.
mamading straight away suggested going to a local club to do a social intervention. he suggested we could spend some money on some props and as an example all buy guy fawkes masks and go into the club and engage people about second chamber reform :-)
alex n suggested we do something fun - like all go and have a haircut. less emphasis on the meaningful so as to keep it light.
i was up for a social intervention. i was also up for not putting the money to a future thing as this would tend to make the group focus on another time in the future and not in doing something together now.
hannah was not so clear about what she wanted. She had not had many assumptions as she had only just heard about it.
oh- some people were hungry. i had not prepared food as i wanted to keep the event as simple as possible. so we all did agree that the first thing we should do is go and eat and we also all agreed to use the money in the middle (hannah had put £20 in the middle too) to eat. (assuming there would be a good amount left over still to decide on)
i realise that i am recounting all that happened. i am not sure actually that i want to do that. it would be very long as i also have my thoughts and reflections on what happened.
ok- more summarised and reflective: the dynamics were interesting. mamading and my energy were more extrovert... wanting to jump in and engage socially externally. alex n and hannah were slightly more introvert...less sure about the specific club and the context.. and were partly up for it. we then suggested a context that would not be so loud so we settled on the south bank, after getting somethign to eat. alex b afterward said he felt in the middle of the 2 pairs... and over dinner our seating pattern also reflected this dynamic. ;-)

decision making tools
we used the thumb signs a few times to check where the group was and to see if we had a decision. (thumbs up=yes, thumbs down =no, thumb sideways =not sure).
on hindsight - mamading said that we could have voted more often. I agree.. and it makes me think of taking the temperature of the group more often.

it did help that the group of people who gathered were all quite gentle, considerate people. no one seemed keen to impose their will. on the downside the lack of imposition also contributed to us not having done anything together apart from eat. however, my ideal would be that we dont arrive at a decision because of imposition. But that we do arrive because we manage to act as one.

there were some ideas however that did arise that could happen in the future. One of them is alex B's idea based on V for Vendetta of showing silent power of the collective to the powers that be. i will let him write about that as he can put the full picture forward. alex nick showed interest in that idea and i would be up for doing something to move that forward to. my thumbs were up more for ideas that we could do there and then this evening but i realise that is only one way of aligning action.. to something in the moment.. but on the other hand it could be valid to align toward a future action.

dinner
by the time we got to the meal and sat down it was 8.30 i think. we did not finish eating till 9. 15 or so. we realised that by the time we got to the south bank it would be 10pm which was the cut off time. we had joked about that the revolution can't happen on a full stomach. and lo and behold.. when people had eaten there was less energy to go and do a social intervention. so food kind of stumped it. we reflected a lot together on the challenge of decision making in groups. we acknowledged that it had not been easy but that the point was to practice it. and the food was lovely :-) we had some pudding too.

my reflection
i was very glad to have intitiated it. for me it was a process anyhow of coming out of my hibernation bubble. i loved the notion of not knowing who would turn up if anyone at all. i think another time i will suggest that we eat before hand and maybe i will provide nibbles. Food is a difficult thing to schedule - you cant really hurry the process up when it starts :D. we spent £79 on food! it was a lovely meal and great discussion and i guess we had actually all agreed to eat so in some way you could call it a great success! in a way i was left with an unsatisfied urge to go out and engage with peeople as a collective. but the experience of witnessing the group, as a participant was slightly more important to me. i.e how we work together.. rather than whether or not we do the thing i wanted to do. i tried very much to be in participant mode.. not in any kind of facilitation mode. so that it is really really about the collective growing in capacity. not facilitated.

parameters
Alex n at one point said how about if we havent reached consensus on how to spend the money by the end of the evening then we burn it! i actually quite liked this idea and it might have had some take-up but we thought it should be something that is set up at the beginning of the evening. Which brings me to the parameters. I would next time set it up so that we had eaten and with some kind of tighter parameters so there is more incentive to actually do something together that same evening.
mamading and i reflected that it would be up to each experiential night initiator to set up the parameters according to their own idea for the evening. in that way each experiential night is unique.
i would like tighter parameters so that we get better at collectively moving as one.... that we find a way to follow each others' ideas. that we find a way to bring out the best ideas in a group together.. all in real time... with no preparation.. that we can self organise and get confident that we can do so. also that it is a new group each time and that this stucture - the group - does not form.. it lives for the 3 hours and then it dies. i like this idea and practice very much. I think that therefore this is the parameter that i should set up beforehand. Mamading mentioned afterwards about how each experiential night is unique. we spoke about future experiential nights and i will leave mamading to write his thoughts about that as we discussed it quite a lot in the evening afterwards back at the flat.

ok. i could say more but will stop there! i hope the others add their own experiences.