What works?
As Yellow enters its third year it is timely to reflect on what it is that has worked.
We have been asking ourselves what have we done (on purpose or by accident) that has contributed to the rich responses and high level of engagement we have had from such a wide variety of people.
Three things immediately spring to mind.
Tiny group size (six people in a group).
Non-porous boundaries (you know who is in the group).
Screen mediated, not screen based (its still a real experience).
Not small, but tiny
A year or so ago, a friend in South Africa told me that on-line, she insisted on working with ‘small’ groups. For her ‘small’ was twenty or thirty. This alerted me to the fact that Yellow isn’t small: it’s tiny.
In business schools and organisations, there is pressure to work with dozens of participants, or more. Very few people work at the level of scale we do. Yet the intimacy afforded by a group of six cannot be replicated at a larger scale (however many break-out groups you build in).
A tiny group can be held lightly, enabling individual concerns and responses space to surface at their own rhythm and to shape what we do. Silence is easier to allow and hold. People can connect to each other more deeply and more quickly. All of which makes it energising, rather than tiring, for participants (and for us). Being tiny is a big part of that.
Who is coming to dinner?
Knowing who will be there also makes a big difference. When I attend an on-line session, I normally don’t know who will be there, so I find myself devoting a large chunk of my attention and energy to navigating and negotiating the relationships and finding a way to be in this particular group.
In Yellow, you know who is going to be there. You get to know and value each other’s energy and perspective, so that on the rare occasions one individual isn’t there, you miss them. This ‘non-porous’ boundary creates a whole, which generates trust and allows people to share and connect in powerful ways. Very early on in Yellow people spoke of how it created a sense of ‘psychological safety’. Much of that comes from knowing who will be there.
Via the screen not on the screen
Yellow happens via Zoom, not on Zoom. We think of it as a somatic experience that each person has in their own physical space, which happens to be mediated via technology.
This means our designs embrace a lot of embodied work. We use movement and gesture, dance and improv. We get people to eat food, or make things with their hands. We have done ‘messy art’ and table top constellations with objects. Indeed, the technology can disinhibit (we once had people dance "like a piece of spaghetti"). The small, known group helps this. When people say “I would be interested if it weren’t online” they are missing this.
Have an experience first, then make sense of it
Each of these started out as hunches. We didn’t know it would work this way, but by paying attention and using reflection and reason to do what they do best – make sense of experience – you can (retrospectively) see what works. Or, to be more accurate, what has worked so far.
It remains to be seen whether it will continue to work in this way. But only more experience will tell us that and as we turn to what is coming, we find ourselves, once again, fumbling our way forward, not knowing what might arise. Which is a big part of why we do this.
