The Assembly Trap
By: Beth Sanders
Tags: Art Of Hosting, Learning, Community, Community Engagement, Meetings

The Assembly Trap

While the expert trap tricks us into thinking we are in conversation, the assembly trap tricks us into thinking we are a community Beth Sanders Dec 9, 2020·8 min read

The expert trap

To explore the assembly trap, we first need to acknowledge the expert trap: when we find ourselves needing to be the expert or defer to others’ expertise. There is a time and place for expertise, like when we need to hear from public health officials about required actions to stay healthy in a pandemic. (They have the expertise we do not and clear instructions for us to stay healthy. In this setting, questions of clarification make sense.)

My caution is this: we do not always need to defer to others’ expertise or require others to defer to our expertise. One way to recognize this pattern of ours is to notice the “expert shape” of our meetings, where we go from meeting to meeting as the expert or expecting to receive information from experts.

When caught in the expert trap, we are either the experts on the stage providing the answers or the audience expecting others to have the answers for us, AND thinking that we are conversation.

Here’s the difference: in expert mode, we meet to provide or receive instructions, to tell rather than discern.

In expert mode, we put one or a few people on a stage, and the rest of us listen. When we are not speaking with each other, we are not in a conversation. When we are listening to others talking to each other, we are not in a conversation. We learn great things in these settings, yet we do not connect our ideas and ourselves — because we are not in contact with each other. We design processes in “expert meetings” to keep us — and our ideas — separate from each other. We do this to keep the experts at the podium, the audience a crowd hungry for the expert’s words.

The assembly trap

While the expert trap tricks us into thinking we are in conversation, the assembly trap tricks us into thinking we are a community.

Community of shared interest

A quick caveat: a community of shared interest is a community. People who arrive at a conference, whether it be in person or online, may have a sense of community. People who live in the same city have a sense of community or do the same kind of work or explore the same news media.

A community of shared interest is primarily uni-directional; the lines of learning relationships are singular, from the shared interest to each of us in the audience. Someone may invite the audience to write letters to the editor or write in an online platform’s chat function. Opportunities are not provided for the audience to connect in substantive ways.

We remain separate, even if there are many of us.

Community surrounding a shared interest

In the expert trap, we leave connections between “the people out there” to chance. At a conference I attended last year, the organizers added more time to the coffee breaks to provide more space in the program for networking. At a series of gatherings held online this year, the organizers turned on Zoom’s chat function, so people to chatter away during the events. These two strategies create conditions for people to make contact, but they leave meaningful connections to chance. It’s like dating people at random, without first knowing a bit of basic information about personality or shared interests; there’s no resonance check.

I’ve been in several 6–9 month online learning environments over the last few years where the expert, the person we gather to learn from, bundles us up in pods or pairs to learn together throughout the class. Instructors often limit our interactions with each other to these small groups, never mixing us up and giving us a chance to get to know each other. Out of 20 people, I only got to know at most five others in a meaningful way; the additional 15 I regularly saw on our calls but had only snippets of contact. Our experience remained in the realm of a “small ‘c’ community” because the energy of our relationship was between experts and audience. There is more than a singular line of communication, but the interconnections are limited.

The best that can happen from this scenario is that the community organizes itself despite the limitations offered by those who put up the maypole (conference or event organizers, for example).

Increase interaction

When we gather with little or no interaction between most participants, we learn in isolation from a few sources and remain in isolation from each other. As a whole, we learn, but our separateness is a constraint — even when we are in the same room.

When we create the conditions for interaction when we gather, we amplify our learning as individuals and collectively. Instead of learning some (on our own, in parallel), we learn more (together, as a community.)

When we foster interconnection, we foster a whole new field of awareness. We create the conditions for more conscious action. We also increase our sense of belonging and connection with each other.

Community of belonging

We experience a sense of belonging when we find people who share our interests. It could be a knitting group, activist group, a community garden, sports team or meditation group. When we find people who have similar interests and values as us, it feels good. There’s a release that may come with finding people like us if we have been waiting to feel belonging for a long time. When we “find people like us,” it is vital to our sense of identity and self. It feels good.

The “feel good” feeling lulls us into the assembly trap. Because it feels good, we think that community is what we are experiencing and that there is no more community work to do. But there’s more to feeling belonging than shared interest: are we meeting our deepest needs for connection? Are we meeting each other’s needs? When we design gatherings to isolate ourselves from each other, we do not meet our needs for connection.

When we design gatherings to isolate ourselves from each other, we do not meet our needs for connection.

When we feel connected through a shared interest, it is essential to notice if we are connected to only that shared interest, not to each other. The expert trap keeps us separate from each other with a clear separation of speaker and audience — and audience members from each other. The expert trap keeps us from finding and meeting each other, from activating the expertise of many because we rely on a few’s expertise.

What if we scaled up the benefits of having shared interests?

Imagine a community of belonging, where we make vast networks of connections across everyone in the room (online or in-person). It might look like this:

Yes, we have a shared interest behind the scenes. We have pockets of people we know quite well. In addition, we foster interconnections among us, activating the expertise of many.

To foster interconnections among us, experiment with designing conversational methodologies with participatory leadership in mind. Here are my favourites:

The Art of Hosting

World Cafe

Open Space Technology

The Circle Way

If we’re not a community, we are not self-organizing

The above methodologies all have an explicit purpose: create the conditions for people to find and meet each other and discern collective insight. They activate the expertise of many. And it is from this collective that self-organizing — consistent with a shared sense of direction — emerges that fosters actions that are a coherent collection. There are interconnections between people and the work we do.

Here’s a message we tell ourselves: that because we have gathered, we are self-organizing. A group of people with similar interests is a group with similar interests. Some may be taking action, but if the group has not identified its own sense of direction (not that provided the experts or convenors), it is not self-organizing. It is a group of people taking independent action.

What does it take to enable self-organizing?

With a shared sense of direction, a community of belonging offers coherence, a “maypole” to which we align our efforts. Here are a few points of entry into self-organizing work (in no particular order):

Identify an explicit, shared purpose

Explore how to work toward that shared purpose

Learn about participatory leadership methodologies

Find and meet people who share your interest to enable self-organizing

Start with a community of shared interest

Shift out of the expert and assembly traps

Design gatherings in ways that promote interconnections and collective discernment (the methodologies above are an excellent place to start)

Monitor the ways the expert and assembly traps creep in, always (never let up)

Identify and offer minimal critical structure to support the group to do its work (facilitation processes, documentation, administration)

A challenge: How big is your belonging?

We often find ourselves in the expert and assembly traps because we want to maintain control of messages, who speaks, who does not speak, etc. It is exclusive. To shift out of these traps, we must acknowledge apower shift.

We know what it feels like not to belong, to feel left out or excluded. Communities have rules, written and unwritten, about who belongs: skin colour, affluence, language, skills, etc. For any self-organizing endeavour, it is crucial to contemplate how you plan on making room for people who don’t seem to belong from your perspective but feel called to do similar work.

The question: How do we welcome and include outsiders? When do boundaries helpful or harmful to our identities as individuals and groups? How big can our sense of belonging be? What new perspectives will make our work more complete, more meaningful?

If you find it challenging to welcome outsiders, remember that the old way of meeting keeps ideas — and us — in a box. We hear about ideas, but we do not generate new ideas in collective space. Welcoming the discomfort that comes with new ideas is a powerful, missed opportunity.

It’s the discomfort that comes with connection: the work that now needs our attention.