Charlie's notebook

Get Together Yet Again

Continuing this series of reviews of 7 Cups' community building course based on the book Get Together, this review is about Chapters 3 and 4. The topics covered are getting people talking, and attracting new people to the group.

This time 7 Cups' course includes some of the examples from the book, and I think this is a big improvement.

Amusingly, the illustration for the 7 Cups version of Chapter 3 has also been used to advertise a brand of powdered milk:

But never mind. The illustrations in the course are purely decorative, while the few illustrations in the book relate directly to the real-life stories the book tells. The course again omits the link to the book's website where you can read about the real-life examples and watch videos.

Curiously, the course does provide links to two videos by Marshall Ganz, How to Tell a Story and Public Narrative, but the book references a different video by him, When did you start thinking of yourself as a leader? (3 minutes), which I think is well worth watching.

The videos mentioned in 7 Cups' course seem to relate to Ganz's socialist political activism, while the video mentioned in the book seems to be politically neutral. I was disappointed to see 7 Cups sneak a partisan political viewpoint into the course by switching videos, even though Ganz is a good speaker who has a lot of interesting things to say.

The course also deviates from the book by mentioning AA. It doesn't explain what AA means, but I suppose it means Alcoholics Anonymous. In the UK, most people would assume AA means the Automobile Association, whose AA logo is well known, and whose yellow vans are seen patrolling the roads to provide assistance in case of breakdowns.

Alcoholics Anonymous is not mentioned in the book. 7 Cups added it. I think this was a mistake. No one says to their friends, "Come and join AA. Being an alcoholic is such fun!" AA is very different from the communities of practice in the book, and I'm sure this is why the book doesn't mention it.

There are significant omissions in the section about collecting shareable stories for the community. In the book there are three types:

1. In-person experiences
2. Training or learning
3. Contributing and sharing content

7 Cups removed 1 and 2. This seems really strange, because in-person experiences are at the heart of what 7 Cups is about, and training or learning is also very common at 7 Cups.

In the quiz for this part of the course there's a major error affecting two of the questions. The book and the course both say:

The goal of structure is to focus conversations (including the hard ones!) on the unique ideas that your community wants to explore together. To find the right balance, work with your early members on simple ground rules that describe how your community will both address and work through conflicts that occur in your discussion space.

The quiz misquotes this:

To focus conversations on the ideas your community wants to explore, you'll need to set ground rules that describe how your community will both address and work through conflicts that occur in your discussion space.

See what happened there? First the word "together" disappeared. Then the words "work with your early members on" got changed to "you'll need to set". It's changed from being (in the book) a leader collaborating with the community, to (at 7 Cups) a leader telling the community what to do. This is exactly the problem that Ganz's video (the one in the book) refers to.

The misquote makes the answer to one of the quiz questions wrong, and also affects the following question (but not its answer). It also goes against the other new training initiative at 7 Cups that's been announced, on servant leadership, which will be aimed at correcting authoritarian styles of leadership within 7 Cups.

This second part of the course seems to confirm that 7 Cups is picking some ideas from the book and rejecting others. I'm a little concerned that the end result might not be what was hoped for back in January. As an introduction to getting people talking and attracting new members it provides a bunch of good ideas, though.

Charlie

Mind Hacking

Someone recently suggested I read this strange book, which is really a website, Mind Hacking, but the website is also published as a book in case you like books. You can pay for the book if you like paying for books. Or you can find an online version for free. Or you can just read the website. And there's an app if you like apps, but I haven't tried the app.

The idea of mind hacking is that you can take control of your mind, a little like a computer hacker takes control of a computer. This is a weird idea.

For one thing, it assumes that the "you" who is doing the hacking and "your mind" are separate things. And indeed the book states precisely this:

You are not your mind.

But it provides no evidence. The idea actually somes from the 17th Century French philosopher René Descartes, or earlier, but the book doesn't acknowledge this. Descartes claimed that being conscious of your own mind proves you have a soul, and it's your soul that is the real "you" observing your mind.

Anyway, to justify this weird idea the book invites the reader to:

Close your eyes and think about your own mind for just a moment.

Then it goes on for a while about this and that. But of course when you close your eyes and think about your own mind, you are just imagining a mind. In your imagination, it's perfectly possible to think that you and this imaginary mind are separate things. But that doesn't mean you and your real mind actually are separate things. You're only imagining it.

So, in your imagination, you can become an imaginary hacker and hack your imaginary mind. That's what the rest of the book turns out to be about.

The most obvious thing about the book is that it's full of stories about the early days of personal computers, and about some of the characters from back in those days who turned out, in the long run, to be famous. It obviously doesn't mention all the characters from back in those days who turned out, in the long run, not to be famous.

The book claims that all these famous people became famous because they were mind hackers. But, for all we know, many of those other people who didn't become famous might have been mind hackers too.

Mind hacking itself turns out to be a collection of well-known self-improvement techniques. The book links each technique loosely to computer programming.

For example, in programming there are things called loops, and many self-help books encourage positive self-talk, so this book mixes up the two unrelated ideas and invents "positive thought loops". The same chapter also claims that Benjamin Franklin was a mind hacker, by the way.

In my opinion the idea that you are not your mind makes no sense in reality. In imagination, fine. In reality, not useful at all.

The biggest problem with it is that if you imagine you are not your mind, and then you "hack" this imaginary mind in some way, the mind you've just hacked isn't real. It isn't you.

Therefore you cannot possibly change your real self using these methods. If you try really, really hard you can create an imaginary self who you imagine is better in some way than your real self. But if you go that far you just end up living in a fantasy world. In psychological jargon you end up no longer authentic.

Psychology Dictionary says:

AUTHENTICITY

1. the quality of being genuine and true to one's own values

I searched the entire book for the word authentic and it's not there. Seems like the author wasn't too concerned about authenticity.

So, on the whole I wouldn't recommend this book unless you'd like to read some very simplified stories about early computers. Avoid taking the rest of it too seriously. Some of the self-help techniques are OK in themselves, but they have nothing to do with hacking.

Charlie

Get Together once more

Third in this series of reviews of 7 Cups' community building course based on the book Get Together, this review is about Chapters 5 and 6.

This part of the course continues to include some examples from the book, which I think is helpful. And this time, for the first time, the quiz doesn't suffer from any confusing misquotes.

Chapter 5 is about cultivating a shared identity, based on badges, rituals and language.

The course claims that at 7 Cups we do a pretty good job with badges and language, so the only thing we need to do is think up some rituals. I think this shows poor understanding of what the book is really saying.

In the case of badges, the course mentions the Listener Oath badge and the barely-known PB badge as examples, but these badges are not awarded to cultivate shared identity among the badge-holders. In neither case are the badge-holders a group that gets together and does something together. These badges, and the others mentioned in the course, have very different purposees from the badges the book is describing.

In the case of language the course notes, correctly of course, that we do have some special language at 7 Cups. But the special language we have tends not to be used by communities or teams to cultivate shared identity. More often, it has the effect of excluding newbies who don't know what the jargon means. How many people reading this, I wonder, know what PB means in the paragraph above? (Answer here.)

Curiously, the course claims:

When you see a 7 Cupper/Cupser even outside the site, there is instantly a connection and you feel the need to introduce yourself and say hello!

Really? I think that's just odd. In fact, offsite contact is strongly discouraged. If you go around wearing your 7 Cups T-shirt and you see someone else wearing a 7 Cups T-shirt, it's never been completely clear that introducing yourself is actually allowed.

Chapter 6 is about tracking metrics, knowing who is committed, and recovering from missteps.

In the book, one section of this chapter is about zeroing in on the individuals who are most engaged in a community of volunteers. This is us! 7 Cups is a community of volunteers!

But the course omits this section

From the book:

As philosopher Simone Weil once said, Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Pay attention to, acknowledge, and listen to your core group. These [ultra-engaged volunteers] are passionate people, who will likely delight in the chance to get more involved. Passing the torch to the folks who are raising their hands is how youll multiply your efforts as a leader and grow together as a community.

The course doesn't include any of this advice about "passing the torch". At 7 Cups those in charge are to remain in charge.

In the section on recovering from missteps, the language has been weakened throughout. The book mentions the possibilities of "fear and distrust", of being "under more scrutiny than normal" and of "damaging relationships beyond repair", but in the course these considerations have been removed.

After describing three initial steps: taking ownership quickly, being transparent, and going deep with community members, the book tells us:

[T]he final step is to internalize what youve learned from the experience. You hit a nerve with your community, and in doing so unearthed something that you didnt know your people were sensitive about. To avoid another challenging situation, allow the knowledge of this sensitivity to inform future decisions that affect your community, and to guide how youll communicate those changes.

But in the course this final step is missing.

This third part of the course continues to diverge from the book in subtle ways that will have the effect of reinforcing the status quo at 7 Cups. It makes me even more concerned that little may be learned from the entire exercise.

Charlie

Get Together yet again

The fourth in this series of reviews of 7 Cups' community building course, based on the book Get Together, is about Chapters 7 and 8.

Helpful examples from the book have again been included, and this time I didn't spot any significant omissions. But this time there were several unfortunate errors in the quiz.

We've seen this kind of thing before. When text from the course is reproduced in the quiz it needs to be copied and pasted without modification. Otherwise questions based on the text may become ambiguous.

And in multiple-choice questions the options need to be more carefully checked, so that the choices intended to be marked true really are the only choices that are true (and similarly for the false choices).

Chapter 7 is about distributed leadership.

Distributed leadership depends on moving away from the idea of a leadership hierarchy, towards identifying and empowering the small set of extra-passionate people who will push the group forward and expand what's possible. To quote the book (and the course):

Growing a community isnt about management. Its about developing leaders…

Dont bend to fears of losing control!

On 7 Cups, however, leadership tends to be strictly hierarchical and controlling, and almost all about management. That's OK, in a way, because 7 Cups hasn't got around to implementing the ideas in the book yet. But I think it means this section of the course has an uneasy relationship with reality. 7 Cups could learn much from this chapter but the course doesn't encourage it.

Chapter 8 is about supporting community leaders.

The general idea is to identify where leaders need support right from the start, prioritize their most valuable activities, and provide resources that make their work for the community easier.

The course ends this chapter by misquoting Hadley Ferguson, a co-founder and Executive Director of of EdCamp. (It also misspells her name consistently, in three places, as "Hedly Fregusan"!)

The book comments:

[T]he art of supporting volunteers lies in balancing structure and freedom.

Then the actual quote is:

When you challenge people to step up into leadership roles, give just enough structure to make it possible for them to take up the challenge.

And then the book comments again:

With structure new leaders gain confidence, with freedom they embrace ownership.

You can see that Hedley Ferguson spoke about structure; the book added comments about freedom.

Unfortunately, the course mentions 7 Cups' Intern Mentor/Teen Star Guide as an example, and it's plain to see that this guide doesn't describe a leadership role at all, just a list of administrative tasks. All structure, no freedom, and therefore no ownership.

These two chapters of the book conflict somewhat with traditions of leadership on 7 Cups, but the course hides the conflict. I think this is disappointing. The reason Get Together was introduced into 7 Cups in the first place was to help 7 Cups to grow as a community. Resistance to the ideas in the book might feel comfortable and safe in the short term, but it won't help 7 Cups in the long term.

Charlie

Bowling Alone

I can highly recommend the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam, about the collapse (mainly) of community in the US in the last decades of the 20th Century:

The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

Using the term social capital to mean the way people get together in groups to make society function, the book brings impressively broad and thorough historical and contemporary research to life with a wealth of anecdotal illustrations and careful analysis.

This is highly relevant to 7 Cups, of course, where what we do in our community fits right in with the subject of the book in so many ways.

However, the book quotes researcher Robert Wuthnow's warnings about self-help groups. This is so relevant to 7 Cups that I've expanded the quote to include more of the original text from Wuthnow's Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and the Quest for a New Community:

Community is what people say they are seeking when they join small groups. Yet the kind of community they create is quite different from the communities in which people have lived in the past. These communities are more fluid and more concerned with the emotional states of the individual…

Small groups are doing a better job than many of their critics would like to think. The communities they create are seldom frail. People feel cared for. They help one another. They share their intimate problems. They identify with their groups and participate regularly over extended periods of time. Why they do so is important to understand, especially because some groups generate bonds of attachment better than others.

But in another sense small groups may not be fostering community as effectively as many of their proponents would like. Some small groups merely provide occasions for individuals to focus on themselves in the presence of others. The social contract binding members together asserts only the weakest of obligations. Come if you have time. Talk if you feel like it. Respect everyone's opinion. Never criticize. Leave quietly if you become dissatisfied. Families would never survive by following these operating norms. Close-knit communities in the past did not, either. But small groups, as we know them, are a phenomenon of the late twentieth century. There are good reasons for the way they are structured. They reflect the fluidity of our lives by allowing us to bond easily but to break our attachments with equivalent ease. If we fail to understand these reasons, we can easily view small groups as something other than what they are. We can imagine that they really substitute for families, neighborhoods, and broader community attachments that may demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not.

Bowling Alone is weakest, I think, when it looks to the future, seeing many challenges to the recovery of social capital with few solutions. Perhaps this is because of the author's tendency to think in terms of central planning, although he does give some examples of unique local initiatives similar to those in Get Together (reviewed above).

Another weakness, from our point of view, is that twenty years have passed since Bowling Alone was published, but even so I think it's probably required reading for anyone who completes 7 Cups' Get Together training and wants to understand it, and 7 Cups' mission, in the wider context of American social history.

Charlie

Siddhartha

After I reviewed Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East, above, someone mentioned his much more famous tale, Siddhartha.

Set in ancient India, it tells the story of the journey through life, and corresponding spiritual journey, of a man, Siddhartha, and his friend and follower, Govinda.

Govinda, it turns out, is more of a follower than a friend, and he eventually switches his allegiance to another spiritual guide. The relationship between Siddhartha and Govinda turns out to be enduring, however.

Siddhartha himself eventually finds a spiritual guide of his own, who goes off leaving Siddhartha in his place.

I suppose every reader of this short tale will see it a little differently, and will recognize and reflect on parallels in their own lives. I enjoyed reading it.

Curiously, the way the story ends supports the ideal of a servant leader, while The Journey to the East undermines it. In this respect, because of the contrast they provide, I think both books may be useful in shedding light on 7 Cups' spritual journey.

Charlie

Get Together for the last time

At last! (you may be thinking) this series of reviews of 7 Cups' online course Get Together is at an end. The last section is about Chapter 9 on its own, because there's no Chapter 10…but that's not the whole story, as I'll reveal later.

Chapter 9 is about celebrations.

Celebrations provide a way for a group to pause, take stock of its achievements, and move forward with renewed energy. This chapter gives tips on how to ensure that celebrations work well, and 7 Cups' course is a good summary of the chapter, with a couple of examples from the book.

In the book this chapter ends by referring, again, to the book's website where there's more information to be found, and 7 Cups' course, again, fails to mention this.

The quiz again suffers from a couple of glitches. First, the course includes a statement that's not in the book. It's not exactly wrong, just badly written. Here it is with my corrections:

When your purpose is clear, planning & execution become[s] easier. You [are] able to enjoy as well as share the message you intended to deliver to your audience[.]

Unfortunately this badly written addition was chosen as the basis for a quiz question.

Second, the course misquotes 7 Cups' mission statement, altering it almost beyond recognition. Here's the correct quote:

Our Goal: We are living in a world with an immense love deficit, which means that none of us is receiving the love we need to reach our true potential, to truly thrive. Our goal is to build a support system, a web, that can hold every member of our world. We believe that we can fill that love-gap for every person in the world, either because they are an active member of our community or because they are touched personally by someone who has been empowered by 7 Cups of Tea…

And unfortunately the barely recognizable misquote was chosen as the basis for another quiz question.

What about Chapter 10? There isn't one, but there's an Epilogue instead! 7 Cups' course ignores the Epilogue, probably because it emphasizes the very aspect of the book that 7 Cups most wants to run away from:

Epilogue: What's next for your community?

The goal of this book is to help you foster a supportive, collaborative, and resilient group of human beings. We've showed you how to progressively ask less from others and do more with them. At each stage, you should have relinquished more of your control and distributed ownership to more and more members…

The alternative to that resilience is an organizational bottleneck…

Your work isn't done until your members can thrive independent of your time and resources. So ask yourself: Will my community flourish without me? …

If you're not to this point yet, incorporate more listening, invite more participation, and, most crucially, make developing leaders a priority. We know that giving up control is scary, but we can promise that distributing ownership is both rewarding and necessary. After you light the spark, your community will burn bright and long only once you've truly built it together.

It's that relinquing control that's the tricky bit, and it's the reason we see fragility instead of resilience in 7 Cups' communities, as well as the reason we see organizational bottlenecks.

Charlie

Still reading. Still loving it. Thank you.

Mental health apps

A news article at CNBC a couple of weeks ago reported on the growing market: Mental health apps draw wave of new users as experts call for more oversight

I suppose these 20,000 apps include 7 Cups among them, although we weren't specifically mentioned:

First-time downloads of the top 20 mental wellness apps in the U.S. hit 4 million in April. That's up 29 percent from 3.1 million in January. By contrast, first-time downloads of the top 20 such apps fell 30 percent during the same period last year.

But there are some concerns, too:

…teletherapy apps have been dogged by concerns around privacy and efficacy.

Six mental health experts emphasized that the digital therapy space needs more transparency and oversight, but there isn't a consensus on what the path forward should be.

I think that by implication, the article contains good news and bad news for 7 Cups.

The growing demand for mental health apps is good news overall for 7 Cups, but the bad news is that 7 Cups' ability to turn that demand into members receiving effective help seems to be limited at present. Comparing 7 Cups with two of its competitors (the ones named in the article) illustrates the problem. The bottom of the three lines on this chart of Amazon's global web rankings over the last 90 days represents 7 Cups:

(Amazon displays these charts at different scales, making them look more dramatic but also more difficult to compare. I redrew them at the same scale on the same chart. This looks less dramatic but visual comparison becomes meaningful. Note that these are rankings, not actual numbers, so the bottom axis isn't zero, it's a ranking of about 52,000th globally.)

Increased availability of investment funding is good news. I assume it's how 7 Cups has been able to restart app development, with a new version of our app now expected in three or four months. But the bad news is that there's no sign of meaningful improvement in listener quality, promised in December. It will be nice if we soon have a consistently wonderful app, but it will need to be powered by consistently wonderful listeners.

According to the article, those two featured competitors are "rapidly onboarding new therapists". I confirmed that on Glassdoor that they both list vacancies, but our Careers at 7 Cups page also links to Glassdoor where we seem to have no vacancies at all.

The article reports that some government restrictions on teletherapy are being lifted, and this is good news. But the bad news is that there's no obvious sign 7 Cups has responded yet by making it easier to get therapy, and many individual therapists who didn't previously work online at all are now able to compete directly with 7 Cups.

Concerns about privacy affect the whole industry, and this could be good news if 7 Cups were squeaky clean:

Sharing data with third parties is ubiquitous across mental health apps. In 2019, when researchers examined data practices of 36 top-ranked apps for depression and smoking cessation, they found that more than 80 percent sent data to Facebook and Google — often without disclosing it in their privacy policies.

But the bad news is that our recently updated Privacy Policy wriggles out of taking responsibility for personal information:

Personal Information that has been anonymized is not Personal Information as it does not allow for a specific individual to be identified.

This is not strictly true. The reason, explained at Digital Information Law, is that anonymized data can be reidentified by 7 Cups' business partners with sufficient accuracy to make it commercially valuable to them:

Recent experiments have shown (some unintentionally) the surprising ease with which apparently anonymous data can be reidentified, that is, combined in a manner that results in identifying individuals to a great degree of certainty.

Concerns about privacy and also effectiveness are making some people warn that government agencies will soon step in with regulations.

There's a saying, "A rising tide lifts all boats", and the tide is rising now for all 20,000 mental wellness apps. It will be good if 7 Cups can make the most of this opportunity.

Charlie

Recovery

I can highly recommend the book Recovery, the autobiographical story, woven into a self-help manual, of comedian and far-left activist Russel Brand's ongoing recovery from multiple addictions using the 12-step process.

I've read explanations of the 12-step recovery process before, and to me they've all seemed incomprehensible and dull. 7 Cups' own 12 Step Working Guide, copied from Narcotics Anonymous if I remember right, seems to me to be one of the least comprehensible and dullest.

In contrast this book is refreshingly both easy to understand and lively.

Part of the 12-step process involves getting help from a sponsor or mentor, and later becoming a mentor to others who are at an earlier stage in the process. This is similar in some ways, but not in other ways, to the role of listeners at 7 Cups. It's interesting that 7 Cups once tried to implement a 12-step-like sponsor role as part of a long-term listening scheme, but this kind of failed.

In these groups that people attend on the basis of mutual need, it is as if you could walk up to these anonymous people on the Tube or city street and they would turn to you and lift their eyes and openly recite the contents of their hearts: 'I feel trapped in my marriage'; 'I've never got over being abused'; 'I am lonely.' With these silent and ubiquitous truths spoken the world is not filled with strangers and grey faces because I cannot help but love people who know the pain I feel.

The essential point here is that in the 12-step process there is no separation between members and listeners. Everyone is both a member and a listener. (I sometimes wonder whether 7 Cups made the right choice.)

In other ways the 12-step process is not just peer support—it relies on the awkward idea of "a higher power". 7 Cups has also tripped up over this apparent veiled reference to religion, which caused controversy when sharing circles were first introduced.

The book returns to the idea of a higher power several times, in one place explaining it like this:

When I last sprained my ankle I just sat back in entitled convalescence, drumming my fingers, while some unbidden invisible force took care of it. …I fully expect the process of healing on an anatomical level to take place. I know too that it will take place on an emotional level; my shattered heart has pieced itself back together a thousand times.

And in another place:

An integral, unavoidable and in fact one of the best parts of this process is developing a belief in a Higher Power. Not that you have to become some sort of religious nut. Well, actually you already are a religious nut, if you take 'religious nut' to mean that you live your life adhering to a set of beliefs and principles and observances concerning conduct. … If you're reading this specifically because you have addiction issues, whether to substances or behaviours, you are in an advanced sect with highly particular and devotional practices, sometimes so ingrained that they don't even have to be explicitly 'thought', they are intensely and unthinkingly believed.

I found some of the autobiographical parts of the book less easy to understand. In particular, Brand's relationship with his then girlfriend, Laura Gallacher, now his wife, and the birth of their first child, in all of which he seems oddly distant. But maybe that's only because the focus of the book is the recovery process.

Charlie