INCM JATO 2019 Moderators' Final Report: Premise / Introduction

INCM JATO 2019

PREMISE TRPEJCA MACEDONIA

Organisers: EASA Macedonia Moderators: Louis Pohl, Ariana Zilliacus, Kyra Zwick Graphic design: borrowed from EASA Macedonia Illustrations: Louis Pohl Photographs: Đ?riana Zilliacus Layout and text: Louis Pohl, Ariana Zilliacus, Kyra Zwick

4

What is the INCM? Who goes?

6

What happens?

8

Our aims as moderators

10

How we organised ourselves

11

How we organised the community

12

Focus group logic

14

Rules for collective organising

16

Large group logic

18

A microstructural approach

20

Learning from the history of parallel radical groups

What is the INCM? The International National Contacts Meeting (INCM) is a key event for the EASA network. The assembly of students and young architects join together to discuss topical issues related to EASA, but also define some strategic direction for the community. This is represented by agreeing on the next hosts of EASA and INCM, and the professional change they propose with their team, theme, context, site and programme; the direction for the entire educational process. In addition to this, National Contacts develop other mutual and cooperatively run events throughout the year, such as SESAM. The INCM is located in a different location every year, this year being hosted by the Macedonian team in Trpejca.

Who goes?

The INCM attendance consists of two equal representatives from every country in Europe and promotes the values of ‘unity and equality’. This is shown in its low barrier to entry for National Contacts (low cost of attendance) and having an extensive consensus process for all strategic decision-making regarding future activities affiliated with the EASA community. The INCM also ensures relevant representatives (National Contacts) are actively engaged, educated, and trained with all the skills to fulfil their duty as the national node of this transnational EASA network, as well as to mobilise energy in other areas of their life, following the values of EASA as an educational system.

4

5

What happens?

The EASA bidding can be conceptualised as an indicator of one of the most significant topics of our time, as defined by the international architecture community; a signature of our collective concern.

This year the theme Reality was chosen for EASA 2021, highlighting a feeling of disenfranchisement with the unreality within our profession. The proposal by the Serbian team was to move beyond architecture as an alienated spectacle, instead generating an advanced system to act as a catalyst and extended social relations between communities in the field. They used the concept of Bauldriard’s hyperreality as a premise for an extensive proposal to democratise spatial praxis; to unpick this unreality through a means of real action. They aim to blur the hairline between mutual education, mutual aid, time and impact with an innovation of an EASA ‘Real Lab’ which functions as a new learning exchange hub in the heart of a Serbian city that resonates with the conditions they explore.

A similar theme was decided for the next INCM, Just, meaning honest or immediate. The Latvian proposal informs the potential for honesty and transparency in the profession. In this framework the INCM is questioned as a blank page, the framework for rebuilding the architect’s social licence in the values of honesty and transparency.

The moderation structure also dealt with other key topics, this year including the development of an initial strategy to eliminate carbon emissions in the architectural profession1. Effective organisation of supranational groups is paramount in this sector, 6

more important than almost any other field. It was felt that EASA as a student and young professional network has unharnessed potential to affect radical change, so the community present at INCM JATO 2019 laid the groundwork for a ‘Young architects declare’, as well as scenario planning for a post carbon future of the profession. This will be developed by workgroups and mobilise member representatives from every region to kickstart a collective strategy. The aim is to help the built environment sector mitigate climate change, which currently has less pressure groups campaigning for significant change, relative to less carbon intensive industries. Attendees are soon to become influential stakeholders in a high carbon industry.

Other topics discussed in depth include: > Internal fees and finance > The role of the National Contact and the potential expansion of this role > The boundaries of the profession and its transdisciplinary potential > A heightened frequency of events and mutual learning platforms > Visibility of the network and the expanded community publishing

7

Our aims as moderators As moderators, it was important to us that attendees learn how to effectively organise using workgroup structures and decentralised, assembly methods of collective organisation.

We wanted to familiarise everyone with transferable skills in community-level organising and consensus building, as well as key moderation techniques, to help them be effective in community mobilisation.

8

1. Considering INCM as an experiment and a learning experience. A reflexive process overcoming the complex situation. Moderators take feedback and pivot according to the consensus in the room. Test principles and rules of thumb of collective organising from other social sciences and researchers, evaluating successes.

2. Everybody gets a chance to speak and everybody gets a chance to listen.

3. Moving against structurelessness and towards decentralisation. Ensuring communication power is decentralised, meaning decision making is fair. (Jo Freidman) 4. Challenge and overcome key problems that seemed impossible to overcome:

a) Lack of transparency to those outside the

room. (Focus groups)

b) Decentralised in structure but not in form.

(Proper methods)

c) Task allocation, task distribution, Communication

(Channels and modes) and rewards.

d) Scalability: Content creators match content consumers.

5. Increase productivity of the community so we can be actively engaged in issues that affect us.

6. Optimising the INCM, Cutting down the time it takes to make decisions, allowing us to make more important ones.

9

How we organised ourselves Navigating the unexpected effectively using Agile/Scrum team dynamics

A coach, motivational but not directly ‘playing the game’, reducing obstacles in the way. (INCM 2020 organisers, INCM 2019 moderators)

Group of three (moderators)

Programmatic options from feedback within community. Suggestions and advice on what to do next.

10

How we organised the community Understanding the exponential nature of communication channels to avoid ‘crossed wires’ in group discussions and the ‘never ending questions’ syndrome A group of four has six potential communication channels at any one time. Roughly the human capability which is seven.

Adding another few members to the group is exponential.

For a group of 6 you have around 15. For a group of 150 you have 11,175. A much higher chance of miscommunication.

In a larger group, with lots more channels of communication, the conversation will naturally become centralised.

This is because we manage the cognitive load by subconciously removing participants. Often this includes our own participation in support of group congnition and understanding.

This is calculatable by this equation, where n is the number of contributors.This is known as Miller’s Law, emerging from the well cited paper ‘magic number seven plus or minus two’.

11

Focus group logic

12

It’s been observed in crowds that groups of more than four, namely groups of five or six, split into two groups; or, they become centralised with the entire group listening to one or two people. Look out for this phenomenon in social situations.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar2 notes that the exact reason is unknown, though the leading hypothesis is that it is caused by communication channels and our memory capacity as discussed previously.

This implies smaller focus groups are better for working collectively. This has been the basis of most anarchist organisation models; forms part of holocracy; SCRUM methodology; and is the reason Navy Seal groups work in four, alongside others. This logic is used across sectors.

13

Rules for collective organising

14

The way we manage tactics and strategy is the heart of maintaining a collective organisation, as defined by Hardt and Negri3.

An unclear understanding of these two ideas and their relationship can lead to total inefficiency and/or centralisation. How you divide work and then reintegrate efforts effectively is fundamental to understanding this.

Large groups are incredible at determining strategy and can use ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. But because of the diversity of communication channels, it is totally impossible to get things done practically.

The idea is that the whole detemines the strategy. Focus groups indicate the tactics or the details.

At present this is the leading methodology for collective governance and its effectiveness has been proven by the creation of an EASA website, which followed this logic.

15

Large group logic

16

The Wisdom Of The Crowd4 is the theory that if a group of people try to guess an unknown quantity, the average of all of the guesses will be more accurate than any of the individual guesses.

An example is an experiment done by professor Marcus du Sautoy. He counted a pile of jellybeans as he put them into a jar, then asked his colleagues how many jellybeans were in the jar. The answer was 4,510 and guesses ranged from 400 all the way up to 50,000 jellybeans. He averaged all 160 total guesses, arriving at 4,515; within 5 of the actual number, or about 1% off.

This phenomenon was demonstrated multiple times, also written about by James Surowiecki who evidenced its cross-applicability to a wider range of circumstances. It forms the basis of many probability-testing methods.

We used this theory extensively in our process, designing the process to enable us to protect and observe the frequency of an opinion and average this, rather than allowing singular opinions to dominate. Everyone became a producer of information, which was then divided and reintegrated, giving us clear insight of frequency. We described this process as the oscillation from information (small groups) to knowledge (crowds).

During both INCM and EASA biddings, the highest frequenting preference during early stages translated to the agreed-upon proposal.

A further optimisation of this process is agreeing on a decision rule; for example, that the highest frequenting choice should be taken as the proposal that will eventually be chosen and/or is the right choice.

17

A microstructural approach The micro-structural approach to organisation design is an emerging perspective that sees large, complex organizations as collections of smaller, simpler, and recurring microorganisational structures.

Rather than being passive observers and analysts of innovations in organising, the microstructural approach advances organizational science by prototyping and piloting new forms of organising - a radical departure from our conventional ways of studying organisations.

Largely, the goal of the microstructural approach in a lateral organisation is to utilise ‘liberating strctures’5, which are enhancements in relational coordination and trust that foster participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and allow everyone to contribute.

18

Five elements define the underlying design of all microstructures, changing based on your aim. The five design elements are outlined below: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

A structuring invitation (Who speaks when) Spatial arrangement and necessary materials Distribution of participation Group configuration A sequence of steps and time allocation for these elements

By pinpointing and changing these microstructural elements, we can begin to iterate the structure of INCM in a managble way. For example, changing the space from audience to circle, adjusting the sequence, or enforcing new configurations. This follows in iteration.

We took into consideration several principals and hand gestures.

Hand gestures inherited from radical groups: - Jazz hands to show conensus - One finger shows a new point - Two fingers show a direct response - Three fingers show that we should move onto a new topic These hand signals were used in previous INCMs and developed and used by groups such as Occupy Wall Street protests, Camp for Climate Action, The Woodcraft Folk Direct Action Network,The 15-M Movement, UK Uncut, Civil rights movements, Quaker meeting, Extinction Rebellion, amongst others.

We used the spatial configuration of a circle and a structure where everyone speaks and listens, as suggested by the community. The larger the group, the stricter we needed to be with this.

19

Learning from the history of radical groups We decided to move away from unstructured groups, towards: > Total structure. This retains equality and decentralisation, removing propensity for elitism; everyone speaks as equals; all agreements are expressed with hand signals and not interjections. > Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. (This includes each focus group determining their Tiny Moderator) > Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents the monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with others in the process of exercising their power. (Done by working in small, changing focus groups and using Wisdom of The Crowds) > Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities that are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person’s “property� and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. (EASA is actually a leading example of this already, with rotational organising roles. But in our group we made sure that we rotated roles, in particular to ensure that men were not the only people taking leadership tasks, such as delivering motivational summaries etc.)

20

“Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion.”

“It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.”

> Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group, or giving them hard work because they are disliked, serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility must be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of apprenticeship program rather than the “sink or swim” method. (We did this by first distributing power to Tiny Moderators and ensuring that everyone had the opportunity to try this role in small groups) > Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible.

Information is power. Access to information enhances one’s power.

(This was done by ensuring feedback was compiled and given immediately; that all discussions in small groups were compiled and transparrently read out to the whole, maximising information transference. Transparency equates to increased speed of descisionmaking ability.) > Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for.

21

Further reading

1 Why architects need to wake up to the carbon emergency. Will

Hurst. 2019.

2 How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar.

2010.

3 Assembly. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2017.

4 Wisdom of the Crowds. James Surowiecki. 2004.

The Microstructures of Organisations. Phanish Puranam. 2018.

5 Tyranny of Structurelessness. Jo Freeman. 1970.

22