In a profession that is supposed to be driven by new ideas and innovation, the day-to-day of product management can often feel like a creative leach. Unhappy customers, failing metrics, forever backlogs, stakeholder negotiations... all can leave PMs with little inspiration. So what to do? There are plenty of articles out there that will relate top habits and tips that one can adopt to keep the mind fluid with new thinking. I agree with them. But here I offer another one. This is how the ASSEMBLY program at NAVEL sparked inspiration, further impacted my commitment to collective organization, and challenged my need to drive outcomes.

Get involved with an artist collective, an activist group or nonprofit organization.

I first learned of NAVEL while attending Sara Schnadt’s presentation on how her installation art informs her system architecture practice at NASA JPL at the Performative Computation Symposium. The event was a full-on hybrid of intellectuals, aesthetes and nerds and focused on the creative application of their unique data paradigm. It was riveting and I returned home exhausted by the mental ardour it took to keep up with the talks. At the time of researching the event, I dove in deeper to NAVEL’s programming and found the opportunity to participate in one of their ASSEMBLIES, a model based on the work of the former-Berlin based organization, SPEKTRUM and the The School of Apocalypse’s working groups.

An ASSEMBLY is a community-led learning group that forms around a theme, practice or experiment. For a period of three months, NAVEL provides each ASSEMBLY with with space, support, and resources—including access to our equipment, peer network, and micro-grant funding.

Here is how it goes down:

1. community leaders pitch their projects/experiments

2. community members vote on those they want to join

3. the most popular proceed to fruition and the grant gets distributed

4. the ASSEMBLY meets 6 times, every 2 weeks

5. all ASSEMBLIES do a final presentation on the process or any results

ASSEMBLIES ranged from creating an artist census, to rewriting the LAPD’s city charter, to analyzing black ethics in rap, to learning about internet security, to cultivating a yoga practice and mindfulness.

GOALS

I joined NAVEL’s proposed ASSEMBLY: “Practicing Collectivity and Reclaiming the Commons” as it felt more structured and less intimidating than some of the other importantly radical and foreign topics. (Which, in retrospect, the choice was in part because I wasn’t ready to drink in the self-effacement and hard-reflection required of my white, binary, and hetero-presenting privilege. Next time, I will take this jump!)

But what I was ready for was to dip my toe into the messiness of artists leading artists.

The goal of the ASSEMBLY was:

To create a document for NAVEL to assess how collective and equitable the organizational structure is, at all levels of operations.

The goal of Katie Guernsey was:

To practice active listening and observation,
without directing,
while meandering conversations ensued
because of group-think conducted by strangers of all backgrounds,
for an ambiguously constructed goal.

Basically, a product manager’s and control freak’s nightmare.

PROCESS

1) Finding a common language

Co-founder and Program Lead, Amanda Vincelli designated Elinor Ostrom’s book, Governing the Commons, as the primary reading material to guide us in our exploration. It is a very dense, academically-oriented, economic case study on the limitations of traditional thinking around the “tragedy of the commons,” the “prisoner’s dilemma” and other game-theory models that characterize the behaviors of participants in common-pool resources (CPRs)... which is how we were conceiving NAVEL’s institution. Our first meeting had nearly 12 people where we defined what “commons” meant, and the role of cultural institutions.

2) Setting the context

While these constructs were helpful in understanding a conception of a community organization of shared resources, it did not provide context as to which aspects NAVEL fulfills. Many of us were new to the organization so we spent the next session learning about NAVEL’s programming, values, historical context and models of engagement.

3) Elaboration and expansion

In the next few meetings, our group whittled down to about 6 people. We began to realize the limitations of the Ostrom book as an application and incorporated other texts that illustrated different approaches to our problem, including:

• A feminist perspective on self-governance

• A collaborative self-organization case study from a Wiccan group

• Facilitation techniques for social justice groups

• Consensus building artifacts for political activism and collective action

We also explored online media that demonstrated game theory in action and other applications of common-pool resource issues.

4) Framework definition

Further into the Ostrom book came the results of her case studies that debunked the traditional theories. Surveying CPR situations from water and irrigation-rights in the Alicante and Philippines, to forestry and land use in Japanese and Swiss mountain villages, she devised design principles that contributed to the longevity and success of these CPR systems.

We also had the toolkits and techniques from our other readings.

It was time to apply these concepts to NAVEL’s structure within the context of the problem we were trying to solve. So we listed out all of NAVEL’s resources that could be considered “common” and asked ourselves: how do we apply these principles to these pooled resources? (Admittedly, I drove this... hey! But only after 4 weeks.)

5) Application

From all of our texts, we had a body of best practices/guidelines/design principles/techniques so we assigned each thematic toolkit to a person who would phrase the best practice/guideline/design principle/technique as a question. A question, mind you, that could be applied to each common resource or program so as to “assess how collective and equitable the organizational structure is, at all levels of operations,” AKA, our goal! For efficiency, we divided into two groups and aggregated all the similar questions, categorized them and then simplified their language to cover the array of values and examinations that we wanted this document to cover.

Our framework of KInship in organizations was born!

6) Presentation

On Monday, June 3rd, all the ASSEMBLIES met, and we divided our presentation to share our process and results.

TAKEAWAYS

1. Get out of your comfort zone to do something that stretches your abilities, values, identity and notions. What did you learn about yourself? What practices can you apply to your role? You might find what intimidates you is actually not that scary.

2. Allow things to get messy and flow to allow for the expansion of thought and ideas- even if you see the through-line. The crystallization of concepts WILL happen as people start to recognize patterns of thought.

3. Improve your collaboration and facilitation techniques by working with strangers from different backgrounds, thought-processes and skill sets.

4. Do yourself a favor and read Emergent Strategy to learn how to better communicate ideas and empower your team.

5. Go to an art exhibition, program or event at NAVEL or any other cultural institution to broaden your experience and activate new parts of your brain!

For those interested in joining an ASSEMBLY or participating at NAVEL, Q2 ASSEMBLIES will be announced on Sep 10, 2019 and the sign-up period will follow between Sep 10-20, 2019.