What you are gettingCreating Communitas is leadership as a worthwhile hard journey taken together: overcome together, win together, do things worth doing.
Where it fitsIt sits under the beam because leading people is a load you carry, and you learn to carry it here so you can be the bravery your people need at home.
Communitas is the bond that forms between people who have done something genuinely hard together, with the outcome uncertain and no assigned roles. It is not team building. It cannot be scheduled into a conference room, and it does not survive a phone in the hand.
The word comes from the anthropologist Victor Turner, who used it for the intense fellowship that appears among people passing through a shared trial together, outside their usual ranks and roles. The research since has been consistent: shared hardship, not shared comfort, is what fuses a group. People who have been through a genuinely difficult experience together describe a bond closer to kin than to colleagues, and will carry a heavier load for each other afterwards. It cannot be produced by an away day with a bar at the end. It needs a real task, an outcome that is in doubt, and the absence of the things that let you opt out, starting with the phone.
On the land it is learned shoulder to shoulder: the shared endeavour day on Gobblers Knob, the walking conversations on the Long Path, the fire. Leadership emerges rather than being appointed. What you take home is the ability to create the same conditions for your own people, and a partner from the cohort who holds you to it.
The long table.
The fire.
The conditions travel. Choose something hard enough that the outcome is genuinely uncertain, and do it together with equality of roles. Keep it regular: a monthly hard thing with your team, a weekly walk with the person the difficult conversation is with, a family day that costs something. Put the phones away for the whole of it. Let leadership come from who steps up rather than who holds the title, and afterwards talk about what people saw each other do. Over a year that is a community, in a company or a household, that can overcome together and win together, and it is the thing people stay for.
Learned shoulder to shoulder on Gobblers Knob
The partner method and the reunion structure are part of the retreat and live with the people who have taken it. If you have been here, or you facilitate with us, write to hello@rootastrolabe.com and we will open them for you.
Dispatches from the field of human renewal. Irregular essays on leadership, nature, and the practice of becoming human again.
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