This is where your journey together becomes more of an exploration of the ecosystem you are creating and evolving together.
When an idea first comes into the world and inspires people, we want to learn and delve into our practice of it. Initial adopters practice the concepts and share their learning. Organizations develop to support others learning to use the tools and principles developing. There’s a lot of buzz. There’s all of the forming – norming – storming phases…and then things continue to get more complicated.
Sometimes we can orient ourselves along a learning journey. People become aware of our passion. They learn about it. They practice it. Maybe the teach it.
The journey — aware → learning → practicing → teaching — is a pipeline with a single summit (teaching), which fits a training organization whose job is to produce more trainers. But our relationships are more complex than that.
If we consider ourselves as a network, we realize it has no summit and doesn’t need everyone to teach. So growth splits into three directions instead of one mandatory climb:
- Roots — how deep your own practice goes.
- Reach — how far you carry it into the network and the world.
- Breadth — how many fields you bridge it into (for example, “permaculture and ___”).
The Network Growth Compass helps organizations and their members see how those relationships are developing. Perhaps you have a lot of people with deep roots, but not a lot of reach. This can help you to see that. Or perhaps you have an instinct to offer more workshops that bridge into other fields, but you aren’t sure who can help you. The Network Growth Compass can help you find those people within your organization (and help them see each other as well).