Community Call: From Field Study to Limicon 2024 with Danielle Johnson

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## About the call

In a series of essays framing the Emerge Austin 2022 conference, Jonathan Rowson put forth a rousing call to action: Let's build a field. This idea ignited a passion within Danielle which prompted her to begin working on a study of the field. That work brought up the question: Who is in this field? As a way to find answers, Danielle volunteered to take the lead on organizing Limicon 2024; a field nurturing, online event, that is currently underway.

In this community call, Danielle shared a little about her journey, some insights she had gained along the way, how Limicon 2024 fit into her work, and how she might further collaborate on the project with the Life Itself community.

About Danielle

Danielle Johnson, PhD is a generalist currently working in the liminal web ecosystem.

Dr. Johnson received an MA in Communication and a PhD in Social/Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Northern Illinois University. She graduated in 2015 and since then has been developing a unified theory of psychology which helps individuals maximize their mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

Danielle is also very interested in field building within the liminal space. Currently, she is focused on applying this work to her local community and planning a field-building based online event, Limicon 2024. You can contact Danielle at drjohnson8808@gmail.com

Transcript

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, sessions, field, space, con, talked, question, danielle, themes, type, layman, emerge, events, work, process, learning, limit, idea, emergent, vibe

Lauren Wigmore 00:00

Now I'm going to hand over to Danielle, welcome. And the floor is all yours.

Danielle Johnson 00:13

Thank you. Hello, everybody. I have a lawn mower situation. So there might be a few seconds here and there when it gets really loud. But I will try to work around that. I'm going to share my screen so I can keep stay on track nobody see that. Perfect. Okay, so thank you for having me here at Life itself. And for this opportunity to kind of share what I've been doing the last year and a half or two years or so, year and a half. When Lauren asked me, like, maybe a month and a half ago or whatever to present on this, I had to come up with a paragraph and what I was going to talk about it. So that's when I had the title from field survey dilemma, con and beyond. And my idea was to kind of talk about my journey into this space, and then the field study and then lemma con, and kind of a progressive kind of view. And I since then have dug into the life itself community. And what what's been going on there with transdisciplinarity. And second, the second renaissance field deliberately developmental spaces. And the paper that I found that really kind of got me excited was the emergent power paper. So in that paper, it talks about what inner capacities to change agents in the emerging ecosystem need to develop so that the ecosystem becomes more powerful and better able to contribute to life serving socio ecological transformation. So that's from that paper. And I had kind of my own version of that. That idea. Mine was how do I develop my potential by living my calling while working with other people in service to the community slash ecosystem slash field slash world? And how does the ecosystem support me. So I found a real synergy with that emergent paper. And so I thought, as I looked at kind of how I was organizing the talk, and how it might tie to the life itself community was, when I look at my journey, it really was into this space. I really think it's like a case study for emergent, like for an emergency lead change agent who's coming into this space. And so as I was reading that paper, and kind of seeing my own experiences, I've tried to highlight kind of throughout my presentation in blue, different things that I was learning or thinking or or developing capacities as I was kind of going through the process. As I talked about the field, I think, how our research missions might be similar or different? And how can our perspectives during these different field building processes that we've done? Like how can we use those to find our edges and then collaborate on future research? And then looking at lemma Khan and how we kind of designed lemma Khan as an emergent space and a deliberately developmental space? How can we use lemma Khan as a case study? And then also, what are the possibilities of the future of lemma Khan? And how might life itself come up the life itself community kind of participate in, in whatever those future phases look like? So just some of the questions that might be relevant here. And I'm open to kind of questions throughout or kind of saying everything and then presenting it. So if something's burning, feel free to to ask. Okay, so the about me thing, and I went, and I made the mistake of watching Isabella's community call before this and

Lauren Wigmore 04:24

and seeing, seeing

Danielle Johnson 04:27

like her about me page, and this is kind of where impostor syndrome comes into this thing, because no, it's perfect. It's perfect. So so I kind of look at these resumes of all these people, and I go, I'm an imposter. Like that's something I've really struggled with as on my way in here. And I look at like, yeah, I was fired from corporate America. And, you know, I spent 15 years in grad school with like, no publications and no grants and I got stuck in the nonprofit world and I've never been in a monastery or studying meditation with a great master from India. I feel like I've big energy. And so sometimes that makes me self conscious in this space. And I'm from a real small town, I'm kind of a redneck. So that also makes me feel like, I'm an imposter. But as I've worked through that, one of the things that I've learned is like, that's just one story. Sorry, I'm trying not to be emotional in this space, but I am. So that's just one of my stories. There's ways when it's I'm not an imposter, and ways that I fit in, like, cure perfectly.

Lauren Wigmore 05:50

I mean, just to say that all of you is welcome in this call. So please just be present with yourself.

05:55

I know thank you. I'm

Danielle Johnson 06:01

in grad school, I studied curiosity and lifelong learning and positive psychology and flow and creativity. And I see a lot of the things that I was learning they're exploring, they're like, deeply relevant to some of the stuff that we talked about in this space and in the liminal space in general. My life has been dedicated to psychological development, like, one of the first like, real books I read was Sigmund Freud's interpretation of dreams. And I just, I was like, 13 years old, and I don't even really think I understood it. But it was just, it was up in the up, like, I don't even know how I got a hold of that book. You know what I mean, but like, I was just always fascinated with with the study of psychological development. And within myself and the people around me and I grew up in a really small town, which makes me a redneck, but also like, I have those values and the trust and the kind of experience of what that's like. I've had a transcendental experience with a worm. I developed my own unified theory of psychology, which is one of the reasons why I didn't make it in grad school was because that idea was like, not really cool there. I chose my life's work over money. I don't even think because I'm noble, just because like, I can't do it the other way. And I love to go meta, and I love to go deep. And so that's why I feel like I'm not an imposter in this space. But also, I think there's some ways that I am an imposter in this space and where that's okay. Like, I think there's some ways where it's okay, that I'm not the person that goes in like, schmoozes with the president or whatever, you know what I mean, like, because I'm the person who like, bridges. And

08:02

that's important, too. So.

Danielle Johnson 08:05

And I also feel like for me, the limit of web has been a deliberately developmental space. And I know it's not a physical location. And I can give you examples of those. But this is one of the activities that I was leaded, as limicon deliberately. Like we explicitly said, limicon was deliberately developmental for the core planning team. And so one of the activities the Ryan kind of helped me through as I was like, why would anybody helped me or Why does anybody want to be here, like kind of looking at all of the people that were kind of supporting Danielle, towards this vision of limb makan? With the idea of the bridge in mind and the field in mind, too. So yeah, I think the whole space was deliberately developmental. So one of my like, my kind of first project in the space when I decided like, how do I get involved was the field study. And that really started at emerge Austin. And again, I feel like an imposter at emerge Austin. I'm like, at the edge of town, like the only hotel I can afford is like, way out and it's like, real sketchy part of town. It's like a 20 minute Uber ride there and like, I can't afford to go to the dinner and I don't really know anybody. So I don't get invited to the dinner for free. You know what I mean? Like the fancy kind of dinner. I started to feel like these sessions aren't about me or like my people. We're talking about like, wisdom and stuff, but I was more interested in like living wisdom. I didn't know who like these really important. People were like, I remember it was like, being Tucker we're talking and Forrest Landry walks up. It took us like, oh, Forrest Landry. Like your work is so important or whatever. And I'm like, I don't know who you are. Sorry. Like, and just, like people were like, the future thinkers are here and I'm like, I don't know those Like so. And then like just little things like I have trouble with new food. And so everything was like vegan and spicy. And just and it was just hard. So, but there was something about kind of like what the collective was doing in that space that really excited me. And I remember on the last day, we were in a small group and and I don't even remember what the main topic was, but I really kind of, like let it up like there was some, like, how is this going to help the people? And I was working in the Department of Juvenile Justice in Illinois at that time, and I'm like, how does what we're doing here like help them because they want to live on regenerative farms to like, I've talked to them about it, and not all of them, you know what I mean, but some of them do and like, what can we do about that?

Danielle Johnson 10:54

And it was at that time that, like Eric Reynolds, and Adam Wright from TLR invited me to kind of a space in Austin, they had a house there that they were kind of talking about. And I remember even telling my Uber driver on the way over about emerge and about like, building a field and like getting really excited about kind of that possibility. And I left after the TLR house that night after meeting those people, I'm kind of talking about going like really like what can I do in this space? Like, like, what does that look like? So there was

Danielle Johnson 11:33

two ways that I got involved. So one was, after a merge Austin, there was a group that got together that started planning emerge, Toronto, and this was the energy was kind of driven by Lehmann, Toronto kind of TLR kind of took up the mantle there and project managed by Adam of TLR. And we were looking at what could we improve upon after Austin. And so part of the focus was kind of the Toronto attractor or this, this group or feel in Toronto, where we're kind of seeing a cluster of people in this space in Toronto. Part of it was around funding. Part of it was around the field study. Part of it was around building more community, and then also incorporating ideas of gebser and decolonization. And so how do we kind of improve on Austin with the same idea and then incorporate some of these new things. And I really, I didn't really know it, but like, people were developing me in the space and offering opportunities for leadership roles in that type of thing. So I was able to kind of step into it there. At the same time, I was also working with transdisciplinary leadership review, and looking at their ideas for field building. And so I had weekly meetings with Adam right where he really

Danielle Johnson 13:02

I mean, coach me basically kind of in a lot of things, support from turquoise sound this, this article called hub field catalysts, galvanize social change just really sparked in me, I was also interested introduced to the park tech incubator, so I got a little bit of funding to work on the field study through there, and then clubhouse sessions, the TLR clubhouse. And at that point, it was really this kind of this is what I'm supposed to do type of type of feeling. So I followed that. And so, you know, my first iteration of kind of trying to put all of the different parts of the field together, you know, my title was stealing the culture by transforming game A into an integral society after building a meta modern field of practice during a time between worlds, because we want to whether the polymetal crisis through emergent processes. And that was me just trying to kind of figure out how all the pieces fit together. And then I'm really dug into

Danielle Johnson 14:06

the series of essays that Jonathan Ralston wrote kind of framing the eMERGE gathering, where he talked about field building, and looking at kind of the strong field framework that he mentioned in that and kind of coming up with this first iteration of the field study, but also kind of struggling with this, like, how much structure do we want, like if the goal is emergence, I just remember really kind of struggling back and forth between this kind of like structure and not having control like, like, where you want a little bit and where you want too much and really kind of trying to process that at the time. So I won't go through all these but just some of the questions kind of that first iteration had. And so then, kind

Danielle Johnson 14:57

of through my work with TLR and beyond The strong field, you know, turquoise and Adam were constantly kind of sending me different ideas and places. And I got into like impact networks and Carol Sanford work work and Adrian Marie brown on emergence and looked at, you know, just field building, but then also ecosystem building and community building and network building and movement building and kind of all of the different similarities between that. I know, there was a point where I kind of looked at the work that life itself had on there, and there was others, with mapping projects and things. And then Robert Keegan. And these are just some of the kinds of new things I was introduced to in that in that space. And so when I was looking at it, there was kind of these kind of traditional ways to define a field and it was like, Okay, well, depending on who our audience is, this is, you know, when we're looking at like a field of business, this is kind of the way but then also feeling really drawn towards Carroll Sanford's idea of field. And, you know, kind of looking at it like the game, a version and the game B version of what a field is, and what the possibilities are there. And so at this point, it's now called the liminal landscape survey, as I've tried to feel like is a field the right word, what's the right word? So I started collecting data in April of 2023. I, one of my first interviews was a live interview of Lehmann, at the meta modern spirituality retreat in Vermont. In May of that year, I connected with a few more liminal individuals in the space. And then also really wanted to kind of bridge the layman into this and so did about 15 interviews with people in the Chicagoland area to kind of bridge like, like, my passion, really, is to how do we how do we connect those two worlds. And again, as I'm going through this, this, this project is, you know, the vehicle that I'm using to help me develop, you know, it's the thing that's triggering me and causing, like, tensions and conflict. So I'm, I'm practicing all these past triggers and belongingness issues and money issues and leaning into the pain, and they'll just some of the lessons I'm learning at this time. So then, the problem that I was running into was kind of how do we define the sample, like, who's in and who's out and it was, it was an icy kind of, as I'm reading the research that you put out, like, that's been a struggle in the life itself community a little bit as well. And so what happened was the eMERGE Toronto gathering was not going to happen in person that year. And so the team decided to pivot to an online type of gathering. Kind of as a placeholder until the next emerge, North America gathering could happen. And yeah, so

Danielle Johnson 18:11

when that work came about it kind of that work in the field survey work kind of clicked together for me. And I felt like I was kind of ready to take on a new level of responsibility and a new challenge and learning that was kind of at the edge of my limits. And so. And then also, it was one of those things where it just again, felt like what I was supposed to do, and even if I did it badly, I was supposed to say like, I will lead this because like the process of me leading it would be important in some way. So that's really kind of what I stepped into when I sent Adam and turquoise and layman like this board that I made in this, like 10 minute video recording of like, okay, here's what limicon 2024 might look like after we had kind of brainstormed as a group to, to what kind of the vibe of it might be.

Danielle Johnson 19:08

And so it was really, for me, bringing in this landscape survey, like, like this would be a way for people to opt in to say, Yes, I am part of this community, or part of whatever this this vision is. There would be different types of topics, we would include different people, spectators, and so that kind of merged into this bigger plan for this where we would have this container with a diff all kinds of different sessions. There was the next wave of people who could watch who could spectate if they wanted to. There was a kind of meta sense of debriefing and looking at oops, the container as a whole as part of this kind of field survey thing. And then there was these artifacts of these kind of collective intelligence. artifacts that would come out of it.

Danielle Johnson 20:03

So this is kind of the original concept of it. And the thing I'm working on at this time is kind of this go fast, or go slow to go fast and kind of tempering this, wanting to kind of go all in on it, but also feeling this this pullback and wrestling with what that might be. And so Adam and layman kind of bring in this idea of convention and fun. And Matt Furnari, O'Meara brings in this idea of deep listening and grief as important concepts for emergence. And then there's a bunch of obstacles. Like, how do we deal with money that's tends to be an obstacle like, how do you lead teams, I like blow up a couple of teams in the process, really kind of fighting for it to be a non egoic event, and really wanting to kind of maintain kind of this spirit of co creation, and that the edges are welcome, and that type of thing. And then just my own personal insecurities and areas that I needed to clean up. And, you know, kind

Danielle Johnson 21:03

of viewing this process as everything is a lesson, the synchronicities got to be a little much of time, like the learning would be so intense, sometimes it got a little like, jarring. But it was really kind of this process, allowing me to lean into my edges and kind of tweak those things that needed to be worked on. And so then, in about the end of October, Phil and Orion enter, enter the domain of limo con. And what they brought into the space was really kind of this experience and enthusiasm for co creation for deliberately developmental spaces. So they were really like, yes, let's use this as a process where we can watch ourselves in the process and push our edges. And it felt right that they were both in Toronto, and that still being an important part of the project. I had spoken to Narayen earlier in the year about kind of the mapping work that he does, and the social systems maps that he looks at. And I just thought I made my own personal map and just kind of saw the the future of possibilities of what that could look like. And so it was really excited about those types of things. Phil's EGP process that he worked on seemed like a really cool way to kind of find out what, what we wanted as a whole as a group. And yeah, just lots of facilitation skills and just being committed to relationships and and there was just a lot of a lot of synergies within our team. So kind of our aspirations for limicon, we're just we provide simple rules and structures. We invite a bunch of diverse parts to the space and then we have kind of this Orient, orienting beacon for participants. And that was this, this thing that this saying that's on the world, we find ourselves in a liminal space between worlds entrenched in a meta crisis and embedded in cultural systems that are inadequate for Regenerative future civilization. We are the people living the question, how do we become the humans, we need to be both individually and collectively, to be in service to hospice, seeing the old systems and midwifing, the new systems that are emerging? And again, a mouthful, but it really needed to be like that to capture all the different parts. And it was like, Okay, well, whoever identifies as that. That's, that's who the field is. Okay, so some of the tools that we use the simple structures that we used, we had a mural board. And this is a general overview. But if you could, I can't do it, but you can scroll in. And each of these small things, this is basically like an online whiteboard. So each of these is an area of maybe like a different session where people could put notes up, they could add to the schedule, they could, you know, there's like a area for a playlist. And there's different areas for different parts of the world. And again, we didn't,

Danielle Johnson 24:16

we can talk about maybe some of the places where we didn't hit the mark, like, as far as I might have wanted to see it, but I'm just kind of describing what the tools are right now. So yeah, so there was this place where people and the idea is to, to gather the collective intelligence to allow people to go here and kind of add the things that they know to the space. We also had a social systems network map. And it's hard to kind of see the connections here, but when you break out of it on the map, you can filter by a bunch of different categories that we had people fill out. We had the GPS and so the questions for those we talked about what's The shadow of limb makan with the idea being that in fractal fractal nature that would be the shadow of many different levels. What's the path to a liminal network state? How do we make a meta modern business bureau and what's the next phase of Luma con and that one was originally religion, but as the kind of time got through, Phil decided like that that was something that was coming up more. And so these were processes to understand to, to kind of take the pulse and understand what was important and what people within the whole field were valuing. And then this the different sessions, so we provided a Google Calendar, and there was a short form, you could fill out that form then uploaded the the sessions into a calendar, we asked people to present what's who's going to host it? What's the vibe of the space, some basic kind of restrictions of the space and like not restrictions, I guess, but like, agreements of the space is it going to be recorded is the camera going to be on Can I come in and just watch. So just so people kind of knew what they were walking into, and the level of participation, and then a link to the event. So most people provided their own links to the event we started at first, we were going to provide links, but then that got really hard, real fast as we started as a lot of the session started. So we ended up having 147 Total online sessions. And I just took a cut of one of the parts of the board's just to kind of give people an idea of some of the different types of sessions that were offered. And then there were also some kind of Hangouts or hybrid or in person type events. So what were some of the outcomes of limicon, I think, the people on the edges, some of those people talked. So I know a lot of people kind of felt because it was a little bit more low key and not like, Oh, this is a big formal conference type experience, that there were some people who presented things that they wouldn't normally have talked about, that they felt they could either be a little more experimental, or that they could be a little more daring in the space, because it felt like that. I think we heard from

Danielle Johnson 27:20

quite a few people that it it helped them to feel less alone that it was like, oh, yeah, there's other people like me out here in this world. I'm meeting these people. Now, this is great. We don't have all the data in yet, but we do, we did see the initial kind of forming of some project partners within the space. We saw people practice skills and have opportunities to grow throughout the space, not just the core team as we planned it, but kind of everybody. People made new friends, people got to share their stories. That was another thing that that several people kind of voiced as being important to them was just having a place where they could share a story that they hadn't been able to share anywhere else before felt important to them. And I think overall,

Danielle Johnson 28:11

the field got a jolt, that a little jolt of energy that that alive in did a little and helped it see itself a little bit. And we'll see. We'll see what happens after that. So what's next as far as lemma con goes, so right now we are attending to some core team relationship stuff. We found that as a team, kind of our core team of three, and then also kind of throughout the process as a way for me to kind of have well, I don't know why

Danielle Johnson 28:48

to help navigate another situation like Lauren came in to kind of our core team dynamic. And Lauren was in charge of most of a great deal of the logistical stuff that happened at lemma con, and really helped to kind of tighten that up and make it a playground that that people could could navigate pretty easy. So kind of looking at those dynamics and some of the edges that were the differences and tensions that we're experiencing. They're kind of analyzing the data of Luma con like, what did we learn from the experience? What did we learn ourselves? What kind of collectively came out of that? perhaps do some follow up interviews, or at least some follow up conversations with people and then think about decisions on what the next iteration of limicon looks like or what does what does that energy coming out of limicon become? And then kind of for me, I'm

Danielle Johnson 29:47

kind of interested in how do we take some of the North American findings on the field study work that's been going and expand that to North America and how that might Look, and then, you know, wondering if

Danielle Johnson 30:04

kind of a series of pop up fields and training people to kind of be the experts in their fields are might be like, One Road to kind of this the second renaissance

30:17

in that in that space, so. So yeah, that's what I got. And I'm open to questions or chatting or whatever comes next.

Lauren Wigmore 30:30

Thank you so much, Danielle. Yes. Let's open out for people's reflections, comments, questions. Does anybody have anything that they would like to jump in? Where you can just unmute yourself and and take over spine?

30:55

Yeah, I'm curious. Daniel, how did you decide an hour all freaking month? And what was the experience been with that? As it been like that was? Or if you were to do it again, will it be same timeframe?

Danielle Johnson 31:15

Think when I started to look at the the nature of what we wanted it to be having it be a month seemed more flexible, because you didn't have to, you know, we were getting closer to the date. And you didn't have to then say, Okay, everybody needs to be available on this date. It was now here's four weeks, sometime in that four weeks, throw session up. And so it was a lot like it kind of created that more relaxed vibe. Versus like, Okay, we have these many days to get these many sessions in. So for me, that's when I was kind of originally looking at it, that's, that felt like a way to kind of handle that tension of trying to pack everything in in two days, or getting everybody finding two days that everybody was available or those types of things.

Danielle Johnson 32:12

And we had toyed with the idea of kind of making themes for different weeks and and guiding it a little more than we did. And we didn't do that I think more because we ran out of time in the space. But I think it might have been better to have it more open. Like I think it kind of created its own vibe throughout the months. And didn't need some of those, you know, orientation week and debrief week and some of those types of things. But that was a consideration that we had in the process. And then your hands up.

32:48

Actually, Rufus had his hand up before me. I'm not sure. I will let Rufus go if you'd like to. And then

Lauren Wigmore 32:58

besides, did you have your hand on?