SINCE OUR CONVERSATION, RICH AND NATI have just announced the launch of Casa Tilo, a retreat centre in Barcelona designed as a gathering place for residential events and co-living. Made possible through start-up capital raised from their community, the space will serve as a home base for their workshops and programmes, offering an immersive environment for collaboration and learning. Casa Tilo officially opens its doors on April 19, and they warmly invite Emerge readers to visit.

Rich Bartlett and Nati Lombardo met in the context of the Enspiral community, a collective experimenting with alternative ways of organizing and supporting each other to do meaningful work in the world. This experience laid the foundation for The Hum, which they started in 2018 to provide training and consultancy on collaborative leadership and decentralized organization. Nati’s experience in creative activism, permaculture, and community complements Rich’s background in engineering and entrepreneurship — they are also life partners as well as work partners.

The Hum develops courses and hosts events to support teams to become more ‘collaborative and nourishing to work in’, and also provides in-house training, facilitation, conflict mediation, and coaching. Initially focused on collaborative decision-making and more structural quandaries, their emphasis has shifted more and more towards building trust and handling conflict in remote and hybrid work environments. Rich mentioned that they’re ‘putting less time into the structures and more into the cultures.’ For example, ‘how do we repair when things go wrong, how do we give each other feedback? How do we handle conflict?’  

We had a wide-ranging conversation with Rich and Nati, but for our purposes within the context of COHERE+, we’ll focus on a few parts: their insights on how to foster coherence across differences, their philosophy on ‘wholeness’ and integrity in relationships of all types, and working with conflict in decentralized teams and communities.

Nati and Rich discussed the challenge of working with differences and reckoning with complexity within the context of climate work. 

‘We've actually got lots of different stakeholders with different positions and it's important to understand all those positions and really try to build coherence across these differences,’ said Rich. ‘I think we become more sophisticated citizens when we have more practice deliberating and governing and doing things at a smaller scale. And so I feel that our contribution to the climate crisis is creating places where people get to practice small scale governance and they hopefully become more complex in the process.’

Their years of experience doing this work has shown that building capacities for coherence is intrinsically tied to processes that encourage holding complexity, particularly in the context of deliberation. Enabling coherence is not about erasing differences or removing dissenting voices but rather opening up to a practice of discussion and deliberation.

So what is it about small-scale governance in particular that enables this kind of skill-building, and how can this create rippling effects on a larger scale?

‘There are things that you can learn with a few people that teach you about very large groups,’ explained Rich. He continued, ‘So if we want people to be competent citizens in a democracy of 50 million people, it'd be good if they spent some time in a democracy of five or fifteen people. Or just start with two. I don't know how to say this politely, but it's easy to have bad opinions about how society should be organized if you've never organized five people. If you don't have that practical experience of bringing a group together and holding it together over a period of time, you'll have all of these opinions that are just opinions.’

Approaches to conflict in decentralized teams and communities

One question they fielded frequently in the early years of their work was how to speed up collaborative decision processes. Teams would come to them with the concern that  they couldn’t move forward fast enough while transitioning from a one-person decision-maker model to consensus decision-making.

Rich and Nati say that the question has shifted into a more nuanced inquiry around implicit power dynamics in a group, and more subtle challenges within various decision-making methodologies. Especially with remote and hybrid working contexts, they’re facing more questions around building trust and positive relationships between collaborators, how to give feedback, and handle conflict. 

On that point, we were curious to know how they approach conflict processes within the communities they’ve founded and with the teams that they work with. As it happens, they came into the conversation with a fresh experience of some tensions and conflict at a recent gathering. They stressed the importance of having people present who can hold conflict transformation or mediation with the whole group, ‘not shying away from it, but actually using it as a source for better understanding and for resolution,’ Nati described.

Rich added, ‘and I think that’s 20 percent skills, 80 percent trust. Having enough trust in the group, and people having had enough positive experiences with each other so that when things get tough, they can say, ok, I’m really pissed off but I also have memories of all the good things that have happened and I know that you have my best interest at heart, we’ve just reached a really tricky point now.’

In long-term collaborations they focus on ‘anticipating conflict’ through building a culture and a set of processes that allows for ongoing conversations and micro-adjustments.

Rich explained the structures around this that they’ve built up in any team they work in:  ‘Rather than wait for things to get explosive, we'll have a retrospective every two weeks where we're proactively asking people to disclose any frustrations or disappointments so it's actually easier to deal with them. And so we build up the shared fabric or the shared understanding that if things are not going well, you mention it pretty soon and people will take you seriously and make adjustments.’

They also build in feedback and retrospective practices every three months, and encourage immediate feedback when two individuals or small groups encounter tensions. 

Nati described the mechanics of this in more detail: ‘The next step is to get on a video call to talk it out, asking each other “what happened there? Where are the misunderstandings? Where is the disconnection and what needs repair?”  And if that doesn't work, then you'd call someone else that can help you. Someone else will sit in and give a hand. And if that doesn't work, then you bring it to the group and you deal with it on a different scale or you bring an external mediator.”

This process of escalating the amount of support needed is founded on a culture that had embedded within it the ‘attitude that things shouldn’t fester.’ To further nuance this premise, they explain that it’s neither about ‘lingering in the mistrust’ nor forcing a false sense of everyone being best friends.

One theme that emerged in conversation about Rich and Nati’s personal as well as working relationship is the sense of ‘wholeness’, which they describe as ‘being yourself in different contexts.’ 

We were curious to understand how they approach this ‘wholeness’ in their working life and personal relationship. (Their working relationship began first, while working together at Enspiral, and then evolved into life partnership.)

Despite the occasional challenges of this work/life overlap (‘just because you had an idea at 9pm, maybe don’t drag me into work right now while I’m resting!’), there’s an integrity to how they approach relational ethics both at home and in how they bring this to teams in their workshops and courses:

‘When we're going into teams and we're talking about how do you communicate, how to give each other feedback, how do you handle conflict — this is the same stuff that we're doing at home with each other,’ they explained.

Their approaches to mediation and communication in their outward offerings are therefore not ‘incidental’ — it’s fundamental to their overarching ‘orientation towards relationships,’ whether as a couple or within a team.