A High Threshold Invitation

When I invite you to consider working together, I want it to be a High Threshold Invitation. 

Let me define what I mean. I learned the concept from Peter Block. And I strongly recommend you articulate your own version:

Definition

A high-threshold invitation is an ask that makes the real stakes clear. Instead of making participation sound easy, convenient, or cost-free, the invitation names the difficulty and the commitment required. It calls people into responsibility and choice.

Key Elements

  • Truthful about the cost: It doesn’t hide that change will be disruptive, or that showing up fully requires time, energy, and courage.

  • Affirms freedom: People are genuinely free to say no. The power comes from the fact that acceptance is a conscious, voluntary choice.

  • Elevates the quality of participation: Those who cross the threshold are more likely to show up with seriousness, presence, and accountability.

Trust in people’s capacity: Instead of “selling” the experience with low-stakes marketing, it assumes people are capable of stepping up when invited honestly.

Here is My Invitation

There is an intelligence in the space that is alive between us. It is emergent and endlessly creative. It wants our attention. Our willingness to make ourselves available to it. 

In order to serve this collective intelligence we must all do the hard work of learning how to let go of what we think we already know.

We share an intelligence that thrives outside the binds of dogma, orthodoxy, ideology and materialism. It flows and innovates from the same source that the ancient path of wisdom flows from.

Mine is an invitation to individuals who are committed to developing the kind of self-sovereignty necessary to enter a collective inquiry in which no one loses their autonomy.

Over the last decades of facilitation experience, I have come upon a number of recurring obstacles. There is a predictable pattern to the ways in which we are getting stuck when we come together. I am making an effort is to break that pattern.

Here is how I am learning to talk about it:

I believe we live in a society that produces racialized outcomes. I also believe that we are subject to all kinds of trauma, personal, cultural and generational trauma.

What I no longer have time for is for the politics of resentment. Nor the politics of identitarianism.

I no longer want to facilitate spaces where people feel entitled to police each other’s language and ways of being.

I want us to nurture fortitude, not to center fragility.

I am committed to work that heals. And I understand that many of us might need time to tend to our healing before we develop self-sovereignty. This is good. It is part of the process.

I no longer have time for a trauma discourse that focuses on blame. I don’t have time for a trauma discourse that makes everyone else wrong while we make ourselves and our tiny group of friends right.  I don’t believe it is wise to foster the illusion of absolute safety. When no one in the course of human history has ever had anything like it. 

I want to hold spaces where it is not only ok, but essential, for people to “not know that they don’t know.”

Here I am sharing how Báyò Akomolafe welcomes (and excludes!) participants into one of his courses. It is an excellent articulation of what I’m trying to get at.

Resonant Example from Báyò Akomolafe

Please read this carefully: 

This course is not for everyone. And not everyone is invited. 

This assertion might seem inhospitable and exclusive, but it is a humble acknowledgement of limitations and a modest rejection of an easy, modern, context-less universalism that includes “everyone” or invites “everyone” in without noticing that the very formulation of the invitation, this inclusivism, is already an enactment of exclusions. Moreover, there is no such thing as “everyone” per se; there are specificities, bodies and contexts, needs and desires, commonalities and stories, openings and gifts.

This course-festival, a celebration of openings, a conjuring of descent, a sharing of fugitive strategies, is not about telling the truth or channeling pre-formed universal ideas, and it does not try to wield answers for all; instead, our pedagogical-spiritual undertaking is a rejection of such suspiciously cohesive and totalitarian notions like “Truth” or “World”.

This is inquiry at the edges of the recognizable, practice at the speed of child-like play – not a gathering to confirm what we already know, but a quest to sit with the shocking unthought. Even more critically, making sanctuary (the core concept that continues to be central to the imagination of the course) is for those on the run, those who need to move, those who must leave the familiar behind, and whose bodies have been rendered incapable of proceeding with the current state of affairs. This course is for fugitives – black identified bodies, brown identified bodies, white identified bodies and people all over the world who identify in other ways.

This course is for you:

  • if you know the irony of victory and feel something ‘outside’ our ways of making sense of things is being called for, 

  • if you sense a need for flight from the discourse, politics, and activisms you’ve experienced,

  • if you can weather the storm of edgy provocations that may eat at your sense of the appropriate,

  • if you are working with an organization, and can be supported in a local cohort to explore the themes of this course,

  • if you feel called to sit with others in experimental indeterminacy and possible failure,

  • if you are willing to be hospitable to the uncomfortable, to the bewildering, and to look again at subjects within the confines and clutches of your critique,

  • if you are willing to listen to other worlds outside your own,

  • if you feel desirous of participating in an active research assemblage that makes you more than an audience member at the feet of presumably wiser persons,

  • if you want to bring new questions and provocations to your social justice work and your understanding of today’s politically polarized world through paradigmatically different frameworks,

  • if you feel politically homeless, and you’ve come to appreciate the limitations of the promise of representation,

  • if you are clear on where to go and what to do about a perceived crisis confronting your community – but are still capable of entertaining (and willing to sit with) a suspicion that your clarity may occlude other modes of engagement,

  • if you have questions, lots of them, and would love to contribute these questions to create a commonwealth of fugitivity across the planet,

  • if you can permit yourself to be gifted the rich and emancipatory hospitality of Blackness as excess, then this course just might be an invitation to you,

  • ...if the prospects of co-creating a local/decolonial sanctuary as a way of becoming response-able to and with/in colonial frameworks nurtures your desires for trying the impossible and calls to you.    

This course may not be for you

If your energies are entirely devoted to or substantially invested in forms of resistance and critique that characterize even well-established strands of social justice thought and practice that are of issue in this course,

  • if you are clear on where to go and what to do about a perceived crisis confronting your community – and find no pressing need or urgency to explore other modes of engagement,

  • if your constitution cannot withstand any challenge to your views,

  • if you require professional care and support that cannot be reasonably provided during an online course, given its limitations,

  • If you expect certain ethical formulations, practices, assumptions, identity-based discourses, and gestures unique to your part of the world (or to the politics that you are used to) to be unreservedly adopted by others across cultures, orientations and cosmologies – and if you countenance a refusal of these proposals as traumatizing or evidence of pathology on the part of the ‘refusing other’. 

WARNING: We’re serious about this course being an exploration that intentionally includes exploring provocative ideas outside the bounds of what’s considered appropriate or acceptable especially in some social justice circles. The hope and purpose of exploring beyond these boundaries is to find new or different ways of orienting ourselves and/or to uncover insights in our disorientation. Please do not join this class if you think this could be more than you want to hold or if it could touch traumas in ways that aren’t good for you. By joining this course, you are agreeing to question your reactions, opinions, and attachments. Please come at your own risk.