Relational Practices List
We have tried and enjoyed the following practices:
Empathy Circling
This practice is, very simply, listening to someone and reflecting back their thoughts. The sweet spot is a balance of maintaining accuracy and fidelity to their original expression while also using one's own representations (rather than parroting back word-for-word).
Authentic Relating
This is a large collection of games/practices, best represented by the manual assembled by Sara Ness. We've used the Noticing game, Hotseat, and others as building blocks of culture and communication.
Authentic Revolution's Games Manual · ART International's Five Practices of Authentic Relating · Our experience report
Circling
Circling is a present-moment practice of noticing our sensations in relationship with one another and being curious about another's experience. It has grown rather popular and has three major schools of practice, plus stylistic variations that fix (birthday) or flow (organic) the focus of attention.
Collective Presencing
A circle practice of group sense-making, developed by Ria Baeck. Exploring the space of a preselected open question, participants bring their observations "to the center" of the circle, where deep listening weaves reflections together in a super-mind-ish phenomenon.
Inquiry Spiraling
Closely related to Collective Presencing, this practice circles around exploring the question space itself, weaving together a simultaneous mix of diverging and converging questions while staying in curiosity. Designed as question-finding, it can be paired with another question-answering/exploring practice.
Case Work
By case work, we mean the examination of developmental challenges that are working us. A case giver shares the story of their situation, and is supported by a small group in taking perspective on that thing and their relationship to it. The word "case" comes from Presencing Institute's (a.k.a. Theory U) Case Clinic practice, and we have developed our own combination practice called Edge Case.
Edge Case Instructions · Case Clinic Instructions · Our experience report
Peer Coaching
Taken as a general concept, this practice is "pure" coaching, defined by the stance that the coachee already holds in themselves everything that's necessary to resolve their own challenge(s). The act of coaching, rather than advising or consulting, is to ask questions that merely help direct the coachee's awareness to notice possible blind spots or unrealized connections — sparking the click of insight or integration that's waiting there for them. This can be done with a question bank of "clean" questions, or we've used a fixed script of a question sequence.
T-group
Adopted via our friends at Communication Dojo, this is the granddaddy (dating back to the 1950s) practice of expressing one's present moment experience in a group setting.
Glass Bead Game
Inspired by a novel, this is a (usually) two-player game in which players take turns riffing off a concept and each other in a kind of improv philosophy jam.
Agile Retrospectives
Widespread in agile software development and elsewhere, literally "learning from looking back" as a group. This can take many forms, from simple rubrics like "start stop continue" or "rose thorn bud" to timeline reconstruction to structural tension analysis. It's a fundamental learning move to "go meta" and many books and guides have been written exploring the domain.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Internal Family Systems (commonly abbreviated as IFS) is a (self-)therapeutic model that embraces looking at the "parts" of ourselves, listening to them, welcoming them, and working with them. Opinions can vary on how neurologically accurate the correspondence is, but even as imaginal-oracular exercises, attempting "parts work" can bring us interesting perspectives on what motivations are driving our feelings and behaviors.
IFS Institute · Our intro and analysis
FAQ
What would you say that you actually do here?
Mostly we get on video calls with each other, face-to-face, and spend very little time writing at each other. We make friends, support each other, and weave bits of our hearts and lives together. A lot of it is "inner work," in contrast to a conventional culture so focused on external accomplishments.
I'm unsure, nervous, or introverted — is this relational stuff a fit for me?
Only you really know. Try one Connection Call and see how it feels. Some of us are highly adept in relational attunement, others come to improve their interpersonal skills — really we're all relating all the time already, to ourselves, others, and the world around us.
Will I offend anyone if I join, don't like it, and then leave?
On the contrary, we'll count that as a success — you learned something and navigated tension. We celebrate arrivals, departures, and boundary-setting with equanimity.
Is there one best way to get started?
A Connection Call. From there we can point you to anything we know about inside and outside the IS web.
My life is pretty busy already — what if I can't keep up?
Only a problem if it feels like one to you. Be clear with yourself and others about your capacity and energy as it changes; we support people doing as they feel called.
Do I need any tech savvy to fit in here?
Managing your mute button is the most crucial tech skill of the 2020s. Besides Zoom and email, we require very little.
What time zones does IS cater to?
Traditional "IS Time" is 4pm Eastern, reachable by early-bird Aussies & Kiwis and night-owl Africans and Europeans. Small-group activities can happen at any convenient time.
Is IS virtual only? Any physical meetups?
Yes, a distributed virtual village — our biggest meetup to date was 8 people. We know people in a remarkable number of cities and are interested in facilitating local connections as they arise.
How many people are in IS?
Total active membership is under 100; synchronous spaces fit a few dozen each, and most conversation happens in crew-sized breakouts of 3–6.
Does membership cost any money?
No, membership is free. We never want a financial barrier in front of participation in our relational web. Our norm is mostly gift culture.
Who pays the bills, then?
IS has a sustainable funding commitment through 2035 from a small family foundation, which we use to operate lean internal infrastructure and support other field-builders.
Is this therapy, or a substitute for it?
No. No one in IS is your therapist. If you're experiencing something that needs professional care, we encourage you to seek it — every individual holds ultimate responsibility for their own safety and needs.
Does IS promote any religion or spirituality?
No. IS maintains neutrality on whether "woo" exists in-the-world or in-the-observer, and holds space for both mystic and materialist lenses.
Who founded this?
James — who wrote "the call" that started Intentional Society after a developmental crisis following a conventionally successful early career.
Who holds the power? What happens in conflict?
We strive for natural, contextual, fluid power dynamics rather than rigid hierarchy or "everyone has equal power" egalitarianism. James, as founder, still holds significant source-keeper influence and the legal "keys" (domains, assets, LLC), with a stated aim to keep distributing leadership.
Can I trust power won't be hoarded or abused down the road?
No system replaces the need for virtue in humans. We draw on Sociocratic decision-making, Teal/Deliberately Developmental culture, Metasystematic mindset, and Agile feedback loops to help us evolve responsibly.
What is the legal structure behind IS?
An unincorporated association for about five years; an LLC was created in late 2025 to administer contractor agreements as the Workteam formed.
Is this yet another playground for privileged people?
We have a fairly broad range of socioeconomic experience among members, though having the time and slack to dedicate to this kind of work isn't available to everyone.
What makes IS unique?
Integrating adult development with relational practices plus cultural evolution is a useful tuning fork — but also, "we're just these particular people."
Are y'all utopians who think you'll save the world?
"Saving the world" is explicitly a non-goal. We long for a wiser, weller world and want to play our part — while staying connected to our bodies, families, and daily lives rather than chasing a savior complex.
What does success look like?
Personal transformation rippling into high-trust communities, a network of cooperating virtual communities, member-owned co-ops, and rising developmental norms globally — but everything has to be worth it for its own sake along the way.
What does failure look like?
Turning away from connection out of discomfort, collapsing into despair, fooling ourselves collectively, or staying small out of fear — each a failure to stay in contact with reality and wield our power wisely.