The importance of transition
Anyone cultivating relationships knows that some of their most important connective work happens in the spaces and the moments between. This is the ‘small stuff’ community builders sweat. Whether shared, or experienced in solitude, the spaces between where we focus and interact are breaths of valuable oxygen for what comes next.
As much of the world has taken to learning, working and playing online during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve bid farewell to many of those spaces in between. Hallways, train rides, a quiet coffee before we walk up the stairs and mentally slide into the next gear required.
Now, we might spend a day at home flicking between contexts like flipping channels. In a work meeting, in a classroom, at a conference, catching up on news, then back at work. Everywhere, at once. And we wonder why we’re feeling so exhausted?
This collapse of transition can amplify the uncanny dissonance we feel when connecting to faces and sounds across screens. It compresses time, space, reason and relation into an endless stream. We wave at our screens, hungry for chronemic cues.
The acceleration of context switching and loss of transitional moments impacts our engagement. We take longer to focus. We lose productivity. We’re less able to communicate and take on new information. It short circuits our cognitive technology and social antenna.
Restore transitions & rehabilitate context
Creating transitional moments and experiences in video gatherings or other virtualised events can help close the gap between the physical and the digital. It can create ritual that helps move people into their next context without the jolt, and a meaningful bookend to the time just spent.
However you’re bringing humans together online, design opportunity moments for people to enter, shift and exit from focus to focus. Repair contextual integrity by installing healthy boundaries and handrails.
Lead a mindful minute of breathing and reflection. Invite dramatic and theatrical exits with a bow. Create adjacent spaces where people can energise or decompress at their own pace. Offer a list of simple suggestions for them to take from this connection into the space between their next, such as a short walk, a long drink of water, even a nap!
Intentional communities need mobility and progression - toward goals and purpose - to thrive. Collectively, let’s use this fork in the road of our futures to move beyond traditional structures of time, and rediscover value in the moments in between that move us.
Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis