I participated deeply in Joe Hudson's leadership trainings from 2017–2019, and as a part of that did two sequences of 18 months cohorts. We had an amazing enjoyable time, but the part that really stuck with me was experiencing a group developing into a self leading organism. It's said that the Guru speaks through the group, and many times I had the distinct experience that the group was living through us as a holographic benevolent over mind.

This experience was predicated on trust and over time, Joe could allow himself to be led by the collective, once the principles were established.

ESF Principles

• Connection First
• Stay in Relationship
• Embrace Intensity
• Loving Accountability
• Everything is an iteration

Given these experiences, I felt that there was something very important for humanity, to have more access to this primordial togetherness, but when I tried to apply it to the startup I worked at, then a DAO (crypto company), I found that reinventing‑organizations‑style philosophy wasn't sufficient in itself, that rather the conditions for this sort of collectivity was a special evolved quality.

Turns out we were missing a principle -- Naturalizing sense making -- that is to say, using natural science as a constraint. The reason for this is obvious when we look at what happens when people try to scale the human potential movement, that is what Neuro‑Linguistic Programming is, which dear reader, you may be attached to, or completely dismissive of, and that is my point, if we went back to Virginia Satir, no doubt she was a genius of interpersonal education, but when Bandler and Grinder made her work explicit, what we got degraded to the level of the practitioner, rather than rasing the practitioner to a higher level of practice.

Okay, and this is a very deep topic, which I would like to be rigorous about, what for instance do I mean by level? There is research into psychotherapist effectiveness that suggests effectiveness is unidimensional! And as my good friend Brian suggested, this dimension could well be the state of open receptivity. A state that is possible when a person feels safe, thus the principles above!

So, as I was saying, whereas NLP or Landmark tried to scale charismatic leadership, and succeeded in creating cultures of let's say controversial reputation, as students of subtle sensitivity, we can do better. We can learn from the success of CBT and DBT, both of which grounded themselves in empirically testable methods, with CBT directly aligned with scientific consensus and DBT extending that consensus by blending behavioral science with acceptance-based practices.

There is a lot more to say here, and I will continue to iterate this essay :)