Common Questions
Q: What would you say that you actually *do* here?
A: "We're people persons, okay?!" (sorry, couldn't resist the movie reference) We mostly get on Zoom calls with each other, is the super-reductive version. We spend our time face-to-face, and very little time writing at each other. At another layer, we make friends and support each other and weave bits of our hearts and lives together, stuff that feels good. We tend to do a lot of what gets called "inner work", in contrast to conventional culture out there that focuses so much on external accomplishments. Zoom out and we do "life, unfolding itself in beauty," which is just as true as the "Zoom calls" answer.
Q: I'm unsure/nervous/introverted — is this relational stuff a fit for me?
A: We love to support people at their growth edges, but only you (mind and body in conversation) really know. You could try one Connection Call and see how that feels. Some of us are highly adept in relational attunement, and others come to improve their interpersonal skills... really we're all relating all the time already: to ourselves, to others, to our environment and the world around us. We're quite warm and supportive relative to conventional society. 🫂
Q: Will I offend anyone if I join, don't like it, and then leave?
A: On the contrary, we'll count that as a success - you learned something and potentially navigated tension! We celebrate arrivals, departures, and boundary-setting with equanimity, as we care about intentionality and integrity over any specific outcomes.
Q: Is there one best way to get started?
A: Well, you can't go too wrong with a Connection Call. From there we can hook you up with anything we know about inside and outside the IS web.
Q: My life is pretty busy/full already, what if I can't keep up with things here?
A: Is that a problem? Only if it feels like one to you. We invite you to be clear with yourself and others about your capacity and energy, and to communicate your intentions as they change — other than that, we just support people doing as they feel called.
Q: Do I need any tech savvy to fit in here? What computer skills do I need?
A: Managing your mute button seems to be the most crucial tech skill of the 2020s! 🤣 Besides Zoom and email, we require very little. We do use docs and spreadsheets sometimes. When we use Miro (a virtual whiteboard program), we design for some folks avoiding it. We're building a web app in 2026, but doing so with an aim to simplify some form-and-spreadsheet-plus-duct-tape experiences.
Q: What time zones does IS cater to?
A: Traditional "IS Time" is 4pm Eastern (USA-based for DST calculations) which allows early-bird Aussies & Kiwis as well as night-owl Africans and Europeans to join in. Large-group activities usually stick with this standard time, while small-group activities can happen at any convenient time.
Q: Is IS virtual only? Are there any physical locations or meetups?
A: Yes, we are a distributed virtual village, and we're "finding the others" across the globe, so our biggest IS meetup to date (as of 2025) was 8 people. As we go, though, we're starting to "know a few people" in a remarkable number of cities and are interested in facilitating local connections as opportunities grow.
Q: How many people are in IS?
A: This is fuzzy based on where you draw the line, but it's fair to say that our total active membership is under 100, and within that our synchronous spaces fit "a few dozen" people each. Within those, we spend most of our conversational time in small "crew"-sized breakouts of 3-6. We don't anticipate having a hard cap at "the Dunbar number" of 150 for the network level, but we feel the other, smaller Dunbar numbers are even more important and build multi-scale principles into our social system designs.
Q: Does membership in Intentional Society cost any money?
A: No, membership is completely free and we don't ever want to put a financial barrier in front of participation in our relational web. (We don't prohibit members from any kind of value exchanges they want to do, or from inviting people to paid offerings, but our norm is mostly "gift culture".)
Q: Who pays the bills, then? Is this unsustainable?
A: IS has a sustainable funding commitment through 2035 from a small family foundation, and we gratefully use this bubble of abundance to operate our lean internal infrastructure as well as supporting other field-builders.
Q: Is this therapy? Is this a substitute for therapy?
A: No. No one in IS is your therapist, and we cannot provide professional mental health support. If you're experiencing something that needs that kind of care, we encourage you to seek it. In our explorations, we do draw material from various therapeutic models and practice skills that grow our emotional and psychological capacities — but every individual must hold ultimate responsibility for their own safety, boundaries, and needs.
Q: Does IS promote any religion or flavor of spirituality?
A: No. However. It's probably useful to say that those who use a fundamentalist lens to any religion will have a hard time with the diversity of IS. Conversely, many world religions have more mystical lineages, and those perspectives seem to recognize their mutual alignment quite easily. The mystic and the materialist must both stretch to empathize with each other, and IS maintains neutrality with regards to "woo" (or supernatural) existing in-the-world or in-the-observer.
Q: Who founded this?
A: Hi, this is James. I wrote the call that started Intentional Society. I had a pretty successful conventional life for 35 years, won some typical accomplishment games a bit early, and then backed my way into a developmental crisis and transformation that put me on the post-conventional path. I have some talent for seeing how things connect, and I'm just some dude (as everyone is, gender-neutrally).
Q: Who holds the power in Intentional Society? What happens in a conflict?
A: Everybody hates centralized rigid command-and-control hierarchies by now. But we also don't do the "tyranny of structurelessness" egalitarianism that pretends that power doesn't exist or that everyone has equal power. We strive for natural, contextual, fluid power dynamics and to make leadership and influence accessible and talk-about-able in our culture. Note from James: as founder, I have held and still (2026) hold a large amount of source-keeper energy and influence in this system. I also hold the ownable "keys" legally - stuff like domain names, digital assets, and an llc for payroll. I hope you'd hear my stance of open and collaborative power-holding reflected in the perception of anyone you ask, and I look to continue distributing leadership at the fastest right pace. (After our 2026 funding announcement, stronger governance accountability is also on the horizon after years of not-needed-yet.)
Q: Can I trust that power won't be hoarded or abused down the road?
A: I mean, first, no - not absolutely. There is no system that can replace the need for virtue in humans. Within our intentions and expertise, however, are leading-edge best practices for self-aware metamodern governance: Sociocratic decision-making and circles, Teal (Reinventing Organizations by Laloux) culture, Deliberately Developmental (An Everyone Culture by Kegan & Lahey) and Metasystematic (by Chapman) mindset, and Agile/XP feedback loops. This toolkit, along with our awareness and relational skills, can help us evolve as-and-into a world-class organization as much as we're called to.
Q: What is the legal structure behind IS?
A: Intentional Society was an unincorporated association for about five years. Upon the creation of the IS Workteam in late 2025, an LLC was created to administer contractor agreements. The spirit of IS is very much beyond conventional corporate structures, but it's unclear when the practical operation of IS will benefit from more complex legal structure such as "non-profit holding corp with unrestricted subsidiaries" or "PBC / B-corp with golden shares" etc.
Q: Is this yet another playground for privileged people?
A: We're proud to have a fairly broad range of socioeconomic experiences represented in our members. At the same time it's true that, on top of "having a working mic/camera/computer/internet", having time and energy available to dedicate to self-development, social, and meaning-making activities requires a level of material and mental security and slack that isn't available to at least half the humans in the world.
Q: What makes IS unique compared to other communities and networks out there?
A: Well, we're the only one that gets everything right, and all the others are wrong. (joking, joking!) Something like, "integrating adult development with relational practices plus cultural evolution" is probably a useful tuning fork, but also "we're not, we're just these particular people" is the other side of that balance.
Q: Are y'all some utopians that think you're gonna save the world?
A: "Saving the world" is explicitly a non-goal of ours, as we don't buy that frame as it's usually used. Do we long for a more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible, a wiser weller world, and to play our part in humanity growing to dissolve the metacrisis by expanding our wisdom capacity big enough to handle our power and create a surviving and thriving world for our descendants? You betcha. But we're well aware that "the world" is a really complex system that is quite resistant to white-knight savior-complex change-making efforts, so we aim to remain connected to our bodies and families and daily lives as we "be the change" and seek integrity at all scales in our actions.
Q: Aw, but I want to save the world! Should I go elsewhere then?
A: The world is perfect exactly as it is... and this includes our desire to change it. We welcome "achiever" energy and frankly there's a lot to do around here! As long as we don't get sucked into attaching our value or worthiness as a human being to how much other people praise us or how proud we can feel of our accomplishments, we embrace that we are always already in active creation of this world and in service to something so much greater than ourselves (whether you call it society, humanity, life, the universe, or God).
Q: What does success look like?
A: (Keeping this answer from 2021, it holds up well!) So many dominos *could* tip, one after the other, larger and larger: Personal transformation, self-authoring, and self-actualization left and right. Diverse Dunbar-scale communities of high trust, mutual support, and capacity to serve. A network of virtual communities with emergent cooperation and a meta-tribe with shared goals and non-naive reciprocal trust. A thriving start-up ecosystem of internal and external services owned as member co-ops. Organizing physical communities in new and existing cities to extend development across more socioeconomic strata. Political projects to raise governmental competence supported by a large virtual society. Personal development norms and expectations rising in nations and societies around the globe. But. Everything we do at every point - every stage along the way - must be worth it for its own sake. If any of this is just a stepping stone to greatness and glory, then we will have fallen right back into the "save the world" trap.
Q: What does failure look like?
A: There's a sense in which the journey is the reward and failure is impossible. Yet we don't take that lens to 100% — we do care and assign value judgements to better or worse futures. But we also don't control outcomes like e.g. "global society collapses" so the appropriate frame is, what would too many near-misses at the edge of our responsibility and capability look like? What comes up there is: If we turn away from connection out of discomfort, we will fail to break the bonds of separateness. If we collapse into despair, we will fail to see the ever-arising opportunities. If we fool ourselves collectively at any scope, we will fail to stay in contact with reality. If we stay small out of fear, we will fail to wield our power wisely. But if we stay grounded in our deep knowing, be who we are called to be in each moment, and flow our actions with integrity, then we can accept whatever comes our way.
