Keep It Cozy with Squad-Sized Groups

Every community has to start somewhere. After founders plant initial seeds, the next crucial phase begins with formation of a "squad"1 - a tight-knit group of 5-8 people. These intimate containers create the conditions for genuine connection, creativity, and shared purpose to flourish.

In squads, everyone has space to contribute. Conversations reach natural depth, trust develops organically, and relationships form without forcing. It's large enough for interesting cross-pollination of ideas, yet small enough that no voice gets lost in the crowd.

As fundamental building blocks, squads help communities stay connected as they grow. Think of them like essential elements of an ecosystem - small, interconnected groups that keep both individuals and the larger collective healthy and engaged.

In my experience, the art of cultivating squads within the community garden rests on the articulation of six essential elements:

1. Intention: The squad's focus and goals, including how it will work and contribute to the whole.

2. Roles: Members take on complementary roles within the squad while the squad itself serves a specific function within the community.

3. Time Commitment: Clear time boundaries and explicit agreements about engagement help squads maintain momentum while respecting everyone's capacity.

4. Boundaries & Interface: A squad needs clear agreements about its relationship with the broader entity, including autonomy, sharing protocols, and information flow.

5. Evolution & Lifecycle: Squads move through natural phases – from formation and bonding, through productive flow, to eventual completion or transformation.

6. Leadership Style: How the squad is guided and supported, with approaches that adapt as it develops and matures.

These six elements - intention, roles, time commitment, boundaries & interface, evolution & lifecycle, and leadership style - work together to create thriving squad environments. When thoughtfully implemented, they provide the structure needed for collaborative exploration and discovery.

In the following sections, we'll explore each element in detail, looking at practical examples and specific strategies for implementation.

Every effective squad needs a well-defined mission that aligns with the community's objectives. This might be a project with specific goals, a topic to explore, or a creative collaboration. The key is articulating this purpose with enough detail so people can clearly see whether they align with it.

Compelling squad statements include:

• The focus or scope of the group

• What you'll be working on together

• The anticipated style of work

• Expected outputs or deliverables

• How this connects to the larger whole

When a squad is clear about its intended direction, I often find people naturally self-select into the group, gravitating toward a focus that resonate with their interests. Not everyone will resonate with every emerging squad, and that's expected.

And just as a garden's purpose might shift from spring flowers to summer vegetables, a squad's approach may need gentle reshaping as the group grows and evolves together. This is common, with practice you’ll learn how to read and follow the group’s ever-changing energy.

Within each squad, different roles allow people to contribute their unique strengths. The positions needed will vary based on the squad's purpose, but might include:

• Facilitators to hold space and guide process

• Scribes to capture key insights

• Subject matter experts for specific content areas

• Project coordinators for tactical execution

• Creative catalysts who bring new perspectives

Think of these roles like companion planting in a garden - some plants provide structure, others attract pollinators, while others enrich the soil. Similarly, a healthy squad needs a diversity of functions that support and enhance each other.

Generally, across different roles and different squad configurations, what matters most is:

• Clear articulation of what each role entails

• Understanding how various positions complement each other

• Flexibility to adapt roles as needs emerge

• Recognition that everyone brings multiple capacities

In the early days of a community, roles might be more fluid or primarily held by early, active members. Like young plants finding their way toward sunlight, the articulation of roles may be less obvious at first, while slowly emerging naturally.

In practice, I’ve noticed roles often reveal themselves when reflecting on how a collective has grown and how myself and members contributed to various projects or participated in meetings and workshops. As the ecosystem matures, roles often become more distributed and clearly defined. Over time, documentation helps in supporting others to step into similar capacities, or create their own, new ones.

One of the most crucial elements of squad design is being explicit about time commitments. In creating a reasonable end-point, we're introducing deadlines to hold ourselves accountable. This brings several benefits:

• Members can realistically assess their capacity to participate

• A container for focused engagement emerges

• The work gains clarity and intentional focus

Like a garden, squads need both active growing periods and times of rest. When setting time commitments, consider the natural rhythms of your seasons - times of high energy and engagement, and times when people need to step back and recharge.

Time commitments might look like:

• A single focused session

• A series of weekly meetings for two months

• A six-month working group with clear milestones

• Regular monthly gatherings with a defined endpoint

The key lies in specificity. "We'll meet until we figure it out" is much less effective than "We'll meet over 6 weekly sessions for 90 minutes each over the next two months.” I’ve also found it’s okay to be fuzzy about your time constraints, depending on the bespoke nature of the space. “This working group will evaluate its progress in early Spring” can work even though it’s not explicit with an exact date. Feel free to find the right vibe for your endeavor.

Regular rhythms like ongoing meetings are an exception to time-bounded commitments. While ongoing meetings can create valuable shared cadence, you’ll want to ensure meeting responsibilities rotate among members rather than falling indefinitely to the same people. I’ll talk about creating community rhythms at depth in the next piece of the series.

Like a garden bed within a landscape, each squad needs clear boundaries while maintaining connections to the larger group. These delineations help the squad develop its own culture and working style while ensuring their contributions enrich the whole.

Good boundary agreements include:

• How autonomous the squad is in making decisions

• When and how to share progress

• What information flows in and out

• How other members can engage

• Where to maintain privacy for deeper work

Documenting these agreements in places accessible to both squad members and the full ecosystem is helpful so everyone understands how to engage appropriately. In practice, I often see squads “working in public” in a dedicated channel within the communal space to achieve this purpose.

It’s also worth noting that many squads aren’t completely closed to outside input from folks external to the group. Particularly in the “working in public” style of squading, the invitation stands for others to chime in as work progresses.

The goal with good squad boundaries is creating enough space for focused endeavor while also ensuring connection and resources continue to flow from the broader community, as needed.

Just like gardens move through seasons, squads have natural phases of development. Understanding these phases helps us provide the right kind of support at the right time, and recognize when a squad has completed its purpose.

Typical squad phases include:

• Formation: Coming together, building initial connections

• Norming: Establishing ways of working together

• Peak Growth: Deep engagement with purpose

• Harvest: Sharing outputs and learnings

• Completion or Transformation: Moving to next phase

Some squads are like annual plants, serving a specific purpose and then completing their cycle. Others are more like perennials, returning in new forms or evolving into different forms.

Over time, you’ll learn how squads operate in your community, when they’re necessary (and not) and more accurately predicting when to get the next squad going. Similar to a mature garden that begins to self-seed, once your culture is enriched, others will develop this same sensitivity and begin forming their own squads with little to no support.

Different types of squads need different types of leadership, just as different plants need different kinds of care. The key is finding a style that nurtures growth while maintaining enough structure for the squad to thrive.

Leadership considerations include how to:

• Structure facilitation (fixed or rotating)

• Make decisions as a group

• Maintain accountability

• Balance structure and emergence

• Distribute responsibility and ownership

The best leadership approach often evolves with the squad - starting with more active guidance and gradually shifting toward shared stewardship as the group matures. Like a garden that needs less intensive care as it establishes itself, squads often become more self-sustaining over time.

Understanding our six elements - intention, roles, time commitment, boundaries & interface, evolution & lifecycle, and leadership style - provides a framework for nurturing healthy squads. As a community builder, you're more gardener than architect.

Your role isn't to control every interaction, but to cultivate an environment where connection and collaboration can naturally flourish. Like a skilled gardener, you attentively observe the social landscape, recognizing emerging growth and identifying areas that require tending.

When it comes to squads, in the early days you might be the one planting the seeds – proposing or encouraging these groups to form and initiating experiences. As the garden grows, your role shifts to supporting others in starting their own initiatives. This might mean creating documentation for how to form a squad, helping people articulate their proposals, or simply pointing out where the soil seems particularly rich for new projects.

Over time, squads become the building blocks of your larger communal structures. Some will be temporary, like seasonal plantings focused on specific projects. Others might be perennial, providing ongoing spaces for dialogue and practice. What they share is an intimate scale that allows both ideas and relationships to root deeply.

As your community grows beyond squad size, these small groups remain essential. They're where the real work happens, where relationships deepen, and where new possibilities emerge. Our role as gardener is to maintain the overall design while trusting in the organic unfolding of each small plot.

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You may read this and think, "Wow! There's so much structure, so many things to consider." My response would be yes, and don't let that discourage you from getting started through experimentation. There's no need to treat this like a checklist, trying to get everything figured out ahead of time and then operating it like a master landscaper with a rigid plan.

Growing communities is much more art than science. Like tending a garden, you start with some basic principles about soil, light, and water, but each garden develops its own character based on local conditions, season, and the interplay between what you plant. You learn by doing – observing what thrives, what needs more support, and how different elements work together.

There's always room for new growth and iteration. The first season informs the next, and each cycle brings new insights. Some things will flourish right away, others might need different conditions to thrive, and that's all part of the process.

And don't forget—this is a community gardener's guide rather than a blueprint. Take what serves your soil, adapt to your climate, and enjoy watching your community grow. 🌱