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Mastermind By Light Leadership

Supporting Booklet

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1. WHAT IS A MASTERMIND? In his book “Think and Grow Rich”1, Napoleon Hill described the original Mastermind principle as,

“The coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people who work towards a definite purpose in a spirit of harmony…no two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.”

He then goes on to say,

“A group of brains coordinated or connected in a spirit of harmony will provide more thought energy than a single brain. Just as a group of electric batteries will provide more energy than a single battery. Through this metaphor it becomes immediately obvious that the mastermind principle holds the secret of the power wielded by [people] who surround themselves with other [people] of brains. When a group of individual brains are coordinated and function in harmony, the increased energy created through that alliance becomes available to every individual brain in the group.”

As we can see, at its core, a Mastermind is intended to be a melding of minds to achieve a greater level of intelligence and problem-solving, together.

1 Which is quoted throughout this supporting booklet

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2. INTRODUCING THE LIGHT LEADERSHIP APP

“Economic advantages may be created by any person who surrounds [them]self with the advice, counsel and personal cooperation of a group of

[people] who are willing to lend wholehearted aid in a spirit of perfect harmony. This form of cooperative alliance has been the basis of nearly every

great fortune.” The Light Leadership Mastermind app offers a new model for effective Masterminding. By allying ourselves with other bright minds, and surrounding ourselves with what Hill calls, the “advice, counsel and personal cooperation of a group of people who are willing to lend wholehearted aid in a spirit of perfect harmony,” human beings can achieve the phenomenon of a “third mind,” or what we call, Collective Intelligence. Collective Intelligence is where the emergent intelligence of the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The Light Leadership Mastermind App supports the cultivation of this emergent Collective Intelligence of a group. It does this by supporting the group to create the cultural conditions that will allow for it “to function in harmony,” and for that harmony to be established, maintained and observed with continuity over time.

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3. HOW THE LIGHT LEADERSHIP APP SUPPORTS COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

“Try to induce any two people to cooperate in a spirit of harmony for any

length of time.” If you’ve ever enacted a vision by starting a business or project (what Hill calls “a definite purpose”) with a small group of people, you’ve likely had the experience of tensions arising within the group relational context. These tensions naturally arise from our:

● Cultural and family conditioning; ● Belief systems; ● Values; ● Past trauma; ● Communication and leadership styles; ● Perceptions; and ● Ingrained habits

and bump up against the equivalent phenomena in the other members of the group. For the group to stay connected, come through these tensions in tact, and continue moving toward the actualization of their “definite purpose”, these tensions need to be navigated by the group and release in order to restore the “spirit of harmony” within the group. The core functionality of the Light Leadership app is therefore to eliminate these relational tensions in the Mastermind group, by illuminating the underlying communication and connection issues that are the group’s biggest risk, in service of restoring the “spirit of harmony” .

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4. RELATIONAL TENSIONS IN A MASTERMIND GROUP

“Men take on the nature and the habits and the power of thought of those with whom they associate in a spirit of sympathy and harmony.”

Research shows that the relational tensions within a highly interacting small group pursuing a “definite purpose” often create2 entropic group dynamics that are a major cause of project failure. Relational tensions can cause: trust to erode, stagnant creative energy, apathy/people becoming checked out, stress, bottled up emotions, isolation, health issues/burn out, impact on personal relationships and so much more. Relational tensions occur when, for example: ● You’re having a hard time giving feedback to the people in your group without someone

having a hissy fit, getting triggered or perceiving you as “the bad guy”;

● You feel like you’re treading on eggshells around other group members because none of the uncomfortable personal or interpersonal stuff is being spoken to (and that’s massively impacting your group’s ability to be consistently responsive or creative);

● You feel like you’re in a consistent untenable power struggle with one or more people in your group, that doesn’t get spoken to or moved through;

● Someone in the group is constantly pulling people aside to share an issue they have with someone else in the group, but they’re never bringing it directly to the person;

● You’re continually frustrated by someone consistently underperforming and wanting an opportunity to address it collectively, without all of the onus being on you; or

● Members of the group aren’t speaking to the issues they’re experiencing because they’re attached to the money they’re earning and afraid at the of risking losing it.

What’s important to note, is that since the health of the relationships within the group are the very foundation of any business or creative endeavour, what’s happening within the group’s relationships, directly affects how effectively the group is showing up and how able they are to produce and adapt in the outside world.

2 These are statistics from a CBInsights report from Feb 2018 collated from list of 101 startup failure post-mortems citing some key relationally-related reasons for startup team failures

● Nomarketneed-42%(a.k.afailureoftheteamtoadaptandpivoteffectively)● Nottherightteam-23%● Disharmonyamongteam/investors-13%● Pivot-relatedfailure-17%(again,thisamountstofailureoftheteamtoadaptandpivot

effectively)

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5. OUR STORY

“Power may be produced through friendly alliance of minds.” When we first came together, as a group of good friends in pursuit of our “definite purpose” (what we call our “Shared Vision”), we were well aware of the kinds of challenges we would face in today’s rapidly changing business environment given the oft reported 90-95% failure of startup endeavors. We knew we would need to learn how to become an adaptable and resilient team, effectively track and respond to the market and each other, and learn to pivot rapidly and often together. And yet, despite our awareness of the challenges and our best efforts to navigate them consciously, we still found ourselves facing many of the myriad issues and slipping into many of the same grooves that are outlined above (pedestalling, martyrdom, silo-ing and a variety of resentments and judgments to name a few). Our original founder was really smart but had no prior experience running a business, knew he needed the diverse perspectives of the other members of the group for the business to perpetually thrive and didn’t want to be stuck at the top of a hierarchy of his friends, giving all of the difficult and uncomfortable feedback. So in an effort to establish and maintain more equal relationships among the members of the group, we decided to create a system that would make the process of giving and receiving feedback smoother, more commonplace and more natural; one that could surface the invisible tensions that so often break groups apart, to ensure that they could be navigated together and bring us back into “function(ing) in harmony”. That’s why we created an app that supports a culture of distributed feedback, provides a pressure release mechanism for any tensions that are building up within the group, empowers each member of the group to address tensions directly with each other, and allows us a group to track and make visible progress around relational coherence and group “harmony”.

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6. WHO IS BEST SUITED TO USE/INTRODUCE THE MASTERMIND APP: ● People who have started or are starting a Mastermind group together.

● Small teams of self-motivated and growth-oriented individuals, who are working toward

actualizing a “definite purpose” together (who also likely don’t thrive in a hierarchical dynamic and never found themselves at home in traditional bureaucratic jobs).

● People who are familiar with new models of business, like holacracy - would include crypto and Blockchain companies who are looking for more decentralized governance models.

● Investors with a portfolio of 20 companies with a success rate of 5-10%, who want to see a

set of metrics around these valuable intangible factors, to show their prospects’ progress (and are potentially willing to engage in new social technologies that could improve the success rate of their entire portfolio).

● Game-changers working in funded startups in the technology or social impact space who are focussed on things that will support impact innovation and social good (such as innovations geared toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or “SDGs” ).

● Millenials in startups who feel connected but not deeply related (the Reddit, Twitter, social networking generation) and who want to feel more deeply, more authentically connected and in closer and healthier relationship with one another.

DOWNLOAD THE APP:

iPhone/iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/light-leadership/id1452714366?mt=8 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lightleadershipllc.llmobile

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7. WHO IS THE APP NOT FOR: ● Single or self-employed individuals.

● People who want to rigidly hold onto control in their group or business.

● People who aren’t open to giving and receiving feedback (even anonymously).

● People who aren’t willing to face the uncomfortable or challenging stuff that comes up in

relationship.

● People who aren’t willing to face the hard but valuable truths about themselves.

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8. WHAT ARE THE FEATURES OF THE APP?

The first step is taken when someone in the group creates a “Sphere” and invites the other members of the group to it. Once someone has created a Sphere, anyone in the group can set the frequency of the tension adjustment periods (as daily or weekly).

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The app then empowers all the participants to adjust the “tension ratings” for the other participants in their Sphere. A tension adjustment is essentially a meritocratic rating mechanism. Participants simply adjust the tension (from 1-100) for each participant in your Sphere to reflect how you feel they have been showing up and contributing in the Sphere for that week.

Each week the data collects the feedback anonymously, compiles it and reflects it back via the

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coherence or “harmony” graphic, that offers a visual representation of the relational tension that’s present amongst the group. The tension history records the different tension ratings among the group over time.

Following the publishing of the graphic, the team gets notified by the app to get together in a Sweat Lodge meeting, where each person has an opportunity to speak to and respond to the ratings adjustments that they have received, or that they have given to others, within the app.

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This experience creates a talking point for group to move and express any underlying tension or emotion, be witnessed in that experience, see if anyone shares their perspective and become emotionally current (and thus more present and available) with the other members of the group. The features of the app are:

● Create a Sphere and invite people to it that you want to engage in the process with

● Join a sphere that’s already been created by someone else

● Set up your own profile and choose your own profile picture

● Adjust your sphere participants’ tension adjustments each week (hard coded for now to that particular adjustment frequency)

● See a visual coherence graphic of the relational tensions

● Sends a push notification that automatically calls a Sweat Lodge in the sphere

● View the history of your tension periods

● Remove people from spheres

● Give feedback in the app about your experience with it NOTE: The coherence graphic above shows how we are also currently experimenting with linking the tension adjustment ratings to financial distributions based on the meritocratic ratings. 9. WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE USING THE MASTERMIND APP:

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● Expect you may be uncomfortable at times

● Expect that no one else can tell you a “right way” to do it

● Expect that the feedback might not always be rosey (and that the truth may hurt sometimes)

● Expect that it could get vulnerable

● Expect people could get triggered or upset at times

● Expect that voices might get raised

● Expect to feel closer and more connected to your team mates than ever before

● Expect to feel more alive than you ever have at work

● Expect it to impact your other relationships positively

● Expect things to get better as you keep doing it

● Expect more creative conversations as a result

● Expect it to skyrocket your business’ productivity and innovation

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10. MASTERMIND APP ETHOS:

“When two or more people coordinate in a spirit of harmony and work toward a definite objective they place themselves in position through that alliance to absorb power directly from a great Universal store-house of infinite intelligence. This is the greatest of all sources of power; it is the source to which the genius turns; it is the source to which every great leader turns, whether [they] may be conscious of they fact or not.”

This Light Leadership Mastermind app is the first step on the road to a new way of being creative together by consistently accessing the group’s emergent Collective Intelligence. This Collective Intelligence and new way of being together is one that welcomes your humanity; Where you no longer have to feel like you’re trapped inside an inflexible and rigid control-based system; One where your emotions aren’t left outside the door; And where there’s space for each person’s voice and feedback to be consistently heard. One where everyone can be maximally creative; And you feel like working together becomes more like playing together.

This is the first step in introducing,

The Light Leadership model. A new distributed and dynamic governance model, that’s designed to support more group connection, collaboration and coherence, creating an elite team that can navigate the rocky road of being a Mastermind or startup that is consistently and rapidly able adapt and innovate. For more information check out our Private Introduction here.

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11. CASE STUDY: SPACEROCK’S STORY

Spacerock is a tech startup built on the Light Leadership operating system, co-founded by 4 guys: MAX MERLIN

SHEN WU SCHUYLER Ownership and decision making are equally distributed within the Sphere.

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Spacerock’s vision is to create technology, tools and systems that put a person’s humanity first on an emotional and relational level, to support productive group dynamics and create value and impact in peoples’ lives as they are co-creating together. This is because at Spacerock they believe in Unity. They believe that Unity is experienced when an individual and group transparently share what’s really going on for them, and can feel free to open to the full spectrum of their creative and emotional expression, in connection with the other members of their group or team. Because that’s how the guys at Spacerock have been able to access their true passion and creativity.

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Over the past 4 months, Spacerock have been utilizing the Light Leadership Mastermind app. The graphics for their tension ratings are laid out below. By looking at the graphics we can observe how the tension in the group has dynamically shifted over time. This gives us insight into the following:

● How the group as a whole are perceiving each others’ contributions;

● How close each member is perceived to be to the heart of the Sphere and the Shared Vision;

● How balanced the group’s perceived contributions are;

● If the team is becoming more evenly distributed in their contribution over time;

● How long it takes for the team to become more balanced and coherent (if at all);

● That there may be a tension to be addressed with a group member if they are consistently further out from the center (as there was in this case with Andrew in March, who subsequently left the Sphere);

● When a group member leaves, how that impacts the relational tension and coherence among the group subsequently;

● If someone in the team is consistently lagging despite the feedback culture;

● If someone in the team forgot or missed a rating period.

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MARCH 2019: 7th March 29th March

APRIL 2019: 17th April 29th April

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MAY 2019: 13th May 20th May 27th May

JUNE 2019: 3rd June 10th June 17th June

With the exception of one or two rating periods that you can see were missed by some of the members of the group, the consistency of the graphic and the relatively even distribution in the ratings, indicate that since May, all the group members have been consistently coming into greater balance of contribution, closer connection with the Shared Vision and more consistent coherence with each other over time.