In a now-famous experiment, Arthur Aron and his colleagues designed a set of behavioral procedures to generate closeness between strangers:
- The researchers put 2 strangers together.
- In 45 minutes, the pair answers 36 questions that progressively increase in vulnerability.
- At the end, they gaze into each other’s eyes for 4 minutes.
- They then separate and privately report how they feel.
Just as expected, this procedure helped most participants feel closer. One pair even began dating and later married. The New York Times popularised the study under the headline The 36 Questions That Lead to Love, giving my teenage self plenty of opportunity to rehearse ‘falling in love’.
It took me more than a decade to realise that I (and everyone) seemed to miss the point: What gets left out of this story was equally — if not more — revealing when it comes to intimacy.
In the experiment, participants were college students from 3 psychology classes in New York. They were informed 2 weeks in advance about the opportunity. If they participated, they’d complete a questionnaire to help researchers best match-make them with someone compatible.
As a college student, this is what you’d likely hear: Hey, you get to skip class to go on a blind date designed by experts — “to help you get close” — with someone pre-screened to be compatible. Wanna join?
When compatibility is promised, risk contained, time calibrated, [...] what does it do to you? Does it make you more open? Less cynical? More willing to be affected?
My point is, the way the researchers measured intimacy had helped them produce it: By shaping expectations, risk, rhythm, space and time, they produced the affect of intimacy. The following is a framework I developed to analyze the relational ontology of environments; overlaying this lens onto the experiment reveals what was engineered:
Risk
The experiment promised connection without danger. Disclosure was guided to be reciprocal. The possibility of social embarrassment was low.
Time
2 weeks of anticipation. 45 minutes of dialogue. 4 minutes of eye-contact.
Rhythm
Disclosure was sequenced by a curated rhythm of reciprocity: question and answer in progressing vulnerability, ending with an emphatic, unusually long eye-contact.
Space
A contained lab setting. Two chairs in proximity, far enough from other participants for a ‘deep’ one-on-one conversation.
Noise
Minimal background distractions. No long-term nor external consequences. Little ambiguity about the format.
Expectation
Besides the excitement of blind dating, the experiment was communicated to produce an expectation of connection, safety, perhaps imaginations of sweet friendships.
The truly fascinating point is not which behavioral procedure produces intimacy, but that by engineering rhythm, time, space, noise, risk and expectation, you can engineer intimacy.
Such capacity to cultivate intimacy is attractive to many organizations, but most (business) projects are not controlled laboratories. They extend beyond 45 minutes and contain endless uncontrollable variables. Thus, a project has the potential more like what I will analyze next: a monastery.
Plum Village (PV) — a global network of mindfulness practice centers — is a massive project. Like the laboratory experiment, its goal is to cultivate intimacy. But PV rests on different assumptions about what a person is and what relationships are.
Whereas the lab presumes individuals as autonomous subjects with fixed identities and personalities, thus intimacy occurs when their psychic boundaries are temporarily lowered under safe conditions; PV unsettles that premise. It begins from the view that all things are already entangled. Therefore intimacy is not the lowering of walls, because the walls were never solid to begin with. It subverts a normative take that sees relationships as interpersonal into a transversive, perversive one.
I will dive deeper into PV analysis in future journals. However, what’s worth noting here is that PV can enact a different relationship ontology without relying on conceptual notions and intellectual capacities. It simply redesigns risk, rhythm, space, time, noise and expectation.
What does this have to do with projects?
Every project is engineering the conditions of relationality.
Meeting’s duration time-boxes disclosure, dictating which level of complexity is allowed to verbalized. Performance matrix continually reproduces what it was engineered to measure. Calendar, lingo, technological choices and so on… Everything participates in (or manifests) the shaping of expectation, space, time, risk, noise and rhythm.
But more than that, most of them just reproduce the ontology of autonomous,separated, fixed human selves that engineered them in the first place.
Project design is ontological design, and in the post-Anthropocene, we need a different design.
When I say “intimacy”, I do not mean psychological safety, trust, team chemistry, or vulnerability exercises. Those are interpersonal readings of intimacy, grounded in the idea that humans are autonomous, contained within their own fortress of a body who sometimes connects.
I am pointing toward something infrastructural: the conditions under which certain relationality reorganizes certain reality, which boundaries are enacted, and how systems continually territorialize and deterritorialize.
In future installments, I will elaborate on this notion of intimacy. If understood within relational ontology, intimacy resembles what Rosi Braidotti called “perverse sexuality” — it has the potency to disrupt the status quo.
Just like an improv, it collapses binaries (right/wrong, pure/impure, I/them, past/present/future etc.), which loosens fixed roles, destabilizes assumed boundaries, and allows new unexpected reconfiguration to emerge.
I imagine such a vision is fascinating to our readers.