As you can see from Renee and Natalie’s posts, bootcamp is back! This time, I’ve got six great participants, with Anna and Marie returning for another round, and some tweaks based on what I learned from my first try. (My other participants, Lauren and Allison, will introduce themselves on this blog this week. My friend, Amy Luckey, is observing, and she may pop onto this blog with her thoughts as well.)

As before, this is as much bootcamp for me as it is for the other participants. The project I’m bringing to the table, once again, is the bootcamp itself. And the big question on my mind this time around is: How can I leverage the bigger group?

With just two people, it was easy to give my participants lots of individual attention and to customize the workouts. With six very different people, all with different projects and skill levels, that won’t be possible.

However, more people also equals more opportunities. The additional diversity will make things more interesting, and it will also allow me to do things I wasn’t able to do with just two, because it will introduce more complicated group dynamics. I have a “power dynamics” workout for one of the later sessions that I’m super excited about and that I couldn’t do with just two people.

A related, underlying question is: How big of a group can I manage, while keeping the quality of everyone’s experiences very high? I don’t know what the upper limit is, but if I’m disciplined about writing myself out of the design, it will bounded by room size, not by the exercises. I need to leverage space and time to encourage quality interactions, and I need to give them permission and encouragement to facilitate themselves. That, after all, is the point of bootcamp — to give them the opportunity to practice these skills.

Looking forward to learning with this group, and sharing what I learn over the next several weeks!