This post is most likely of interest to those who are already familiar with the Triratna Buddhist movement, and have witnessed the arrival of Liberation Unleashed and the Ten Fetters community.

In around 2012, the website Liberation Unleashed errupted into the awareness of my Buddhist movement, Triratna.

I started hearing about people who gained rapid benefit from its form of online, text based “direct pointing” inquiry. I did later engage with it, and gained hugely myself, but that’s not the subject of this post.

A little while after Liberation Unleashed appeared, another community of people began to engage with its techniques, taking people into deeper insights. This Ten Fetters community was initiated by Kevin Schanilec, and then founded on Facebook by Christiane Michelberger.

It proved very successful within the Triratna Buddhist Community. Whilst Ten Fetters was not a Triratna venture (Christiane had no Triratna background), a significant proportion of participants were Triratna members. It really appealed to a proportion of peopl within the Triratna community.

So what happened next? From the outside, it looked like there was a serious effort to “close down” both Liberation Unleashed and Ten Fetters. There were accusations of people “making claims” and more. It was a mess. Eventually, a Liberation Unleashed style project was instigated in Triratna, for members of the Triratna Order only, called Order Insight Inquiry. The process of developing this project was, as I understand it from the outside, deeply painful, as it seemed like those in control of Triratna seemed to want to “control” the process, when they absolutely weren’t in a position to understand what it was about. “Let me try and reframe your project to align with my ideas and hope it survives” would seem a reasonable characterisation of what I witnessed.

It is easy for me to look at this and see the Direct Pointing people as the good guys - they were the innovators, creating cool new methods that were rapid and effective, and the Triratna institutions as stuck in the mud, deliberately stifling this innovation.

However, I would like to argue that there’s another explanation of this dynamic. And for this, I draw heavily on learnings from a book, The Lean Enterprise, published by O’Reilly in 2014.

This book draws on lessons in the world of startups. Drawing on manufacturing learnings in Japan, particularly Toyota, different approaches to startups were identified - particularly influenced also by the “Agile Software Development” movement that arose in the early 2000s.

The Lean Enterprise takes these ideas, and explores how they can be applied to enterprises - that is, existing, established businesses. In this case, we can view Triratna as an enterprise. (For the sake of this argument, it doesn’t matter whether an enterprise is engaged in selling anything or not.)

A startup is about innovation and rapid prototyping. An enterprise is about stability and consistency. But there needs to be a transition between the two, and this is represented by the Product Adoption Curve:

Here, we can see a product starts with innovators, who explore new possibilities. Then, early adopters, typically people with a high tolerance for risk, engage and explore their innovation. Then comes the chasm. Most innovations don’t make it past the chasm. Either because their idea doesn’t have sufficient mass appeal, or because they ran out of resources to implement it.

If a product makes it past the chasm, it moves to the early majority phase. Here, the idea is stable, but still being explored, and made consistent. The world wants it, so it must focus on stability, consistency and maintain quality.

After some time, the idea moves to the late majority phase. Here, it is stable. It is a known entity, the effort now is to maintain consistency and gain the most benefit out of the idea as can be achieved.

Eventually, the value of the idea will diminish, and we move to the laggards - those that still see benefit, even despite much of the world moving on to another innovation.

The key addition of the Lean Enterprise book, for me, was its identification of differing management styles. If an enterprise is managed with a mainstream (enterprise) approach, then it quickly leads to chaos and dissolution. If a startup is managed with a startup (innovative) approach, then it quickly leads to burocracy and stiflement.

Perhaps it is already clear how this applies to the story of Triratna and Direct Pointing, but let’s spell it out.

Triratna is an established institution with a history dating back to the late 1960s. It knows what it is about, it has its structures and practices in place. So, in terms of the lifecycle above, it is “mainstream”.

Direct Pointing, on the other hand, was very much an innovation. But… it was capturing general attention, and particularly within Triratna. Thus, it had moved from the innovation to the early adopter phase. It was threatening to cross the chasm.

What came next was unfortunate. What, in my eyes, was a tremendous innovation, was met by the institutions of Triratna with its normal “mainstream” management style. To them, no doubt, this seemed normal. “It is how we do things”, and it works well for established projects - slow progress, a focus on quality, etc. But for the innovators, it appeared to be painfully slow, tedious and demoralising.

What lessons might Triratna draw from this?

Any product/offering dies eventually (moves into the laggard phase). It makes sense to keep an eye on fresh innovations that might bring fresh ideas and life into existing practices and contexts.

This openness to new ideas would involve the creation of an “incubator”. a place where innovation can happen freely. Limit its scope, but allow it to happen.Most innovations will fail, so effort to control them prematurely is wasted effort. When it looks like an innovation might succeed (as was the case with DP and Ten Fetters), then you start a gradual process of clarification and quality and start to build the required structures to fully take advantage of it. But this needs to happen slowly and carefully, being careful not to stifle the innovative energy of those backing the innovation.