Chapters 8 and 9 recount group interactions during the final three island times, leading to RA’s deliberate dissolution and reorganization. Unlike previous chapters, these chapters use a first-person, present-tense narrative to closely examine management issues and group dynamics during the last RA meetings and to reaffirm findings presented earlier in the book. Throughout these meetings, RA struggled to manage the transition from a close-knit group of friends to a formalized organization while retaining its foundational social practices, idioculture, and relationships. The group underwent a secularization process and became polarized over future directions. These chapters depict a group grappling with powerful sociological forces in tension with one another and trying to maintain effective collaboration and decision-making as the conditions for effective group decision-making eroded. Ultimately, RA lost its adaptive capacity and became stuck in a resilient yet undesirable state, leading to the decision to disband and seek new pathways to transformation. My own role in RA also comes to the foreground when during pivotal moments of interaction group leaders asked me to provide guidance based on my research, which consequently shaped their decisions and RA’s future.

Chapter 4 shows how, paradoxically, RA’s success led to the gradual loss of its generative idioculture and collaborative processes. This is described as the challenge of “getting big while remaining small.” Emotions and social bonding drove the group’s early successes, but RA’s increasing influence on sustainability science created pressure to expand and diversify. This pressure caused the gradual erosion of the idioculture and social practices that characterized early RA. Irreverence and informality gave way to bureaucratic processes. Rituals that once fostered solidarity and commitment started to lose their meaning or created rifts, leading to factions and lost faith. As key roles and relationships vanished with the departure of original members, the group faced challenges like those involved in routinizing charismatic authority in religious movements.

Chapters 8 and 9 recount group interactions during the final three island times, leading to RA’s deliberate dissolution and reorganization. Unlike previous chapters, these chapters use a first-person, present-tense narrative to closely examine management issues and group dynamics during the last RA meetings and to reaffirm findings presented earlier in the book. Throughout these meetings, RA struggled to manage the transition from a close-knit group of friends to a formalized organization while retaining its foundational social practices, idioculture, and relationships. The group underwent a secularization process and became polarized over future directions. These chapters depict a group grappling with powerful sociological forces in tension with one another and trying to maintain effective collaboration and decision-making as the conditions for effective group decision-making eroded. Ultimately, RA lost its adaptive capacity and became stuck in a resilient yet undesirable state, leading to the decision to disband and seek new pathways to transformation. My own role in RA also comes to the foreground when during pivotal moments of interaction group leaders asked me to provide guidance based on my research, which consequently shaped their decisions and RA’s future.