What Organizational Behaviour Tells Us About Rainbow, Bhakti, KN¿WHERE and Raven’s Knoll

Over the last several posts, we have been looking at something that at first appeared to be a fairly simple question: who knows whom?

We looked at the Rainbow Family. We looked at Bhakti in the Woods and Bhakti Bliss. We looked at performers, facilitators and organizers who appear around those communities. We then started comparing those names with KN¿WHERE and the wider network of events that have appeared at Raven’s Knoll.

What has emerged does not justify claiming that all of these groups are secretly one organization. The evidence we have examined does not establish that.

What it does suggest is something both more ordinary and, from an organizational behaviour perspective, more interesting.

We appear to be looking at an interconnected social ecosystem.

Organizations Do Not Need Organizational Charts

One of the first lessons of organizational behaviour is that formal organizational structure is only part of the story.

A business might have managers, departments, policies and reporting relationships. But alongside that formal structure exists an informal organization built through friendships, reputation, influence, shared experiences and personal relationships.

The same principle can be applied to communities that deliberately avoid conventional hierarchy.

The Rainbow Family, for example, has historically emphasized decentralization and the absence of conventional membership or centralized leadership. That does not mean organizational behaviour disappears.

Whenever people interact repeatedly, behavioural norms develop.

Certain people become trusted.

Certain people become influential.

People learn who knows how to organize something, who knows performers, who has access to land, who has equipment, who has experience running gatherings and who can connect one group of people with another.

This is what organizational behaviour calls an informal organization.

It can exist without titles, membership cards or an organizational chart.

Culture Travels Through People

This becomes important when looking at Bhakti in the Woods and Bhakti Bliss.

Finding people who have participated in both Rainbow-associated communities and Bhakti events does not demonstrate that one organization controls the other.

People carry culture with them.

They carry language.

They carry rituals.

They carry music.

They carry organizational habits.

They carry ideas about community, leadership, spirituality, cooperation and conflict.

When people move between communities, pieces of those cultures can move with them.

Organizational behaviour describes this through concepts such as organizational culture, socialization and communities of practice.

A person does not need instructions from Organization A before bringing something they learned there into Community B.

Sometimes cultural transmission happens simply because people participate in both environments.

That gives us an important rule for interpreting what we have found:

Connection is not control.

Two communities sharing a performer, facilitator or organizer establishes a relationship between people. It does not automatically establish a command relationship between organizations.

The People Between the Communities

This is where our investigation became particularly interesting.

We began asking whether Eric Mandala represented the primary bridge between Rainbow-associated networks and the Bhakti community, or whether other people could also be identified moving through those spaces.

We then started checking additional recurring names and asking whether some of those people also appeared around KN¿WHERE.

In organizational behaviour and social network analysis, people occupying these positions are often described as boundary spanners.

A boundary spanner connects communities that might otherwise remain relatively separate.

They may introduce people.

They may recommend performers.

They may bring organizers together.

They may transfer information.

They may introduce new practices or ideas.

They may simply appear repeatedly in several communities and become a trusted connection between them.

The distinction matters.

If only one person connects two otherwise separate communities, the network might look something like this:

Community A → Individual → Community B

But when several people independently appear in both communities, something different begins to emerge:

Community A ⇄ overlapping social network ⇄ Community B

That still does not prove centralized coordination.

It indicates something much more familiar: a shared social network.

People Know People

This may sound almost too simple, but it explains a remarkable amount of organizational behaviour.

People know people.

Organizers reuse performers they trust.

Performers recommend other performers.

Volunteers become organizers.

Participants attend another festival.

Someone meets someone around a campfire and gets invited to another event six months later.

Relationships accumulate.

Eventually several apparently separate events can occupy the same broader social ecosystem without belonging to the same organization.

Homophily: Why These Communities May Naturally Overlap

There is another useful concept here: homophily.

Homophily describes the tendency of people with similar interests, beliefs, lifestyles or identities to associate with one another.

Consider the possible progression:

Someone interested in alternative spirituality may become interested in community gatherings.

That person may attend ecstatic dance or devotional music events.

They may become involved in camping festivals.

They may know people interested in environmentalism, Paganism, yoga, transformational festivals, Rainbow gatherings or electronic music.

None of those connections necessarily requires an organizing authority.

The network grows because people sharing similar interests repeatedly encounter one another.

This is one reason we need to be cautious when investigating overlapping communities.

Network overlap is evidence of relationships. It is not, by itself, evidence of centralized coordination.

Then Raven’s Knoll Enters the Picture

This brings us back to Raven’s Knoll.

Much of our earlier discussion focused on Raven’s Knoll as a Pagan space and on the apparent tension between that historical identity and the increasingly varied collection of events taking place there.

But organizational behaviour gives us another way of looking at the situation.

Instead of asking only:

Why did Raven’s Knoll host KN¿WHERE?

we can ask:

How did Raven’s Knoll’s organizational culture and social network evolve until hosting an event such as KN¿WHERE became possible?

That is a very different question.

It shifts our attention away from searching for one decision or one person responsible for everything and instead asks how organizational change happens over time.

Organizational Change Rarely Happens All at Once

Organizational Behaviour gives us several models for understanding change.

One of the oldest is Kurt Lewin’s three-stage model:

Unfreeze → Change → Refreeze

An existing organizational culture first becomes loosened. New behaviours, relationships or practices are introduced. Eventually a new cultural equilibrium develops.

When looking at Raven’s Knoll, however, there is another possibility worth considering.

Perhaps there has never been a complete refreezing.

The identity may instead have remained increasingly fluid.

Conceptually, the progression might look something like:

Pagan sacred space → Pagan campground → broader community gathering space → diversified festival venue.

Those categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, nor does this simple progression prove when or why any particular change occurred.

But it illustrates the organizational tension we have repeatedly encountered.

Long-term participants can continue to understand a place according to an earlier organizational identity while those responsible for operating the property gradually develop a broader understanding of what the organization has become.

That Creates Organizational Identity Conflict

This is where the Raven’s Knoll story becomes much larger than one festival.

Organizational identity answers a deceptively simple question:

Who are we?

When members, leaders and stakeholders have different answers to that question, conflict becomes almost inevitable.

One person may understand Raven’s Knoll primarily as Pagan sacred land.

Another may understand it as a festival campground.

Another may understand it as privately owned property available for diverse community events.

Another may see all three descriptions as compatible.

The organizational problem arises when people believe they share the same definition but actually do not.

Formal Ownership and Psychological Ownership Are Different

There is another OB concept underneath some of this conflict: psychological ownership.

People can develop an intense sense that a community, organization or place is partly “theirs” even when they have no legal ownership of it.

They may have volunteered there.

Built things there.

Performed rituals there.

Created friendships there.

Returned year after year.

Buried memories there.

Eventually the distinction between the place belongs to someone and I belong to this place becomes emotionally significant.

When the direction of the property changes, those people may therefore experience more than disagreement.

They may experience a perceived loss of organizational identity and belonging.

That does not give them legal authority over the property.

But it helps explain why organizational changes involving community spaces can generate disproportionately strong emotional responses.

A Better Way to Understand What We Found

After looking at the Rainbow Family, Bhakti in the Woods, Bhakti Bliss, KN¿WHERE and Raven’s Knoll, I do not believe the responsible conclusion is:

These are all secretly the same organization.

We have not established that.

A much stronger and more defensible conclusion is:

These communities appear to participate, to varying degrees, in an overlapping social ecosystem through which performers, facilitators, organizers, participants, relationships and cultural practices can move.

That distinction is important.

The Organizational Behaviour Behind It

Several OB concepts now appear repeatedly throughout this story.

Informal organization: Influence and coordination can exist without formal titles or hierarchy.

Organizational culture: Communities develop shared values, rituals, language and behavioural expectations.

Social identity: People develop part of their personal identity through membership or participation in communities.

Boundary spanning: Certain individuals connect otherwise separate groups.

Social networks: Information, resources and people move through relationships rather than organizational charts.

Referent power: People can influence others because they are respected, charismatic or trusted rather than because they possess formal authority.

Normative influence: People learn how to behave by observing what their community considers normal.

Homophily: People with similar values and interests naturally form interconnected networks.

Organizational identity: Conflict develops when stakeholders disagree about what an organization fundamentally represents.

Organizational change: Communities evolve through accumulated decisions and relationships rather than necessarily through a single dramatic event.

What KN¿WHERE May Actually Represent

Looked at this way, KN¿WHERE may be less important as an isolated incident than as an organizational symptom.

It tells us something about what Raven’s Knoll had become capable of hosting.

That does not automatically tell us whether that change was good, bad, intentional or accidental.

Those are separate questions.

But from an organizational behaviour perspective, an event rarely appears inside an organizational environment completely disconnected from everything that came before it.

Relationships had to exist.

Someone had to know someone.

Someone had to believe the event fit the property.

Someone had to possess enough influence or authority to make it possible.

That is organizational behaviour.

The More Interesting Question

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

The question is not simply:

Who brought KN¿WHERE to Raven’s Knoll?

The more useful question may be:

What changes in Raven’s Knoll’s culture, relationships, stakeholder network and organizational identity made KN¿WHERE a reasonable possibility in the first place?

That is where the Rainbow, Bhakti and KN¿WHERE research becomes relevant.

Not because it reveals some hidden master organization.

Because it begins showing us the network.

And organizations, communities and cultures are ultimately built from networks of people.

The organizational chart, when one exists at all, only tells part of the story.

The relationships tell us the rest.

And that may be the most useful finding to come out of this investigation so far.