Nancy White has posted a very nice “white paper” (pun intended!) on what she is calling “triangulating learning.” Essentially she gives a clear picture of how to reach outside of your organizational boundaries to put social connections to work to increase creativity, collect inspiration and ground-truth ideas:
Triangulating learning through external support from individuals, communities and networks can provide significant, low or no cost support to innovators and learners within institutions. This triangulation requires networking skills and a willingness to learn in public – even possibly loose part of all credit for one’s work. The rewards, however, are increased learning, practical experience and ultimately the ability to change not just one’s self, but one’s organization.
via Full Circle Associates » Need Your Feedback on my Triangulating Thinking.
Those of us freelancers that have blogged for a long time are certainly familiar with this idea, but Nancy provides some very practical notes about getting started especially for people who work within organizational constraints.
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Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is cool and quiet this morning. There is a stiff breeze off the Baltic Sea and the sky is grey and overcast. I’m ensconced in a cozy cafe on the Old Town Square that bears a striking resemblance to a hobbit hole, drinking strong coffee nibbling chocolate and eating a late breakfast of a spiced meat pastry that is like a cross between a croissant and a samoza.
It’s a lot of travelling to get here from Vancouver. My adventure began with a bracing water taxi ride from Bowen Island to Granville Island in Vancouver, lumping through a southeasterly wind on Saturday evening. I hopped a British Airways 747 bound for Heathrow and populated largely by old Sikh men and women. Turns out 180 of us on the YVR-LHR flight were heading on to Delhi. It was a good flight, watching the surprisingly good remake of the taking of Pelham 1-2-3 and the surprisingly drawn out Australia. I managed to sleep in all the right places and stay awake in all the right places, and the jetlag was almost completely taken care of.
In London we landed in a bad squall which set the plane into a quiet desperate prayer session, but once we pulled up at the gate, the storm had moved on and an incredible rainbow graced the new Terminal 5. I ran for a connection, got stuck behind a huge group of Japanese travellers going through security and made my connection as the door was closing. The Finnair flight to Helsinki was fun; the video screen showed a shot from the nose of the aircraft on take off and landing, so it was like watching a real time live flight simulator. Not much to see in the dark, but perhaps the flight home will reveal more.
In Helsinki I had a bit of a layover, so I wandered around the airport. It was after 9:00pm when we got in and the late hop to Tallinn didn’t leave until 11:45, so I caught up on Skype – Estonia’s most famous high tech export! – with friends in North America who were beginning their Sundays. Helsinki airport is a lot like Ottawa’s airport. Everywhere I go, northern cities strike a home chord with me.
Noting that the further away I got from Canada, the more English was spoken on planes, I boarded a Finnair commuter flight to Tallinn, which is a short 35 minute jump over the Gulf of Finland. The two cities are only 85 km apart, almost as close as Vancouver is to Victoria. During the Soviet era, Estonians tuned into Finnish TV and radio all the time and were constantly exposed to western culture over the air.
Arriving in Tallinn at 12:30 I was met by my friends Piret Jeedas and Robert Oetjen, with whom Toke Moeller and I are running an Art of Participatory Leadership workshop this week. We drove through town, which in the dark reminded me a little of Winnipeg, and I arrived at my hostel accomodation in the old town. We woke up the landlady who hadn’t been told of my arrival. She was sweet and got me settled in and I quickly fell asleep.
I’m pretty good at dealing with jetlag, but today was a masterful triumph. I awoke at 8am refreshed and ready to go. Today is my day to explore Tallinn a little and hang out and relax. I have spent the morning walking around the old town, seeing some of the places that featured prominently in Estonian history, especially the Toompea, which is the Estonian Parliament. In 1991, a Russian minority protest against Estonian independence outside the Toompea almost became violent when the group broke into the castle and caused alarm amongst the Estonian politicians who were besieged inside. The political leaders called for Estonian citizens to come to their aid and a huge crowd showed up to barricade the Russians inside the castle courtyard. When it came time to let them go, the crownd simply parted and the Russians left. Anger and the threat of violence had been met with non-violence and song, and the singing revolution continued to work its remarkable magic. Here is a video of that day.
This morning I walked around the area that is shown in that video, the parking lot outside the Toompea where the Estonians rallied after the Russians broke in. Just knowing the recent history of that place deeply tuned me in to the sense of Estonia. For a long time I have been drawn to this place, sensing a connection both in the northern nature of the country and the indigenous struggle for freedom from hundreds of years of colonization from Danes, Swedes, Germans and Russians. Estonians I think have always craved their own self-government and cultural sovereignty and it’s clear being here that given the chance to take hold of their country, they have chosen an identity that is fiercely national without being nationalistic, and open minded to the rest of the world and especially the west.
Walking around here it is hard to imagine what it was like when Tallinn was a Soviet city on the Baltic. Near to where I am staying is the old KGB headquarters, a building that is still held in contempt by Estonians. When the Soviet Union was in control here tens of thousands of people were exiled to Siberia, imprisoned or killed, and the KGB and its predecessors took care of all of that. The fact that a mere 25 years ago, writing this blog post would be a dangerous prospect for a Canadian visitor is a testament to how far Estonia has come in embracing democratic freedoms and human rights.
One morning of walking around obviously does not make for a complete picture, and for sure there are lots of complex questions and conditions here with the economy, questions of European union, dynamics between ethnic minorities and relations to Russia, poverty, exploitation and all of the problems that come with capitalism, but the overall sense here is that Estonia has struck a balance that reminds me a lot of Canada. Estonians have lived on this coast as long as Skwxwu7mesh people have lived in Howe Sound – for 9000 years. Language and culture is intact, thriving even amongst the ruins of castles and TV towers built by those who have sought control of this country. Hanging out here, in a hobbit hole coffee shop on the old town square, it is clear that despite it all, they have survived.
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From Bernie DeKoven, funsmith: Four freedoms of play:
Scot Osterweil (MIT Comparative Media Studies, Education Arcade Project) has observed this truth: play has no agenda. Freedom is central to the experience of play. To understand the anatomy of play, Scot has identified four components that he calls the “four freedoms of play.” If these freedoms are not respected, the play experience is severely compromised or even ruined.
Freedom to Experiment
The player’s motivations are entirely intrinsic and personal. The process is open-ended.
Freedom to Fail
Losing is part of the process.
Freedom to Try on Different Identities
Players aren’t necessarily limited by their bodies or surrounding physical context.
Freedom of Effort
As described in Peter and Iona Opie’s classic ethnography of playground culture, children may scramble around in a game of tag, avoiding being caught for twenty minutes, and then suddenly stop and allow themselves to be tagged once they have reached a certain degree of effort or perhaps want to move on to another activity.
Useful rules for everything from setting up improv exercises to doing rapid prototyping of new ideas and products.
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I believe in all that has never yet been spoken
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
by Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875 – 1926)
English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
via I believe in all that has never yet been spoken at Seeds for a happy planet.
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When I was 10 years old, my family moved to Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, just on the north edge of London and eight miles away from White Hart Lane, the home of Tottenham Hotspur. I lived in the area for three years which were glorious years to be a Spurs fan, as we won two FA Cups and had a great team with the likes of Glen Hoddle, Ozzie Ardilles and Ricardo Villa. I grew to like football alot, and although I lost touch for a number of years, the rise of internet video has made it easy to follow my team once again, and so I have been, especially this year, when we are having a great season.
English football runs on a very different system than North American sports. As a lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan, I have recently abandoned a 40 year addiction to NHL hockey because the league is screwed. In North America, the league owns the teams. there are no real home teams, and with the exception of a few that will never leave, the NHL can whimsically move franchises hither and yon, even to the desert of Arizona if they wish, which on the face of it doesn’t seem like a very good place to move a team from Winnipeg. And it wasn’t.
In short, the League controls the teams and top down control mechanisms are a little disingenuous when it comes to fan support. Fans give the impression that the team is theirs but it really isn’t.
In contrast, British sports are very much a bottom up model. Although the Football Association is well established, it is a chaordic structure that is based on an agreement. The FA looks after the national teams and runs a tournament called the FA Cup. Teams choose to play in the Football League, or not, which structures home and away fixtures through several divisions. Teams play in one division and can move up and down depending on how well they do year to year. At the highest level, teams play in the Barclay Premier League, the elite league, and yet another chaordic structure. The Leagues do not determine which franchises will play where, nor whether or not a club can exist. Each one simply sets rules of engagement for it’s own tournaments, and everyone signs on. The result is that in the FA, you have teams who are owned by multi billionaires and you have teams that are owned by supporters. Certainly to compete at the highest levels you need the talent that money can buy and so the teams at the top usually have a big backer or two. But the nature of promotion and relegation within the League system means that little fish can enter the big leagues, and so you get these family owned clubs like Wigan (who were the butt of jokes as a fourth division team when I was a boy) entering and staying on at the top flight with the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and my beloved Spurs.
And that structure and sense of family, and reliance on the supporters for their ongoing existence means that gestures such as this one are possible: Last week Spurs racked a record win against Wigan, beating them 9-1 at White Hart Lane. The Wigan players were so ashamed of their performance that they got together and offered to refund Wigan fans who attended the match OUT OF THEIR OWN SALARIES: (See Wigan refund fans who witnessed Spurs massacre.) That kind of bottom-up accountability comes with a longstanding relationship between players, owners and fans. That would never happen in North America, where players and owners are immune from performance, where all that maters is money and if you lose, you move. Wigan can’t move. They either survive or fold. And their survival depends entirely on their supporters.
So I’m doubly impressed this week, with the Wigan players for displaying great integrity and for Spurs for kicking their asses!