A plant by the Marriot near the Tampa airport.
A busy and packed trip to Baltimore and Tampa this week prevented much in the way of blogging, but there were several links of note that crossed my attention.
- A Metis blogger called “âpihtawikosisân” has been producing some incredible stuff on Attawapiskat and the decline of useful conversation in the public sphere. I have much more to say about this.
- Related to this, some youth at Rosebud have asserted their desire not to be a part of the poverty pornography industry, indulged in by network TV news.
- You need power to change things of course, but when you don’t have it, their are some options. Tom Atlee processes lessons about power from the #Occupy movement, while Seth Godin talks about what you can do in more mundane organizational settings.
- And if you’re really down and out, you’re probably already in the majority of people in the world making a living under the radar. Robert Neuwirth thinks you’re leading edge.
A review of things that caught my eye this week:
- In #Occupy news, three articles of note: The Good (an #Occupy Wall Street Open Space), The Bad (an #Occupy LA arrest and torture) and The Ugly (Republican messaging regarding #Occupy).
- And The Helpful. A story about the choices cities make in dealing with #Occupy camps
- And in related news, a beautiful story about Pancho Ramos Stierle and his commitment to generosity.
- Two fantastic TED talks: Louie Schwartzberg on Gratitude and Luis von Ahn on how to make good use of useless tasks.
- MIT reports that improvisation may be the key to managing change (duh!)
- And finally, Jay Nolly who was the much loved starting goalkeeper for our Vancouver Whitecaps for three and a half years, was traded this week to Chicago. My favourite memory of him was in the 2010 season at Swangard Stadium when he made this crucial save.
You know the ones. 3M, the makers of the greatest facilitation invention ever – the post it note – decided a number of years ago to do for the flipchart what they had done for the scrap of paper: add an adhesive to it.
Now instead of taping flipchart paper up on a wall, all you have to do is peel it from a pad and affix it to a wall. Neat and tidy.
And almost completely useless.
For anyone who does any amount of creative facilitation, the only thing better than a piece of white, clean, plain flipchart paper, is a roll of white clean, flipchart paper. With plain flipchart paper you can do the following:
- Take notes on an easel
- lay it on a table top and make mind maps
- write on the back of it
- tape it in landscape portrait on a wall to make mind maps
- cut it into pieces for Open Space topics
- fold it into huge paper airplanes
- lay it on top of cafe tables for participants to write notes and draw on
- fold it up and easily separate it later
- roll it up, and unroll it again
- tape together several pieces to make a mural.
It’s amazing. You can make it bigger or smaller, tape it any which way you like and write over every part of the surface. And the stuff is pretty cheap, coming in at 50 sheets for about $12 if you buy the pads individually, 24 cents a sheet.
Contrast this to the 3M sticky post-it flipchart. On the surface, these things seem to be the miracle we have all been waiting for. But unless you are using a single sheet and hanging it in a vertical position, and not needing to do anything with it later, these beasts are compromised by all kinds of design flaws:
- You can only hang them one way without using tape.
- You cannot write on the top, because there is a glossy strip there where the adhesive was stuck on the previous sheet.
- You can’t really use the back (at least people don’t).
- you can’t roll or fold them without a mess (and sometimes an impossible sticky tangle, with ripped sheets as a result).
- You can’t place them in a heap without them sticking together, making later sorting out a massive chore.
- You can’t cut them up without first removing the sticky top
- You can’t make them into murals (see glossy strip, above)
- Not useful for cafe table tops, as they stick and you can’t write something and then rotate the sheet.
And on top of that, for all that inconvenience, they will set you back a whopping $42 for only 30 sheets. More than a DOLLAR a sheet.
So, meeting organizers, I know you are trying to be professional and innovative by buying the latest and greatest from 3M (the post-it people after all!) but please take a pass on these pads. Plain white paper wins every single time.
This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.
Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done. “We’ve done that before,” she said. Nobody likes that. I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing. We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions. We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints. I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”
Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern. People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it. Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources. Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:
The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:


So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group. We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either. Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts, The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications. This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.