A smart observation on the deep architecture of good design:
One conclusion so far is that the possibility space for change opens up when we connect different people who can begin resonating together around shared stories, opportunities, and dreams. It’s a process of liberating people from the confines of clusters of sameness and ideological colonialism so they can move toward more diverse connections and pragmatic alignments.
As it turns out, the fusion of difference and resonance is a powerful approach because in that space, people move away from trying to change each other, which opens the space for the possibilities of creating innovative and scalable changes together. Resonant listening to one another’s differences allows us to join in both-and innovations that could never be possible in an either-or constrained world.
via jack/zen.
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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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From How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic:
I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”:
The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by about 5 percent and the number of vehicles traveling at high speeds between 50-60 km/h decreased by about 12 percent during the cherry blossom period.
One imagines a whole new sub-field of traffic engineering, with myriad questions: Do certain buildings or even architectural styles affect driver behavior? Can beautiful people literally “stop traffic”?
This is a lovely observation.
Lately I have been working as much as possible with graphic recorders who bring a level of beauty into a meeting that has a similar effect. When people work with graphic recorders, they approach the wall reflectively, take care to choose their words and make sure that what they are adding to the record is somehow commensurate with the aesthetic experience being captured.
People want more effective meetings and gatherings and I think a key way to get to effectiveness is to slow down. Slowing down can only happen in a physical environment where there is beauty that can catch our eye, catch ahold of the flow of conversations and cause little swirls and eddies that invite it to loop back on itself, become reflective and therefore effective.
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Today John Inman had a great post on using the world cafe for a five hour strategic planning session with a non-profit. His process works as follows:
First I asked that the whole system be in the retreat. We had board members, a customer, grant writer, community member, and contractors.
1. Introduction in group setting
2. Introduce the process
3. Pose the question
4. Three cafe tables with three people each, start the cafe
5. Three rounds of conversation each 20 minutes
6. Returned people to original table and asked them to capture the main themes at each table. 20 minutes
7. Harvested main themes in group
8. Group process for prioritization and assessing performance on each focus
9. Opportunity map outcomes
10. Group process to explore opportunities to work on and time frames
11. Assign teams to develop tactical plans to address opportunities
12. Used affinity process to capture everyone’s values, and group into value titles
13. Developed the values for the non-profit from this harvest
14. From conversation developed mission for the non-profit
15. Created list of what the non-profit is and is not for them to develop a story about their organization and it role in the community
16. Provided a foundation for a vision statement to be drafted.
17. Reflection session and adjournAnd all of this in 5 hours. It was the most productive planning session I have ever had and I believe that is in no small part due to driving them into conversation early and the power of conversation transformed the session.
Years ago I developed a process for doing something similar in Open Space. the challenge was how to hold an open planning conversation on the future of the organization, but address key areas without being controlling. We designed a day and a half strategic planning retreat with a non-profit by first identifying the key areas which the plan needed to cover. In this case the organization needed to plan in five basic areas: services, funding, human resources, government relations and labour relations. We then issued an invitation to everyone who needed to come. Our process ran like this:
- Prepare a harvest wall with five blank spots for reporting, each with one of the five topic headings.
- Open Space and invite any conversations to take place but point out that only those conversations that touch on the five planning topics will go forward into the plan.
- Open Space as usual with convenors hosting sessions and taking notes. Convenors type notes up on laptops and print them out, placing the printed copy in one of the five topic areas (or outside the five topic areas, if the conversation was not relevant to planning).
- Overnight, compile the reports from each of the five groups and print a copy for each participant.
- In the morning, there are five breakout spaces in the meeting room each one focusing on one of the five topics.
- People self-organize their participation in a 1.5 to 2 hour conversation on each of these five areas. I think we asked them to undertake specific tasks such as identifying key priorities, and planning action (including preliminary resource estimates and communications implications). Also we asked them to identify initial implementation steps. Rules of Open Space applied, especially the law of two feet.
- Groups met and then reported back. Their initial plans were then sent to the executive of the organization for refining and more detailed resource costing (everyone knew that going in).
Like John, my experience of the process was incredibly productive and the plans were excellent, and sustainable over the long term because there was a huge amount of buy-in from the co-creation process.
These participatory processes are far more than “just talk” and with wise planning and focussed harvests, they are a very fast way to make headway on what can otherwise be tedious planning processes.
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Adopting change as the point of working together. When so many efforts seemed aimed at preserving the status quo and mitigating the results of things that change and are not the same as before, what would happen if we adopted change as the point of things?
Jack Ricchiuto on working with a group using this principle:
As usual they are amazed at the pragmatism, efficiency, and wisdom of treating change as a tool of project success rather than a risk, liability, and cost. When change becomes key to how we design future projects, we work with an infinitely greater sense of joy and innovation. When action learning is THE point of projects, change – not compliance -is the key to our success.
via jack/zen ” zenext » Blog Archive » Change as design principle.
It is hard to remember that in fact things are always changing and that the point of getting together is most often to create that change. Why not just put it upfront: if we are not changing we are not alive.