Learning from how things really are
I was on a Skype call this morning with my friend Peggy Holman and we were noodling through the agenda for the summit I’m doing in May. Peggy and I are NOT linear conversationalists, and so whenever we talk we get into really delightful eddies and currents that do nothing to enhance our current productivity but which do make us better friends…
At any rate, we got talking about how the emergent process we use, like Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space and so on work well because they are based on how we human beings actually relate to and work with each other when we’re not thinking about it.
This morning I found this article in Worthwhile about JetBlue, another of the WestJet/SouthWest type airlines that seem to have a lock on customer service. Apparently, the CEO David Neelman was inspired by watching the way people were treated in a Brazilian village where he worked in a previous life. Of course this brought to my mind the story of Open Space Technology which Harrison Owen says began when he noticed the way things got done in a Nigerian village where he worked in the 1960s.
In the Worthwhile article, David Batsone asks:
I challenge individuals to think differently. Personal lessons do not have to stay within our private borders. In fact, they are a fountain out of which flows our public creativity.
Neeleman inspires us to bring the best of who we are to the workplace so that we can bring more soul to our company culture.”
It should not be hard. Yesterday I had coffee with Jon Husband and Rene Barsalo of La Soci�t� des arts technologiques. Rene showed me an amazing slide which shows that human experience with technology. It looks at it in terms of generations, noting something like 1700 generations of experience with language before writing was invented. It has been 300 or so generations of writers, even fewer with the printing press and then the rapid fire changes brought on by telegraph, radio, TV, phones, faxes, computers and mobile technology. For well over 2000 generations, humans have evolved communication strategies that are based on synchronous conversation with someone you can see and touch and hear.
We have not yet evolved into homo wirearchus, and until we do, the best of who we are will continue to come from the best of who we have always been: small groups of people figuring stuff out together with conversation and personal contact. Technology can either serve that instinct or get in the way of it, and I believe THAT is the challenge we need to take up, in both the digital world and with the technologies of process and human interaction.
Technorati Tags: openspace, appreciativeinquiry, jetblue, communication, technology
