I wonder why so many design initiatives are so data and information constrained.
What about actual human behavior and how to apply its chaotic nature into rational logistics? Where we need to go to move beyond rational design? How do our relations integrate into information from a design perspective?
Imagine how the concept of ‘resiliency’ ties into an understanding of sustainability through the ‘supply chain’. Imagine reforming our concept of ‘supply’ to eliminate the ‘chain’ but still keep the connection. What, for example, would a fractal supply network look like? A design ecology without the bondage of chains – what would it look like?
How might we build a prototype or model of resiliency based on fractally-scaled micro-feedback loops that don’t break the supply chainin times of crisis, but rather undo links that leave them desiring to be reconnected – they intelligently seek new supply nodes to hook up with. I can foresee this approach would redefine ‘resilience’ to align with ‘opened-intelligent-capacity’. I wonder what the code would look like?
These quick simple video animations and article bring some meaning to three points that I feel are crucial in healthy ‘whole-system’ design, and brings the term ‘social innovation’ to a brighter light:
Improve Group Trainings and Team Design Sessions with Discovery Colabs
The Art of Collaborative Design: Learn how to facilitate more powerful, generative meetings using this collaborative design process.
Discovery Colabs can be either physical or virtual and have nearly the same top level process configuration. However, the online tools used for a physical onsite session are quite different than those used in a virtual online session, which are described in a different presentation. Contact me for more information.
What is a Discovery Colab?
A Colab is a facilitated group experience specifically designed to create the necessary conditions for intensively creative and productive activity. It can be either physical, virtual, or both.
As implied in the name, Collab-oration refers to a group working together as a unified whole, rich in diversity, celebrating the variation in points of view, experiences, personality types, expertise and work styles.
The Lab-oratory component of Colab refers to an environment where participants can make discoveries and be highly creative. Underlying the entire design of the experience is the intention of creating a community of individuals who will work together as a coordinated whole for achieving a mutually created vision/goal.
The mechanics of a Colab involve a series of facilitated work sessions – all carefully crafted to build one upon the other and to foster intensely productive and creative insights, solutions, plans, etc. The outcome of each work session and, ultimately the outcome of the entire multi-day event, are a direct result of desired outcomes pre-specified by principals and stakeholders.
Benefits from Running Discovery Colabs
You will greatly improve and accelerate the quality of your strategic, tactical, and operational aspects of business planning.
You will generate a shared company vision rather than one that comes from only executive direction. This will allow you to more easily reach measurable goals because they are founded on common values that the entire team or company has selected.
You will broaden your understanding of how to build and innovate within your organization in a more sustainable fashion.
You will create a better understanding of what a triple bottom line business looks like, how it operates, and how to profit from it in many ways.
A (w)holistic design of your organization will emerge that identifies all of its elements and shape it into a systemic, integrated, architectural whole.
The Primary Ingredients in a Discovery Colab
Below is a general definition of the future ‘scope of work’ that will be included within the actual proposal, to be presented at a later date.
Creating Your Own Colab, Retreat, or Collaborative Meeting – The Basic Steps
Interview core team or primary decision-makers
Establish first level needs and desired outcomes with core team
Create list of stakeholders who will be present, along with commitment levels
Design the Colab™ based on stakeholder list and desired outcomes
Perform the Colab™ itself
Develop a continuum of activities that build on your meeting outcomes.
What Happens Before The Colab?
Critical information that needs to come from the core team:
Determine stakeholders, their commitments to the organization and level of participation
Create and distribute a survey, used to assess stakeholder relationships and needs
Complete an online values assessment (optional)
How much development time does a Colab require?
A typical Colab is structured into three parts – Pre, During, and Post. The ‘Pre’ period is a time for gathering information. The ‘During’ period is the actual Colab event itself. The ‘Post’ period is the time when outcomes turn into delivered activities and is crucial for a Colab’s success. It is often where focus fades and breakdown occurs. The facilitator’s job is just as important during this time. As a rule of thumb, each actual Colab event day requires about two to four man-hour days of development time.
The CoLab Group Experience
The word “Colab” represents two vital aspects of a facilitated group experience:
Laboratory: A place to make discoveries, to uncover important truths, together with those who are your community.
Collaboration: Working together as a unified whole – rich in diversity – celebrating variation in points of view and creativity – all coordinated for achieving a mutually created vision or goal. You will need to:
Choose or create a “workspace experience” where things will get done.
Facilitate a series of experiences (or work sessions) crafted to build one upon the other that will allow for creative insights, clear plans, and productive solutions to emerge.
Recognize that the outcome of each work session, and ultimately the entire multi-day event, is a direct result of pre-specified expectations that you determine collaboratively with company principals and stakeholders.
Knowledge capture: We document key information during the Colab event using various content mapping methods to capture the essence of insights and activities that emerge during your CoLab event. These materials will be made available online as an essential resource for post Colab developments (otherwise known as the “Continuum”).
What might a one to three day Colab look like?
Day One (From Passion to Envisioning) – Determine WHY are you are doing this?
Create stakeholder values alignment
Establish a values synthesis to help shape a common vision
Craft an integrated mission with the vision
Use storytelling to develop a company ‘value proposition’
Outcomes: Core values and vision shared by the organization and stakeholder community
Day Two (From Vision to Goals) – Determine WHAT you want to achieve?
Expand your understanding of Six Point Architecture ™ for purpose of broadening group’s perspective
Go through a second iteration of the first day’s value proposition in light of the Six Point Architecture
Outcomes: Develop the organization’s highest level goals and how it will be organized
Day Three (From Goals to Actionable Strategy) – Determine HOW you are going to do it?
Develop critical strategic paths
Isolate responsible parties for each discrete project. Determine who does what, when, where, how?
Outcomes: Timeline of milestones, critical steps, resources needed, and responsible people
Virtual (or online) Portion of a CoLab
Document key information during the Colab event using various content mapping methods to capture the essence of insights and activities that emerge during your Colab event. Make these materials available online as an essential resource for post Colab developments and continuation.
Ensure that the agreements, ideas, discussions, wisdom, knowledge, learning, skills and memories, etc, are preserved in a format that allows for continued development and evolution. The outcomes of the event need to be a web-based synthesis, put into a storybook form, that shows the generation of the Colab including: graphic imagery, all white board notes, group creations, vision and strategic outcomes, and videos and audios of key Colab sessions. Graphic recordings of meeting minutes with real-time graphic representations of discussions, ideas, agreements.
How To Design The Colab Process
Assist in the development of creating a core team. With the core team, interview key stakeholders to determine your desires, requirements, and anticipated outcomes. We can provide you with guidance on how to develop a process that accelerates you toward the achievement of needed action and desired outcomes.
Review your company’s existing documents/content (vision, strategies, stakeholder lists, etc.) looking for specific actions that you’d like to achieve and then incorporate them into the Colab experience so that those projects/actions can be moved forward and even completed. For example, if you need a feasibility study done, make that one of the activities that the collective group creates; right down to the responsible people, milestones, and resources that are needed.
Here are a few essential aspects for consideration while you are crafting your Colab into a customized experience:
Colab logistics
Dates and number of days
Stakeholder enrollment; number of participants what days
Anticipated budget required (Colab plus venue, number of days)
Commitment dates
Colab investment objectives
How will you justify cost?
What is the desired return on your investment?
What are the key performance metrics or milestones?
CoLab design principles
Common ground and values
Company identity through storytelling
Triple bottom line perspectives
Harvesting information that informs decision-making
Developing a self sustaining company learning system
Look for innovation via integration of the whole-system
After the Colab … Follow Through!
It is suggested that you get commitment from your group for its ongoing success by setting up customized quarterly reviews, secondary sessions, online collaboration tools, extended organizational and business modeling, coaching, and/or outside council. We will help you design a program that works.
Discovery CoLab Deliverables
To ensure that the agreements, ideas, discussions, wisdom, knowledge, learnings, skills and memories, etc, are preserved in a format that allows for continued development and evolution. Make your event outcomes web-based with the primary objective of synthesizing your work. Going through a synthesis process is where you gain huge results.
Put your outcomes into a storybook form that shows the generation of the CoLab™ including: graphic imagery, all white boards notes, group creations, vision and strategic outcomes; videos and audios of key CoLab™ sessions. Graphic recordings of meeting “minutes” with real-time graphic representations of discussions, ideas, agreements.
What kind of follow up?
Be committed to your ongoing success by providing regular reviews, secondary sessions, online collaboration tools, extended organizational and business modeling, coaching, and council as needed for your team members.
I can teach you how to run your own ‘Discovery Colab’ meetings by having me facilitate your next collaborative design session or team meeting.
Click Here To Join The Changing Normal Meetup Group.
WHAT IS CHANGING NORMAL?
Rappoport addresses the idea of what NORMAL is in his articles. He speaks to each individual having the ability to create realities, and how our essential creative nature for doing this is being suppressed. [Caution: His writings are not for minds whose belief systems are easily threatened!]
WHAT IS A CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY?
The work of “Changing Normal” is founded on the dream of a new mythology arising. One that is globally aware, and speaks to the magnificence of our individual and collective manifesting potential.
Each person’s true Identity can get suppressed by an unconsciously arising shared belief system. This is when myth takes on negative connotations. However, once an individual awakens to the myth-making method, each holds the power to become creators of grand new worlds. This can not be done until one’s ego is transformed to align with both personal and shared realities.
A cultural mythology arises when individual messages inform group thought (mind), expressed through metaphorical (emotion), and transferred through a collectively connected medium (body). This is how our shared reality is created, controlled, and sustained.
WHOLE SYSTEM COMMUNITIES THROUGH MYTHIC DESIGN
Culture change happens as a conscious co-creative emergent process. Below I describe my vision for an online community that I am creating called ‘Changing Normal’. A collaborative process for designing and developing a more livable and sustainable future using an open flexible framework called ‘community domains’ (see slides below), providing a comprehensive approach for building real-life communities designed with the whole system in mind. Participants will be invited to use the changing normal environment to share their talents, unique creativity, and passion with others. The long term goal is to transfer each person’s creativity into real-life formations and healthier more sustainable communities worldwide.
Linking Cultural Misfits with Changing Normal
Additional considerations under way to discuss how the (so-called) crazed “Cultural Misfit” plays a role in transforming an insane world that is requesting healing and transformation.
TOOLS & FRAMEWORKS FOR CHANGING NORMAL
Click once on the moving pages below to stop pages from changing. Click links on pages to access more details.
Click once on the moving pages above to stop pages from changing. Click links on pages to access more details.
YOUTUBE VIDEOS Uploaded on Apr 10, 2009
CN 040909 Part One
CN 040909 Part Two
CN 040909 Part Three
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social innovation, collaborative design, design ecology
The three ‘V’s – victor, victim, villain. If you are human being, you can’t escape it. We all wear their cloaks at times in our lives. You are more dependent on these three V’s than you probably know.
Our ways of thinking shape our world. Whether we know it or not, the way we formulate our ideas do control how we see the world and how we make choices.
Consider for a moment how our inter-actions and choices emerge through them. How might these 3V’s show up as part of ongoing issues within your workplace and home-life? Most, if not all, of our decisions and actions emerge through the interactions underlying this ‘3V’ culture-making archetype.
Consider This …
Applying quantum physics to human behavior
Villain (Evil Bad Guy)
All models have rotation or spin. Thus each subject within a model becomes one of the others. The victor-victim-villain archetypal interaction has (like all models) a dynamic movement that moves each subject into becoming one of the others. In this case, the victor becomes the victim, the victim becomes the villain, and the villain becomes the victor. Have you ever noticed how this happens in your favorite movies? How the good-guy and bad-guy overlay each other’s light and dark sides? Batman and IronMan are two good examples that present this interplay. Have you also noticed, at least in our Western society, that there is often more attention placed on – not the hero, but on the villain? Because of this, the villain ends up being the real hero. This is the archetypal rotation in action. The policeman-assailant-assaulted scenario is another example how each person in the triad play an unconscious role in keeping this cultural engine running.
Awareness Shifts
Now then, in a (w)holistic view, do we need to allow the time it takes for each one of us to become the other? If so, this is a conscious act, is it not? Otherwise each of us (too often) get unconsciously caught migrating from one identity to another, and then fall back again, creating a polarized oscillation. Bouncing back and forth to and from the identity we had for ourselves previously. Instead of moving through one and into the next identity within this triad configuration, we stuck in one of them, and movement stops.
An Open Conclusion
Psychology, archetypes, and the dynamics of change
Victim (Suppressed Person)
What might be another model that could work better than the one we are unconsciously using today?
If we could become aware myth-makers, maybe we could design something different for a relational dynamic model? We have become the result of it designing us, rather than consciously using the model to create a collective intelligence that supersedes the interplay within the subjects of victor, victim, and villain.
What if we had an archetype for this dynamic? An archetype of archetypes? Would this allow humanity’s failing displays of destructive expression to be able to move downstream into other realms of possible life, form, awareness, and consciousness?
I’m writing a book on ‘cultural misfits’, and it’s just coming to my mind that this may be its charter – to transmute “objective isolated acts” (static) into “subjective interdependent actions” (dynamic). How we think about models – their influence on our beliefs, choices, and actions – may give us a way to begin consciously creating our way of life, rather than be unconsciously run by them.
+ + +
A new insight …
The Hidden Healer is ‘Vulnerability’
After watching this TED presentation I realized that the center of this complex, codependent triad, is the hidden healer to the turmoil created by the 3V interactions. It is VULNERABILITY. Watch the below well done presentation, which based on research, and you will see what I mean.
And what does this all have to do with COLLABORATION, INNOVATION, and CHANGE?
To become vulnerable, it means by default that you are connected to others. This simple yet profound point is unlike what most organizations teach. Instead they remove the irritating grit quickly to get to the strategic gems. Known as being ‘efficient’, it is a false premise and ends up not being effective at all, and certainly is not sustainable. In fact, when the grit is removed, it is a rare case where the innovation is not removed along with it. Turbulence, conflict, disagreement are healthy, but have to be placed within the context of our humanity, not our productivity.
More on this later, but it is very clear to me now that the gooey, yucky, sticky, muddy stuff that is created when each member of the organization or team consciously chooses to become vulnerable with each other, the whole game changes. Thus, this 4th V (vulnerability) is a baseline for healthy and effective collaboration and design.
Here’s the part that stops the show for most and they run away: At the core of our shells is vulnerability, which consists of those uncomfortable feelings we have when feeling exposed. And what binds the core together is the festering seed of SHAME.
Brené Brown: Listening to shame; Being vulnerable
As an experiment … I will be continuing my work on this post, so stay tuned.
Here is a framework that can help you to hold powerful conversations.
A way of revealing individual value from community values. Inside this crystal is a movement of energy that defines the health of a community and the individuals that make it. It’s “V” formation shapes the alchemical vessel of community, allowing for the transformation of personal meaning and collective identity.
To ensure that the agreements, ideas, discussions, wisdom, knowledge, learnings, skills and memories, etc, are preserved in a format that allows for continued development and evolution. Make your event outcomes web-based with the primary objective of synthesizing your work. Going through a synthesis process is where you gain huge results.
