Category: change

Back when there was “social” in the software…

Picture of the head of a dog (Australian shepherd?) looking at you.
Alan Levine’s blog avatar

Alan Levine noted that he is just past his blogaversary and linked to a post of his from 2006 that I just love. It is a story of how he created an artifact from a presentation I gave at NorthernVoice (a BLOGGING conference, can you IMAGINE that?? We were crazy kids back in the day!). What was magical about this story is how Alan’s recording of my talk rippled across our respective networks and how people added to it and amplified it. (Bev, I loved your notes. Still do! Nick, all these years you mashed it up and now retirement is on the horizon! Who would have guessed!) I think this is when I really became a fan of CogDog, aka, Alan.

A picture of a woman in 2006 with shoulder length curly born hair glasses, holding two bags of Dove Dark chocolates. Photo by Alan Levine.
Photo by Alan Levine of a much younger, shaggier me, sharing chocolate

Alan’s post also has me looking back at years and years of Flickr event albums. Mama mia, there are stories. I often think I have few stories to tell. My problem is simply that I just don’t practice telling them! A little nostalgia… And boy, I was a lot younger back then! And with a lot longer hair. Still sharing the same Dove Dark chocolates though!

Edit a few minutes later: I’m listening to the audio. Still relevant.

From the Archives: Reflections on the FbD Learning Series

Screen shot of four videos from Floodplains by Design's "Collaboration Campfires"

Along time ago and in a place far far away, I supported an awesome network of folks at Floodplains by Design. When the pandemic hit we did a lot of the proverbial pivoting. Network work often entails a lot of meetings and we moved everything online. We ran a series of online facilitation workshops in 2020 and in 2021 and lo and behold today I resurfaced the videos of the sessions. The 2020 series was positioned as “Virtual Coffees” and the 2021 series was called the “Collaboration Campfire!” If you are so inclined, take a stroll through the videos here: https://vimeo.com/user142408470

Here are a few of the things that stand out for me from those two years of constant pivoting.

  • A small but consistent core of community leaders are the glue that enables intermittent and even one time participation to have value.  Our co-chairs and core members provided consistency, stability and network weaving through their wonderful relationships.
  • The community core (plus guests) designs as a TEAM, not the external facilitator designing and delivering. Team design yields experiences that meet a range of needs rather than one championed by a single designer.
  • Find that balance between process and content. Content is essential for the technical floodplains work, but the social bonds between members is nurtured through process. 
  • Vary the process, but not everything, all the time. We used a lot of Liberating Structures and we would try and use a structure more than once, but not the same set or string of structures every time. This gave both comfort (familiarity) and variety. More importantly, it built capacity for folks to go back and use the process on their home turf. Or river, as it were.
  • Don’t over-pack the agenda. Oi, some day we will all integrate this learning into our practices!
  • Reflect and learn after every round. There is always room for new insights and ways of doing things. 
  • Celebrate!

 

From the Archives: Passion in Individualistic Cultures

Text on paper reading "Open doors remind people of passion" accompanied by two thought balloons reading "we are always learners" and "tell me who you are, and your story!"
A snippet from a graphic recording I did in 2016 that seems to fit with this post!

Futurity.org – Autonomy sparks on-the-job passion. This article from 2011 caught my eye only late last year about Xiao-Ping Chen’s research at the University of Washington. It reflects on individualistic and harmonious passion. (I like that latter term!)

I have been thinking a lot about the destructive power of individualism in the US lately. If every individual sets their behavior on individual gain, our society suffers. If we are all in lock step and lose diverse thought, our society suffers. (Yeah, oversimplification!) So we need harmonious passion.

“Harmonious passion comes from intrinsic motivation,” explains study co-author and doctoral student Dong Liu. “You are passionate not only because you are interested in the work, but because it identifies part of you. It defines you.”

The research team found that harmonious passion facilitates increased workplace creativity—acts of devising new and improved ways of doing tasks, from an ergonomic shift on an assembly line to an innovative marketing campaign. The study is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Some people, Chen explains, are naturally predisposed to be passionate about their work. These people will exercise creativity whatever the environment. The rest, however, could develop harmonious passion if given a degree of autonomy to decide how they will execute their tasks—even when pressure to perform is external (think deadlines) rather than internal.

https://www.futurity.org/autonomy-sparks-on-the-job-passion/

Of course, context matters, but the frame of individualistic and harmonious passion allow a different frame of reference that might be useful these days!

From the Archives: Sensing Our Changing Roles

Well this little post has tried to be born into the world twice. Time to give it light. I’m going to leave it exactly as it was with it’s last draft date of 2015. Seems to me the image suggests so much that is relevant today!

A blog post from Peggy Holman on  Changing Roles in Changing Times from way back in February of 2014, came across my screen today and triggered one of those moments “blog this, Nancy!” While Peggy’s post was about the changing roles in journalism, the image she included from the Berkana Institute was what caught my eye.

From Peggy Holman, adapted from Berkana Institute's

From the Archives: Visual and Audio “Getting Into Online meetings” Ideas

Back in 2020 and 2021 some of my friends and colleagues refused to get stuck in the same-old, same-old of starting meetings online. Fisher Qua showed me a Music Labs experimental tool and playing with it (in this clip) opened possibilities of co-creating visually and aurally that could start a meeting in a way that immediately changed our participation and experience.

A bit wild, sure, but why do we seek so much to maintain the status quo? Why do we snap back to the safe, predictable, without even considering if it is still useful? Time for more creative destruction. Make space for something that is more useful. What meeting starting habits have you creatively destroyed? What new practices emerged from that space you created?