Do your ideas matter?

Leif Hansen writes this in a newsletter: “Are you like me in feeling that life is just too precious to waste time going to events where we’re talked at as if we’re merely disembodied information-processing machines?  I think most of us would rather just download those experiences and listen to them while driving, thank you very much!”

Johnnie Moore writes of  his “frustration with rooms of smart people listening politely to long winded keynotes and dire panels, as if they’re not actually capable of intelligent thought or dissent.”

He’s referring to a post by Jeff Jarvis which starts like this: “This is bullshit. Why should you be sitting there listening to me? To paraphrase Dan Gillmor, you know more than I do…But right now, you’re the audience and I’m lecturing. That’s bullshit.”

Are you seeing a theme here?

I think it’s time we recognised speeches, key note presentations, Q & A sessions for what they are – an anachronism from a past era. An era where the verb google didn’t exist, and where the media determined who and what we listened to. We are living in a different era – one that isn’t served by one-to-many ‘expert’ presentations, no matter how they are dressed up.

We need engagement, interaction, curiosity and as Seth Godin writes in Linchpin, to “solve interesting problems”, where ‘interesting’ is the key word.” These are the questions that google can’t answer.

Or as Tim Brown says in Change by Design – let’s ask questions that begin with ‘How might we…?’

Why make a big deal out of speeches, presentations, Q & A sessions? Surely if people want to listen, they can? Problem is, when captured, in person, at an event there’s no choice. Someone else has decided that everyone in the room should hear what so-and-so has to say. And maybe what they have to say is indeed interesting and relevant. The issue is around the paternalistic notion of someone else knowing what’s so important that everyone in the room should be held captive. If it’s a TED talk, that will only last about 20 minutes. However, I can download every TED talk and listen while I’m exercising, driving or sitting under a tree.

I’ve never been to a TED event but I can bet that the room would be buzzing after listening to a number of presentations – buzzing with people interacting with each other. I’m also betting many people would find the interaction stimulating.

So, how might we make best use of the amazing brain power of a group of people together in the same room?

And why does it matter? Let’s explore this question first. It matters because if we can’t engage a captive audience and encourage them to share their knowledge and ideas, how are we going to engage them in many of the wicked problems that beset us? We might be losing valuable opportunities to tap into the broader intelligence.

I’d like to further explore the notion of ‘keynote listeners’ and encourage greater use of processes like Open Space and World Cafe that enable conversations on which to springboard ideas. That means everyone in the room has to take some responsibility, and maybe that’s the real issue.

Touring with the band

While watching this excellent trio of talented Quebecois musicians known as Genticorum I was musing the nature of collaboration. Each of these musicians is no doubt talented in his own right, yet together they can do so much more. I saw this time and again over the last few days watching various bands perform. I saw them looking out for each other, building on each other’s strengths, creating something together than they couldn’t do alone. It reminded me of the challenge of working alone – of looking for others to collaborate with and the fun, energy and creativity that can emerge; the difficulty of explaining that to clients; and the expectations that, of course, musicians collaborate, but facilitators don’t need to. This facilitator prefers to be a band member rather than a solo performer.

Crumbs!

With shared interests in facilitation and open space, and a passion for improv, conversation, and exploring ideas, it was really only a matter of time before Johnnie Moore and I developed a workshop that brings all of that together in some way.  It’s called Crumbs! and you can read about it here on Matt Moore’s (no relation) web site.

Matt has invited us to Sydney to offer Crumbs! on May 13.

It’s about the tyrannies that oppress us and limit our capacity to be creative and innovative.

These tyrannies are the Tyranny of the Explicit, or the fear of not knowing; the Tyranny of Excellence, or the fear of not being good enough; and the Tyranny of Effort, or the fear of failure.

It’s going to be fun to explore these with Johnnie, and even more fun to explore how to bust them. We’d love you to come and play.

The tyranny of excellence

Johnnie Moore and I recorded a podcast with David Robinson – artist, improvisor, theatre director, coach and diversity consultant – about the tyranny of excellence, or as David likes to describe it: putting down your clever and picking up your ordinary. Read some background and a run-down here. Download the podcast here. (25m, 23.5 MB)

Coincidence

So I go to the US a few years back and meet New York based improviser and consultant Cathy Salit. Fast forward to this week and Cathy is in Australia to do a pilot of her Performance Of A Lifetime program with a client.

In the meantime, New Zealander Anne Pattillo and I do some work together, start a facilitation training business, write the odd manifesto together – you get the picture.

Cathy is in Melbourne for less than a week. As it happens Anne is also in town for a facilitation gig, and I’m just back from working overseas, so we squeeze in a lunch. Anne meets Cathy for the first time. We have a great lunch, lots of laughs, and go our separate ways.

The following day, Anne’s doing her gig at the Werribee Mansion – and at afternoon tea time looks across the hall at another group facilitated by, you guessed it, Cathy.

And while this is happening unbeknownst to me, a book arrives in the mail from the TED book club called Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler.

Oh, and it’s also a full moon!

Richer

Scoff if you want. Having criteria to decide what I do and don’t do is actually liberating. Yeah, I know – it’s totally out of character, I’m sure such discipline is not something you would generally attribute to me. Nonetheless, I’ve been applying my criteria – and that is harder than it sounds – and very happy when I do. I may be poorer (in a money way of measuring) but I am much richer in every other way.

Here they are again:

• Can I make a real contribution? Is there a need for my skills? Will I make a difference?
• Will it stretch me? Is it edgy? Will it contribute to my continued learning?
• Is there an opportunity to build capacity, and transfer my skills, knowledge and enthusiasm to others?
• Will it enable me to make money and provide for the future?
• Is there an opportunity to travel to new or interesting places?
• Will I be with cool people, especially friends? Will I potentially make new friends, and build existing relationships?
• Will I have fun?
• Am I excited by the prospect?

Four, or more, and it’s a yes!

How might we design a conference?

I’ve been reading Tim Brown’s Change by Design and I’m surprised at how much the principles in the book about design thinking resonate around what Johnnie Moore, Chris Corrigan, Anne Pattillo, Geoff Brown and I have been doing for a national conference on evaluating behaviour change.

In collaboration with the conference organisers and hosts we’ve created a design team to bring some edgy thinking and practices to the delivery of what could have been yet another predictable conference. We’re thinking this conference will be anything but predictable.

Tim says “design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognise patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols”. And while design thinking has mostly been applied to objects and their functionality, more and more the principles have been applied to services and experiences.

He also explains some other principles of design thinking:

• building on one another’s good ideas
• direct engagement with people
• genuine reciprocity of interests
• investigative learning
• exploring questions around ‘how might we…’?
• the challenge and excitement of applying design thinking to problems that matter
• finding ways to encourage individuals to move towards more sustainable behaviours

So it seems that a conference that explores complexity and the art of evaluation within a context of behaviour change for sustainability just calls out for design thinking.

Geoff Brown does a great job in this slideshow of describing some of the key principles that underpin this Show Me The Change conference.

Getting out of the way

Andrew Rixon shared this quote with facilitators in response to a discussion about the failure of action planning.

“The goal for wu wei is to get out of your own way, so to speak. This is like when you are playing an instrument and if you start thinking about playing the instrument, then you will get in your own way and interfere with your own playing. It is aimless action, because if there was a goal that you need to aim at and hit, then you will develop anxiety about this goal. Zhuangzi made a point of this, where he writes about an archer who at first didn’t have anything to aim at. When there was nothing to aim at, the archer was happy and content with his being. He was practicing wu wei. But, then he set up a target and “got in his own way.” He was going against the Tao and the natural course of things by having to hit that goal.”

This sums up my own frustrations with goals, targets, action planning and what Johnnie Moore calls “commitment ceremonies”. The stress associated with ‘having to hit the target’ seems to take precedence over the actual doing and being.

As a facilitator I get in my own way when I delude myself that I can control what’s happening. I feel the stress when ‘people are not doing it right’ and  have to remind myself to let go, and to let be. And nothing drains the energy of a group faster than a superficial ‘action planning’ session at the end of an otherwise productive workshop where people are asked to shoehorn into a commitment they either don’t want or aren’t ready for. Can’t we trust people to do what needs to be done when the time is right? I suspect that monitoring and key performance indicators and milestones mostly redirects attention away from the real work.

Here’s an example of what can happen when you do let go.

This week I’ve been facilitating a workshop with aid workers who have been working with communities affected by a natural disaster. The time is now right to move from disaster response to community development, known as a transition phase. Day four of a five-day workshop: I randomly handed out a Visual Explorer card to each person and asked them to share with another person what they liked about the card, what the card reflects of their experience working with communities, and what is important to remember as we proceed from the workshop back into the field. After a few minutes I asked them to form groups of four and to continue sharing their insights about their cards. This is where it gets interesting.

When I invited the group to share their insights they told a story woven from the four cards that reflected their experiences and their hopes. It was surprising, insightful and moving. I had no idea this might happen and certainly hadn’t planned for it! Who would have thought such richness would come from a random, unplanned activity?

This didn’t result from me working harder or thinking more or planning more – just the opposite. Instead of being oppressed by the Tyranny of Effort, I simply let go of the need to plan where it might lead and trusted the participants to do whatever work they needed to do.

This also reminds me of another quote about catching up with your own shadow. The only way you can do that is not by running faster, but by stopping and resting under the shade of a tree.

Perfectionism

Dan Pink has a post on perfectionism, that adds another dimension to thoughts I’ve been riffing with Johnnie Moore and David Robinson around what we’re calling The Tyranny of Excellence.

One of the principles of improv is to ‘be average’ – to give yourself permission to stop worrying what others think, do what you do, and allow yourself to shine. David describes it as ‘putting down your clever and picking up your ordinary’. I wrote about it here. This nearly always gets a strong reaction – either ranging from “Yes! At last.” to “Oh, no, that can’t be right.”

Here’s some recent research that Dan cites:

According to research reported in this Miller-McCune article, perfectionism comes in two varieties: adaptive and maladaptive. And one of the key determinants of the type of perfectionism someone displays is whether the quest for perfection is “motivated from an inner urge or an outside push.”

…if you’re pursuing perfection because of pressure from others — parents, bosses, peers — that’s likely to take you down the path of dissatisfaction and reduced well-being.

The Tyranny of Excellence  sets us up to fail. It oppresses us by demanding we be creative, strive for excellence, make the right decision – even the best decision – to not be ordinary. It can be both internally driven, by that small voice telling us we’re an impostor or not ‘good’ enough, or externally driven by feedback and judgement. Is it any wonder that it’s easier then to just do nothing, to give up trying to meet such unreachable standards? And here’s the rub. What is ordinary to me, what I do really well because it is ordinary (to me) may very well seem extraordinary to you (because it’s not ordinary to you).

So it seems it’s a good step to aim for perfection if it’s what you want, not to appease others. And maybe it’s also worth considering the idea of ’satisficing’ rather than ‘maximising’ as described by Sarah Wilson.

Here’s some of what she wrote:

Then there’s this idea of “satisficing”, a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, coined by an economist. Satisficing involves making decisions by first selecting criteria that matters most to you, then going with the first option that ticks all such boxes.

Thing is, most of us are “maximizers” – we put off deciding until we’ve examined every possible option, which makes life not unlike a bottomless purgatorial pit. I’d argue our culture encourages us to maximize, to believe a perfect decision exists; it justifies the enless choices consumerism chucks at us. But – quelle irony – research shows satisficers actually make better decisions than maximizers, and are happier to boot.

Seeing what’s right in front of us

Ideas, and thoughts are rarely linear. Makes me wonder why we try and capture them that way, why we struggle to make order out of chaos. And why we focus on what might be, sometimes avoiding what’s happening right in front of us.

Dave Snowden has written about avoiding reality in favour of a vision. And Johnnie Moore has a good summary here. In my experience, many people, when describing a preferred future simply project the present anyway, making the future bigger and shinier.

So I was interested in this report from Haiti from Tales From the Hood blogger J. In a post called A Measure of Humanity, J. explores the dilemma between planning for the long-term reconstruction of Haiti and providing shelter for people right now. J. writes about this dilemma in a way that brings it into sharp focus. No abstract concepts here. Just human lives.

More than any other emergency response than I have ever personally been part of, the earthquake response in Haiti has been plagued by people telling us to think about the long term now.

I mean, on one hand, who in the world would argue? It’s a total no-brainer. Who would argue with the experts who say that we must plan now for the long term? Who ever would say that taking a long term view to the reconstruction of Haiti is a bad thing?

But I have to get this out there: The earthquake happened one month ago, yesterday, and there are still people sleeping outside, under bed sheets. Maybe we could actually deal with some of the immediate needs before holding conferences and meetings and drawing up detailed plans for the “long term”?