Trying too hard

Sometimes I find myself trying too hard. Trying too hard to impress, or to keep the peace, or to come up with a brilliant idea. And this despite that I know that I can’t do all or any of those things even some, let alone all, of the time – and certainly not on demand. It’s when I catch myself trying too hard that I try to become more playful. And that’s where it gets tricky, because it’s hard (ironic eh?) to be very playful on your own. Much easier to get sucked in to the prevailing mood. It’s remarkably easy to forget playfulness in the midst of all the serious stuff of life (read tedium) – paying bills, catching trains or planes, standing in queues, or (God forbid!) attending meetings.

Why be more playful? I think it opens opportunity. I think it’s fun and when I’m having fun I’m more likely to try something new or adventurous and who knows where it might lead? I also think it helps others to relax too. I was chatting with a friend the other day who played an improv game with a group of his colleagues. He said he learnt more about them in that few minutes than in years of regular meetings. He saw who jumped straight in, who opted out. He saw a different side to his colleagues. I wondered if it was a ‘different’ side, or whether he was seeing the ‘real’ person, rather than the work persona?

A few weeks ago I ran a workshop with a group of people using improv games for much of the time. Later, the feedback I received was that people felt “challenged, inspired, confused, excited and energised”. All from being playful! I’m reminded of the 80s when the management mantra was to leave your personal life at home and not bring your personal self and problems to the work place. Always seemed bizarre to me as to how I was supposed to split myself into the ‘work Viv and the ‘home’ Viv. Seems some people have taken this to heart though and still see work as ‘serious’ and play as well, something else that’s not really appropriate in the world of work. Thankfully this is changing, and there are lots of commentators who talk about the benefits of play and of having fun, yes, even at work!: Keith Sawyer, Alex Kjerulf. And it’s not a new theme for me either. I’ve written about it before here and here.

So, how to be more playful? As well as the usual paraphenalia I carry with me, I’m going to try and find ways of actually being playful more often. Maybe I should dig those juggling balls out of the cupboard and have them in my bag? Which brings me to the question of whether I need things to be playful? Or other people to play with? Or whether playfulness is a state of mind? I guess it’s all of the above.

My challenge is to be true to my own convictions: I know that play, and laughter, releases endorphins. I know that play triggers different parts of the brain. I know that the way we act when playing games is a window to how we act in other situations. I know that I’m more open when playing games. I know I have more ideas, and even if I don’t, I have more fun anyway. And I also know that I stress over what people will think of me when I suggest a game in lieu of a more serious, more conventional, approach.

It’s certainly easier, and maybe even safer, to be conventional, to be unexceptional. Challenging the status quo has always been an uncomfortable place to be. I have enough experience of facilitation now that I know how to be predictable, and I know how to use a whole range of processes to deliver perceived outcomes for the client. I know how to use management speak, how to play the corporate game. Problem is, I don’t want to. I prefer to challenge, to disrupt and to take people to their learning edge where something might actually shift as a result of what we do together. It’s unpredictable. It’s sometimes scary (yep, for me too!). It’s one of the reasons I have this blog – to capture these thoughts, to share them, and to find playmates (wanna play?).

For me, and my clients, some of whom do some of the most serious work imaginable, playfulness is a way to seriously explore what they do and how they do it – to innovate even. Guess that’s why my business is called Beyond the Edge.

This, I think, is the work I’ve been waiting to do.

HT to my playmates. You know who you are.

Video styles

I’m about to acquire a cool little Kodak video camera, so I’ve been noticing different styles of video communication. Maybe I won’t be able to emulate any of these, but they do provide some great ideas and inspiration.

Realist, real time, first person: probably the easiest of videos to make

More realist, this time the protagonist is filmed and there’s some editing. This relies on the awesome talent of the protagonist and a steady hand and keen eye of the maker.

Then there’s this real time, whole-day open space filmed with a fixed camera and compressed  to 30 secs (hat tip Johnnie Moore)

And now we move away from realist to some other cool ways of sharing information. CommonCraft developed this paperworks approach which remains a favourite.

And my favourite style uses kinetic type. This is still my all-time favourite video. The Girl Effect.

And now motion graphics. A current favourite.

And finally, someone I just discovered last night (thanks to Kath Copley) Tales of Mere Existence by Lev Yilmaz.

What’s your favourite video style?

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.

Visual

This is one of my favourite sites at the moment. It’s an Australian site that promotes art and photography. You can make cool t-shirts, order prints or cards. And what I love most is that its front page changes every day with a collage of themed images. Go on, go and have a look at REDBUBBLE.

There is no manual

I once worked with a young woman who wanted to know, at every turn, what she should do, how she should do it. She was smart, passionate and able – yet she was gripped by fear. Gripped by the fear of not doing it ‘right’. The problem was, and is, that there is no manual – there is no ‘right’ way. As Seth Godin would put it – she was in the grip of her lizard brain, that primitive part of our brain that is either hungry, scared, angry or horny. It’s the reason we are afraid. I heard that she’d recently had a baby. I hope she’s worked out how to tame that lizard brain because I’m pretty sure there’s no manual for raising a child either.

This is the premise of Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin. We have a choice to stay stuck, or we can embrace the fear and create some momentum. That’s the good news. The bad news is that our conditioning, and that damn lizard brain, might stop us. We’re conditioned to fit in, not stand out. We’re conditioned to deny our own genius, our art – whatever it is – because we might fail and then the lizard brain can say ‘told you so!’. We fear failure to the point where we don’t even try. Prototyping is all about trying and discarding. Accepting failure. Our lizard brain doesn’t like failure. It once meant we were probably dead, a tasty meal for some predator.

The predators today are no less fearful – it’s just that they are harder to recognise. Security, compensation for our labour, following the rules. These are the things that prevent us from embracing our art and sharing it with the world. Not because we want to get paid, but because there’s nothing else we CAN do, but share our art. Share our passion. We have to accept that it might not work and do it anyway.

Generosity is at the heart of Linchpin, gifting our art to others, not for something in return, not for a later transaction, but for the human to human connection. And for movement. If you’re stuck there’s no movement. It’s hard to be generous if you’re stuck.

There’s no ‘how to’ in this book. It’s a description of what the world needs, and Godin suggests each of us needs to find our own way, create our own map, forge our own future, share our own art, find others who will share the passion and momentum rather than hold us back with the threat of ‘not safe, not secure, not wise’. It’s not  a bad description of how to navigate a complex world where even if there was a manual, it would be out of date before you finished reading it.

Stop thinking

Over the past fortnight I’ve had a particularly tricky problem on my mind – nothing too serious, just messy and complicated and a bit demoralising. The more I thought about it the less able I felt. I started to question my own capacity to think and make sense, yet alone identify options.

So I let it go. I stopped thinking about the issue for a whole week. Consciously, anyway. I read books. I blogged. I watched mindless television and exciting football games (that’d be Aussie Rules Football of course!) I walked on the beach and in the forest. I balanced rocks. I had weird dreams – none of which I can remember. I weeded the vegie garden. I trained some people in facilitation. I listened to music. I slept in. I met friends for coffee, and others for dinner.

And then I returned to the problem. And click, click, click. The synapses fired. Options were all around. Ideas exploding. Enthusiasm reignited. I just had to let it go and be patient. Easy to say. Hard to do. Worth remembering.

Photo credit: iStockphoto

A doorstop versus relationship rules

Many years ago I read a very good article about the differences between a Big Mac and the Naked Chef by Joel Spolsky. It was 2001. It’s about scaleability, and quality. And surprisingly, it’s still on the web, hence the link. The main premise was this:

1. Some things need talent to do really well.
2. It’s hard to scale talent.
3. One way people try to scale talent is by having the talent create rules for the untalented to follow.
4. The quality of the resulting product is very low.

Now Joel was talking about IT companies. I think this can be applied to anyone, anything. Especially organisations that want to control the quality and outputs of their workers. It is, of course, possible. The price is quality and innovation.

Fast forward to 2009 and the book In Pursuit of Elegance by Matthew May that I wrote about here.

My heart sinks when I see the manual - the guide on how to do things. There’s a belief that if we have a manual (or rules of engagement, or accredidation, or similar) we can minimise risk and ensure quality. Matthew May argues the opposite. If we have the rules all set out we stop paying attention. And we are less engaged with the task at hand. He cites Hans Monderman, a Dutch road traffic engineer and innovator.

Hans Monderman is behind the design of Laweiplein in Drachten – an unregulated traffic intersection that accounts for 22,000 cars, thousands of cyclists and pedestrians.

One of the reasons this works is because “…you are not just another adherent to an imposed order, but rather a fully engaged and contributing participant in the emerging self-organisation.”

What Hans Monderman discovered is the same as what Jackson Pollock discovered. And is also true for flocking birds. “When you are fully involved in a process governed by very simple relationship rules, a natural inclination takes over, and a self-organised pattern emerges that is far more orderly than anything legislation could produce. Under those circumstances, you’re connected and interacting with what’s around you.”

Now let’s apply that to organisations. Is it possible that a handful of relationship rules, that are interpreted by people, would be more effective, engaging and purposeful than a doorstop of a manual full of do’s and don’ts?

Insanely Great Slideshows

Some of you might know that Geoff Brown and I have been playing with slideshows – learning ourselves how to make them insanely great and providing some training to share what we’ve learned with others. Two of our key influencers have been Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen guru and Nancy Duarte, slide:ology guru

You can go here and see three short videos of them chatting casually about three key questioons they often get about slideshows:

1. How do your methodologies apply to scientific or technical presentations?

2. How many slides should I use?

3. If we simplify our slides using your methodology and then need to circulate the slides how do people know what the content of the presentation was?

Well worth a look.

Geoff has been facilitating a conference where we had an opportunity to work with the keynote speakers to help them develop insanely great slideshows. Apparently they did a fantastic job and the audience was wowed! Importantly, the audience is more likely to remember their messages.

At some facilitation training I delivered recently in Indonesia I used a slideshow where I incorporated much of what I’ve learnt. Even without additional training this influenced people present to try their hand at simplifying their messages and using more images.

Both these examples are great feedback for us and is what encourages us to continue to offer this low-key, and seemingly impactful training. Okay, that’s the sales pitch – the real reason we do it is cos we can make some money and have fun while doing so. Oh, and work together too. That’s always fun.

Photo credit: www.iStockphoto.com

What’s catching my attention

Performance Reviews

I’d  had a discussion with a friend earlier this week about performance reviews. I haven’t heard many good comments about them. And luckily I don’t have to partake – my performance is reviewed, well, every time I perform! Alex Kjerulf posted this update on Facebook today:

The link he refers to – why performance reviews are a waste of time –  is well worth a look.

Also from Alex, this Dilbert cartoon

Visual, back-of-the-napkin explanation

Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin has created this explanation of the US health care system. As well as being informative, it’s a good example of visual story telling of a complicated issue.

More about the US health care system and town hall meetings

Chris Corrigan writes about what we can learn from disrupted meetings and about ‘chaordic confidence’

Stepping into manual photography

Here’s a photo that I took today. It’s unremarkable, really. And as I continue on my photographic journey I hope I will eventually have some remarkable photos to post. But back to this one. It represents a learning journey, because it’s one of the first photos I’ve taken on my gorgeous new Canon Powershot G10 camera using completely manual settings.

It’s SO easy to use a camera on automatic mode. Point and shoot. But I’ve found it’s made me lazy. I don’t think so much about the photo. I don’t consider the light and the composition. I don’t care enough.

So, I turned off the automatic function and re-learned ISO settings, shutter speed, aperture, and depth of field. I’m often frustrated when taking photos because I know what I want to acheive but am unsure how to do it.

As someone who makes a living out of training others, it’s a useful reminder to be the learner – to struggle with concepts, to try and fail, to feel the frustration, and the delight when I move a little closer to what I want to achieve. Today was another step on the journey.