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.

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!

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!

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.

“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.

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.

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”?

Post Script: Checking out a few of my favourite blogs this windy and rainy Sunday evening, I stumbled onto Hugh MacLeod’s latest post where he says:

The work people do is all driven by different things- money, ambition, intellect, sex, whatever. The work I do, and the work for a lot of people who read my blog and buy my cartoons, seems to be largely driven by the need to “connect”.

We like doing stuff that connects with people. We’re “Connectors”.

Spooky. I don’t think I read Hugh’s post before I wrote my own. Not today anyway. Maybe I read it yesterday, and just like Keith Sawyer writes in his book Group Genius, most ideas build upon others, are generated incrementally rather than as a blast of creative insight. Maybe this is an example. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence!