Microsoft’s solution, using its Dynamics AX technology, is intended to help large building operators monitor their environmental impact and efficiency.

Google’s solution is open source software that is intended to stimulate an ecosystem of products that help consumers change their behavior through better access to real time information (see NYT article). In the same way that Prius owners tend to change their driving habits due to the information display that shows how different kinds of driving produce different fuel economy in the car.

The advent of real-time data coupled with social technologies that help people see how their friends and neighbors are doing compared to them will likely have a significant impact on our power consumption.

It can be quite a challenge to effectively corral a group of “experts” in any field, and Emily Axelrod did a fabulous job of keeping us focused and on task while inviting the full participation of the various skills represented in the room. There are times when groups manage to hold a healthy respect for the diverse capacities and perspectives represented by the individuals present and still maintain both an equal playing field and a practical orientation. This was one of those times.

We began with a welcome from Steve Cady and a review of feedback from last year’s conference. More than 2/3 of last year’s participants filled out the online feedback form. Jon Kennedy, Peggy Holman, and I had a hand in sifting through the results to identify key themes and get a sense of the distribution of perspectives. The spectrum ranged from “loved it” to “hated it” with approximately 75% saying they would recommend the conference to others and would consider coming again. Yet there was a clear indication that some audiences did not feel included or find enough value, especially those representing businesses and those coming to learn about specific change methodologies.Last year’s conference had a strong focus on emergent design, identifying and adapting to the changing conditions in the room. Some of those adaptive design decisions were seen as successful and others less so by participants. Those with learning styles that thrive in highly structured environments were fish out of water — some of them began to grow lungs and others flopped out of the room and back to more familiar territory. Still others hung around with questions about how to design differently to accommodate the many needs represented.

At the end of last year’s conference, I proposed a pre-conference that would specifically address the needs of people who were coming to sample different methodologies to get a sense of what they are, when to use them, and how to design change initiatives with various methods in your toolkit. I’m happy to say that Nexus U will be the implementation of that idea, enhanced through collaboration with others. In two days participants will get a sense of the history of change methodologies, hear a range of stories of their application in real situations, and get to choose a couple of specific methods to understand in more detail. Then there will be an opportunity to apply new learning in the design of an intervention for a real-world case. We hope this experience will both satisfy those who wanted more specific details about methods and also prepare people for the conference that follows.

The conference will pick up the theme of thinking and designing from a systemic perspective to address real-world issues. There will again be a variety of perspectives represented by attendees, but this year we hope to do a better job of weaving together opportunities for different needs to be met while providing plenty of opportunity for cross-pollination of ideas and initiatives. Participants in Nexus U will bring their learning forward to both explore their questions further and to help bring others up to speed for Nexus II (the conference). There will be a combination of theory and application, as well as a spacious design that allows time for critical informal conversations and the emergence of new alliances.

The conference brochure will be available in the next few weeks.

Save the dates, it’s gonna be good:

Nexus U – March 29-30, 2008 (Sat-Sun)

Nexus II – March 30-April 1, 2008 (Sun-Tue)

For the past few months, I’ve been doing a bit of action research for my own organization. The goal is to better understand peoples’ perceptions of the future and how that perception can or should impact their actions in the present. The research protocol is very simple. When you are engaged in conversation and have achieved a reasonable level of trust, ask the question, “What do you and your organization need to be and do to be relevant in the next 20 to 50 years?”

I find that this question elicits a variety of interesting responses. Invariably, it gets people thinking about the futures they think are likely and how they might respond to them. My goal in the conversation, which may happen over time, is to move from this “respond to” position toward a more proactive stance that identifies concrete action that will help create a desired future. There is something incredibly powerful in the act of choosing your preferred future. Along the way there is a shift where people begin to see themselves as creators of culture rather than simply consumers of culture. This is the magic moment where empowering possibilities arise.

You are hereby invited to try this experiment yourself. Start with people you know well and see where the conversation leads. Invite them to join the experiment too, and to report back their results. Try it on yourself and see what happens.

As always, if you have an ah-ha experience and are willing to share, or if this raises questions or concerns for you, please let me know.

I look forward to the conversation.

But wait, said a little nagging voice inside my head before I left for the trip, what about all that email that will pile up while you’re away? Don’t you owe it to yourself to keep it at bay by checking in and managing your in-box every few days? You’ll be much happier when you return!

Sensible enough. I could easily stop at a local internet cafe every few days to tame the ever active in-box. The only issue was that I have a number of email accounts I use on a regular basis. I have a business account, a personal account, a dot-Mac account, a Gmail account, and a legacy account from my previous company that some folks in my network continue to use even though I’ve asked several times for them to update their information. I didn’t want to check all these accounts separately, so I started looking for a solution that would centralize everything, give me access via the web, and provide an easy transition back to my laptop when I returned from the trip.

Gmail turned out to be an ideal solution. It has a great webmail interface, can connect to other email servers to pull mail into a single in-box AND it provides great features for transitioning back to my regular laptop-based email client when I return. Plus Gmail now backs up all of my email and provides web access to everything, including mail archived long ago.

There’s a bit of setup involved. Here are the details:

Retrieving mail from other servers

1. Log into your Gmail account, click Settings at the top of the page, then click the Accounts tab. Use the Get Mail from Other Accounts section to tell Gmail how to grab your email from other places. I wanted Gmail to download and then delete mail from my other mail servers (not leave a copy on the other servers), so I selected those options. I also use the Label feature to automatically label incoming mail so I know which email account it was sent to and can quickly see all new mail TO my business account.

2. Configure the Send Mail As settings if you want to use Gmail to send FROM your non-Gmail accounts. That way you hit reply and the outgoing message is FROM whichever account the original message was sent TO.

That takes care of retrieving mail. At this point, I could access all of my email via the web using Gmail, so I was good to go on my trip. When I returned, I ran into a couple of additional learning opportunities.

Organizing Email

Warning: Since Gmail uses Labels instead of the more traditional Folders found in most mail clients, I set up all sorts of labels to organize my mail while on the road. When I returned, all of that mail was downloaded to the in-box on my laptop, un-organized once again. Luckily, all of the SPAM had been filtered out, and everything I had deleted or sent was properly organized. I just had to re-file things I had attempted to “file” using Labels.

Returning to my Laptop

I use Apple Mail to access email from my laptop. If you use something different, your settings may vary. Most mail clients have similar capabilities, so you should be able to make it work on your equipment without too much fuss.

When I returned, I decided it would be nice to continue using Gmail to centralize all of my messages. It does a wonderful job of removing SPAM and refusing email with viruses, and I’d prefer not to have that garbage on my laptop in the first place. Here’s what I had to do:

1. Set each email account to NOT automatically retrieve mail.
At first I disabled all accounts other than Gmail, but I discovered that I needed the accounts enabled so that I could send mail FROM those accounts via my laptop. You only need to do this for accounts you need to send mail FROM. Others can be disabled. (I don’t recommend deleting anything until you’re sure it’s working the way you want!)

2. Set the SMTP server for each account to smtp.gmail.com and include your gmail login info for the SMTP connection.
This makes it possible to send ALL mail using the Gmail servers, even mail sent FROM your non-Gmail accounts. It also means that Gmail will store a copy of ALL mail you SEND in the Gmail SENT folder. Now you have a backup of all SENT mail from this date forward.

3. Go back to Gmail Settings and click the Forwarding and POP tab.
Under POP download, it should say POP is enabled. Tell Gmail what you want it to do when messages are accessed via your POP client (e.g. Apple Mail). I use the archive Gmail’s copy option. This bit of magic means that the following will happen:

• Gmail will check my external accounts (about every hour OR whenever I check for new mail)
• All new mail will be in the Gmail in-box
• I can check my mail using the Gmail web interface if I want
• Alternately, I can check my mail from Apple Mail, and all new messages will be downloaded to my local in-box where I can manage them as I see fit, work with them off-line, etc.
  • Instead of deleting the copy on Gmail (as would normally happen when checking mail from a POP server), those messages are archived. They are available for searching in Gmail and can be found using All Mail, but they are no longer in Gmail’s in-box.

That’s it! Now I can be up to date with my email whether I’m using my laptop or someone else’s computer.
PS

If you haven’t already done so, I recommend uploading a copy of your address book to Gmail so you can find your contacts online from any computer, and Gmail will be able to auto-find email addresses when you type someone’s name.

Since music has become all-pervasive in our culture, in many ways it has moved into the background. It comes out of walls and sidewalks as we walk down city streets, iPods, cell phones, car stereos and even elevators. Since we are surrounded by music in so many ways, fewer people take time to make music themselves.

Tod Machover wants that to change. He and his team at the MIT Media Lab have created software that makes it possible for anyone to create music. It’s called Hyperscore.

Hyperscore is music composition software that re-imagines what is required to compose original music. It provides instant access to playing creatively within a highly structured medium. The fundamentals of melody, harmony, rhythm, key changes and timing are click-and drag simple. Instead of notes on a staff, there is a palette where you can paint instruments into a melody and drum beats into a rhythm. The harmony palette then provides a place to arrange your melodies and rhythms into a composition. Drag a melody up to hear it walk up the scale as it plays. Drag the harmony line down to change keys at a particular point in the piece.

It takes less than 5 minutes to learn and then you’re off and running with the potential to create everything from simple riffs to full-length symphonies. When you’re finished, you can output your composition in standard musical notation so it can be played by other musicians. In fact, MIT has partnered with school systems to create programs where children compose original music that is later played by a symphony orchestra.

Besides the fact that Hyperscore is tremendously fun to play with, I am impressed with how Machover and his team focused on engaging creativity rather than learning the details of the craft. To accomplish this feat, they use technology to hide the complexity of the traditional composition medium while bringing its fundamental forms to the surface. This is a fantastic design challenge. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if more technologists took this approach to design?

What if organizations and teams applied the same concepts to their design challenges – including products, processes and projects? How would that work?

They might start by asking questions like these:

• What do our users/customers/stakeholders care about? What excites and inspires them?
• What are the minimum conditions that will maximize creative engagement?
• How can the results of creativity be shared easily and broadly?
• What are the fundamental forms of the product / process / medium we’re working with?
• What happens when we remove everything that’s non-essential?

What other questions do you think would be valuable?

Accessing creativity in a person is accessing an energy that goes deep into their being. It’s a way to touch the spark or life force that drives action and innovation. From that place we are willing to learn whatever we need to learn, to do whatever needs to be done. The learning and doing become fuel that drives our creativity. Fill ‘er up!

(One way to learn more about engaging creativity in organizations is to attend the Nexus for Change conference in March.)

Tags: changehandbook, nexusforchange, adaptiveorganizations, creativity,

The panel included Bonnie Dunbar, former astronaut and current director of Seattle’s Museum of Flight, Tod Machover, co-director of the MIT Media Lab, Rosamund Zander, psychologist and author of The Art of Possibility and Charles Johnson, an acclaimed novelist and teacher at the University of Washington. I was especially interested to hear Tod Machover and Rosamund Zander since there is so much creativity coming out of the MIT Media Lab and I resonate with and appreciate Ros Zander’s work in The Art of Possibility.

The panelists each told stories about what experiences in their lives opened their capacity for imagination. Most told fabulous stories about being supported by parents, especially mothers, to explore their passions and pursue their dreams.

Tod Machover told a story about his mother as a new piano teacher inviting her children to run through the house and bring back an object that makes an interesting sound. She would ask, “What sound does it make?”, “What’s the loudest sound it can make?”, “What’s the softest?”, “How does it make you feel?”, “What do these sounds sound like together?” Pretty soon they had accomplished a musical composition with found objects. Then she would ask them to draw a picture of what they had just done so they could play the same music again the next week. I wish my piano teacher had used this method!

Ros Zander spoke of receiving a music box from her father when she was a small child, shortly after her parents had divorced. Her mother did not think the gift was appropriate for her age and tried to convince her that she could have a stuffed bear instead. Ros realized at that moment that she could have both things… the world of possibility and abundance thinking had opened up for her.

There was a good deal of discussion about creating an environment for imagination to flourish. Most panelists agreed that as mentors, we can create that environment but it is essential that the spark or passion for learning, the curiosity about something, be present in each person. Several felt that many kids today are not in touch with their passion. Often this seems to be connected to a fear of failure. Kids develop opinions about things without ever trying them ad a single failure can be reason enough to stop trying. How do we learn to have productive failures, to treat failure as a learning experience?

I believe that in order to be alive, each human being must have a creative, curious spark inside them. It may be only a smoldering ember, but it is an internal, generative energy for what they love and care about. If we as leaders and mentors can locate that spark and find a way to blow on it, we can help ignite the passion in our children, our co-workers, our employees, and ourselves. Once that spark is present, the conversation changes. Clarity of purpose is easier to access. At that point we can explore the best ways to engage that person’s passion, to open the space for their passion to expand and be directed in productive ways.

Another interesting piece that arose in the conversation was a tension between the need to “learn the past” to understand what has and has not been done so far, and the perspective that if we jump with both feet into a project that we care about, that is achievable and also a stretch, we will learn whatever we need to learn to make it happen. I’m a fan of jumping in with both feet, as long as the circumstances do not put lives in jeapordy. Anything that acts as a doorway to passion is a good place to start. There may be history, skills, and practice to do in order to fully achieve one’s vision. It is much easier to do that work when it is in service to something we care about.

The entire conversation reminded me that there is a strong connection between change methodologies, creativity, imagination, possibility, passion, purpose and practice (wow, that’s a lot of P’s!). When we engage ourselves creatively, we shift our world view, we shake up our established thought patterns. This act sparks the imagination and opens up new possibilities. New possibilities are a pathway for passion and purpose to find form through our practice in the world. Change methodologies seek to engage these elements on a collective level to help shift our ability to be creative, think systemically, and establish new patterns of practice that allow for a more dynamic environment. When we align our practices in service to our individual and collective passions, we create powerful life-affirming organizations that are adaptive to and even excited by change.

Tags: changehandbook, nexusforchange, adaptiveorganizations, creativity,