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)

Like her I am working as a consultant while PhD-ifying myself, and I’m at this juncture of looking for my “next assignment.” Not working is not an option as this program is a fair chunk of annual change.

As a natural systemic thinker, I am interested (and have some expertise) in a wide variety of subject areas. In fact I’ve interviewed for a couple of jobs lately and find that bringing my systemic outlook into the formal interview conversation can make people a bit nervous! I suppose if you’re not used to connecting a wide variety of dots into a more coherent whole picture on a regular basis, interviewing someone who does could make you wonder if this person has the ability to focus on the task at hand.

Unlike Dorianne, I’ve been a consultant and entrepreneur all of my professional life. I’ve worked with startups and Fortune 100 companies on such a wide variety of projects that my breadth of experience appears suspicious to some in the corporate hiring arena. I don’t mean to brag, I’m talking about the challenge I face in communicating my full value to an audience that is holding a limited perspective of what they want and need. While their perspective is absolutely valid, my value add is seeing what other people don’t usually see, helping to identify and fill in the gaps before they become crises. Here’s a story to illustrate the consequences of not thinking systemically:

Yesterday I received a piece of mail from the Rocky Mountain Institute. Enclosed was a transcript of a brief speech given by Amory Lovins, one of RMI’s founders. In the transcript he tells the story of the perils of addressing complex systemic issues via non-systemic solutions.

In the 1950s, there was a malaria outbreak in parts of Borneo. The World Health Organization leapt into action, sending planes to spray the entire region with DDT. The DDT was intended to kill mosquitoes, thus halting the malaria outbreak, which it did. Shortly thereafter, peoples’ roofs started caving in. Perplexed, the colonial government decided to address the problem by providing villagers with tin roofs for their huts. Once the roofs were installed, people began to report that they couldn’t sleep. The sound of the rain on the metal roofs was so loud it kept them awake at night. It turns out that the DDT, in addition to killing mosquitoes, had also killed parasitic wasps and other insects. The wasps were in a symbiotic relationship with thatch-eating caterpillars. Since there were no wasps, the caterpillar population soared, and thatch roofs were a readily available food source. Meanwhile, geckoes were eating insects that were treated with DDT. The DDT built up in the bodies of the geckoes, who were then eaten by cats. The cats received such a dose of DDT that they began to die off. As that happened, the rat population began to rise. Pretty soon, the World Health Organization was concerned that there would be a typhus or plague outbreak. So they again leapt into action, working with the Royal Air Force of Singapore to initiate “Operation Cat Drop.” Imagine the sight of cats parachuting down from airplanes — commando cats sent to control the rat population.

Wish I had a picture of that.

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.

Imagine having versions of this that show the inner workings of every healthy and diseased bodily function. As a patient, you could see what works well and what doesn’t work so well, and have a stronger capacity to visualize healthy function in your own body.

If you know of other great examples that illustrate complex systems in action, please let me know.