Gabriel Shirley » leadingchange

Attendr and the UnConference

gabrielshirley — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:07:00 +0000

As I work on the Design Team for the upcoming Nexus for Change conference, I’m reminded of the “new” popularity of what are sometimes called “unconferences” in the world of technologists. An unconference is an event that is designed with minimal boundaries that maximize the potential for useful and interesting things to happen. They are gatherings designed to support emergence. Simply put, they maximize your ability to participate in the conversations you care most about. You get to create the agenda with other participants on the spot, ensuring there will be time and space for your issue or burning question.

While this manner of meeting is “new” to many people, it has been around for a few decades in the form of process methodologies like Open Space Technology (See the Change Handbook for additional methods that support creativity, break-through and emergence.) It’s also quite similar to the way human beings have come together to solve challenging (and everyday) issues for thousands of years. But I digress…

In preparing for Nexus for Change, Peggy Holman reminded me of a new social networking tool that is designed to help stimulate interest and connections among participants before, during and after an event. It’s called Attendr, and it’s currently available for free to anyone who wants to try it out.

It’s a kind of registration system where you fill out a profile, upload a picture, and add tags that represent your affiliations and areas of interest. Then you can identify other attendees you already know and read profiles of others to create a list of people you would like to meet. All of this plus a mashup that includes a GoogleMap of where attendees are from, flickr photos related to the event title, and recent blogs posts about your event. To see all of this in action, take a look at the Nexus for Change Attendr.

Overall, I think this is a great tool that provides a valuable service to those willing to take a few minutes to fill out a profile. I can identify not only who is coming to the event, but also whose interests overlap with mine so I have a sense of people I’d like to meet once the conference begins. And the map shows me if someone I already know is a friend of the people I’d like to meet.

Nexus for Change is not a population of techno-geeks, however, and it’s clear from feedback I’ve received that some of Attendr’s design is challenging for non-techies to understand on the first try. The biggest challenge for most people is figuring out how to identify people you know and those you want to meet. There are also some inconsistencies with site navigation that will hopefully be ironed out in a future release.

To improve the experience for Nexus users, I’ve created an Attendr instruction sheet that you are welcome to re-use for your own event. Contact me and I’ll send you a Word version for easy editing. Early results indicate that the instructions provide most users easy access to Attendr’s powerful and simple features.

Let me know what you think of Attendr!

Active Music, Hyperscore and Creativity

gabrielshirley — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:29:00 +0000

Another report from the Guiding Lights Weekend:

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,

Practice and Patterns for Leading Change

gabrielshirley — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:48:00 +0000

Neuroscientists and biologists have shown that we are indeed creatures of habit. The neural pathways in our brains and bodies actively grow to support our ability to do the things we do repeatedly. One of the reasons we are often resistant to change is that we have established physical systems that support doing things the way we currently do them. That was a great evolutionary strategy for our ancient ancestors — it helped to keep them alive by, say, using fire to ward off predators. It worked yesterday, so it’ll probably work today too. Pretty soon it becomes the one and only answer to the problem. Warding off perceived danger is often not a great strategy in today’s world, where being adaptable to change is likely to be the most valuable evolutionary capacity we can have. The rate of change is increasing all around us, and that’s one thing we can pretty much count on to stay the same.

The good news is that our brains are pattern-making as well as pattern-holding devices. Changing habits is a matter of re-patterning our existing pathways through repetition — what I like to call practice. If we make a concerted effort to practice a new habit every time we feel like doing something the old way, we begin to develop physiological resources that support the new habit. Some scientists say it takes 20 or 25 consecutive repetitions of a new behavior to begin to pattern it in the brain.

So if you want to stop procrastinating, you might try the following: Every time you feel like you’re procrastinating, immediately stop what you’re doing and work on the thing you’re putting off for 30 minutes. If two hours later you feel like you’re procrastinating again, stop and give it another 30 minutes. If you’re as good a procrastinator as I have been in my life, you will repeat this pattern 25 times in just a few weeks.

After a month, re-evaluate. Are you able to notice you are procrastinating earlier than you used to? Does the urge to “just do it” take over so that perhaps you don’t feel like you’re procrastinating as much?

Let me know about your re-patterning experiment. I’m curious to hear if your experience matches what scientists are saying.

Organization leaders who are helping their people work with change are facing the same kinds of patterns. They exist at a neuro-physiological level in every person in a company. Framing the experience as practice helps people take themselves more lightly as they work to establish new patterns. Using change methodologies such as those described in The Change Handbook helps to set a collective context of practice and possibility. As we engage peoples’ creativity, we create space for new patterns to form more quickly. Perhaps more important, learning to engage creativity on a regular basis helps to establish a pattern of greater ease with change.