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)

(Nancy Margulies painting from the Channel Rock gathering)

This year I was fortunate enough to attend 2 such gatherings, the first at an off-the-grid retreat center called Channel Rock that is stewarded by Gifford and Libba Pinchot. It serves as the remote campus for the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, which offers one of the first sustainable MBA degrees in the United States. The site is accessible only by boat or on foot… there are no roads that lead there. The conference was about the fundamental elements of change methodologies, and how to be effective in a time of extinction level issues (an extension of my work with The Change Handbook and Nexus for Change).

(Oyster BBQ on the beach at Hollyhock)

The second conference I attended was an invitational event at Hollyhock, a 25-year-old learning center with a mission that combines personal development with social action. It’s a rustic, beautiful place that is a fabulous setting for important conversations and action planning.

At both events I had my laptop and my iPhone. The laptop mostly stayed in its bag, while the iPhone came along in my pocket. I used it to take pictures of the groups, to capture contact information, to take notes, and to send quick email during breaks. Each evening, I connected the iPhone to my laptop to charge and synchronize it (I left the docking station at home, so I was using the computer to charge the phone via USB). By the last day of the event, I was able to email everyone a full contact roster that included head shots of each person, taken from the phone, as well as a group vCard for one-click importing into contact management software. I exported the full-sized photos from iPhoto to Flickr, and I created a wiki (using PBwiki) to post some of the conference artifacts.

I’ve attended quite a number of conferences and meetings over the last 17 years, and in the past I’ve often had good intentions about following up with contacts but waited long enough to do so that my memory of which person said what or which face went with what name had faded. The iPhone helps me in 2 ways to remedy this problem: It provides a non-obtrusive kinesthetic experience (taking photos, adding contact info, taking notes — all in one device) and it captures that information for future reference.

I experienced the iPhone as an extension of myself, of what I wanted to do. It enhanced my experience of being in nature with other people, capturing important details but not distracting me for too long, and it helped me deepen and extend human connections by formalizing my learning process and giving me the ability to act on networking opportunities immediately. Interestingly, it’s also the least amount of time I’ve spent staring at my laptop to “catch up” with email in quite a while.

From a design perspective, the iPhone is so seamless for me that I don’t think about it as “technology.” It’s just an extension of how I engage human relationships. If this is true for other people as well, it’s quite a design coup for Apple.

One of the key elements of our emergent design process is to keep the conversation open and continue to include diverse perspectives as they show up. To that end, the entire design process for the conference was (and is) open to anyone who chooses. As disturbances show up in the process of design and in the conference itself, we do our best to invite them in as learning opportunities. And we agree that we are practicing this work… the work of emergent design is about having a strong willingness to practice. Things that don’t work are learning experiences, not failures. And there is always room for improvement.

Post-conference feedback results are now available for review and analysis at http://nexusforchange.org. Session notes from over 30 sessions held at the conference are also available, as are photos of the work of our amazing graphic recording team. Action Groups are posting their initiatives and others are invited to join in where they feel called.

Check it out, post your thoughts, and send us feedback. You are welcome to chime in even if you were not able to attend the conference this year.

It is NOT your typical talking-heads conference. Rather it is an inclusive, participatory, multi-dimensional gathering that seeks to explore, capture, and extend ideas and relationships around what is possible given the phenomenal experience of the people in the room. As a group of people who work with systemic change from different perspectives, we seek to get to know each other and discover what will be possible as a result of our strengthened relationships.

There is a Conference Central page linked from the Nexus site for folks around the world who want to tune in. The conference will be blogged by several people, and there is a public Flickr group (nexusforchange) for images of the event. You can post your burning questions and ah-ha insights. We also have some special guests like Harrison Owen who will be participating in the conference via on-site buddies with Skype video conferencing. If you know someone who is attending, you could ask them to be your Skype buddy as well.

An amazing amount of experience will be in the room for 2 days. To capture as much as possible, we have a team of graphic facilitators who will be creating visual representations of conference activities. And we have a TV crew and a radio crew on-site doing some live streaming of portions of the conference.

To get a taste of what’s to come, check out the Pre-Conference Online Fish Bowl we produced a few weeks ago. It includes a podcast telephone conversation with Harrison Owen, Jean Bartunek, Nancy Badore, and Marv Weisbord.

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!

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,

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.