Gabriel Shirley

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 29 November 2007

Forever and a Day

OK, so it’s been months since my last post. My main excuse is that I’ve started a PhD program at Fielding Graduate University, but today I realized this really is no excuse at all. This morning I found the blog of a fellow student who is sharing her experience of the transition from Fortune 100 executive to PhD student. Dorianne has inspired me to get typing again, working with the experience I have in front of me.

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.

parachuting cats

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Posted in PhD, complexsystems

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 15 August 2007

Making the Shift

I just posted to the Story Field Conference Conversations blog about an upcoming film called The Shift. I highly recommend it.

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Posted in complexsystems, conference, creativity, emergentdesign, success, thoughtfortheday

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 29 July 2007

iPhone in the woods

I spent the last 2 weeks at conferences on Cortes Island, about 200 miles north of Seattle as the crow flies. Cortes is the gateway to a vast wilderness that extends from British Columbia through the Northwest Territories to Alaska. It’s an ancient summer gathering place for native peoples in the area who came together to trade, tell stories, eat and swim together in some of the warmest summer waters the inland Pacific has to offer. Each summer, I endeavor to spend some time on Cortes, gathering with friends and colleagues from around the world, each of us bringing a unique perspective and experience to addressing some of the major issues of our time.

(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.

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Posted in UserCenteredDesign, changehandbook, conference, iPhone, nexusforchange

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 6 July 2007

iPhone: The First Week

Yes, I was one of those (slightly obsessed) people who stood in line last Friday to be one of the first to own Apple’s new iPhone. I’ve been interested in designing technologies that are adaptive to human needs for many years and this gadget is one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in a while. It brings together existing technologies (there’s nothing really new in the iPhone) and focuses on creating a user experience that is exceptionally compelling and highly functional.

I must admit, there were several motivating factors that helped me make the decision to purchase an iPhone at this time — I don’t usually purchase 1.0 versions of any physical product at this price point. First, I already use Apple hardware and software to organize my life — the calendar, email, web browser, and iTunes media organizer included in MacOS X. That makes the iPhone the first device to be fully compatible with my digital world. Previous smart phones, such as the Blackberry and the Treo, require third-party software to synchronize with a Mac, and the results are somewhat mixed. Second, my partner Tracy was in need of a new cell phone, so I had the excuse of buying an iPhone and passing my old phone to her (this also helped me bypass the “early termination fee” when moving from Verizon to AT&T). Third, my iPod’s screen has been on the fritz for several months. It’s basically unreadable and I use it only as an alarm clock, since those settings were already in place before the screen went out. If these elements had not been in place, I may have chosen to wait until next January when a second iteration of iPhone hardware may be announced.

The verdict?
For me, the iPhone is working as advertised. Synchronizing with my computer is as easy as plugging it in and letting iTunes do the work. The battery lasts all day, even with significant use of all features. I can add new calendar events to the phone while out and about, check and reply to email, take notes, and check the weather. The web browsing experience is amazing for the screen size. The touch screen keyboard took about 3 days to get used to, but now I’m typing on it at about 75% of my full-keyboard typing speed. In short, this thing just works.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. Others have identified several shortcomings and the AT&T network has been oddly missing in some critical places (near the Seattle airport, for example). I’m sure that Apple and AT&T teams are watching closely the initial experiences of early adopters in order to improve that experience in the coming months.

My favorite feature of the iPhone has to do with its architecture — it works as a phone, but it thinks like a modern computer, meaning it can do multiple things at one time. While on a call, it’s easy to look up a phone number or address. If you are near a WIFI network, you can even look up information on the web to relay to the person on the other end of the phone. Yesterday afternoon I was working at a remote site when I received a call asking if I wanted to go to the movies. I switched to speaker phone, opened the web browser, and did a Google search for “Ratatouille near 98103″ – then relayed that information to my friend (the movie was ok, but not as good as I wanted it to be). This multi-tasking ability is absent in most cell phones, and it’s really the key ingredient that changes a “phone” into a “communications and entertainment” device.

Since the phone is based on Apple’s MacOS X operating system, there’s a tremendous ability to improve the user experience without changing the hardware at all. I expect this to be the first cell phone I’ve owned that will actually get better over time without a hardware upgrade.

I’ll end with a list of software-only changes that would significantly improve the iPhone experience.

Things I the iPhone Could Do with a Software Update
As a user experience designer, here are the things I hope Apple will update in the iPhone’s software over the coming months to make current generation iPhones even better:

Sync with my computer automatically over a wi-fi network (right now a cable is required)
Sync To Do Lists from Address Book
Copy/Paste
Add Flash player to Safari on the iPhone (web sites made with Flash technology don’t work today)
Voice commands for making calls hands-free (a feature present on most modern cell phones)
Vocal directions for Google Maps (avoid the danger of looking at the screen while driving)
Allow developers to make iPhone widgets (I’d like a flight status widget for example)
View Notes and Email in landscape orientation (only web browsing currently works in landscape)
One-touch email to “me” for Notes, Pictures, Maps
Send calendar invitations via email
Send contact info via email (find a contact, click to send that info to a 3rd party)
Show multiple calendars with different colors and options to display selected calendars only
Bluetooth tether — connect a laptop wirelessly to the phone for remote internet access
Create new email folders from the phone for organizing messages
Email rules – add ability to filter and organize email coming to the phone (see my previous post about using gMail to do this on the server before it gets to your iPhone or in-box)

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Posted in UserCenteredDesign, agile, creativity, iPhone

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 20 June 2007

Using Gmail to Coordinate Multiple Email Accounts

I recently returned from a trip to Italy, where I was traveling without a laptop. While I must admit to feeling a bit naked since I tend to take the thing everywhere, I also experienced the freedom of being computer-free, not having the extra weight, and not worrying about losing an essential tool to a theif. Ah, the joy of it all.

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.

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Posted in adaptiveorganizations, complexsystems

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 6 April 2007

Nexus Reflections

Nexus for change was quite a gathering. The mix of people was extraordinary and there was a buzz of conversation from the moment people left the registration table. It was also an emergent, experimental event that attracted participants with a wide variety of needs. This is a tricky thing to do, and it’s a learning edge the planning team is working with as we move to support the Action Groups that were formed at the conference and begin to think about next year’s event.

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.

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Posted in emergentdesign, nexusforchange

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 14 March 2007

The Nexus is Coming!

Next week (March 21-23) is the Nexus for Change conference at BGSU in Ohio. Over 330 people have registered… a full house! I’ve been working with the 70-person (!) Design Team for several months to come to a final design for this conference of change practitioners, scholars, leaders and activists. The “final touch” details are being put in place and the amazing staff at BGSU is working hard to fulfill an endless series of requests.

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.

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Posted in changehandbook, conference, nexusforchange

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 14 March 2007

Visualizing Systems: The Inner Life of a Cell

I love finding new ways to visualize complex systems at different levels of magnification. Victoria Castle alerted me to this video from Bio Visions at Harvard University. It’s an animated fly-through of the inside of a living cell in action.

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.

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Posted in biology, complexsystems

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 12 February 2007

What makes an online forum successful?

This is a question I’ve been asked many times. And too many times I’ve not been asked, but have offered my opinions anyway! The following answer is one I will share with a corporate client that is using private online forums behind the firewall for employee interaction and virtual teaming. It’s really only the start of an answer… but it’s enough to get a conversation started that we can re-visit over time:

Successful forums have a compelling purpose that participants care about. They matter to people. They tend to be either information-driven or participation-driven, or both. The strongest key to success is for the compelling purpose to be greater than the resistance of the group to changing what they currently do.

An information-driven forum is one where key information is posted to the forum as the primary central location for distribution. Participants know the forum is where they will find what they want, and the value is mainly transactional. People show up, grab a file or a link, post a quick comment, and leave. They monitor their email to discover when new information is posted to the forum, but they probably won’t visit otherwise, unless they have important information to share. It’s about content.

A participation-driven forum is one where the key driver is a need to participate with others to learn new material, explore new horizons, figure out problems, or just to stay connected. Participants want to be in touch with each other and it may be difficult for them to stay in touch either face-to-face or by telephone. The forum provides a place where the group can be together that is not dependent on each person’s specific schedule. Content is important in a participation-driven forum, but the primary focus is on people connecting, knowing the content will change from day to day or week to week. It’s about relationships.

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Posted in forums, onlinecommunity, success

Posted by: gabrielshirley | 8 February 2007

Attendr and the UnConference

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!

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Posted in changehandbook, leadingchange, nexusforchange

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