Gail Taylor recently posted an essay on “rip off artists” to her Tomorrow Makers blog concerning intellectual plagiarism in the knowledge economy. I have no doubt it was a difficult post for her to write, as she is one who tends overwhelmingly to see the positive in peoples’ intentions and ideas. It is an important post for members of The Value Web - as well as other individuals and organizations who use the MG Taylor methods legitimately and with integrity. Honoring the work and ideas upon which our work and ideas have developed brings honor upon ourselves and to the clients and partners with whom we work. This is perhaps as important as the legal agreements and licensing fees we have put in place; demonstrating our acknowledgment not just the body of knowledge we have inherited, but the spirit behind it as well.
~Todd Johnston

Lucky me! I recently had the good fortune to work with Matt Taylor and Lisa Piazza (MGTaylor Corporation). The way that they designed reminded me to add a little GRASS to my life. Unfortunately, this homonym is laden with heavy meaning that will likely force us to drop its use, at least officially, before we are labeled potentially dangerous and have our phones tapped!

For definition sake in this blog I use the term GRASS to mean: global, responsible, accountable sustainable stewardship. It was coined during an event called L5, as part of a parallel process design challenge to distill the characteristics of members in an emerging value web, or community. The characteristics, and the catchy name, have loosely guided the Value Web Association since its inception, and loosely guided my design tenants. I see, though, that it would be easier to be GRASS, and apply it, if we have an agreed-upon definition and a few simple rules.

I saw the relevance of GRASS as I watched Matt and Lisa gracefully weave it into a 2-day DesignSession. Not only did they introduce it in the scan, where the planet’s needs were squarely the priority vantage point, but also throughout the two days as THE essential vantage point to keep in mind while addressing short-term practical realities. Returning to this high-level vantage point from time to time during the days allowed the near-term solutions and insights to be guided by a global awareness. It was powerful and it made a big difference in context.

As a Value Web member I know the importance of designing in a GRASS way. It’s time for all Value Web members to define and make explicit our path to GRASS in the future. Having lived and designed together for the past few years, guided by GRASS, I am sure that we’ll discover and delight in all the ways of operationalizing this shared-vision.

For now, I’ve formalized my own rule #1: “remind, refresh, and evoke the benefits of sustainably-designed solutions that exist in abundance and are consistent with our values, mission and vision statements.” What other rules might guide here?

JE

… at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2008
in Davos, Switzerland …

In a recent post to his Technium blog, Kevin Kelly, with his usual eloquence, reminds us that, “now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well” (emphasis his). The key reason for this, Kelly goes on to say, is time. Pure ‘bottom up’ does not operate on a time scale requisite with our ‘instant culture’. In his words:

We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including Wikipedia, has design wired into it.

What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness.

It strikes me that this combination of design and hive-ness is precisely what enables a process such as a DesignShop to facilitate the conception and emergence of ideas from within a community of participants (i.e., the ‘bottom’) and then develop them into definable, actionable solutions over the course of just a few days.

In the case of DesignShop, ‘top down’ refers to constraints that are imposed upon the participants through the design decisions made by the facilitation team, which typically includes a small subset of participants called ’sponsors’. As the event begins, participants are given precise instructions and commands. They are told, in essence, where to go, what to do, who to do it with and for how long. This highly constrained structure–which should place minimal constraints on content–acts as a scaffolding for the participants to attach their ideas.

Over the course of a few modules facilitated in this ‘top down’ manner, a wide range of ideas is generated. Some ideas fall away, others continue to rise, and begin to combine and cohere to each other. Roughly speaking, this coincides with the Scan phase of an event. These newly formed ideas are then put through any number of modeling and simulation processes so as to scrutinize and evaluate them more rigorously. Through this cycle of design, participants ‘create the problem‘ they want to solve. This is the Focus phase.

By the time the problem has been created, ‘control’ of the design process resides almost completely with the participants. They will self select which components of the problem they will work on solving, the sequence in which the components will be addressed, and, most importantly, what constitutes a satisfactory solution. During this cycle, facilitation team members are often absorbed into the participant teams, providing them with the capacity to document and productize their work in real-time. This is the Act.

From my experience, it is the top down component that is missing — whether by intention or by oversight — from many self-described collaborative, creative problem solving processes, while most strategic design processes lack any real bottom-up, hive-mind decision making. By bringing the top down and bottom up together in a way that leverages the strengths of each, we create a field ripe for emergence, within a time frame even our instant culture can appreciate.
~Todd Johnston

Going through my archives earlier in the week, I uncovered “Slow + Design” a manifesto of a “slow approach to distributed economy and sustainable sensoriality” that was published in preparation for a 2006 seminar on the subject taking place in Milan.

Using the Slow Food movement as a starting point, the authors first outline the slow approach as

the simple, but in current times revolutionary, affirmation that it is not possible to produce and appreciate quality if we do not allow ourselves the time to do so, in other words, if we do not activate some kind of slowdown. However, slow does not only mean this. It also means a concrete way of actually putting this idea into practice. It means cultivating quality: linking products and their producers to their places of production and to their end-users who, by taking part in the production chain in different ways, become themselves coproducers.

Turning to “design”,

we can observe that a “new design” is emerging: a design that adopts a systemic view, that looks at the complexities of social networks, develops a capacity for listening and interrelates with the creativity and diffuse entrepreneurship that characterise contemporary society. In so doing it becomes an active part of the transformation processes underway and in those that must take place, confronted as we are with the enormous issues at stake.

These passages — and many others in the 27-page document — resonate as strongly with me today as they did when I first encountered the manifesto a year and a half ago. From my perspective as a Process Designer grounded in the practices and methods of MG Taylor, my fascination is in seeing how “slow design” can enable groups, organizations and communities to accelerate their path toward solutions.

I call this “expanding time to compress time.”

It is a response to the question, “What is the role of slow in an event designed specifically to compress weeks, months or even years worth of design and decision making into a few days?” I claim that

robust processes can, over the course of just a few hours, greatly expand the volume of thought and feeling a group holds collectively in their minds within a given moment. And over the course of a few days, it is possible to increase this volume of thought and feeling by an order of magnitude - or more. Thus, this expansion has the equivalent effect of slowing down time while, paradoxically, enabling a corresponding compression in the time it takes a group of people to discover, design and decide together — without compromise — their course of action.

In opening a significant space for imagination, conjecture, play, modeling and iterative design, the processes that The Value Web utilize enables participants to engage in a way that is comprehensive, holistic, inclusive, reflective and considered, facilitating evolutionary and emergent solutions to take form over an incredibly short period of time.
~Todd Johnston

PS> The Slow Design movement has grown considerably over the past couple of years. If you’d like to learn more, here are a few starting points:

www.slowdesign.org
www.slowlab.net
www.slowdesign.blogspot.com

The Value Web is thrilled to welcome Sita Magnuson to our membership. A few of us have known Sita for some years and we were very happy to have an opportunity to invite her to KreW Value Web events. Sita joined us for the India Economic Summit in Delhi this past December and again for the Annual Meeting in Davos just last month. Thank you, Sita, for your excellent work in every event and for the contributions you are already making to the Value Web.

The Value Web has successfully survived another World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. For the fourth year in a row we had the privilege to support the WorkSpace together with the Forum staff.

The theme of this years Annual Meeting, The Power of Collaborative Innovation, was very exciting for us. An essential piece of the Value Web’s history, way of working and objective for every event we do is to unleash the power of collaboration and ultimately see Group Genius™ emerge.

In the WorkSpace we aren’t surprised by collaboration. By setting the stage and conditions for creativity, collaboration just happens. We are delighted to watch participants have a great collaborative experience. We are also very happy to see familiar faces returning to the WorkSpace expecting an engaging collaborative experience around very current and key issues.

It is an exciting privilege to hold the energy of a creative space where some of the best minds across all industries and disciplines comes to share ideas, consider the most interesting questions, model solutions, and make important connections that could lead to world changing solutions.

Pictured above: The WorkSpace teams including members of The Value Web, Forum Staff, Publicis Live tech support and our special guest, Gail Taylor!

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