Getting stuff done - collectively

Euan's story about stuff - which arose when we were chatting at the British Museum recently is now a post called Stuff

The guts of Euan's post is here, 

We were each asked to bring to the event 5 things which we felt had
meaning for us or said something about us. After an initial welcome
presentation we were asked to sit in groups of around six people, to
tell the story of the things that we had brought, and say why we had
brought them. As a result we found out about each other through stories
and metaphors rather than through our job titles or names. We also
shared a vulnerability as the things that we had brought had deep
personal meaning for us. We were each worried that the other people in
the group would laugh at us or not like the things we had brought -
they might even drop them. This was a very levelling activity which
brought the groups very quickly to a high degree of understanding and
trust.

Next the combined group (about 30 of us) were asked to lay all of
our things out on the floor at one end of the hall, then step back and
stand at the other end. The image of all of those people's personal
things laid out on that church hall floor in north London has stayed
with me ever since - it so reminded me of photographs of the personal
belongings left behind by people killed in the holocaust - poignantly
tatty looking but full of meaning.

We were then instructed to step forward one by one and move an artefact next to something else we felt it was associated with.

One by one, almost reverentially given the fact that we were
touching and moving other people's very personal belongings, we began
to move things next to things we felt they were associated with.
Patterns began to form and reform (we were allowed to move things more
than once) as we silently stepped forward one after the other. Around
20 minutes passed until it became clear that we were telling four
predominant stories with our patterns, one around families, one around
work, one around entertainment and the last around nature.

What was fascinating was that although we didn't articulate why we
were moving things at any time, nor were we instructed in any way other
than our original simple instructions, yet we were able to carry out a
complex process in a very short space of time with no fuss at all.

Euan's lessons from this experience is

We can tolerate a lot of apparent messiness and our ability and desire to make patterns allows us to get real value from it.

Dave Snowden was right when he said if you have a complex environment you need to have simple rules. Complex rules just result in a mess.

One mans rubbish is another man's gold dust.

This reminds me of the work we did with TV2 in Finland, where SMLXL was tasked to relaunch the station as a brand and through all its on air communications and marketing. I observed that we could do this job but, it was the people in the station that were the key to success.

My question was - would they embrace with the same passion that we went to work on this project when we left? I am no change management expert - but Euan's story resonates with me because we treated people with respect, we listened and we just got stuff done by recognising that people wanted to be involved - so we invited them in – it enabled them to feel respected within the group, people were motivated and cognitive, it became a shared experience which then became a powerful bonding agent. It was a true project of collaboration and co-creation. And we engaged in the organisation from top to bottom, we ate with them and spent far less time with the management. I would have a sneaky conversation with Päivi the channel head - but that was it.

I still feel immensely proud of that project.

We can work together on complex activities with minimal directions.

Writes Euan, and I concur with that from my own shared experience. At the heart of all this talk about mass-collaboration, or co-creation, is the fact that we are happier when we act together in collective action. This so much of what and who we are.

We cannot deny the rise of the individual, but neither can we deny that collective action is so much a part of what defines us as a race. Euan's story is also interesting, as when people do collaborate together - it makes them on the one hand initially feel exposed - and finally euphoric as the shared experience of bonding brings a greater sense of belonging, and togetherness.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes

The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us as deeply as the capacity for erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression.Yet there appears to be no constituency today for collective joy itself. In fact the very term Collective Joy is largely unfamiliar and exotic.

Ehrenreich points us towards the Berlin Love Parade or the Burning Man Festival - as events generated and created by shared experience.

Extrapolating Euan's story further as we push towards deeper theories and ideas around collaboration and society - Ehrenreich writes

In fact the very notion of the "collective," of the common good, has been eroded by the self-serving agendas of the powerful–their greed and hunger for still more power. Throughout the world (capitalist and postcommunist), decades of conservative social policy have undermined any sense of mutual responsibility and placed the burden of risk squarely on the individual or the family.

I have argued that in fact the splitting of communities and the rise of the family unit becomes a wonderful piece of social engineering. But perhaps that should be the grist of a another post. 

However, lastly I make the observation that we are a "We" species and we have an innate need to connect, communicate and collaborate socially. The evolution of a "We Media" - for a "We species" (Social Media) is in fact no surprise to me at all - we have collectively directed technology towardsthat specific goal.

We as human beings know how to get stuff done - its just that there is a great deal that gets in the way of getting stuff done in the post modern age.