Spiral Dynamics and the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Don Beck) from Integral Life on Vimeo.

I’d like everybody to notice how Don Beck talks about design in this video.
As you might now I like to talk about Spiral Dynamics and how it can work as a perspective on design problems.

Based on this quite high level idea of design that Don Beck expresses here,
lets talk about strategic design
lets talk about complex design
lets talk about the role of the designer and the processes applied

The designer is often the person who walks away when the stuff’s ready to be made. The designer is the planner, the thinker, the investigator, but not the bricklayer.
And concerning prcess facilitation the designer can no longer be only the expert that is asked to give the answer – then walks away to think in the studio and finally comes back with the answer. And when that’s no longer the case – are we really talking about designers here – or are we talking about some other form of practice?

Some years ago a friend of mine, Finn Voldtofte, was hosting some meetings that he had decided to call CIPI – collective intelligence practitioners initiative. He wanted it to be a forum for sharing experiences with reaching that place with a group where the group is smarter than its components – where are sort synergetic high energy occurs. The participants were mostly facilitators and process consultants, but the idea of facilitation was expanded a little, which allowed a researcher such as myself to join them. First time I was there, we were sitting four people on floor in front of Finn’s fire place for a very intense and deep conversation.

I don’t remember the course of events precisely, but the CIPI meetings was the bed from which the Moving the Edge convention sprang. On that link you can read more about it, but the site itself is defunct. The CIPI meetings went on after that, but ended haltingly when Finn died in December 06.

Now the CIPI has been reinvigorated by Martin Ehrensvärd and Maja Rottbøll, and I am happily participating again. The new life that has come to the new circle also invites me to think about the experiences and impact of the first round of CIPI, and how it has influenced present and future.

As I said, CIPI was a life-navigating circle to step into. This was because of the strong theme of our work together – Collective Intelligence. Ever since this series of sessions of conversations, where we were able to reach a very strong shared ‘field’ of intelligence, I have had a vision of working more to develop this capacity in myself and others. I has become a deep part of my identity. It was a massive experience to be able to intentionally create a space where you can know more than you usually can, and see more and reach for more than you usually can.

CIPI was created in order to explore the principles and practices that would create a field of collective intelligence. These principles and practices were collected and explored through observing the social energy in the group and how this energy shifted around and which actions triggered which changes. I think we laded on a list of social and personal practices, which is what each participant in the circle should watch in himself while also atending and remembering the readiness of the social practices. In one way the work was never finished, because it cannot be fully described. But I remember a distinct feeling of going in circles back to revisit the same basic principles over and over again. A feeling of “maybe we actually have a good-enough image of what we need”. A feeling that started a impatient build-up in me. “What would we be able to do now with this insight?”

When I talk about collective intelligence I talk about a intentional practice of personally engaged encounters. Not random stuff happening on the internet. Sure a lot of activity on the web and at large social events can be seen and described as manifestations of a form of intelligence that is beyond the individual. Like wikipedia or linux etc. In my view it is confusing the concept of collective intelligence to spread it over such broad subjects, but right now I do not have a better word for the experience than that.

Basically our explorations were done as a group of people sitting down in a circle and exploring what would emerge. The concept of “magic in the middle” guided us to reach into a shared field, and from there explore any concepts and ideas that would emerge.

As a designer I can see the enormous potential for this form of collaboration in working with solutions to future potentials. We could create circles were people could collaborate from their highest possible capacity. Design is inherently about exploring the unknown or the not-yet-known. It is a curious practice. I see the ideas of collective intelligence as hinting at a new way of doing design. As design spreads into new sectors of life and business, I would love to see this kind of processes unfold in innovation team, in organizational development and ideation processes. The simple but challenging process of brain-storming is actually a kind of collective intelligence practice. Without much demand on the inner work of the participants.

Collective intelligence, in the way we worked and still work with it, can be linked to spiritual practices,  is highly applicable in organzations, innovations, ideations and any other kind of creations – processes where the end point is unknown and the participants must lean forward to reach for new insights and this is best done when building energitically onto what we all bring to the circle.

For those who read Danish you can see more on the current facebook group – some of it is in English, actually

The map and the talk centered around the notions design-thinking and design-doing – as positioned between material and context (doing / what you work with), and between logic and aestehtic (thinking / how you perceive the world and discover the New). Without going into detailed depth with the framework or map, I can just show you the finished map after each direction and quadrant is explained:

After the presenation I had an interesting conversation with the audience on, if we see kaos pilots as a type of designers, then what is then their design material. I think that the notion of material is shared throughout the different design disciplines, but I was unclear to me how the kaos pilots would define their particular approach.

There were several suggestions; maybe it is ‘time’, as the KP are process designers, then what they basically manipulate is the time and process that they facilitate others to go through. Another suggestion was that they, by their own example, facilitate people to see their new potentials. Maja argued that Margaret J. Wheatley has made an image of facilitators building bridges for people to walk into new possibilities. Following that image the KP – and other process facilitators’ design material – becomes the dreams or visions they are able to create, tell and ask people to join. Altenatively – following the same metaphor – the facilitators’ design material is themselves. The facilitator must work hard with him or herself in order to navigate tiny detail in the process facilitation.

For me this is a very interesting discussion- Not because I am overly concerned with how kaos pilots define their field of expertise, but because the design field is evolving rapidly into fourth order design (Buchanan) and one way of describing the design field of fourth order is ‘design as facilitation’. As a researcher and as a practitioner I find it immensely important that we explore where competences and expertise is to be founded for such new development. I am especially interested in the mindset of the designer – meaning how we think while designing or – in a more elaborate way; how we position our consciousness while facilitating creative change processes… – Now that’s interesting.

Concerning the issue of whether Kaos Pilots are or should be considered as designers. Michael Donemann argued no. And proposed that the profession of kaos pilots is that of Animateurs – I’m not completely certain what he means, but I made the link as good as possible, and the imagery that the word generates in my head works well. Denouncing the ever-popular and stigmatized concept of ‘designer’ and using/making up a new category might actually be a good idea for the KP’s. However…

But it makes me think whether it actually makes sense to talk about a designer in fourth order of design. Also looking at the on-going debate on design thinking as design-used-by-(non)-designers-in-strategic-business-context, it might actully be stretching the word ‘design’ too far?? If the fourth prder design’s material is himself, then are we actually talking bout a designer anymore, or are we talking about a group coach? A group coach that can draw a littel better than normal??

It was interesting to see how a designerly approach to strategic questions was both approached and promoted, and at the same time constrained and refrained. The opening talk was circling around issues like wicked problems and iterative processes. However, based on their experience with introducing such notions into a stringent business context, the creative and exploratory processes were constrained by very rigorous process formats. So, as I posted on Twitter afterwards, does this mean that the creative and fun part of design is only 20% and structure is the last 80%, when dealing with innovation in business? Yes well, it does – at least 80%, looking more like 90 or 95% in the eyes of the MSI-guys.

The process we learned at the workshop seemed pretty efficient for developing new ideas and perspectives, and getting sufficient backing for these ideas and perspectives in research. Apart from this work process and collaboration format what I take from the workshop are a bunch of insights and interesting assumptions or issues-for-follow-up:

Is it necessary to pack design and the open, exploratory work-format of designers (design thinking) into rigorous structures for businesses to feel comfortable enough to engage with design thinking in strategic processes?

Is there actually a clash between designerly ways of going about a problem or issue on one side and the need for rigor on the other side? Exploring with design freely and managing structure strictly. Open vs. closed? Divergent vs. convergent thinking?

Is there still such a mistrust of design on corporate level when it comes to anything other than look-and-feel that we have to call it something else? The MSI-team has stopped talking about “strategic design” and is now only saying “strategic inquiry”, which omits the d.word, but then says almost nothing about the mode of inquiry. Can’t we get business people to understand the power of design thinking without calling it something else?

All these are very interesting questions to me, and if you are interested I can tell you more about the workshop, discuss the questions with you or just explore the potential of design thinking in general. I’m here and I’m ON the issue… (wish that you cold follow my twitter searching on the issue – it is very interesting)

First Tina’s question, which contains a very good sum-up of the problem I try to address below:
“I notice I am kind of riding on a wave of optimism based only on four or five speeches, mass hypnosis and the general and collective need to believe that he is holding space for a change in human consciousness that has many parents. I think the possibility he has in real political action is limited to green meme. I think he is yellow in terms of personal believes, how else could he have managed to get to this point and appeal to Europeans as well. I think he holds a turquoise vision for the world, and has reached a transparency toward the whole picture. I hope so anyway. Can’t you write us all an essay summing up these matters and apply it to Wilber’s integral model?”

Will try.

I, too, believe in the change that has come with Obama, but when he is looked upon with Spiral Dynamics we see that he is a complicated figure, and not just sitting in the turquoise as one would dream of a world leader to do. If we run through a few of his political and moral stand points we see several memes present.

Barack Obama is pro-choice meaning he is in favor of women’s right to freely choose abortion. This is a standpoint that is one of the cases that is used to explain the levels in Spiral Dynamics (SD) and would place him solidly above blue. The blue meme is historically very strong in the US with the political and religious right dominating the Republican Party on value issues. According to Ken Wilber the Republican political domination we have seen in the last couple of decades – only penetrated by Clinton’s presidency – can be attributed to the pragmatic alliance between wall-street-republicans, who could then decide financial politics and leave value politics to the bible-belt-republicans, who have led the political scene on issues ranging from abortion and gun control, the use of cigars in the oval office to the war on terror.

Basically Obama being above the blue meme with its base in religious absolute values is his key to success, in my opinion. This represents a shift in political focus that IS the change he has been referring to throughout his campaign. And yet he has also nurtured these values by being openly Christian, although not too much – when he denounced his revered Jeremiah, and by supporting other issues that is important to the blue meme (family values and country) voters like the right to bear arms and a strong commitment to secure the holy land (Israel).

Actually the blue meme is very interesting in American politics. Politicians must balance on a knife’s edge when dealing with blue values. The blue vote is important because it decides the swing states on the edges of the bible belt – like North Carolina and Ohio. Hillary Clinton, I think, lost her campaign by being too strong in her support for the blue values. This then backfired on her in the primaries since green and orange voters dislikes the hardcore blue value and are threatened by them – especially on the democratic side (since there is less of a history for the previously mentioned alliance for the Democrats). Obama wisely were much softer in his support. Actually he was inclusive in his tone and vocabulary instead of stressing differences. Hillary Clinton ended up looking like she was flip-flopping between issues – depending on which state she was in.
Barack Obama included and went beyond blue meme.

We are not completely done with Blue. The main reason why Republicans have been able to make a strong alliance between the blue meme religious/family values right and the orange corporate/Wall Street is simply due to the fact that blue and orange are net to each other in the spiral development. They have similar values on some issues and very dissimilar and conflicting on others. So there have gone a very big effort into avoiding potential conflicts over, say, central issues of freedom and responsibility. In corporate settings republicans are all for freedom from most governing principles and legislative control whereas in highly tense issues like gay marriages they are intensely against the freely roaming wills of the individuals – here they are for harsh government and legislation – just as an illustrative examples.

The democrats have a much harder time combining orange with green, which must be their demographic base if they are to win over the blue foundation. The democrats have basically no chance in hell to win the religious right with their inclusive approach to post-modern living and. So again the key player-meme is the orange corporate, business, success, personal expression vMEME(as Beck and Cowan insists on calling the memes). Blue and orange have been around for so long that they can find a working order. Green’s let’s-all-be-equal thinking is the direct expression of opposition towards the dominating orange meme. Orange is very strong in the US since it entails the American Dream – the ability for any individual to make it big – not to be messed with. On a side-comment Barack Obama probably saw some of his toughest stress from Joe-the-Plumber. Joe was a guy who walked up the Obama on the street and asked him whether his financial policy would destroy his ability to run his newly acquired plumbing business. This is a personification of the personal struggle a lot of Americans have with the American Dream. Luckily Obama responded relatively well and Joe later turned out not just to be a fiery Republican, but also something of a idiot, with eg. his comment that an Obama administration would mean the end of the state of Israel.

Ok, back to the main story. So green and orange dislikes each other basically because orange stands for “I will accomplish on my own power and have success over you” and green stands for “together we can overcome the hardness of the world. We are all equal, and you better start behaving equal”.

So the alliance between green and orange is difficult to create and manage. Barack Obama has done so by being the incarnation of a rising and successful leader and entrepreneur while also advocating a greater concern for those who have less than is fair in the American system.
But actually I think Obama’s two best cards in splitting the republican alliance have been the incredibly mismanagement of so many issues by the Bush-administration AND the ongoing financial crisis that has trawled the globe in a few months now. Both of these have been signs to blue-leaning-into-green and skeptical orange voters that something else was needed. Which incidentally again became Obama’s brand promise “Change we need”.

I think that most Europeans, being solidly based in the green meme, have so high hopes for Obama because he represents a change away from a blue meme in George W. Bush that we just couldn’t understand and couldn’t take more of. We now think that Obama is green like us and will be a green president for the entire globe. This is very unlikely. The US will not have a green ruling government for the next few decades. It will have to be fundamentally orange in order to sustain support from the population. Certain policies can be green and even beyond, but not the entire range of government.
Which is totally fine as long as those few cornerstone policies that are put in place from a higher perspective are carried through, and not just pulled back as we saw often with Bill Clinton’s administration.
Barack Obama himself is probably at a yellow or turquoise level himself in certain ways, I hope.

…

OK
A few weeks have passed since I started this piece. Obama has made his inaugural speech and his first few actions as president. And stand back – the man is most certainly turquoise. As it is always the case, turquoise contains and integrates the former layers/memes and this is what I have tried to unravel in this post.
Obama being at turquoise however does not mean that everything he is going to do will seem enlightened or will be something we all agree with. Most of the problems facing him are not easily solved at any of the given levels of thinking. But a turquoise president is far better in any crisis than an aggressive blue. History will not be kind to The second Former Bush. The former administration is an example of how old way of thinking will not just delay progress and growth but will actually do harm to the world.

I think I might be at a decision point in my research career. As I have re-started doing interaction design research after a short trip into full-time design consulting, I am now faced with the important decision of what to focus my research towards. So in order to draw on our collective intelligence I am putting this question up for a popular vote right here on the site. (I don’t know how to do a radio-button vote, so please give your thoughts in the comments at the end of the post, thx)

I have several issues I am interested in. Some are overlapping and some are so far out of main-stream research that pursuing them would mean an actual risk of being burned at the collegial stake. But here’s he list as it appear right now from the top of my head. Add issues you feel are more important.

1. Social interaction with an evolutionary perspective: This means continuing my focus from the PhD dissertation. Adding the evolutionary perspective would be the new, provocative thing where I would direct my design experiments to focus on interaction platforms and experiences that would evolve the user (Uh, can I even say that?) and explore the idea of social fields, somehow.
2. Design thinking: also something I picked up and elaborated on in the dissertation. My work there has been fairly well received and it could be interesting to move further down that line. Design thinking is right now described as introducing a notion of aesthetic inquiry into scientific studies as well as other innovation processes, I guess. It is both a discussion within a philosophy-of-science context as well as a meta-reflection on the process of design. A bit heavy theoretical focus, but it might work as a focus I could work with on the side of another experimental research, like the one mentioned above.
3. The third option is to refocus completely away from my previous research-through-design work, which means building stuff, see what happens and use that as outset for making theory (science, maybe even).
   I have thought about starting to work more with the process of design and doing research into making new ways creating ideas, of collaborating, of exploring etc. This is then what I call research-in-design as opposed to research-through-design (the researcher designs stuff himself) or research-on-design (the researcher looks at the product of design in, say, historical or ergonomic analysis).
   I would explore innovation and design processes in ways inspired by the work of C. Otto Scharmer of MIT. I’d like to add to that field, but have no vision right now of how that could happen.
4. Except that I could do a project and call it “the creative potential of immersion and contemplation”.
   I have for some years now been very interested in and dedicated to a meditative practice and can see how this has value. In a project like this it might be interesting to explore what Ken Wilber calls the relationship between first-person and third-person perspectives, and then focus in on the design – the process of creating the new.
   One major drawback of a project such as this is that it is starting to move closer to the fire, so to speak. The work of Wilber, although solid as far as I can tell, is not really recognized as valid foundational philosophy for research. Which incidentally also makes it intriguingly dangerous to pursue.
   By the way, focusing more on process than product would also mean that I had a strong competence even after all this computer/technology hype has blown over :-)
5. As we move closer to the hot first-row seats at the stake, I also have a big interest in how the body relates to all these technologies. Actually the interest is in how the body relates. Period. I’d love to call a project “Wisdom of the Shaman” and explore how the ancient, spiritual ways of knowing and relating could be explored in relation to the technologies we create and how we make it interface to us. Yes, gentlemen – light up your torches.
   But actually at Interactive Spaces we have been working with kinesthetic interaction for some time now, and developed interfaces for learning that uses the potential of the body and movement. So there might be a relevant new corridor of exploration. But the S-word (spiritual) would probably create an insane level of resistance in the research field.

I am all out of ideas from the top of my head for now. New ones might pop up, and then I should probably add more to here.

AND I would love to hear your comments and collect your votes for what the next big thing is going to be.

To create is to potentially embarrass oneself in front of others. It is about the courage to be oneself and to be seen as oneself. Putting ink to a page, or pressing one’s fingers against clay, or typing a line of computer code, or blowing glass and realizing mistake. Or success. With everyone watching. But most importantly, you.

So it dawned upon me how important it is to be creative. Because it means you have within you infinite capacity to experiment. You are unafraid to go somewhere new because you are creating a new thought process about your own creativity. You know that if you stop and no longer challenge yourself, you cease to be creative. You become still, silent, and the bow no longer connect with the strings and music is not made. And you do not exist. You show you do not have the courage to exist.

Creativity is courage. The world needs more fearless people that can influence all disciplines to challenge their very existence. Creativity is reflection aimed not at yourself, but at the world around you.

So, get to work people. Change the world.

I have just (again) spent an evening on YouTube watching whatever I could find on Ken Wilber and “integral politics” – try it, very interesting. Previously I have read his books “A Brief Theory of Everything” and “A brief History of Everything”. You can borrow my copies if you want.

To those who have not yet bumped into Ken Wilber yet, I can tell you that he is one of the most popular philosophers in US today. His books have been translated in a multitude of languages and he has written a fair number of books already.

Integral thinking and integral theory is a way to describe how there are differences between people and what these differences are. To see these spectrums unfolded is very interesting, and Ken Wilber is then also excelent at explaining how the theories can be applied to understanding politics, sex, science, spiritualty etc. If you want to get yourself a blast and connect it with your interest in the upcoming American election, then I can reccomend:

• Integral “Third-Way” Politics
• Ken Wilber – Integral Politics
• Clinton at Davos

The question for me then becomes: since I am so in-tune with Wilbers’s thoughts, and since I have this big interest in design and innovation, then what is the overlap between the two? Is there a way to think about design in terms of integral thinking? Has it been done already, and I am just unaware of it?

I can see integral thinkings application primarily in terms of the processes of design: When involving users and stake holders from different levels and gravitational points of development. This would mean to integrate integral thinking into areas such as participatory design, innovation facilitation, service design facilitation, process design and other consultant-esque design fields.

But it might actually also work in the “internal” design process – that part of the design process where the designers are creating something for the market. Would it hold any value to think about how a product or a service should be designed according to the level of development of the audience that you are designing for? Maybe it can be conected to the work on Design for Making Meaning…

I have no clue whether I am on to something here. The only hint is that I resonate with these theories, and there must be a reason for this.

When a little guy like that arrives and your couple becomes a family, a lot of things happen. First of all you start going to bed earlier because you start getting up really early and wake up in the nights too. So you have less time in during the day to sit down by yourself, simply because of all the practical things that need to get done. Furthermore you need to put more time into your relationship, since they two of you must deal with a large number of new things: new roles, new relations with other family members, new demands for separating work and family time and so on and so on – the list is long. At one point I even argued to a friend of mine that when you become a parent it is an illusion that you are the same – you simply become a different person. I have changed in so many ways that, at that time, it seemed I had changed completely. Not totally true but the change is considerable.

The point is that all these changes, natural as they are, seemed to be in opposition to the time I could take to meditate.

So I stopped.

Maybe I sat down once or twice a month, which is like nothing. One core demand in meditation is that you make it a daily practice – something you do as a part of your daily routine. There are many different ways of explaining why this is important according to which tradition you have as background for your meditation, but the bottom line is that it just is important. Do it daily if you mean it. Make it part of your life-practice.

Since I stopped I have experienced an increased sense of stress. I became increasingly more difficult to distance myself from daily, weekly surges of tasks and thoughts, considerations and choices. I guess most people know how it feels when there are too many items like that in your perspective. However, I had just recently felt how it feels when you are not in that space.

This stress silently creeps up on you exactly like that frog in the pot on the stove. You don’t really notice it, but suddenly it is too much. Of course you feel various sudden increases in stress, but at one point I simply discovered that my overall capacity to deal with/ignore stuff is too low. Either my limit has gone down or I have gotten myself into to many things. Actually in my case – as it would be to most other people in this situation, I guess – it was both. My new job is more demanding than anything I have tried before. Even though I am on 75% paternity leave I carry the stress around for days. More and more details become obstacles in your hands, not simply because you limit you perspective, but also because you do thing too fast and loose touch with them.

This picture is from today when I had to hurry and get my headset for my phone out to make a call. I was really trying to do it fast, while doing a few other things – and the picture shows the result.

Overall I have recently been working to refind my alignment to the world. I guess that this is what meditation can do for you. Alignment. I don’t know if I am especially prone to stress or I just work in a stressed environment, because I basically like it, but I know that the meditation was one of the ways I have previously made a foundation underneath all the thoughts and choices.

Tomorrow I am getting up at 05.45 to meditate before the little Lauge wakes up. He is reaching an age where he is getting into a routine himself, so everything considered – now seems like a good point in time to get back to the routine.

First I was contacted by Therese Hansen, a student from the computer science department at University of Aarhus, who was doing something with social software for her master thesis work. Here is her post about it – in Danish. She is using my frame work describing different levels of social interaction to be designed for, and interestingly enough she has given it a name: DSDC from them beginning letter of each of the four levels: Distributed attention, Shared focus, Dialogue and Collective action. And here I had just called the framework “levels of social interaction” plainly without thinking about the branding effect of giving a framework a real name. so DSDC it is – and hooray for user participation. Therese and I met to talk about the framework and round a few design ideas. She is now experimenting with an integration of wordpress and twitter, as can also be seen in her blog, and she might be aiming this mashup to profesional conferences.

I guess I should make a page explaining the key features of the DSDC framework…

A few weeks later George Por told me he is working with a colleague on a working paper about collective learning and the collective learner, in which he is using one of the other key concepts in the dissertation: the collective user. The collective user is a way to describe a shift in focus in the design process. Normally a social design concept, service etc. would be aimed at a single user participating in some kind of social process (at certain levels – DSDC :-) ) The concept of a collective user twists the idea of the user away from the individual towards a focus on the social gathering as a whole. As an example you could design a service for the whole family – its dreams, goals and needs – instead of designing the service for the individual family members. This shifts a different set of design objectives into the foreground. Basically introducing collectivity and interaction beyond individuality is going to be one the next interesting things of this social web (2.0) that is emerging right now.