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  Tiffany von Emmel 2:38 am on July 13, 2008 Permalink
  Tags: open culture, use of self, video (9)   

  To breathe life open 

  Breathing in, I am mountain. Breathing out, I am solid. Thich Nhat Hahn

  Openess is fundamental to Life. Human, biological, ecological, organizational process depend on feedback to learn, and enable resilience and adoptation.
  
  This may seem obvious, if you are immersed in an Open Source or Open Space community or Organizational Improvisation. However, Openness is so radical within an organizational context, that a culture of openess needs to be continually fed and nurtured by everyone. People do tweaky things when stressed or anxious.  Muscles go into lockdown and breath shortens. Doors are shut. Groups closed. Communication slows. After awhile, patterns of fragmentation and discontinuity emerge in a system. When recognizing this, as a facilitator, it is time to  open the window, increase honest exchanges in the system to strengthen connection where silos had mushroomed, and amp up curiosity and playfulness.

   With sustainable development projects and organizations who support
  sustainability, like Dreamfish, the same is even more true. Openness is required in a big way to create a support system for change agents working for sustainability.
  Resilience and adaption need to built into processes to deal with
  environmental challenges. For an organization to support  patterns of
  resilience, the ecosystem of the organization needs to breathe life
  with an open culture.

  So, this is a reminder, to myself, to take a break, relax, increasing blood flow to the blood vessels, soften the breath to increase oxygen, thus to open up.  Because, as we each practice openess, we take a stand for Openess. The practice of openness nurtures Openess.

  On Openness and Sustainability:
  - Jamais C.’s http://openthefuture.com/2007/02/the_resilient_world.html
   
  
  http://oae.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/482

  Lenore Newman, Uncertainty, innovation, and dynamic sustainable development, http://ejournal.nbii.org/archives/vol1iss2/0501-001.newman.html

   

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  Tiffany von Emmel 8:23 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
  Tags: agile development, web (4)   

  Product development as improvisation 

  Yesterday, Sunday morning,  a member in the Dreamfish
  community, called me at home to tell me he was in town.  Michael is a
  community builder in Seattle, who works at a local level to facilitate
  groups and neighborhoods to move towards sustainability. Michael was in town for the 20th Annual contact improvisation festival. We had never met in person, but we have exchanged on Dreamfish.

  And in
  the familiar communication pattern that fellow improvisers take on with each other,
  Michael and I didn’t dive into our calendars to schedule a meeting.
  Rather, we established an intentionality to meet soon,
  exchanged our mobile phone numbers as an agreement to be in exchange,
  and communicated about what we were doing where and when…and so, we
  will meet in whatever form our interaction will emerge.

  What serendipity that he called, I thought. I
  was in the midst of planning a session for Dreamfish team to practice
  movement improvisation as a way to support organizing principles for
  sustainability in our organization and web development.  A
  thoughtful emergent design process in collaboration with clients is one
  of Dreamfish’s improvisational practices.  And here, Michael Dobbie, our community member aka
  customer and improviser, comes along just at this moment. I think I will ask him if he wants to participate in our jam ession, called product development…..or maybe while at the  Contact Improvisation festival.

  In this encounter, I am reminded of how many amazing change agents there are in this sustainability network, whom I would like to reconnect and collaborate with as we continue to produce the New Thing of Dreamfish around the corner. I have had less frequent communication with you for awhile as I was building. And, I would like to adjust course and be in closer communication, to support product development as an Agile community jam as we move forward.

  Improvisation is the art of
  facilitation of a system. With a high
  comfort with ambiguity, we produce our collective creativity through
  establishing the container of shared intentionality, balancing the
  frequency of exchanges, and sharing the differences that influence our
  choices. These three things–Container, Exchanges, and Differences
  —are elements, which two of my colleagues,  Ed Olsen and Glenda Eoyang , describe as the organizing principles of  a complex adaptive system. Facilitators of a system practice an art of
  listening in the present moment and responding by tweaking these elements to enable a healthier system. 

  We have some artful change agents in the thousand people within the community of Dreamfish. Let’s jam!