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!