Category: Systems Thinking

(un-sketchnotes) HHDL, Climate, Youth

I recently had the honor of attending a program featuring His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) at MIT’s Center for Ethics and Transformative Values. The conversations focused on Change-Makers for a Better World, including 2 panels: Global Systems 3.0: Equitable Solutions for a Changing World with: Deborah Ancona (DA), John Sterman (JS), Rebecca Henderson (RH), Marshall Ganz (MG), and SPARK: Youth… with the stunning Noa Machover, Vivienne Harr, and Jacarrea Garraway.

There was a (slim) chance i would scribe the session. Thank the HEAVENS it did not come to pass (due to safety, set up, and someone else’s great wisdom.) Once the session started, it became clear the stakes and acoustics would have seriously thrown me for a loop.

Here are notes, though – a scrawled, unglamorous record – in the scratch, some nuggets, highlighted in gold. Main take away? Youth has got it going on!

HHDL: “The past cannot change. The future can change, and change now…. Your generation must create a better world, a more compassionate world… The last century was a century of violence. This century should be the century of peace.”

IDEAS

A group of ~35 spirited Indonesian travellers came to MIT’s Sloan School of Management, to explore what is required for deep systems change through a variety of frameworks and hands-on learning, including Presencing and Theory U. The group is the 5th cohort of IDEAS Indonesia (Innovative Dynamic Education and Action for Sustainability) a year long program designed “to engage leaders across sectors to jointly step forward and take on Indonesia’s complex challenges of conservation, education and business/social enterprise by going through a profound learning process.”

I have scribed for the program at various points over the years, and each time am brought to tears by the sincerity of heart in the room, the opening of minds, and the will to take new tangible action steps back home. I witness a blooming of individuals and of the collective, and am never left unmoved or unchanged by the experience.

Here are some images from the session. If shared, please make sure to include the speaker’s name in any crediting. Thanks!

What I / We Do

Here is an attempt to share what i/we do, via PechaKucha Boston vol. 28 – May 22 – Oberon, Cambridge. (Relevant to note: while this was my very first time presenting in a public context, we have a pro in the family – my brother, Matthew Bird, speaks here on the  PK format.) Lesson learned: no paper notes requiring page flipping! Or at least account for the time of the flip… And “Um…. ” Well… You can see for yourself…

What do I do?

I finally have it down to a sentence, which passes my mother test (the Jewish mother test, wanting to “get it” fast and directly…) “What I do is draw while people talk.” Okay, sometimes there might be a following question, which is “Uh… sooooo…..?” At which point I realize a bit more explanation is needed.

Graphic Facilitation

“What I do is model ideas, like making maps of a terrain, and in this case the terrain is a presentation, a meeting, a dialogue….” “Oh – so you help make pictures of what people say?” “Yes, exactly.” If I’m lucky, it stops here. Or, the next question:  “So for this, you get paid?!”

dpict

To which I say, “YES. Not bad, right?” So is it a job? “Well sort of…” I founded a small company with 2 partners, within a global network of contractors, with whom we share work. We’re entirely virtual, working where and when needed, sometimes together, often on our own…. And the conversation continues.

Looks Like

Here are some examples of what it looks like…. From this point, it becomes a bit more nuanced to explain what it is I do. But for creative people who are seeking alternative paths of work, vocation, and contribution, it might be an interesting story to hear.

Crooked Path

It’s been a crooked path. I always loved drawing, from an early age, as a way to calm my mind and emotions. I studied painting and art history, and thought for sure I’d end up in a remote studio on a hillside. But what followed the time at school varied. Each step that seemed off the path actually enlarged the path, and drawing was a steady companion.

Reconciliation

People often ask how I got started. I won’t go into details, but I will say this: the now applied skill developed as early coping strategy for finding common threads between disparate parts, while at the same time honoring and appreciating difference. What I usually say is that I ended up at the right place at the right time, meeting a need in society.

Sense Making

We’ve all heard, and experience directly, the increasing complexity of our times, as well as an increased need for sense making. What I do is help make sense. We all perceive differently, and to create an image or a map, through which we take individual and collective journeys, is something that does take on utility.

Role of Structure: Synthesis

Depending on the needs of the crowd, I will use more synthetic approach, where I listen to lots of content and organize it into clusters, carefully framing and making connections, aiming to reduce the complexity and offer cohesion.

Role of Structure: Amplification

Other times, I use a more deconstructive approach, intentionally taking one concept and breaking it into parts, so that what seems like a knot is more easy to parse out. This would have the direct opposite effect of Synthesis, as the approach aims to surface and amplify complexity – expanding a conversation and prompting new thinking.

Types of Support

In terms of scale of support, sometimes we draw for groups of 10, other times up to 2,000. Sometimes for 3 hours. Other times for 6 hours a day, 8 days in a row (killer). Sometime we support a team for 1 event only. Other times we work up to 10 years with one client. Sometimes we wipe the dry erase boards down and leave no trace. Other times we thoroughly document and make products to further share the insights.

Feedback Loops

I find the feedback loops of this practice fascinating. There’s an audience – or a receiving body – that experiences the art form, which creates a loop of feedback even while drawing. I almost always feel the energy of a room at my back. It’s a kind of performance art, in an organizational or social context, with the content of many voices trying to understand where they are at in this point in time on our planet.

Joining a System

Many more times than not, I travel and work alone, maybe know the agenda, mostly have supplies in order at the venue. We join systems for small pieces of time, and if we’re lucky we work with the culture over time. But the longer-term impact of the “touch” of our drawings is still to be understood.

Role of Time

I am always delighted when someone who once seemed entirely disengaged in a session finds me after 10+ years and says “that one drawing that you did for us, the one of the person holding the earth… that really stuck with me …” In this business the RoV (Return on Value) is almost impossible to anticipate.

Iceberg

The iceberg model, used in system dynamics, helps explain this work further. We’re used to seeing events, actions, and behaviors – like the exposed tip of the iceberg. But the terrain we aim to touch with our graphics is at the level of structure – that less seen, in the domain of patterns and mental models.

Practice Model

To give a quick window into the practice itself, this is a model I made to decipher my process. Like the iceberg, what we see is the domain of drawing. And underneath, invisible, you’ll find the practices of: listening deeply, discerning what to represent, perceiving related content and dynamics, and being, at core. 

Creative Tension

All this, while closely sensing the creative tension in the room. A wide gap between a group’s vision and current reality indicates a high level of tension. Noticing this, I would draw to offer some ease. Less tension, more alignment, might call for drawing out the voices of the dreamers and naysayers – to increase creativity in the conversation.

Adoption

I’ve been making a parallel recently with this work to photography, or other mediums in their infancy, when early adopters embraced a new tool and stretched it’s use and application. I believe that scribing is an art form of the 21st-century, increasingly included as a vehicle for insight to see, act, reflect, and learn about our times.

Presencing

This image speaks to something at the very core of what we do. “Presencing” – a concept of Otto Scharmer – asks us to suspend judgment, quiet cynicism, and move through fear, so that one can approach the work with an open mind, heart, and will – insuring space to receive what wants to come through into the room

Next?

I’m grateful for this opportunity to try to convey what we do, hoping to reinforce a belief in today’s creative population that our paths are ours to define. Schools are starting to transform from classroom structures to environments for makers and inventors. But we’re not quite there yet.

Field

We need people to take this out into the streets to merge it with other art forms, to take it beyond corporate environments, to take it into parts of society where money doesn’t define where creativity can flourish, to grow this practice so that visual communication becomes as commonplace as writing a sentence or talking with a friend.

Thank you.

Eight Days, Eight Lessons

Intent: Share, so those in our small profession can grow our collective range…

These reflections came morning 7 of 8, which could have been the timing of a scriber’s high (not sure of the feeling, because i don’t run… but a kind of bleary flow certainly kicked in. See #3.) The context was graphic facilitation for an MIT Sloan Executive Education program, ~50 people each day, who will apply their new skills to actionable, organizational projects, with potential global impact.

Lessons learned from a scribing marathon:

1. Consider the nest. The walls are the branches. Your drawings on them, the twigs and string that weave…  Plan ahead with real estate, know how much space is needed per session, tally your entire horizontal band of wall/board space, divide, and start crafting the container. Our content covered almost 180 linear feet, ~22/day, ~720sf in all, on bio-foam board and dry erase walls, starting in one room for 3 days and moving to another room for the remaining 5.

2. Hold the long view. Hold it no matter what, even if you have multiple small long views within the larger one, i.e.: “I’ll make it to lunch and there is only a 5′ board in my way.” – or – “If one decision-making person in this company changes the way they think of / engage with the earth because of something they see on the wall……”

3. Trust that flow will find you. It took a few days, and came when i least expected it – but there it was, in the form of an olive oval. In the midst of financial balance sheet lingo, the struggle to keep up became too much and “let go…” took over. Then it happened, my hand was led from some other magical kingdom of coloring. To anyone else’s eye, an oval is an oval – but this one was different.

4. Develop coping strategies. Identify what might help you along the way and adapt as needed – basically do whatever it takes to keep you going. I started with exercise and quick meditation in AM. Then switched to a ton of sleep. Then switched to ice cream (yes, this went against Lesson 6, but was a PM thing to get me to the next day…) Then was into water. Then First Aid Kit’s “To a Poet” over and over and over. Then Candy Crush. (I am aware how this may seem…. but know also I’m not alone here…)

5. Dress to move. This is too obvious… but still after 18 years in the profession was a lesson. One day I wore a skirt to be more “professional”. Fine. But then every time I bent down to draw low on a board or grab a marker off the floor I was self-conscious, and that limited the quality of my listening and attention to the content. Enough said.

6. Avoid sweets (and increase minerals). I forgot this previously-learned lesson, and by 3pm each day was sorry. Sweets quite simply, in fact, create sugar highs and lows and put us on a crash course with the beast named Tired. Minerals help us fend off and process toxins. On certain days I aimed for super-steady, letting go of coffee and wheat and eating voluminous fruits and veggies. But come on… it’s hard. Actually if you can manage to cut out sugars – your energy will be much more consistent. And less caffeine does = less shaky hands. This lesson is a big boohoo, esp when every dessert stares you right in your reward-hungry face.

7. Go out on a limb. Draw within and outside your comfort zone. After x numbers of circles, i had to draw a map. Yikes. Looked it up online, and made it work. Also drew a bunch of animals, which i usually avoid like the plague: elephant, bear, ox, cow… oy. And a few faces: Charlie Chaplin and a red bearded baron. All these things made me squirm. Also, systems thinking was a big part of the content… even as a novice, and in front of the experts, some loops came out. If you are really off base, people will correct you. This increases learning.

8. Make yourself laugh. Who cares if it’s only you?! That doesn’t matter. Draw things that make you smile, and when no one can see, snap a picture and send it to a colleague who WILL get it. There are other things to consider in this lesson that might not be appropriate for a broad audience, but insert what you want, for example: Go in a dark hallway and whistle off key at full capacity… Whatever keeps your heart open, your mind engaged, and your hand drawing.

No doubt these lessons will expand – and i welcome input to keep us all forward-creating.

Thank you’s to those who helped w/o knowing they were helping: Sita for the endless Bird-plane ripples, Alicia and Neuland for enabling dry-erase fatty markers, Stuart for germology, Kripalu for nutritional counseling, Otto for the introduction to the MIT exec group and longest view, and Kandinsky for the always relevant Point and Line to Plane, and MB and JJP for the nest outside the nest.

Too Big to Fail Mapped

In a gesture of positive sibling reinforcement, my brother reminded me last night that i DO get out in the world now and then even though my deck, container plants, and an engrossing book by Ilan Mochari have recently taken their grip.

Created this map real-time  in 2011, during a session with the World Economic Forum that sought to help groups identify intervention points in global systems like health, climate, food security, pandemics, etc. The graphic supported a presentation on systems, using the US housing (and consequent) crisis as an example.

As a result of this work, i sold my house and downsized by .5  into a condo, getting my own “American dream” accurate to the life i was living and reducing my stuff, a mortgage and expenses almost in half. It was hugely impactful to understand the overall dynamic in more depth – which i might never have done if not needing to densely prepare for the session in order to get the visual out in about 20 minutes. I barely understood the crisis then, a bit better now – and STILL find enormous power in visualizing systemic dynamics, with the obvious actions and the paired behavioral reinforcing and balancing loops.

The dry-erase surface from Moving Walls. The amazing team that supported this unpacking from The Value Web.