Full Circle Associates

I love reading Gillian Martin Mehers’s blog, You Learn Something New Every Day. Now there is my kind of person! Recently she posted about a facilitation challenge that I related to: going to a gathering venue and not being allowed to post things on the way. As I’m fully into flip charts and graphic recording/facilitation, I always ask in advance if I can put stuff on the wall, and if not, I arrange for pin boards or some alternative. However, Gillian and her team came up with a new one - human flip charts. Tight Parameters = Opportunities for Innovation.

There are two things I appreciate about Gillian’s improvisational response to a challenge. One, it is creative. Two, in engages and involves everyone in the room in the solution. The “problem” isn’t just the facilitators’. It is the challenge and operating conditions of the group.

Where we are able to give over both control AND responsibility, I find we get greater engagement.

Edit: a few hours later, I find this picture of CIFOR’s annual meeting Open Space Marketplace — one of the more innovative ones that I’ve seen!

Today on Twitter there was a lovely conversation about improvisation. Alas, my twitter timeline doesn’t go back far enough to capture it, but it was something that I think Jeremiah Owyang wrote about the importance of improvisation and achitwood and I chimed in about improvisation being a key skill these days. We noted that often it is seen as something risky and all about disruption, but it is in fact an amazing practice to bolster collaboration and innovation.

achitwood Improv - you gotta know your instrument (whether music, theatre, collab) to make music with others!

jowyang Nate wrote a great blog post on Jazz Improve because of this thread: http://tinyurl.com/23wtxj

As the conversation progressed, Jeremiah brought in the thread of jazz as one branch of improvisation and people started chiming in that they played an instrument or were in a band. That triggered some collective wondering if people who are interested in improvisation might be better suited to or interested in social media. That’s when Jeremiah came up with the idea of a wikis. So I set up a wiki! social media musicians. Come join in the play! In the meantime, here are a few snippets from the Twitter conversation.

jowyang Since there are SO many musicians here, I propose over the next 30 days we record ourselves playing and put it on a public wiki….. jowyang The wiki wouldn’t HOUSE the videos, but just point to them wherever they live (blip, youtube, metacafe, facebook, whatever)

veroniquec wishing I had a musical bone in my body to contribute to @jowyang ’s music wiki — sounds like fun!

Karoli @jowyang: that was a great post. My kid is a jazz studies major in college…improv is as much a gift as a learned skill. I’m in awe

ourfounder @jowyang - A public Music Wiki sounds fun actually. I wouldn’t mind contributing.

jowyang @all jazz social media folks, see this video of Bobby McFerrin involving crowd http://tinyurl.com/yq8369