Letzte Woche war bundesweite Coworking Week mit über 100 Veranstaltungen in ganz Deutschland - in München war besonders im Combinat 56 einiges geboten. Zumindest die Auftaktveranstaltung (Open Elevator mit anschliessender Vernissage) und den krönenden Abschluss (mit einem Vortrag von Nahne Steinauer vom Kursbüro zu Online-Geschäftsmodellen) habe ich mir nicht entgehen lassen - und dabei interessante Leute kennengelernt, andere Coworker wiedergetroffen und neue Impulse bekommen. Coworking in schönster Form.
Das passt zu meinem aktuellen Thema, bei dem es um vernetztes Arbeiten geht: Die Formen und Vorteile von Netzwerkbildung, speziell für Klein- und Kleinstunternehmen, aber auch die Schwierigkeiten und Grenzen. Nachdem ich mich durch jede Menge wissenschaftlicher Artikel und Fallstudien gelesen hatte, fiel mir auf, dass noch vor 5 - 10 Jahren sehr viel Hoffnung in das Internet und die damit verbundenen neuen technischen Kooperations- und Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten gesetzt wurde, die vernetztes Arbeiten ermöglichen sollten.
Tun sie ja auch. Trotzdem ist inzwischen eine gewisse Ernüchterung (oder Gewöhnung an Web2.0) eingetreten. Tolle technische Lösungen sind eine schöne Sache, der Erfolg eines "Collaborative Network" hängt aber an anderen Faktoren - und viele davon haben wieder mit Vertrauen zu tun: Angst vor Kontrollverlust, Angst vor Know-How-Verlust, Unsicherheit über Kompetenzen, Gewinnverteilungs- und Haftungsfragen,... all diese Dinge brauchen eine Kultur des Vertrauens (einschliesslich Selbstvertrauen) um ansprechbar zu werden. Persönliche Treffen sind dabei noch immer die besten "Tools" um Vertrauen aufzubauen. Was ich in der Wissenschaftsliteratur noch nicht gelesen habe: Coworking Spaces als besonders geeignete Orte, um sich zwanglos kennenzulernen und Vertrauen zu fassen. Kommt noch, ganz sicher!
„Sustainable Growth“ is one of those post-crash mantras. You can hear it wherever people discuss ways to move out of the crisis. I heard about “sustainable growth” just last week at an event in Munich were key note speakers from Nokia Siemens Networks, SAP, Nokia and other companies discussed the trends that would move the ICT industry out of the economic crisis. Oh, sustainable growth.
What do we actually mean when we put sustainability next to growth? In the contexts that I heard or read about “sustainable growth” it often meant nothing but “any growth”. These were the desperate contexts. In other contexts “sustainable growth” translated as “stable growth”, i.e. a kind of growth that is safe, reliable and comes without disturbing bumps. There is nothing wrong with that, yet I think the aspect of keeping growth in balance with the larger ecosystem is not fully expressed through stability.
Sustainability and growth are not easy bedfellows. If there is one thing that can be learned from the financial crisis then it is that too much growth is not sustainable. Therefore, the talk of "sustainable growth" is not credible without addressing this intricacy.
It seems important to get the priorities right. Would we limit growth for the sake of sustainability? And where is the tipping point? A question that is hard to answer.
Yvon Chouinard, the founder of outdoor-apparel maker Patagonia has a pretty radical aproach: "I'm kind of like a samurai," he told FastCompany in an interview. "They say if you want to be a samurai, you can't be afraid of dying, and as soon as you flinch, you get your head cut off. I'm not afraid of losing this business." With that he wanted to emphasize that, in case of doubt, his vision for Patagonia ("to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.")will not be compromised, even if it would mean to make a loss.
In fact, Chouinard experienced that the more he did for the environment (like annually donating one percent of sales to environmental groups), the better it was for his company's financials. He encourages other companies to follow the same path: "I'm saying to other companies that every time we did the right thing for the planet, we made money on it. I'm telling them that not only do we have to change, but also that it will be a good thing economically." ( see interview)
That made me think. Is the economy ready for a samurai approach towards growth and defend sustainable values, even if that might (but does not have to) mean to lose shareholders, profits or clients?
The search for the next "killer app" is going on for decades already. So, obviously, not much brain was needed to write about "killer communities". (As spotted in a presentation on the slideshare front page.)
"Killer apps" evoke images of "bloody competition". Seems to me that it's time to use metaphors that are in line with the spirit of collaboration and co-creation- Especially when talking about communities.
It has been said that we need to change the stories that we tell ourselves in order to be able to transform who we are. The story of Pandora's box may be one such story. As Wikipedia explains, "Pandora had been given a large jar and instruction by Zeus to keep it closed, but she had also been given the gift of curiosity, and ultimately opened it. When she opened it, all of the evils, ills, diseases, and burdensome labor that mankind had not known previously, escaped from the jar, but it is said, that at the very bottom of her box, there lay hope. There is no reason to think Pandora acted out of malice in opening the jar, for she was exercising her curiosity, and when she saw what was let out of it, she quickly closed it."
This beautiful animation by Gobelins retells the story very differently. While curiosity may be the reason why The Evil comes into the world, it is also fearless curiosity that becomes key to outwitting The Evil and to personal growth (in a very literal sense).
While the demon in the video insists on enacting patterns of domination and victimization (another old story) - the child refuses to play according to this script. She even has the courage to dive right into the mysterious dark box, from which she re-emerges as a grown being.
When I came across this video I had just finished reading Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin. Bill Plotkin believes that by courageously facing the underworld of the soul, we can find our true place in the world and our authentic self. He describes various “soulcraft skills”, such as dream work, wandering in nature or vision quests, which help to step out of the ordinary world with its usual scripts, and into a process of self-discovery. A process that is, by necessity, a terrifying experience for the ego, which would prefer safety and comfort to transcendence any time.
So what do we do with Pandora's Box? Do we continue to complain about "The Evil", be scared by it, try to control or fight it. Or do we have the courage to accept and face it, study it without looking for blame, - and be changed by this process.
Last week Reuters reported about a British company that is barcoding trees to protect the forest:
"Deep in the world's tropical rainforests, workers are hammering thousands of barcodes into hardwood trees to help in the fight against illegal logging, corruption and global warming.
The plastic tags, like those on supermarket groceries, have been nailed to a million trees across Africa, southeast Asia and South America to help countries keep track of timber reserves.
Helveta, the British company behind the technology, says the barcodes will help firms comply with tough laws on importing sustainable timber into the United States and Europe.
They could also play a role in fighting deforestation, which accounts for about a fifth of global emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide. ...
"We bring transparency and visibility where historically that has probably been limited at best," Patrick Newton, Helveta's chief executive officer, told Reuters."
Sounds like a good solution? I am not so sure. To me that sounds like a reflex reaction to treat symptoms of a deeper pathology with the cures that we tare most familiar with: controlling, measuring, administrating. Nature is seen as something we can put a tag on, simply a resource. And that would be one of the memes that is being spread with this type of solution: Nature is a resource that we can only protect if we bring it into our warehousing system.
Maybe barcoding is a better-than-nothing solution for the time being, but generally speaking, it only enforces alienation from nature. Which is the real reason for thoughtless pollution or irresponsible exploitation of the ecosystem
A website I noticed today: Shop around tours is a service “For People who live to shop and love to travel”. – Shop around tours offers guided tours for bargain shoppers e.g. Designer outlet shopping in Tuscany.
One testimonial statement of a (however briefly) satisfied shopper was on the landing page of the website: “You’ve created a wonderful environment for all of us bag-loving, shoe-hoarding, fashion-craving shoppers and we are all eternally grateful.” – Kate H. Arlington, VA
Hard to believe someone would really say this without irony. But it is a true statement of current reality: our environment is created for and by shopping addicts.
Wonderful? Eternally grateful? I am not buying this!
I just browsed through the United Nations Creative Economy Report 2008, which provides "empirical evidence that the creative industries are among the most dynamic emerging sectors in world trade." There is a huge number of similar reports on country, region and city level, which underlines the increasing role that creative enterprises have for the economy (especially today's economy that so badly needs to reinvent itself!) - and also the growing appreciation of this role.
The upgrading of creative folks to business people also has a disruptive potential for the economy, which hardly ever shows up in Creative Industries reports.
For one thing, fostering Creativity means encouraging a certain degree of chaos. This is easy to understand, as Creativity flows from a disregard of rules, from crossing boundaries, from experimenting, from challenging oneself (and others) continuously, and from cultivating a beginner's mind. In other words, creativity comes from continuous self-development, it is more a path than a gift.
No big news probably, when you think of creative professionals in arts, design, or architecture, which often work self-employed or in very small firms. They take care of their creative freedom within a self-defined system.
But as a growing number of people (categorized as the "Creative Class" by Richard Florida ) working in areas such as programming or services have chosen the route of creative empowerment (and are encouraged to do so), the anarchistic side of creativity needs to be able to play out in organizations with more traditional structures. Some of these traditional structures are already being replaced: Flexible working hours, inspiring office spaces and learning opportunities, are not unusual anymore. Yet, working (or rather: collaborating) with only a limited set of pre-given rules and with a larger degree of freedom is still a challenge and we can expect to see some unfamiliar approaches to this in the Creative Economy.
The other, even more disruptive feature is the role that creative workers see for themselves. In the mentioned reports, creative entrepreneurs are seen as growth engines and also as central knots in sustainable, thriving communities. Increasingly, creative professionals also see themselves as creators of an alternative future. That, too, is only logical, as the act of creating something - be it a dress, an ad or a user interface - is tied to making a conscious choice about how others will experience that dress, that ad or that user interface in the future. But creators today go even further. Robert Fabricant at design mind writes: "We’re experiencing a sea change in the way designers engage with the world. Instead of aspiring to influence user behavior from a distance, we increasingly want the products we design to have more immediate impact through direct social engagement." He calls this "Design with Intent". GK VanPatter of NextD strikes a similar tone when he describes the new level of design (Design 3.0) as Transformation Design - a "design approach that reimagines systems and takes leadership toward change in social and organizational structures and systems" (see an explanation at the on Social Design blog)
Examples abound and we've all already seen them in the field of media. Think of successful videos like The Story of Stuff, the HOME movie project, blogs like inhabitat or treehugger. All of this has been thought of by creative minds. What we see more and more today is creative people going out on the street, directly engaging with people in "public interventions" or enabling fellow citizens to see themselves as creators, too. One cool example is the bubble project by Ji Lee (see video above), who is also creative director at Google, another one the Free Beats in NY Central Park (see below).
So, what is the subversive element here? The creative people who contribute to the above examples are not in for money or fame. They are prototyping a world where you do not ask "what's in it for me" but "what can I give or how can I inspire". Sure, they need to live and they know their worth. But they are not likely to sacrifice their values for industrial growth. Again, it is easy to imagine this "values first" approach for freelancers or self-employed. But what if this trend catches on inside corporations? Embracing the Creative Economy could be like inviting Trojan Horses that will start a transformation, a cultural revolution, from within.
Bubble project and Free Beats spotted through freshcreation.
After reading about the social grammar of change (see Theory U by Otto Scharmer) I had an encounter with the semantics of social conflict today.
I was hiking with colleagues and the day was a bad choice as the weather was a variation of heavy rain, mist and just a few spells of sun. Finally sitting in the Panoramarestaurant on mount Wallberg, we did not get to see the scenic mountain panorama. But we got something more mystic and enchanting, at least this is how the view of the rising fog, crawling up alongside the mountain and rising into the sky, looked to me.
Was it really fog or should one speak of clouds? This is the question that led to a dispute between two of my colleagues: One insisted that what barred our view was fog, the other was convinced that in reality, the mist outside was a cloud. While the two discussed this, I realized that they actually had slightly different interpretations or semantics behind the same words. For the one, “fog” was what could be around you, while a “cloud” was further away (typically up in the sky, or potentially down in the sky when seen from a plane). For the other, “fog” was what materialized itself above surfaces while a “cloud” always formed in the sky. Down in our office, the two men would not even notice the uneven meaning they attribute to the same sequence of sounds. Up in the mountains, this slight distinctness became apparent (the mist was around us but appeared to have formed in the sky) and hence, a conflict arose.
Not a serious conflict, of course, but it brought home the familiar wisdom that much of the disputes and quarrels in our everyday life are actually about different uses of words and unnoticed misunderstandings. If we are able to go from dispute to dialogue (e.g. by applying the rules of nonviolent communication), we could probably more often than not uncover the deeper reason for conflict: Diverse meanings are associated to words or whole texts and we are not very conscious of this, we make vague assumptions about the intentions or interpretaitons of the other without asking for verification. Once these deeper layers of communication can be identified and laid open, finding “a common language” would be a lot easier.
Language and also how we use and understand it is fuzzy by nature and constantly evolving. It is only the dictionaries and grammar rules that make language look like something fixed. At school, pupils are trained to believe in these rules, they are taught that a sentence or a word can be used and written either correctly or incorrectly. Different contexts or different learning paths behind the word that an individual uses, play next to no role.
Which makes me wonder if Civilization 2.0, if we make it to this advanced level, would have a need to write down language rules. For the future society, it would be more important to foster communication “rules” or rather communication practices which allow people to lay open their semantics and interpretations as soon as they notice signs of misunderstanding. Probably there would be less mindless talk and more appreciation of diversity, as a result. Orthography might become an indicator of the historical context of a text. And individual orthography may be just as acceptable as the individual message of an author - any author, starting with the pupil in elementary school. (Written words may not even be as vital as we believe them to be today. Who knows, writing may be totally optional to learn...)
Come to think of it, signs for the end of orthographic rules can be found easily already today:
Many authors have developed an individual way of expressing their thoughts also through an individual orthography. That makes their texts harder to read. That also means a reader will automatically pay much more attention to every single word and its contextual meaning.
We hear that orthography of young people is getting worse because of texting. Txtng forcs U 2 rite n reed creatively. No rules, just be short.
I have read and heard time and again that more pupils leave school and more students leave university without proper basic reading and writing skills. Maybe this lack of internalized rules can translate into freemindedness or creativity? A radical thought, but hey...
Already today, keyboards are being replaced by touch screens. And when futurists say that we will stop typing or writing as everything can be controlled or communicated with spoken language or directly with thoughts, they may be talking of a very near future. Sensors and software that can comprehend language is already in use today, and also tools that can read the mind or respond to emotions already exist.
When written language becomes less important, so will grammar and orthography. This has implications basically for the way we learn foreign languages, but not for learning the mother tongue. (Sigh of relief ... no collective aphasia!).
On the other hand, semantics – the study of meaning - will become a lot more important, but not as a set of semantic rules, but rather as an awareness for context-based semantics and personal semantics.
The semantics of social conflict is replaced by a semantics of dialogue and awareness.
Letzte Woche war bundesweite Coworking Week mit über 100 Veranstaltungen in ganz Deutschland - in München war besonders im Combinat 56 einiges geboten. Zumindest die Auftaktveranstaltung (Open Elevator mit anschliessender Vernissage) und den krönenden Abschluss (mit einem Vortrag von Nahne Steinauer vom Kursbüro zu Online-Geschäftsmodellen) habe ich mir nicht entgehen lassen - und dabei interessante Leute kennengelernt, andere Coworker wiedergetroffen und neue Impulse bekommen. Coworking in schönster Form.
