Various Applications: Practical Catalysts Large and Small
Practical applications of arts-fired catalysts and orbital learning can spring from any one or a combination of our senses, exactly analogous to our many art forms: painting and drawing, stories and poetry, sculpture, hand crafts, songs and instrumental music, expressive movement and dance, theater and acting. Whether formally conceived and rigorously rendered or invented on the fly in the spirit of improvisation, arts-based experiences can deliver us to new vistas, perspectives, introspections and expressions of strategy. Skilfully facilitated experiences in nature can serve a similar, mind-shifting purpose precisely because nature too reconnects us with our senses, with beauty and imagination. “To the Eye of a Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination Itself. As a Man is, so he Sees. As the Eye is formed, Such are its Powers.” (Blake) In this final section of our article, we share four contrasting applications of our arts-based methodology drawn from four different art forms, playing out at different scales of personal and group process.
The Concert of Ideas and The Harvest of Learnings
Invented in the late 1970s by John Cimino and colleagues, the Concert of Ideas is a keynote type event embodying a set of artful triggers designed to set the minds and hearts of participants in curious exploratory motion. Featuring grand and exciting music performed by award-winning artists, the Concert of Ideas IS a world-class concert performance. Music by Bernstein, Copland, Gershwin and Rachmaninoff as well as Broadway showstoppers are essential ingredients of a Concert of Ideas. But there is more. Woven through the music and creatively juxtaposed to leverage imaginations, audiences discover equally brilliant contributions from thinkers such as Einstein, Picasso, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Margaret Mead, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The whirlwind of connective possibilities is exhilarating. Participants are royally entertained. Simultaneously, they are invited to think deeply, to entertain new perspectives, and ultimately, to enter into thoughtful dialogue with one another.
The Concert of Ideas is the original prototype for the orbital model of thinking and learning. Each song, story, poem or theatrical scenario comprising the Concert of Ideas serves as a catalyst to launch the listener-participant on a journey of exploration around the central focus or theme of the Concert of Ideas. Each image, metaphor or narrative trail embedded in the songs, stories, poems and theatrical scenarios suggests a curious and inviting trajectory for closer examination, but importantly does not deliver discrete answers. Instead, it points to possibilities, to directions of exploration, leaving the process open to the participant’s own originally conceived configurations of thought and meaning. In this way, the thinking and learning happen by surprise along the way in the midst of captivating play.
Taken altogether, the Concert of Ideas might be considered one large scale, multi-layered catalyst for setting the mind in motion. As such, it is critical the experience be thoroughly and invitingly debriefed. Opportunities for quiet reflection, small group discussion and sharing of insights back to plenary are vital to shepherding the process to its richest outcomes. Deep dives into emergent and more specialized content are a natural next step on the heels of a Concert of Ideas and the ensuing processing. Further artful catalysts on a smaller scale can refresh the minds and imaginations of participants as often as needed along the way to crafting the final work product.
A special culminating event aimed at synthesis and full ownership of the final work product can also take an artful form. Known within Creative Leaps International as a “Harvest of Learnings”, this culminating event is assembled collaboratively with participants to distill and imaginatively re-express key insights and outcomes of the entire work process. The end result is a celebration of personal creativity and achievement. Music, poetry, song, humor, spontaneity and the element of surprise merge with the honest insights, learnings and enthusiasms of the fully engaged participants. The experience anchors learning, creates powerful memories and sends people home with a sense of triumph. What is more, the arts-based methodology has been internalized, its catalyst energies and orbital strategies absorbed into the tool kits of the participants themselves.
Modelling Collective Vision
Everyone can be an artist. The experience of engaging in artistic expression opens the pathways for creativity, immerses us in flow, and makes connections and associations among ideas and thoughts fruitful for strategy crafting. The challenge is that not everyone is awash with artistic talent across all of the arts – who is? We have developed a technique that makes the artistic experience accessible to nearly everyone, more like serious play than art. The method has individuals working in small groups to build models set in the future.
To get ready for such an activity, we first need to explore and define either a problem or a scenario. The group needs a trigger to set themselves in motion. One approach is to articulate a clear, current problem and then take the group to the future using a variety of stories. Once the setting is established, small groups are challenged to build a model of what the future is like when a positive solution is in practice. For example here is a potential problem, We know that our current program/offering is falling short in terms of active engagement - what would a future program/offering be like that was really engaging? A second approach to set the context is around future vision based on depicting and extending a number of current trends and forces. For example, We know that these four trends are emerging and will disrupt our current business model - what future business model will likely emerge as a result of these intersecting trends?
The second step in preparation is to identify a single artful medium for model building. We sometimes use clay or putty, but building blocks, pipe cleaners and small objects, or any kind of collection of small, odd objects can be used – even a combination of items. The goal here is set the bar very low for entry so everyone plays. We set groups in motion and ask that they build their model and write a story to tell when they make their presentation. This works well in mid-sized group setting where four or five or more groups can show their models and tell their stories. The larger group learns along the way.
The orbital experience is activated in three phases. First, each individual in the small group begins to touch and hold the objects. Once some familiarity is gained, they start to put things together, even before the group has decided where to go. The experience of building, tangibly, kinesthetically, sets the mind in motion around the task. The first orbital experience. The second comes from creating the story in the small group. As the story unfolds and builds, the models tend to adapt and reshape. Experiencing the story adds layers of clarity and possibility, the second orbital experience. The third, and maybe final, maybe not, experience comes during the small group presentations. Experiencing the minds of another group, their story, sends the individuals away again on a micro learning journey. Returning to their own thoughts, now more enhanced with each story.
Reflecting and harvesting is a critical facilitation matter. What we might be left with are great stories and lumps of clay, all swept away at the end of the day. The positive experience will live on, but meaning must be extracted and documented. We like to use photographs of the models, videos of the stories when possible, and a set of synthesis exercises at the conclusion of the activity to identify the key learnings and takeaways. There will always be a next step in the strategy process and good outputs from the modeling and storytelling need to be isolated so they can serve as inputs to the next part of the process.
Engaged Enactment of Our Current Dilemmas and Potential Solutions
A completely different twist on the storytelling that accompanies building models is to make the story an art itself. Here we describe the arts of acting, improvisation, and role play as the inspiration for thinking about the future. Utilizing this artistic medium, participants fully enact and engage in an alternate and possible future through expression and active creation.
To get ready and design the journey, there are three key activities. First, we create a scenario of the future to establish the setting for the action. Second, we engage participants in generating forecasts of the future, extending the scenario using a variety of likely events and situations that could be, but currently are not. The final activity is writing and enacting the script, where smaller groups are encouraged by facilitators who have been coached in telling a good story and delivering the story through acting and role play. Some basic ground rules are typically enough for a group to deliver an entertaining and enlightening story. Again, this is art for the masses, accessible to nearly everyone.
The method activates orbital learning in three phases. The scenario is the initial activation of the orbital experience. When the future scenario is depicted, usually through a combination of narrative and projected images, a new idea space is generated. We find participants being able to fill voids between what is and what could be and generate new interpretations and perspectives – ideas emerge. The session then turns to participant engagement in building their own forecasts. These forecasts need not be perfect nor even accurate, in fact, we have found some of the more absurd futures make for a better story and unlock unseen possibilities. Sometimes playing with what is surely not possible opens in the mind further to unseen possibilities.
Finally, we have the performance of the story or script as the final opportunity for orbital learning. This happens on two levels – one as performer and another as audience. Doing something, expressing something has a different impact than thinking about the same subject. We find that the actors experience the future differently than the audience and have different learnings. We encourage personal journaling about the experience shortly after telling the story, more on this soon. For the audience, they have the opportunity to be entertained, to observe, and to make additional connections. While it is helpful again for audience participants to journal on the experience, we have found that questions or prompts help accelerate their ability to unpack and record learnings. Mixing in a bit of surprise through improv can really add some fun twists to the storytelling and acting.
Harvesting learning in this situation is a bit challenging. It is important to find a way to capture each story and we recommend two approaches. One is to have the group actually write a script, and while it may not be perfectly performed, it provides a record. The second and perhaps preferred method is to video record the story. While his has many advantages, it may not always be practical. A second recommended strategy for harvesting is individual journaling on the experience. It may only take 15 or 20 minutes, but embedding some quiet time, either after each individual performance or after a collection on them, really allows each participant to better understand and reflect on what happened and what new possibilities emerged for them. Finally, we like the whole group to debrief as a way to push the learnings even further and identify consensus characteristics of the potential futures and unique ideas that manifested during the performances. We recommend creating an archive of these three methods for harvesting learning; the stories can be used in the future for further provocation.
Visual Imagery as a Catalyst for Exploring Values, Perspectives and Extension of Future Thinking
We live in a highly visual culture and visual imagery is everywhere. Somehow, we never tire of it. Our brains light up in response to it. Our emotions kick in instinctively and our imaginations appear to revel in the perceptual intrigues even the most ordinary images can be heir to. To utilize visual imagery as a tool for activating imagination, personal perspectives and future thinking is to work in most everyone’s comfort zone. While a smaller number of us may feel capable and comfortable drawing images, the threshold for participation in viewing visual imagery is virtually non-existent. Pictures tell stories and we love stories. Pictures can be provocative or pull at our heartstrings. Pictures can be puzzles, illusions, astoundingly beautiful or shockingly horrific. They are worth a thousand words. Taking tips from artists and advertisers over the centuries, teams of researchers and facilitators have designed an impressive array of visual tools with which we can extend our thinking and prime our individual expressiveness.
Perhaps the best known tool of this kind is called Visual Explorer and was designed by a group at the Center for Creative in Greensboro, North Carolina. In essence, it a set of more than 100 vivid and suitably diverse images which can be spread on the floor along the periphery of a modestly large room where participants can stroll as they search for one or more images they freely associate with an issue, question, challenge or personal attribute. The pictures selected by participants become the subject of personal reflections, guided journaling and finally facilitated small group conversations where the pictures can be shared and explored for what they might signify and potentially reveal about the issue or subject at hand. Skilful facilitation of this process is crucial to the harvesting of rich outcomes. The pictures themselves are the catalysts for launching minds and hearts in curious exploratory motion through the idea space surrounding the focal point of their orbital journeys.
As a sample of this experience, here below are seven visual images utilized in a small scale version of this activity developed by John Cimino and known as Visual Primer.
The questions which follow form the outline of the facilitation process guiding participants through their orbital journeys. The journey unfolds in three discrete phases, each phase beginning with quiet personal viewing of the seven images followed by a response to the prompts of a particular question. The questions and prompts are progressive, each one inviting a deeper exploration of a participant’s inner terrain.
Round One: Take a look at each of the seven images which follow and make a brief note or two of what each image conveys to you -- a thought, an impression, a message, a value, an emotion, an insight?
Round Two: Secondly, which images do you find yourself drawn to most?
Round Three: In what ways do they connect with who you are, the issue we are exploring or the desired future we are seeking?
As with the Visual Explorer activity, the initial processing of the images via Rounds 1 through 3 is accomplished by each participant on his or her own as guided by the facilitator. The small group conversations follow. On the heels of small group conversations, a plenary discussion can debrief the overall experience harvesting the most significant outcomes, insights and trajectories for future explorations. What’s more, a number of images will have been identified as hallmarks of the group’s journey and strategy crafting. Finally, it’s worth noting that this particular activity affords experience designers and facilitators tremendous latitude for converting it to a variety of purposes simply by varying the inventory of images and customizing the set of questions, particularly question #3.
Summary and Conclusions
In earlier blog posts, we took a fresh look at how we experience the arts and the processes they set in motion linked to perception, imagination, memory and the senses. We then introduced an orbital model of thinking and learning as an effective way of exploring the idea space surrounding whatever we might designate as our subject or point of focus. Referring back to the arts, we showed how arts experiences can serve as an efficient and powerful catalyst for launching our attentions into that idea space affording us satellite views of our subject from a variety of perspectives.
In our more recent posts, we endeavored to unpack this arts-based methodology into a series of six steps: (i) creating mental readiness, (ii) the designer’s tools for guiding the activity, (iii) activation and immersion in the orbital experience, (iv) debriefing and processing the experience, (v) opportunities for extension learning, and (vi) final synthesis, discernment or recycling of the experience. We followed this with four sample applications of the methodology at different scales and drawn from different art forms: The Concert of Ideas and Harvest of Learnings using music, poetry, theater; Modelling Collective Vision using clay and other small manipulables modeling of future scenarios; Engaged Enactment of Dilemmas and Solutions using acting and improvisation; and Visual Primer using visual imagery as catalyst for future thinking.
Throughout all of these experiences and applications, participants and facilitators move through three basic mindsets or internal states. The first state is engagement or readiness, the process of enlisting a willing spirit of wholehearted participation. The second state is all about the participant’s creative response to the arts-based catalysts and orbital journey. The third state is that of discernment, making sense and identifying outcomes. The orbital nature of the experience affords the time and space for an unhurried 360 perspective seamlessly modulated through our senses, our imaginations and the felt experience of our emotions. The approach is indirect rather than linear and one dimensional, at once properly distanced and surprisingly intimate, precisely the way of all great art, universal and personal at the same time.
Our hope for this post is first and foremost as an invitation to play, an invitation to jump in and experiment with the myriad ways the arts can inflect, inspire and enrich our thinking. Strategy crafting is an affair of the heart as much as the mind, a process challenging our imaginations, intuitions and our willingness to act. To craft strategy means we must work skilfully, smartly, artfully calling upon all our faculties. After all, the vessel we would construct must be seaworthy, as secure and watertight in rough seas as in calm. Finally, our creation must inspire confidence, dedication and ownership, all those “trickster’ qualities of our nature too slippery to grasp with mere logic. It is in our nature to dream, to seek new horizons and to act to make those horizons visible and achievable. Consider the work of art your work, the work of bringing the future in being.
Robert Brodnick, Ph.D.
Vice President for Strategy & Innovation
530.798.4082
John Cimino
President
|
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.