I arrived arrived in Calgary 5:30 pm. Paul picked me up and we drove directly to Master’s. Tom, Paul, Jeff and I reviewed the the Collaboration Studio and did an informal punch list of things to fix and projects to do later after the DesignShop. The environment was still not cleaned up as final work was still going with a number of trades: painting, electrical, hardware for the entry doors and so on. We decided to delay the raised seating installation was until after the DesignShop due to the risk that it might not be completed prior to the event. There were a number of small problems to be addressed with only one built flaw - we worked out some adjustments for this that brought it into an acceptable range. Not a bad result given that the team was new, the time pressure of the project was intense and the complexity of the design was high. I am very pleased with the result. This is going to be a great space once it is “practiced.” We set Wednesday as the day to work through punch list items, do cleaning, plant, art and book buying, and setting them in place; and, designing and getting set up for the first use with students and teachers on Thursday. Gail and Patsy arrived late Tuesday to be part of the planning process for the Thursday and Friday sessions as well as the DesignShop walk through process over the weekend. Most of the KnowledgeWorkers were scheduled for Friday and Saturday arrivals.

This was a good day but perhaps not as powerful as it could have been. We (MG Taylor and Master’s Sponsors) simply did not have the time to plan it out. There was more Explaining than necessary and not as much Experience as there could have been. The Five Es of Education [link: the 5 es of education] were not as balanced as I would have wished. That said, the day ended with a great deal of energy and both the projects and understanding of the Collaboration Studio’s mission were advanced. The Story of Matt and Gail and of MG Taylor Corporation was told and this is an important aspect of passing on the tradition of a NavCenter. The teachers that participated in the DesignShop, and those who supported the event as KnowledgeWorkers, will have a much better sense of the Collaboration Studio and how to use it. They are the first wave of transfer.

The Teachers had a debrief session the Friday after the DesignShop to discuss it and to review rules-of-engagement for use of the Studio

We started the day with a StrawDog that was built from the Saturday Sponsor session. The design held up with just a few modifications. This made the Sunday Sponsor session easy.

One of the things that always fascinates me about people in DesignShops is how beautiful they are when they are fully engaged in a collaborative, creative process, They come alive in ways that are (unfortunately) not common to the daily workplace.

This difference, between the “normal” work environment and the NavCenter, is dramatic and becomes more so as time progresses. This can be seen in body language, facial expression, tone of voice and the intensity of focus over extended hours of work.

Tom started the event with an overview of Master’s vision and a challenge to all to recreate the concept of learning in the 21st Century.

The Glass Bead Game reports revealed the high level of creativity and artistic talent among the participant-designers. This is not unusual. However, this module drew it out quickly and made it apparent to all.

It always amazes me how little time we spend, as a society, thinking about the future. Our focus becomes ever shorter even as the impacts of what we do reaches out further and further into the future. We are compiling a greater and greater inventory of social liabilities most of which could have been avoided without paying a very great price. Now, the bills are coming due and they look to be enormous. And, at the same time, we continue to underutilize the enormous assets we have created.

A critical part of the SCAN is to get everyone to be come clear on just what their view of the future is and and their vision of it also. We want them to share these viewpoints, and play with the implications of them, before taking on, directly, the work that they “came here to do.”

Sometimes this is resisted as a waste of time. As if a few hours of unfettered thinking about the world we are creating is not practical. This group embraced the exercise and took it on with a high level of gusto - “This Future Is For You!” (to turn a phrase.

This first sharing is intimate. Everyone has the opportunity to express themselves and their agenda without interruption or debate. A common language is built in an unforced way; mutual respect gained as each learns the depth and nuance of each other’s experience and thinking.

This is a liberating experience and one not typically found in the modern workplace where the creed of utilitarianism still rules. It is the UTILITY of where we are headed as a society that I most question [link].

Progressively, unnoticed, the SCAN gets more specific - it is a genital glide from “abstract” issues to circling around the work at hand until it lands directly on it at the of the day. By this time most of the participant-designers have worked together in small teams. They have now been “introduced.” everyone has their own unique approach to creative work. Unfortunately, in a group, the “styles” most often clash. What the DesignShop does is to offer a process that is natural and aligns the creative energy of each participant-designer so that they become synchronized. Content is left free. Energy is channeled.

By the end of the day the energy is focused and the teams are working to articulate their VISION of education and the Master’s opportunity. The journey has begun.

There are many fears that people can legitimately hold in regards the prospect of truly collaborating on a complex and multiyear project. It is easy, in the prevalent social world that now exists, for the results of creative genius to be robbed and compromised by the system in place. I shared an example of this [link] as an out come we were not going to experience.

This unfortunate reality is a consequence of the structure in which most work. STRUCTURE WINS and this structure is largely designed by default. To design an alternative, people must be in an alternative and this fact makes up the essence of what A DesignShop is about.

The FOCUS process is always a roller coaster ride. In SCAN, we often challenge the participant/designers to rethink their paradigm. In FOCUS, they challenge themselves.

This DesignShop was no exception. The very premise of why Master’s was building a new school was tested as was the nature of the urban setting the new Campus should both be in and create by its presence. These are not simple questions nor do they make for easy dialogs.

Testing every design assumption is necessary for understanding and essential to creating the right problem. Problems, once clear, are not that difficult to solve. Getting the right problem in mind is the real challenge. This DesignShop is the first of many to come as we identify the many options before us, create the many programs and projects that, together, add up to the VISION we hold and the future it will reveal. Growing a ValueWeb capable of accomplishing this vision, which is both fixed in theory and emergent in practice, is the main task ahead. A ValueWeb is not the simple assemblage of the “logical” players - it is the result of a self selection process that is tempered by candid dialog and common experience. The DesignShop does not plan a ValueWeb - it practices one into existence.

This work is both exciting and stressful. We design the environments the way we do to stimulate the imagination and to mitigate stress. The environment adjusts to the work not just in the spatial sense but also in the mood that is set. It reflects the time of day, has the variety found in nature but rarely inside a building and exemplifies behavior that is congruent with people are being asked to do. This is not a place (in spirit, process or physical statement) where compromise comes easy. It is a place where hearing one another, building on one another’s ideas and reaching for synergies that go beyond what each can do alone comes easy.

The transition between FOCUS and ACT is an abrupt shift in energy.

To me the dialog around selecting the Buckets of Work is always fascinating. The real conversation is not so much around the Buckets themselves; it is about the underlying issues. In “merely” selecting the Buckets, much deeper aspects of the work are being sorted out,

This is the way a single mind works: on one level a systematic process; on the other, a far richer and complex process, accession millions of connections, is happening. the DesignShop is an architecture that facilitates a group of people so that they can function more like a single I. We call this GroupGenius. Solutions emerge [link].

What makes ValueWebs WORK is this functional alignment: individual mind to DesignShop designers to ValueWeb - all recursive levels of the same architecture [link]. Conventional methods neither understand no facilitate this result. This is why they fail when faced with broad-scale systemic challenges. And, almost everything critical, interesting and worth doing in our time IS a system issue or closely connected to one. All the easy stuff has been done.

There is a point somewhere between late FOCUS and early ACT where the entire process escapes. It no longer can be “designed” or “controlled.” It captures everyone and takes the lead. This is exactly what happens in an individual’s singular, creative act. Everything - for a period of time - becomes “subordinate” to a super ordinate goal. This happened after the Buckets were selected and I joined the New Campus Design/Build Team for the rest of the process. The KnowledgeWorkers took over stewarding the DesignShop. This gave me the opportunity to to meet my future team mates in a different relationship. While in the process of designing the ValueWeb, a significant portion of it formed.

This was an organic, self selected process - it required “stepping up” on the part of all.

ValueWebs have to form this way. They will not come together in the same way that the alliance and joint venture of the past did. ValueWebs can superficially look like these old forms, however, at the root of it, they are not related to these far more mechanistic expressions of organization.

Myself, I was surprised how the ACT day played out. This does not happen often. Although I had a different model of the outcome in mind, I had to succumb to the net vector that we all had been instrumental in creating, intentionally and not, together.

I was disappointed with this at the beginning of the final reports - story telling really - until I started to listen to what was being said. Then, I realized how much was there and how deep each team had actually gone. All we have to do is organize to continue the work.

I think, however, this turn in the road did not find us fully capable of capturing all the work that was completed. We organized what we did capture to go into a wiki [link for participants] and this will facilitate the next iteration of work. This also may turn out to be the best circumstance - we shall see.

One of the trickiest judgments in any process of design - for individual, group, participant or facilitator - is to know when an iteration of work done; when it is good enough for now. I tell my architectural students that you know you are done with a design cycle when you cannot get any smarter without out going out and building something. Acting on what we have created is clearly the next phase of the project. This is how we will get smarter. And this is how we will grow the ValueWeb. The story of this project will be the story of its ValueWeb. The is the key and the process cannot be forced.

We have found that the peak of a DesignShops impact is usually about a year after the event. Of course, we will have many more exercises - large and small - within that period. The experience will accumulate. And, the Collaboration Studio will be the keeper of these experiences. The pace of implementation will start slowly yet yield an ever increasing return. The path between intension and heuristic search will be found and one day we will look back on this event and see all that we have achieved represented in our beginning.