Author Archives: petervan

Play Drives Change

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Kanaal Site – Axel Vervoordt – Wijnegem, Antwerp

For the past years, I have been on a quest to discover what is required to enable change. I try to avoid glorifying terms like “deep”, or “meaningful” change. What we are after in the end is just “good” change, right? In my opinion, good change is change that leads to ethical, moral and spiritual advancement. All the rest follows: profit, happiness, communities, and networks of returning customers.

Deeply influenced by the work of Robert Fritz on structural conflict and structural tension, and that structure drives everything – especially behavior – I became dissatisfied by the responsive reaction in many organizations that can be summarized as “what problem are you trying to solve?” It is too solutionist, reductionist to my tasting, and I prefer Robert’s suggestion of the creative orientation of the artist/creator who is not solving a problem but develops mastery to create what she really wants.

So, the key starting point is to know what you want. Let that sink in for a moment. To know what you want.

Once you know what you want, you can create and change the structure that will at least be helpful – not working against you – in letting emerge and amplify the behavior that leads to what you want.

Structure is broader here than hierarchy or reporting lines. Structure includes contexts, vision, vehicles, mechanisms, and networks. Like an architect, you design spaces and structures to enable certain preferred – at time messy – human behaviors.  In a corporate environment, you don’t architect buildings, but you architect contexts. You become a context designer. As an architect, you are not only responsible for the imaginative part, but also for seeing through the execution ànd adaptation needed as the context changes throughout time. Structure and contexts drive flows of information. Like water in a riverbed, if you change the course of the riverbed, the water will behave differently.

Structure drives flow drives behavior.

Let’s add Leandro Herrero in the mix. He wrote “Viral Change” and “Homo Imitans”. Key insights: people copy behavior and behaviors drive culture. If you plant people with the desired behavior into your organization, there is a good chance others will start copying that behavior. Hence “Imitans”. Like viruses infecting others – in a positive way. Do I need to make a drawing in this Covid-19 era?

Leandro’s bottom-line: behavior drives change and not the other way. And you can design for certain preferred behaviors. It’s bottom-up. It is not because an executive team defines culture that everybody will start behaving like it. It is because you have seeded infectious behavior that a culture will emerge through imitation.

Like changing and influencing the structure of a building or a riverbed, we can influence the information flows in organizations. These changed flows lead to different behaviors that on their term drive culture. In the end culture drives change and advancement

Structure drives flow drives behavior drives culture drives change.

In 1938, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote a book titled “Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture”. The core message of Huizinga is that play drives culture.

That the disposition of a culture is already embedded in the play preceding it.

“By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play (Huizinga)”

“There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making—namely, playing. (Huizinga)”

This brings me to the insights of John Seely Brown in “A New Culture of Learning”, who quotes Huizinga extensively.

Visual/Insight inspired by John Seely Brown (JSB)

JSB talks about a “21st Century Augmented Imagination”, with a better balance between Homo Sapiens (Man as a Thinker), Homo Faber (Man as a Maker), and Homo Ludens (Man as a Player). Where imagination is triggered, tested, and augmented by play. And discovering the rules of the (future) game to play by playing it.

“In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it (JSB)”

So, by adding “play drives culture”, we get:

Play drives structure drives flow drives behavior drives culture drives change.

Or in simpler, reductionist terms:

Play drives change

This post was written as a guest contributor to nexxworks.

This version includes additional imagery related to the books mentioned.

Travelling without Moving – Anxious

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This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Travelling without moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

The plan/ambition with this series: to share where I have been the last year, what I learned, where I am going, and what is required.

The broader quest is to discover what is required to enable real change.

After the Play-Post of begin Jan 2021, we continue with “Anxious” in a post-VUCA world.

BANI is what is next after VUCA.

Already in 2018, Jamais Cascio coined the term BANI. See my post from Aug 2019 and Jamais’ update from April 2020.

BANI stands for Brittleness, Anxious, Non-Linear, and Incomprehensible.

Let’s focus on the “A” of BANI.

I suggested that the preferred response to Anxiousness was empathy or agency.

But that felt too open ended.

Empathy with what, and agency in what kind of world?

And was it forward or backward looking?

A possible world or a preferred world?

I went back to the most common definition for anxious:

“being worried about what may happen or have happened”

Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, some people are so frightened or nervous that they do not know what to do. They sometimes remain still because they do not know where the light comes from or which way to go.

Another reaction is to fake that you know what to do, especially if you are in the spotlight for one reason or another. In other words, to bluff yourself out of an anxious situation.

Imagine a workshop where the top executives of a firm are sitting on the first VIP row of a theatre (in COVID-times, it would be a massive Zoom session with all the employees being able to look over the shoulder of their executives).

All the employees are sitting in the rows behind the VIP row to witness how their executives manage a difficult situation, or even more frightening, being able to see inside the heads of those who bluff to know, don’t blink an eye, and confidently steer their troops in the wrong direction, efficiently of course.

Remaining still or bluffing strong are most probably not the wisest responses to anxiety.

A better response would have to do with orientation or some kind of possibility mapping.

I assume many of my readers are familiar with Joseph Voros’ Future Cone.

Great background explanation by Joseph Voros here.

These days, you can buy out-of-the-box possibility mapping workshops from some of the big-4 and many boutique consultancies. Some of them already fully COVID-proof online, with Miro boards of future cones, chatrooms, Clubhouse conversations, Slack and other real-time streams.

But all this online-first coolness can also be distracting. What I am exploring is some kind of new genre, where we also inject artists to resonate with and for the content at a non-cognitive level, not as entertainment, but with an aesthetic that is demonstrative, not just a gimmick overlay.

An aesthetic that has a sense of stillness and serenity that makes the effort and work real, beyond perception and reason, with an anchoring in humanistic relevance.

Without falling for the temptation to add such toolkit to a “Pot-Pourri” of other coolness, as a tapas-bar, a Chinese menu to choose from.

What is missing in the “Pot-Pourri” is a sense of agency, a sense for direction and choice. Choice as in opinion, and direction as in judgment and daring to step forward with preference.

If not, the online-first future cones become a surrogate for analog Post-It-driven brainstorms, just mapping future concepts on the dimensions of possible, plausible, probable, and impossible.

The crux is daring to address the preferrable future. Because that is using the map beyond seeing better what is and what could be. It is using the map for standing for an opinion, a direction, most probably in the space of moral, spiritual, and aesthetical advancement.

That’s of course a more difficult sell.

But for now, let’s summarise, not as a conclusion, but more as a beacon in our developing story that a possible response to anxiousness is possibility mapping with the courage to set direction and preference.

Next time we’ll talk about “Unbound” – Unbound from thingness that is.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,

Petervan’s Delicacies – 28 Jan 2021

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If you can’t get enough of these and want more than 5 articles, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan

Travelling without Moving – Play

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White birds playing on air with food (via Reddit)

This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Traveling without moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

The plan/ambition with this series: to share where I have been in 2020, what I learned, where I am going, and what is required.

The broader quest is to discover what is required to enable real change.

After the Pause-Post of end Nov 2020, we continue with “Play”.

“I’d like to do nothing for some time

be free

flying and gliding

like birds in the sky

left, right, up, down, up, down,…

defying centrifugal forces

unlimited by time, space, distance, force

like free painting

with myself as the paintbrush

and the sky as canvas

4-dimensional

playful like the birds,

showing little tricks,

challenge and pursue

but not limited

by any form of danger”

@petervan

It is a poem I wrote in 2012 laying at a pool at the Paradores Hotel in La Palma (Canary Islands), watching the birds playing in the blue sky…

This is the sort of play I would like to write about today.

This is the sort of play written about by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens in 1938

I believe I already mentioned Homo Ludens in my post about a New Babylon

Huizinga believes play is of all times, and not limited to humans.

Animals play also.

A lot.

It is not “play” as in “game”.

Game – at least finite games – hints at some underlying sense for competition.

This is play without competition.

Play just for the pleasure of play.

Like birds in the sky,

cows in the pasture,

dogs on the beach,

humans teasing each other…

The core message of Huizinga is that play drives culture.

That the disposition of a culture is already embedded in the play preceding it.

By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play (Huizinga)

Play is irrational.

Play is a voluntary activity.

Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc.

Play casts a spell over us; it is “enchanting”, “captivating”. It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.

The child plays in complete—we can well say, in sacred—earnest.

But it plays and knows that it plays.

Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”.

We do not play for wages, we work for them

@Huizinga

The last one resonates well with my current state of being. For me, and especially since my retirement from corporate life on 1 Dec 2020, “work” has become “paid play”, although most of the work in 2020 was “unpaid play”.

But it is play.

In 2017, in my series “Trends for human advancement”, I strongly believed that structure is driving everything, and landed on the phrase:

“Structure drives flow drives behaviour drives culture drives change”

With the insights of Huizinga, I would complement it as follows:

“Play drives structure drives flow drives behaviour drives culture drives change”

So, to be able to change, we first need to re-learn to play.

“There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making—namely, playing.”

@Huizinga

This brings me to the insights of John Seely Brown in “A New Culture of Learning”, who quotes Huizinga extensively

I rediscovered John Seely Brown (JSB) when reading “Design Unbound” that he wrote together with Ann Pendleton-Jullian. Much (!) more about that book and Ann’s work and how it changed and formed my thinking in 2020 and ongoing.

Visual/Insight by JSB

JSB talks about a “21st Century Augmented Imagination”, with a better balance between Homo Sapien, Homo Faber, and Homo Ludens

Play, questioning, and—perhaps most important—imagination lie at the very heart of arc-of-life learning

In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it

Play fuses the two elements of learning that we have been talking about: the information network and the petri dish (or bounded environment of experimentation). That fusion is what we call the new culture of learning

@JSB

Later in this series, we’ll also talk extensively about the concept of “Studios”, leveraging the practice of practices that is architecture (again, as so well documented by Ann Pendleton-Jullian in “Four Studios (+1)”)

The key point here that play and critique are indispensable tools and skills  for collective learning when integrating game play and game design in the scaffolding of the disposition of imagination.

Next time we’ll talk about “Anxious” one of the states of a post-VUCA world. And what a possible response to that anxiety can be.

From there – in subsequent posts – we’ll leave the road of reductionism and will enter a space where we will mix more abstraction and holistic thinking.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,

Petervan Delicacies – 2 Jan 2021

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Also in the new year, I will continue with my usual, incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. Enjoy!

If you can’t get enough of these and want more than 5 articles, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan

Petervan’s Delicacies – 5 Dec 2020

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delicacies

As usual, an incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. Enjoy!

If you can’t get enough of these and want more than 5 articles, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan

Travelling without Moving – Pause

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Alley entrance of the Gaasbeek Castle – Picture Petervan

This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Travelling without Moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

After the Silence post of last week, we continue with Pause.

In “Silence”, I mentioned “Stop the clocks – Manifesto for a Slow Future”, Joke Hermsen’s book about Silencing the Time. Minutes after I published that post, I got a notification of a new book by Joke Hermsen

“Ogenblik & Eeuwigheid” or “Moment & Eternity” opens with Joke’s reflections on a Kairos/Chronos exhibition she curated in 2017 in the Gaasbeek Castle south of Brussels. Coincidence or not, but I happened to be there, and here is a video of one of the installations exhibited then.

I wrote about this exhibition in “About Time”

“This is about that mysterious moment when our soul is unguarded and spreads out its wings. Kairos manoeuvres virtuoso between two worlds: the measurable and the immeasurable, the known and the un-known, backing out of our knowledge, covertly showing us a glimpse of the possible”

Her new book is once again about Chronos and Kairos and the potential of art to move us into the surplus of Kairos

Het surplus aan tijdservaring die de kunst voor ons in petto heeft verschilt aanzienlijk van het louter meten van tijd op de klok.

The surplus of time experience made available by art is quite different from the pure measurement of time

Artists covered/mentioned are:

Sean Scully

Virginia Woolf

Hilma Af Klint

Marlène Dumas

Thomas Mann

Mark Rothko

Hannah Arendt

Edmond Jabès

But this post was to be about Pause.

Robert Poynton wrote a book about it.

I highly recommend it.

Robert lives between Oxford and a remote Spanish town west of Madrid. In Spain, he lives off grid – literally and metaphorically.

His remote, hilltop house is even off the electricity grid.

It is also the place where he contemplates.

Intro https://www.robertpoynton.com/

Together with Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network, we started some 1-1 calls to share what these books trigger for us and our communities. We decided to start a small experiment: we read a chapter of the book, schedule a 1-1 call to let flow our minds, record it, and share it with our communities.

Very down to earth, no tricks, no gimmicks, just a gentle and calm wandering and meandering of minds from two opposite sides of this earth. One person from Melbourne, Australia and one from Aalst, Belgium; one person in autumn, one in spring.

These are very calm conversations; so best is to take a pause, install yourself in a quiet corner and enjoy!

Episode-1 on “Why Pause?” is here.

Episode-2 on “What’s in a Pause” is here.

Episode-3 on “Habits” is here.

Episode-4 on “Design” is here.

Episode-5 on “Culture” is here.

Episode-6 on “Tools” is here.

Episode-7 on “Time to Pause” is here.

Episode-8 on “Afterword” is here.

“Everything is an offer”, Robert writes in Pause.

It is an invitation to calm and tranquility as powerful sources of vitality ànd relaxation.

Yes! They can go together.

But sometimes the rhythms of an ordinary day offer stillness as well.

Even the ticking of the Chronos clock as a background soundscape can bring me in a state of calm and stillness.

Like monks doing their miniatures.

I found this online clock that ticks for 12 hours.

It’s the only thing it does.

And in the meantime, I am drawing thousands of little bricks in brick bonds.

It’s useless, I know.

But it brings me in a Zen state, a state of deep calm and happiness.

I am literately and metaphorically losing my time.

In a recent newsletter update about “pottering” in his garden, Robert wrote:

“When I do what I am drawn to, I am absorbed by my surroundings – by what I see, or hear, or smell. My attention is open, soft, pliable. This stills something inside me and I find a kind of quiet calm.”
 
“This stillness is something that is given to me, not something I create. It is a gift; and one I cherish. It is settling, if not nourishing to be reminded that the worries and concerns that bother me so, are mostly of my own invention. And that moving around can help me to be still.”

I am attracted by Robert’s pause, his stillness as a gift.

A place where I want to hang-out, where I can lose my Chronos time.

In the meantime, I got many conversations with Robert. I shared with him my ideas on creating better gatherings, beyond “conferences” as entertainment, but more as learning experiences, resonating beyond the cognitive, and how we can do much better than just copying the analog.

(Not) to my surprise, Robert spent a lot of time as well on how learning can be done better, differently. And together with Alex Carabi, he created Yellow Learning. I mention it quickly here, as Yellow is one of the other keywords in this series Traveling without Moving.

Check it out:

https://www.yellowlearning.org/

I was part of the second cohort ending next week. Yellow is fee based. But worth its money, trust me. If you are interested, the call for the next groups Jan-June 2021 is open now.

Apply here: https://www.yellowlearning.org/apply-to-join

Next time, we’ll talk about “Play”

Hope you enjoy the series.

Warmest,