I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So I think the very motion of our life is towards happiness…

- The Dalai Lama, quoted in The art of happiness

I could not agree more. Our nature is to be happy and peaceful and to work together for mutual benefit.

Thomas found this excellent article on social entrepreneurship, ie. the pursuit of a social mission using business-like methods.

According to the article, the characteristics of social entrepreneurs are:
* Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value),
* Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission,
* Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning,
* Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
* Exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.

Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. This is exactly the territory I find myself exploring with the happy at work project. Yes, we operate as a business, charging companies for our services, but we’re not in it for the money, wa want to make people happy at work. It’s nice to see that someone has put some thought into this area, and I certainly recognize much of the thinking in the article.

The web of life by Fritjof Capra is an important book. In a well structured and readable manner, he takes on some of the largest questions related to life, and manages to do so in a clear and understandable way, that removes none of the majesty of the topic under discussion: Life.

From systems theory, the Gaia hypothesis and complexity theory to evolution, autopoiesis and the strange phenomenon we call a mind (which in his thinking is a process, not a thing), Capra describes the main theories needed for a totally new understanding of life. This is heady reading, and it has certainly influenced my thinking in the area.

Here’s one of my favourite quotes from the book:
The recognition of symbiosis as a major evolutionary force has profound philosophical implications. All larger organisms, including ourselves, are living testimonies to the fact that destructive practices do not work in the long run. In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity.

Brilliant. Capra is talking about the creation and evolution of life, but the same theme occurs in many of the books I’ve been reading lately, namely that the world is not a struggle for survival and that the strategy that will get you the farthest is one of cooperation and co-creation. As Piet Hein put it:
Co-existence
or no existence.

I belive that totally and deeply. Another property that I’m thinking about more and more is robustness – the fact that complex systems can withstand extreme external influences and yet retain their essential structures. This stands in sharp contrast to some human-manufactured systems, which fail if just one little thing goes wrong- as when a space shuttle blows up because of a faulty O-ring.

This book has many lessons to teach us, and will stand up to many re-readings. Parts of it are complex and not easily accessible, but it is well worth the effort. I recommend it highly!

I just discovered a bit of a poem, that makes the perfect conclusion to the blog swap experiment:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Elliot, Four Quarters

I believe, that the ability to tell a good story is one of the most important tools available to leaders (and remember: We’re all leaders). Stories have the ability to bring a point across without forcing the issue. Where rational arguments fail, stories can contain boths sides of a dilemma and can illuminate an interesting paradox without having to solve it. You might argue that stories open, where facts close.

“The story factor” by Annette Simmons is the best book on storytelling that I’ve read. It contains all the reasons why stories are good tools as well as a list of situations where you can use stories effectively (and how). Finally there’s a lot of info on how to find the good stories and how to tell them. And of course the book itself contains loads of stories, most of which are highly entertaining, and useful for many situations.

As an example, here’s a story that I heard recently, and immediately incorporated into the “happy at work” workshops. It’s the story of the ostrich who learned to fly. Normally ostriches can’t, and this ostrich wanted to share his new knowledge with all the other ostriches, so he arranged a flying conference in Africa. Other ostriches walked in from all over Africa, and over the course of a couple of days, he taught all of them to fly. Then on the last day, he stood and watched, as all the ostriches walked home.

I use this story to illustrate the gap between learning and action, and it illustrates the point in a funny and interesting way, without browbeating people about how difficult it is to translate learning into doing. It sets the stage perfectly for the “planning the future” part of the workshop.

Compared to one of the seminal works on storytelling, Stephen Denning’s “The Springboard”, Annette Simmons’ book is much more useful and contains more tips that will get you started as a storyteller. If you’re at all interested in the potential and practice of storytelling, this is the book for you.

I just finished reading Gesundheit! by Patch Adams, and it left me totally high. I saw the movie Patch Adams starring Robin Williams a while ago, but I never realized that there was a real doctor by that name, striving to create a totally revolutionary hospital – the Gesundheit Institute.

Patch Adams is mostly known for introducing humour in the treatment of his patients, but this book reveals that his philosophy goes way beyond that. It is about the whole person. This is hardly a new notion, but it is certainly waaaay different from how medicine is practiced in most places today. For example, when a new patient arrived, rather than conducting an interview in an office, Patch would take that person fishing or for a walk in the woods, depending on what that patient enjoys doing. The interview would cover symptoms and medical history but would also include talking about the persons hopes and dreams, spirituality, upbringing and much more.

Some parts of the book that really stuck in my mind are:
* Fun death. Why does dying need to be an unpleasant experience? Sure you want to postpone it as long as possible, but is it impossible to create an environment in which dying is as much a part of life as everything else, and is appreciated as such? Patch writes at one point that “Dying is that process a few minutes before death when the brain is deprived of oxygen; everything else is living”.

* A description of a hypothetical patient og the Gesundheit Institute, a 37 year old man with an ulcer. The treatment would consist of he and his family staying at the institute for a week or ten days. While he gets treated, the family can enjoy the nature and generally have fun.

* Patch on greed: “Greed is one of society’s worst malignancies, and it appears to have metastasized to every corner of the earth… Certainly one of greeds most devastating symptoms is cynicism… We believe that a society must care for its population enough to take care of its need.”

* On loneliness: “I remember an eleven-year old girl who had a huge bony tumor of the face with one eye floating out in the mass. Most people found it difficult to be with her because of her appearance. Her pain was not in the dying but in the loneliness of being a person others could not bear to see. She and I played an joked and enjoyed her life away.”

Patch is still working to raise the funds that will allow him to build the institute, and I’m simply flabbergasted that he hasn’t yet succeeded. Having read the book, it is obvious to me that his way of practicing medicine is not only better for the patient, it is also better for the medical staff (who suffer hard from burnout today) and (incredibly) more efficient and cheaper than todays bloated health care system. If I ever get sick, I certainly want to be treated the Gesundheit way!

I’ve had a lot of positive experiences with meetings where participants sit in a circle without a table. This is also the seating arrangement in Open Space meetings, and on the Open Space mailing list, there’s been a discussion recently about what circles do for a meeting, sparked by a question from Chris. And here’s my thinking on it.

I’ve noticed that sitting in a circle puts you in there 100%. There is no place to hide in a circle, which can be quite disconcerting to somebody who comes to a meeting expecting to just sit back and zone out. You can read an account by a participant in an Open Space meeting I facilitated here to get an idea of how this can feel (the story also happens to be really funny).

Geometrically, circles minimize the surface to area ratio. If you want to fence in as large an area as possible and you only have a set amount of fencing materials make your fence a circle, this will give you the largest possible area inside the fence. What this means in a group process is not totally clear to me, but maybe it minimizes the “exposure” to the world outside the circle, keeping most of the attention inside. The reason that igloos are round (or spherical, rather) is that the round shape gives you the smallest possible surface, and thus the smallest heat loss.

Circles can also create a lot of resistance. A lot of people react adversely when asked to sit in a circle. Some people think kindergarten, others think 12-step meeting. Usually this resistance evaporates after about 5 minutes, though.

In my opinion, many of the benefits we see from circles are largely due to the fact that there is no table between participants. I’m pretty sure that sitting at a round table is only marginally better than sitting at a square one. I’m sure this is not news to anybody on this list, but to me, having no tables means:
* a smaller distance between participants
* you can see the whole body-language
* you can’t slump over the table and zone out

Here’s a funny thought: If you had Open Space meetings in space (in zero-g) participants could sit in a sphere, rather than a circle. That would fit even more people in :o)

It seems like Dan Brown is trying to develop a new format: The ultra-condensed thriller. The action in his last book, Deception Point, took place over 48 hours, and most of the story in The Da Vinci Code unfolds over only 12 hours. Considering this, Brown still manages to pack an enormous amount of action into such a short time span. The book takes off within the first few pages, and it simply doesn’t let up until the (quite satisfying) conclusion. The action drives you forward, and there’s always a new event or question that you’re just burning to discover the explanation for.

Robert Langdon (a symbologist who was also the protagonist of Angels and Demons) becomes involved in a case of murder and gruesome self-mutilation at the Louvre, and to clear himself of blame, he must find clues in the bible, in ancient organizations such as the catholic church and the Priory of Sion and in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, whose art never quite is what it seems.

The book works wonderfully as a thriller, but it works on another level as well: The alternative view on historical facts like bible history and the art of Leonardo da Vinci is extremely thought provoking. The book would work fine without it, it’s just that it adds a wonderful depth and believability that is rarely seen in a thriller. This is one of the best suspense novelse I’ve ever read, and I recommend it highly!

The experiment is over. This weel Chris Corrigan and I swapped blogs, mostly just for the hell of it. Chris wrote very eloquently about his learnings here, forever changing the way I think of blogs by introducing the pants metaphor, and I summed up my experience here.

All in all an interesting experience, and I’m glad we did it. What do you think about it?

We’ve come to the end of the week-long blog swapping experiment between me and Alexander. And so I have a few preliminary observations before I return to Parking Lot:

1. It feels like a thing
I was surprised how much it felt like someone else was in my house. This is an inexplicable feeling, for as Alex pointed out early in the week, there is no real “space” in cyberspace. And yet, I think our brains are not yet wired to think of the Internet as “vapourware” We have to find a physical correlation between web sites and physical locations in the world. Thus we use terms like “building,” “under construction”, “site”, “home page”, and so on to describe this non-space. And because our interactions on the Internet are couched in these metaphors, it seems that my website is actually a place, and Alex has been over there rearranging the furniture while I’ve been raiding his fridge and leaving notes on the back of the door.

2. I’m attached to my weblog
This is perhaps the most interesting learning. I couldn’t help feeling a little disconcerted that Alex was writing on my blog, and that the site seemed to be updating itself without me. It felt a little as if my online identity had been poached, and as a result I actually added a “posted by” field at Parking Lot so people would know who was writing there.

This has nothing to do with the quality of Alex’s posts over at Parking Lot, which were excellent and even created a pretty substantial comments thread in one case. It’s just that I had a hard time giving up my weblog to someone else, perhaps worried a little that people would mistake Alex’s voice for mine, or more precisely maybe a fer that that my voice would turn out to be less important than I thought it was. How’s that for some honest ego searching?

Also, I was reluctant to post stuff here that continues a narrative thread from other things I have been doing at Parking Lot. I already wrote about this in this post’s comments.

3. Testing, testing…is this me speaking?
I know Alex trusted me to write what I wanted to in this space, but I have to admit that I wasn’t sure exactly what to do here. Should I try and build on things he was doing, like post something on happiness? Should I follow my own interests, like posting something on Aboriginal music? Should I try to do something new? I tried it all out.

Over time, I’m sure my voice would have settled down in this space, but it’s like wearing clothes that look good on someone else: they affect how one carries onself, and it comes through as maybe seeming inauthentic. How much of what I wrote here was honest-to-goodness blog fodder and how much was contrived for the experiment? How much arose because I was writing in an unfamiliar place, heavily influenced by another’s voice?

And what about design? I designed Parking Lot to work specifically for the kinds of writing I do. Therefore I use another typeface when quoting and I have lots of whitespace, which enourages expansive thinking. Alex’s blog is not designed for my style in particular, and it’s interesting to note that I actually wrote differently here than I would have at Parking Lot.

4. Ahhhhh…
Perhaps the best analogy I can make is that it feels a little like the expereince of trying a new pair of pants on. In the dressing room at the clothes store, you can get a sense of how the pants look and feel but you really have no idea how they will wear in the real world. Plus, new pants are scratchy and uncomfortable. After trying them on it’s always a relief to get back into the old pair of jeans you wore into the store. Now I wouldn’t say that this experiment has made me want to get into Alex’s pants (though he is an attractive guy!) but the metaphor “wears” well and has “legs” for me anyway!

(I should have punned more….!)

5. In conclusion, I’d like to thank the Academy…
Well, Alex anyway. I was totally unsure of this experiment and decided to just plunge into it without any agenda. I’ve actually learned a lot about attachment, the true nature of the Internet and the limitations in the metaphors we use to conceive of “webspace.” Alex has added some great stuff to my blog, and I hope what I’ve put here won’t be purged from archives!

So thanks Alex for letting me play around here and for conceiving the idea in the first place. And thanks to our readers who have scratched their heads all week wondering what the hell we were up to.

I invite Alex to post his findings at Parking Lot.

Cheers!

Chris