The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Author: Alexander

  • Circles

    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)

  • Book review: The DaVinci Code

    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!

  • Back in my pants

    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?

  • Blog swap

    As an experiment, Chris Corrigan and I are swapping blogs for a week. I’ll be posting to his blog (Parking Lot), and he’ll be writing here.

    I’ve been having online conversations with Chris for a while, and I ran into him at the Practice of Peace conference outside Seattle in november. He works as a facilitator, change agent and problem solver and is a frontrunner in the use and development of Open Space Technology.

    To me, this blog swap is an experiment in writing to a different space. To go to new (virtual) surroundings and see what that brings. To play with the format, and see if it’s fun. To improvise around a set of topics that may or may not arise from the new place. To simply try something out of the ordinary. Let’s see what happens.

    Welcome Chris, take it away.

  • Quote

    Change that is deeply effective and positive presents a paradoxical challenge. On the one hand, there needs to be an appreciation and acceptance of how things are in the here and now. On the other hand, there needs to be an active intention to make things better. Nothing needs to change, and everything can improve. This is the way to avoid the two extremist traps of activist’s frustration or pessimistic complacency.

    – Patch Adams

    I’m reading Gesundheit by Patch Adams , a combination autobiography and explanation of his lifes work, the creation of the Gesundheit Institute. This is a marvellous book. I keep wanting to jump to he PC and put quotes from it online, and when I read this one I couldn’t contain myself. Patch cuts straight to one of the deepest paradoxes surrounding change in a clear, concise and well formulated way. My hat’s off to this man.

  • Gratitude

    2003 has been a wonderful year for me. Here’s a list of some of the things that I’m really grateful for in 2003, in no particular order:
    * The company of the wonderful and innovative people at Arena. Thomas, Ole, David, Valdemar, Peter, Tine, Guan, Niels and many more. We rock!
    * Moving to an appartment on the 7th. floor. Great sunsets!
    * Meeting Traci, Justin, Christine, Mike and the other wonderful people at the World Dynamics CEO round table.
    * Seeing Seattle with Pam.
    * Seeing the happy at work project take off like it has, and being able to make people happy.
    (more…)

  • Quote

    All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill our history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great political leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing.

    – Moliere

  • About time

    As an ex-nerd, I agree completely with this PvP strip. I my opinion Scott Kurtz keeps getting funnier, and PvP is currently my favourite online comic.

  • Happy at work in 2003

    For those of you who read danish, I wrote this summary of the “Happy at work” project in 2003.

    The short version in english: It’s been one hell of a year. In january it was just me and a few loose ideas, and none of the methods had been tested. Now, there are lots of interesting, skilled and dedicated people working on it, we’ve proven that our methods work, and there are lots of exciting projects coming out of it.

    A HUGE thank you to everyone who participated. I can’t wait to see what we’ll do in 2004, I KNOW it will be wild.

  • Complaining

    I realized a while ago that if you’re against complaining, you can’t even complain about other people complaining. You can’t even complain about not being able to complain about other people complaining, and you can’t complain about that either. Oh, the agony of the positive approach :o)