I would have thought one of these was Synchronicity but that doesn’t seem right.

Phenomenon 1: You learn a new word, idea, author’s name, book title, etc. The next day you see this word in the newspaper, or someone mentions it in conversation, or you spot the term online. Regularly.

Phenomenon 2: You are writing an email with music playing, and as you finish a sentence with the word “dirt” you’ll hear the vocalist sing “dirt.” Or you are chatting in front of the TV and as you utter a word, the characters on the show say the same word.

Are there words for this? Or do we need a neologism?

Tags: coincidence, neologism, term, word

Originally uploaded by LeoL30.

Originally uploaded by LeoL30.

Originally uploaded by LeoL30.

Originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.



Originally uploaded by kerry extraordinary..



Originally uploaded by Buratto.

Today is the fifth anniversary of All This ChittahChattah, although it admittedly bears little resemblance (visually, content, focus) to its earliest days. Man, how time marches on!

Tags: 5, all this chittahchattah, anniversary, Blog

Happy Holidays by Billy Idol is Yet Another Moment where parody withers under the steely glare of reality. I mean, wasn’t this a sketch on SNL Saturday Night Live in the 80s? It should have been.

Tags: billy idol, comedy, music, parody, reality, rock 'n roll, snl

• Not a new trend, but a growing one – rock music repurposed for the younger set
  Parents wanna make little rockers out of their kids (or is this to make them feel better about themselves as still cool? If their kids are cool, are they?)
• Aging rock music fans and aging pop artists struggle with the AARP banner
  Will the money the AARP can bring reinvent the marketing of music to older consumers? Will rock music reinvent the image of the AARP? The “R” is for RAWK not RETIRED, folks!
• Cingular’s TXT2CONNECT – A Parent’s Text Tutorial
  Developed with clinical psychologist Dr. Ruth Peters, tutorial provides parents with tips on how to better communicate with kids via text messaging and to understand popular text messaging lingo
• NYT on the role/challenges of technology-based communication divides in parenting
  Cingular will hold a series of interactive “texting bees” around the country early next year to teach parents how to send text messages to their children (though the TXT2CONNECT stuff says nothing about it that I could find)
• More growth in India – hotels
  International destination for business travel doesn’t have the infrastructure to accommodate. Emphasis to date has been on luxury lodging. More companies, chains, building is coming, but is overdue and will take time
• Before his death Altman was to make a fictionalized version of Hands on a Hardbody
  Amazing documentary, great storytelling about a contest to win a free truck if you touch it the longest. Film is out of print and not on DVD?!! And a contestant in a recent event killed himself?!
• Hands on a Hard Body: The Documentary (1997) (IMDB listing)
  The original film; a great example of ethnographic interviewing, observation, participation, storytelling.

• The American Diabetes Association logo; where it appears and what it endorses
  As product decisions (especially food/health) get more complex, we’ll rely on the simplification of marks to tell us what’s okay; although the validity of many of ‘em seems to be extremely questionable. Perhaps the only marks are us.
• DC Comics plans Minx, graphic novels for young adult female readers
  They are targeted at American girls who read manga
• Putting rudeness in context (and considering its social benefits)
  Calling someone a meathead could be a “way that we establish, affirm and strengthen bonds of friendship and intimacy”
• “The Real Match Game Story: Behind the Blank” on GSN
  Everything we’ll ever need to know about the wacky leerfest that modeled the promiscuous, drunken, risqué, gender-bending behavior of ’70s celebs for an unlikely daytime audience; in the guise of a quiz show.

A few tidbits from this story

On a recent Friday morning in the southern India city of Hyderabad, one of the country’s biggest companies, Reliance, plunged into the retail market by opening 11 neighborhood supermarkets simultaneously across the city.

The stores offer customers long, clean, brightly lit aisles lined with deep black plastic bins full of produce, all clearly labeled with prices. There are even modern juice bars near the exits.

“I’m already a Reliance fan,” said one early customer, Amrit Dugar, a wedding planner. “I use them for my telecom and petrol.”

Such a different notion of brand. Phone company, gas station, grocery store? Seems like these large companies in India have unique combinations of holdings, but their brands transcend their categories.

India has only a few dozen very large supermarkets, but Reliance plans to change not just the scale of what Indian retailers have seen before, but also the way they get products to market.

The Reliance Fresh stores are a mere fraction the size of the average Western supermarket, but huge compared to the majority of Indian shops; fewer than 5 percent of the country’s stores are more than 500 square feet. In three to six months, Reliance Retail will open a few flagship stores with about 100,000 square feet of space each (the average Wal-Mart is 85,000 square feet) focusing on foods, not manufactured goods.

It plans to spend $5.6 billion to open more than 4,000 stores in 1,500 towns, cities and villages over the next four years, exceeding 100 million square feet of retail space.

The article goes on to describe the coming of retail in a big way, beyond just Reliance, and the impact that this can have on small businesses, and on employment in India. The numbers in this story, the size of the country and the tiny-ness of the current retail footprint and the plans — all are mind-boggling.

Tags: grocery store, india, reliance, retail, shopping

• Dagwood-branded restaurant opens, targeted at Baby Boomers
  Blondie started appearing in newspapers in 1930. This brand extension has been a long time coming! Big plans to franchise the restaurant; we shall see how big they can get.
• Battersea Power Station, seen on Floyd’s “Animals” album cover
  It’s a landmark, but ongoing plans to redevelop it seem to get stalled and stalled – will this latest effort bear fruit?
• Insiders from surfing, skateboarding develop popular products
  They know their market because they are the market, and they are a subculture. How to grow without selling out, if selling out (going mainstream) means the death of the essence of the brand?
• Keller Fay asks people to keep diaries; documents how brands fit into everyday life
  What brands do people talk about and how do they talk about them? Keller Fay will sell you the data, but what you do with this data is not so obvious; you can track word-of-mouth, but how do you create it?
• Groups and Belongingness – a collection of photos
  The first one is misleading, but the rest are interesting examples of a basic human behavior – the formation of tribes – and an emergent human behavior – posing for photos.

See part 1 here of my experience at the AIN2006 Applied Improv conference. See part 2 here and see part 3 here.

This was the first time in a long time I’d attended a conference where I really didn’t know anyone (nor was I presenting), and as an introvert, this was pretty challenging. Factor in the general distance in tone and aim from my typical conference setting and you’ll see why I was half-in, half-out of the whole thing. Given that it was local, I passed on a lot of the social stuff and instead came home; I didn’t feel the need to be in a hotel ballroom at 8:00 am for the first presentations. I picked carefully what sessions I would go to; of course that means I had few opportunities to meet people and interact casually and become more connected to the sessions. It’s a balance for us introverts; one day I happened to come down the stairs with people and end up joining them for lunch, just because of timing; the next day I came back after lunch a few minutes early and stood by myself for a while before the sessions started (this happened at the breaks as well).

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not blaming anyone for that and I’m comfortable with letting it happen. I’m extremely fortunate that most professional things I go there are more people I know and want to talk with than I will have the chance to.

The only reason to even go into this introvert perspective on a conference is to frame my overall reaction to the way the group interacted; I was an observer as well as a participant (as a good ethnographer should be).

This group was very earnest and enthusiastic, with lots of affirmation, applause, and laughter. When many of the people in attendance are performers and/or facilitators, the dynamic between presenter and audience skews pretty dramatically from the norm. Example 1: in the storytelling presentation, someone asked a question about how we remember stories, and someone in the audience spoke up and said there was a useful exercise she would like us all try – speaking the words to Happy Birthday “go ahead and do it…”. It illustrated her response, but the dynamic was unusual. She was asking the group to do something; that is normally reserved for the presenter. Example 2: in the session on polarity management vs. problem solving, someone offered to spend a few minutes after the session formally wrapped to share some thing she had heard a professor for University of Toronto say about the concept.

The encouragement from others gave some sessions the feeling of a Patti Smith concert; where quiet comments directed at the presenter were spoken from time to time (“Andrew, you rock”). Although some presenters were taken aback by this attitude in general and found difficulty in getting through their material. Some talks were repeats of other talks given elsewhere – to non-improv audiences, and the presenters seemed surprised when things didn’t work as they had expected. “Oh, I forgot you are all improvisers” was a comment I heard a couple of times.

There was some funny jargon where everything was a type of work. “Let’s start off on the chairs and then we’ll move to some floor work.” “After this introduction we’ll get into our story work” – just like Michael Richards informing us on Letterman that he had to do some “personal work.”

The last day was held as “open space”; unscheduled time slots that could be claimed by anyone who showed up and wanted to run something, very much in the spirit of the unconference (as I suppose, was this participation ethic that many audience folk brought with them).

In the storytelling session, one person got up and told a story as part of a group exercise. Her story dealt with an experience she had facilitating a workshop (ya see what I mean?) and was interestingly characteristic of much of this group, I believe. In her story, there was some tension between some of the audience members who wanted another participant’s noisy child to leave. The mother of the child was living in her car and was desperate to be in this session (the goal of which was transformancing or something I hadn’t heard of). The person telling this story related how they were in this situation and being asked to make a decision that seemed impossible, but rather than acting she allowed herself to “go wide” and remain “in the field” and just then a man walked up and offered to look after the child, solving the problem. The emphasis of the story seemed to be the external spiritual force out there somewhere that changed the situation to a successful one. There was no acknowledgment of personal choice or responsibility, and also no pleasure in the mysteries of fate, but credit given to an inner peaceful state that let it all happen. It was a fascinating way of processing an experience and if I allowed myself to get past my negative reactions to the way the story was told (a bias against anything too New Age) I could somewhat identify with how she saw things. But I would never process something that way, let alone relate it that way.

Given the pretty vast cultural differences with the folks I encounter in design, research, marketing, and strategy circles, (where, for example, you’d never see the font Comic Sans being used) I’m fascinated by the notion that there’s some real overlap with the services being offered and the types of organizations we’re all working in.

Tags: ain2006, applied improv network, conference, improv

Yahoo has a strange bug or design flaw in their logic for adding to your My Yahoo page. It’s been like this forever and I’m amazed that they haven’t bothered to fix it.

From the My Yahoo page, the weather module lets you see your current selected cities, and also search for others. Here I’m searching for Holland, MI (where we’ll be spending the third week in December).


Here’s the results for Holland. And in the top right is a button to add this city to my My Yahoo weather.

But clicking that doesn’t add Holland. It takes me to a page where I can remove existing cities, or begin a completely new process to add any city I want.

So here I have to type in Holland, again (!), and ask for search results.

Here’s the result. Once again I have the option to add it to my My Yahoo weather.

Only this time it actually works.

Tags: bug, flaw, interaction design, my yahoo, weather, yahoo

See part 1 here of my experience at the AIN2006 Applied Improv conference. See part 2 here and part 4 here.

Carla Rieger (who positions herself as a motivation speaker and “Artistry of Change Expert”) led a half-day version of a full-day seminar entitled Captivate Your Audience Through Stories. Stories are memorable, she says, because they are an (imaginary) kinesthetic experience that goes into long-term memory more efficiently.

Carla alluded to four different styles of storytellers, although we didn’t get a ton of detail about the differences (the titles are quite descriptive, however).

1. asserter
2. demonstrator
3. contemplator
4. narrator

The workshop wasn’t about storytelling in general, but applying it specifically to training and facilitation (which may have been a common factor for many of the participants, but is still a bit narrow).

Carla couldn’t define to our satisfaction the difference between an anecdote and a story, but she was distinguishing between the two. An anecdote seemed to be a short relating of some sequence of events, whereas a story at the very least led to a concluding point.

She outlined a 5-part story structure

1. Set the platform: the status quo (Dorothy is in Kansas, in black and white).
2. Tilt the platform: a new element or conflict (the tornado takes Dorothy to Oz)
3. Consequences: the bulk of the narrative (Dorothy goes to Emerald City to see the Wizard)
4. Getting Back to Stability: a new heroic act (Dorothy melts the witch and goes back to the Wizard with the broom)
5. New Platform: the new status quo; what is different as a result of this story (Dorothy is back home and there’s no place like it)

Individually we brainstormed ideas for stories, then got into groups of 3 and picked one to tell each other. Our team listened and then fed us back our story in those five parts. This was pretty hard. My story (about a strange movie-going experience) normally ends on a punch-line, but suddenly I had to add a denouement; I really wasn’t prepared for that. Others told stories with multiple tilts. The point was to figure out how to evolve the story so that it did fit into the structure, of course. Oh, and we also acted out the story through a series of tableaux (one for each stage in the structure); it wasn’t exactly clear what this provided. Others reported varying experiences with the actual improv part of the exercise. I had some small insight about the challenges of the structure; since the final step was very conceptual and hard to act, it said something back to us about the challenge of creating that part of the story.

Next steps, after the workshop, were for all of us to then try and write up our story (and Carla suggested we actually tell the story into a voice recorder and type that up, for a more natural flow). She offered to review our stories and send us a few presentations and PDFs if we sent something in to her. I think this Friday is the deadline and I’m not sure I have the motivation to write the story up; I’ve got a bunch of stories I feel I’ve committed to telling in one form or another. But we’ll see.

The notion of a proper structure for a story is interesting. Certainly one has to learn a basic vocabulary before starting to tweak it or personalize it. I feel confident about my own storytelling abilities, but they are not trained or schooled; I don’t know the principles and can’t improve my stories by focusing on specific tasks.

I noticed Nicolas Nova’s recent post about story flows, where the action of famous stories are graphically represented. It would be interesting to look at these in terms of Carla’s structure and see if there’s any alignment between these models.

Tags: ain2006, applied improv network, carla rieger, improv, stories, storytelling

See part 1 here of my experience at the AIN2006 Applied Improv conference. See part 3 here and part 4 here.

The Innovise Guys (Doug Stevenson and Gregg Fraley) ran a session that was described as an introduction to Innovisation(tm), although I’m not really sure what it was specifically about. They started after lunch and so things were late. And trying to facilitate a room full of facilitators was challenging, since everyone wanted to take the discussion in new ways, and each bit of facilitator-ese they offered up (“okay, let’s rock and roll, since we’re getting low on time”) was countered with a participant’s own facilitator-speak (“Gregg, if I could just honor that rock with some roll of my own, and ask….”). It wasn’t entirely clear what the session was supposed to accomplish; I think their idea was the power in combining improv activities with stuff from Creative Problem Solving (you may remember I considered attending their conference earlier this year). The exercises didn’t seem to work, however. In one, the group was given a problem (“help me find an inexpensive fuel-efficient car”) and asked to throw out words. Some words applied to the problem but by design the suggestions drifted into the random and silly. Then we stopped and looked at the list of words and use them, one-by-one, as seeds for generating actual solutions. In another, an improv game was staged where the actors were product development people trying to slogan, package, advertise, and create a jingle for a new cereal product. They were instructed to respond with the usual “yes, and…” but with extra enthusiasm. And we the audience were supposed to…do something…build on these ideas somehow. The whole approach left me somewhat cold (and soggy in milk?) since I’m not convinced coming up with ideas is anyone’s big challenge. Connecting those ideas to an actual problem, prioritizing ideas, and sorry for being obvious here but ensuring those ideas have some resonance with the people you are targeting them at…those are the tough problems. Play-acting as marketing people may be fun and feel creative, but it doesn’t automatically solve the right problems the right way. Maybe I’m being too literal and the point is to think of the right setting to use this stuff. It’s one thing, then, to offer facilitation tips for meetings, but another to frame it as a trademarked methodology for innovation.

Although they were charming and personable as facilitators, I still don’t buy into the whole creative-consultant-as-clown routine. These guys have created characters for themselves, gently, with a caricature-style logo (above, although neither of them have brown hair any longer, so…), and matching outfits (big black bowling shirts with slogans stitched on ‘em, baggy khaki pants, and matching brightly colored silly shoes). Why?

Tags: ain2006, applied improv network, doug stevenson, gregg fraley, improv, innovise

See part 2 here of my experience at the AIN2006 Applied Improv conference. See part 3 here and part 4 here.

Last week I went to AIN2006, the annual conference of the Applied Improv Network. This was my first time attending any such conference, and I was a little uncertain what to expect. Indeed, since the event was local I hedged my bets somewhat by picking carefully what sessions I wanted to attend and passing on the banquet/comedy night/scavenger hunt/etc. More on the overall experience later.

I showed up (faint with hunger, and late since I was at school that evening) at the end of the pre-conference day for an evening of mixer stuff. The energy was very positive as different people led the room (of maybe 60 people) through a range of exercises. In one, we had a bingo card with different personal characteristics (“likes country and western,” “allergic to cats,” “commutes across a bridge”) and we had to fill the cells with names. Good ice-breaker, as people would exchange with each other rather than name-and-bolt. Although there was some eager shoving that was a bit surprising. In another game we had to close our eyes, fold our arms to our body, and walk to the center of the room, and when you encountered someone else you could attract or repel, eventually we ended up as a coagulated mob in the middle of the room. This was very challenging; both to keep your eyes closed, and to allow an incredible violation of social distance. Indeed, by having my eyes closed gave me some permission to violate the norm, since I could somehow surrender any responsibility. When I was surrounded by people on either side and could not choose where to move, I had to accept that other people were touching me, and just let it happen. I was intrigued to notice where my own boundaries were, and what the triggers were (or mitigating factors), but much of the debrief emphasized the sensual nature of experience, with lots of giggling. Perhaps many of those folks knew each other and had spent the day together, and were at a different point of trust than I was, having just walked in.

The sessions I attended were less experiential than that (although all were far more participatory and physical than anything I’ve done at any other conference). Andrew Welch talked about improv applied to quadrants (one person next to me asked me sotto voce “what’s a quadrant?”). I don’t know if that term is local to the improv world, to the type of leadership consulting Andrew does, or what. Quadrants in this case refers to some 2 x 2 model, two perpendicular axes that lead to a four quadrant model representing behavior, goals, personality types, or whatever.

Andrew asked the group (most of whom seemed to be some type of applied improv training facilitator consultant) what the challenges are in “our” industry that don’t seem to go away. And the answers were amazingly consistent with what I’ve heard in any sort of consulting discussion (design, user experience, usability, ethnography, etc.). Clients ask for the world, but have no time. Clients want to change culture, or behavior, but have no budget. This dovetailed into an exercise about how to explain and sell services to a prospective client; there’s something very universal about these challenges, although as usual, the default is to beat up clients for not “getting it” and I’m pretty tired of that rhetoric.

Andrew introduced the difference between a problem, and a polarity. If there’s no upside, then it’s a problem. If there is an upside, it’s a polarity. Take gossip for an example – there are benefits to gossip; there’s a reason people do it and get something out of it. A problem, in his framework, was something like a conveyor belt that wasn’t wide enough to accommodate the pizza. Cultural issues were almost always going to be polarities, it seems.

Problem solving:

• Working towards a final answer, decision, or outcome
• Requires an Either/Or mindset
• Policies, rules, facts, solution to problem

Polarity Management:

• Managing unsolvable problems, optimizing the tension between 2 interdependent opposites
• Requires a Both/And mindset
• Stability and Change; Activity and Rest; Planning and Action

This frame-shift was presented as a key to more effective leadership.

In the second half of his talk, Andrew started with a curious exercise. He ran four scenes with two people who had a certain relationship and a certain location. In the first version, the actors were given the location and relationship. In the second version (I tried this one), one actor knew the relationship and the other actor knew the location. In the third version, an audience member knew both and would ding a bell if the dialog was “right”, and in the fourth version the actors drew dialog from slips of paper to constantly evolve the entire story.

This demonstrated four different problem types:
KNOWN: Both players knew who and where
KNOWABLE: Players could learn who and where from each other
COMPLEX: Players could possibly discern who and where (in hindsight) by probing
CHAOTIC: Who and where were unpredictable, as was dialogue

and with that comes four different approaches to problem solving:
KNOWN: Sense – Categorize – Respond
KNOWABLE: Sense – Analyze – Respond
COMPLEX: Probe – Sense – Respond
CHAOTIC: Act – Sense – Respond

[and part of the point here was the use of improv to demonstrate this model more tangibly than a basic slide deck, or say, um, a blog entry]

There were certain types of jobs that tended strongly towards one of these types
KNOWN: Sense – Categorize – Respond — Loan officer, FDA inspector
KNOWABLE: Sense – Analyze – Respond — Architect
COMPLEX: Probe – Sense – Respond — Kindergarten teacher
CHAOTIC: Act – Sense – Respond — Firefighter

This is known as The Cynefin Framework.

Both of these models remind me of to Wicked Problems, a framework I was excited to encounter (though admittedly I haven’t found any way to apply it other than in conversation).

I’ll describe the other talks and the conference in general in subsequent posts.

Tags: ain2006, andrew welch, applied improv network, cynefin, improv, polarity management

Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry. Studio 60.

Bradley Whitford (a different one) and Joe Perry. Aerosmith.

Hmm.

Tags: aerosmith, bradley whitford, matthew perry, names, studio 60 on the sunset strip

Stockstock is a film festival consisting of short films made entirely from stock footage. We select a limited amount of stock footage and give it to you; your job is to make it into some kind of short video presentation.

Anne and I submitted and won in 2003. Maybe it’s time to think about doing it again.

Tags: competition, editing, film, film festival, movie, stockstock, video