"Planning is the ordering of resources over time. Success is getting things to follow in the right order." Paul Case

For many years I thought of planning as a linear process. It could be collaborative or not, but generally it was a typical project management process. Then when I read Kevin Kelly's book, Out of Control, in 1993 and read chapter four: Assembling Complexity, I learned to think about planning differently. It is the story of restoring a prairie. Nature has a lot to share! Nature does not work in a linear fashion, achieving one goal at a time. Rather, it cycles through plateaus each one attracting a new higher order plateau. Actually, to me, nature seems to have a more fun creating than most project teams have.

"Anthropologists have found 'galumphing' to be one of the prime talents that characterize higher life forms. Galumphing is the immaculately rambunctious and seemingly inexhaustible play-energy apparent in puppies, kittens, children, baby baboons - and also in young communities and civilizations. Galumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity. It is profligate, excessive, exaggerated, uneconomical... In the higher animals and in people, it is of supreme evolutionary value."
Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Matt and I have long used the word 'galumph' to describe our cats racing through the house with a certain gait, or when they chase grasshoppers or snowflakes with a wild spirited abandon. However, this is the first time I have come across the meaning and context of the word. I think back to the organizations and communities that began with a galumphing. The Well, Wired Magazine, GBN, The Calvert Fund, The Whole Earth Catalog, the Open Source phenomenon, The Learning Exchange, MG Taylor Corporation, Architectz of Group Genius are a few that come to mind. Years after their origin - even though some are now deceased - the memory of them brings them back to life. They all galumphed themselves into being. Each brought delight to both the production and user communities. There was an eagerness to engage, to play, to build on the ideas.

My recent run-ins with all things Slow began shortly after returning from the World Economic Forum on Africa. A colleague I'd met there sent me an essay on "The Importance of a Certain Slowness" by Paul Cilliers, which touches on the Slow Movement and then presents, from a systems perspective, an argument that "the cult of speed, and especially the understanding that speed is related to efficiency, is a destructive one." Furthermore, "a slower approach is necessary, not only for survival, but also because it allows us to cope with a complex world better."

How and where does the quality of slowness fit into events and experiences typically constrained in time and beholden to enormous expectations of outcome? In other words, what is the role of slow in an event designed specifically to compress weeks, months or even years worth of design and decision making into a few days?