Wayfinding, part seven

In which we offer a process for the play and practice of wayfinding

“Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.” –David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning

The practice of wayfinding is not new. Many people practice it without naming it.  They intuitively sense how to bring ideas together in new and critical ways. By making the practice of wayfinding known, by giving it a name, and working it together we believe there is likelihood of dramatically increasing the number of individuals who are attracted to it and who will use it to engage with the future, step into the unknown, and appreciate the opportunity to shape the future towards a better, more fit world.

Below is a way of getting started with wayfinding. If one of your roles is facilitating large groups,  we encourage you to incorporate wayfinding exercises such as this.  While one can certainly do wayfinding as an individual or in a small group, the excitement comes as people work together,  watching divergent and individual ideas connect, collide and meld into each other and entirely new possibilities emerge from obscurity.  In practicing wayfinding, people come to see how one idea can go in different directions depending on connections made.

In this offering, we are creating a hypothetical three-hour convening with around 30 participants. 

Prepare by immersing yourself in websites such as
• Edge - http://www.edge.org
• The Reality Club - http://www.edge.org/discourse/about.html
• Long Now seminars - http://www.longnow.org/seminars
• Raymond Kurzweil’s site - http://www.kurzweilai.net
• TEDTalks - http://www.ted.com
• Kevin Kelly's site - http://www.kk.org

Here and any number of other places, you will find thinkers and doers whose passion and avocation is to expand the notion of who and what we are as humans, and to amplify ideas, processes and accomplishments throughout the world. It is through wayfinding that these individual ideas can be contextualized, connected and cohered, and a greater understanding of our world’s situations, challenges and possibilities can be gained.

Several days ahead of your convening, invite participants to do the same thing. Know that some will and others won’t. This is OK. 
 
To begin your wayfinding, you will need the ability to work big – such as a large white board or a roll of butcher paper.  We typically work with a surface of 12 - 20 linear feet and 6ft top to bottom.  Across the top of your work surface mark years, going back and forward in time at least 25 years. (We’ve done this practice for as large a span of time as seven generations, but that requires a lot of wall space!) Have an abundant supply of sticky notes in many colors. Use these to signify subject areas such as economy, technology, culture, politics, learning & education, science, etc.
 
Step 1: (Before the group arrives) Choose a few ideas sparked from your exploration and place them on your Working Big wall using the color coding system you developed.  
 
Some examples could be:
• TIME Magazine “Person of the Year” is “You” thanks to YouTube, 2005.
• On-line games and simulations a major part of elementary curriculum in many countries by 2015.
• MTV, 1980
• Apple Macintosh, “a computer for the rest of us,” 1984.
• Maldives fall below sea level, 2029.
• Tiananmen Square,  1989.
• US defense budget cut by 25% in 2020.
• “Edible landscapes” outnumber grass lawns in US, 2022.
• 100 billionth song downloaded from iTunes 2030

Step 2:  (30 minutes) Welcome participants and Introduce the exercise to them. Explain the categories and color coding system and then give them 20 minutes to blitz the walls. Remind them to write so others can read the ideas.  They can add as many ideas as they want ... work back and forth across the entire time line.  Let one idea spark another. Don’t worry about the contradictions.  Add wild card ideas. Think world wide, even if group is very local. 

Step 3: (10 minutes) have the group stand back and view the wall.  Participants can ask others for clarification of words, but this is not a time to debate.

Step 4:  (30 minutes) Take some time to see together what is on the wall.  Ask a participant to name something that s/he put on the wall and name something(s) else that they did not put up that seems to connect to their item.  These occurrences can be years apart or very close.   Repeat with at least five more participants, as time allows. The purpose of this step is to begin to see the the ideas not as single linear events but as connected stories each intertwining with the others. 

Step 4 (5 minutes) Ask each  participant to write down four or five items from the wall that fall into one of the following categories:
something they really want to happen ... something they believe will help shape a better world;
something they are afraid of and feel it will lead towards a worst case scenario;
something where they see the most possibility to influence an outcome.

Step 5: (40 minutes) Group participants in teams of four or five and have them share what they selected from the group timeline. If possible, work in breakouts and have wall space available for the teams to create a timeline using what they individually selected from the group wall.  After all the the individual items have been posted or shared,  have the team select two “big” ideas/events from the future that they all could invest in and identify things that need to happen before hand if these big ideas are to happen.  How can the individual ideas and events that need to happen tie together to make the big ideas more likely? If you’ve chosen “negative” events that put us on course for worst-case situations,  what are the ideas and events that if connected could redirect our course?

Provide some means for the teams to create a document or artifact of their work that can be shared with the other teams.
 
Step 6:  Bring the group back together and have each team take about 10 minutes to share the timelines and ideas they developed.

Step 7+: From here the process takes on a life of its own and you can go in several directions as the group begins to dialog.  We have seen this exercise go on for hours, even when participants had set limits for themselves.  As you flesh out these histories, look for and speculate on where they intersect or influence one another.

This is not a right/wrong debate; rather think of it as a a process to create a scaffolding – a way to get a foothold into the future. It begins a conversation from within a potential future. It is the dialog about the relationships between ideas that matter.  It may take a while to get started, to get your brains and intuitions working together.  With these thought experiments, you can begin to see how one paradigm shapes ideas and creates a pattern in which other ideas must follow. Disruptive ideas, once they take hold, create whole new ecosystems of simple ideas and products. Many of the products might have been on the drawing table for a decade or more, yet unable to mature because they lacked a seminal idea to provide a foundation.
 
When President Kennedy challenged his country to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth, the NASA team thought almost every key component would need to be invented and many were frightened by the challenge. Yet, once project leaders put forth a request for proposals to the rest of the world, they learned that most of the parts were either in circulation or simply waiting for a bigger idea to come along that would transform their context, purpose or marketplace. The moon project was long before the Panarchy paradigm had power to grow. The tools and technologies were simply not available for widespread participation.  Had they been, would the moon project have continued to evolve and give guidance to a more sustainable world?  Certainly the one shot of earth from space was a game changer.  The NASA story provides a way to explore alternative scenarios.  Change one or two key happenings and the entire world changes. 
 
As you work your ideas, include possibilities that scare you, that go against your values, or could just as likely lead to a dark outcome.  Make your scenario a map of best case/worst case and explore the moments where these possibilities bifurcate.  Although you can’t control the future, through taking part early in the design cycle you can,  add influence. Take part in creating the future by design, not default.  The more lay people engage with these ideas, the more transparent we make the future, the more likely we can steer toward best case. 

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Wayfinding, part six

In which we tell our stories of wayfinding

“If great ideas usually arrive in fragments, a partial cluster of neurons, then part of the secret to having great ideas lies in creating a working environment where those fragments are nurtured and sustained over time.” 
- Steven Johnson, from The Invention of Air

Our wish is that every conference would add wayfinding to its agenda and that every year, all or some of the participants would explore the shortest routes to a healthy future.  We have helped shape several conferences that have engaged participants in this way with some surprising results, full of emergent ideas that have taken hold and become reality over time. In 1999 with MG Taylor Corporation, we facilitated Group Genius Weekend with the Foresight Institute, exploring 50 years into the future of a nanotechnology enabled world.  Looking back on the brainstorming of that weekend, one can see the influence that this shared thinking among experts and laypeople has played in shaping the way in which nanotech has emerged as both a science and a social conversation.  Author and participant David Brin commented, "it was a great gathering of independent thinkers from all over this rambunctious civilization. Proof positive that the spirit of bold amateur thinking is not dying, but thriving, more brash than ever."
 
In 2001, the World Economic Forum, whose mission is “improving the state of the world,” asked MG Taylor to design and conduct workshops for their Annual Meeting in Davos.  They wanted sessions that were far more engaging than panels and keynote speeches.  Many of the participants wanted to play with ideas and explore together.  They felt tremendous value was being lost in not having the great minds that gather in Davos doing more collaboration.  The workshops sold out, faster than any of the other sessions. Kings and queens, titans of industry, politicians, civil servants, artists, reporters, scientists, and other thought leaders explored 20 years into the future.  Many commented that they had never had a session with the diversity of these workshops.  The participants built models, exchanged ideas, and surprised, challenged and delighted each other.

Over the years, Tomorrow Makers together with an international association of process designers and facilitators known as The Value Web have helped these kinds of workshops continue at the Forum via the WorkSpace, spreading to regional meetings throughout the world and into the boardrooms and community spaces of the participants.  And while it is difficult to see exactly how these events matter in the moment, over the long now it is easy to see how participating in these kinds of sessions have shaped the thinking and efforts of the participants. Participants in these sessions recurrently find ideas they had not thought of before; they forge strange relationships; they play with ideas that they oppose, working them into something else, something more fit.  They let go of assumptions that they had about an idea as they become familiar with it, seeing how it can help improve the state of the world. 
 
In 2006, working with Syntony Quest, Tomorrow Makers engaged 250 participants attending the fiftieth anniversary of the International Society of Systems Science in a backcasting exercise. In a three hour block of time, the group worked backward from 2056—their 100th anniversary—and explored how systemic thinking and doing moved out of the university and into communities, changing the way decisions were made and how ideas built on each other.  The participants were amazed at how ideas moved through various cycles over time, evolving from “either/or” thinking to “and” thinking, and how, in holding a long now, feedback loops were able to steer and perturb the system toward a vital, healthy world for all.  The group was not fighting the dangerous era we are now in, but instead working through it and embedding ideas that would help shape a best-case future. 

Most recently, Gail facilitated a Synergizer PatchWorks Event, engaging 65 leaders of significant organizations to step into the future and claim happenings over a 200 year period (1910 - 2110) they believed necessary for a better world. To do this they were doing a lot of wayfinding or crossing boundaries and seeking small and large influences that would enhance or deter events from happening.

These workshops tug upon the idea of a red thread ... a continuous search for the critical paths forward to a more fit, healthy world. Participants come to see the interconnectivity of all the needed changes—some fast and others slow—as a continuum of a long now and how doing particular things changes everything else.

These were not called wayfinding events, but that was the nature and purpose for them.  Over the last 30 years, exercises like those mentioned above have revealed time and again the intuitive and intellectual knowing that emerges when people step into the future together and explore the relationship and shaping of ideas over time. With hindsight, it is remarkable how close the content generated with these exercises aligns with reality.  Participants tell us years later how this single exercise helped them think about the future differently. Experts and futurists have told us that they are astounded by the knowledge these participants carry with them and how it gets released and incorporated into the larger view.  When people play together in this way, trust grows. It becomes apparent that the world of either/or, or the world of bad compromises, does not need to be the reality.  As ideas are expressed and begin to intertwine, an emergence forms and carries participants forward into group genius, allowing worn out assumptions to fall away naturally while the whole escapes to a higher order. 

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Wayfinding, part five

In which we explore wayfinding’s vital role in steering toward best case futures.

“In assembling complexity, the bounty of increasing returns is won by multiple tries over time.  As various parts reorganize to a new whole, the system escapes into a higher order.”
- Ilya Prigogine

This in-between time is ripe for assembling a new complexity.  As systems break down, people begin searching for new solutions. They turn away from what no longer works and create paths forward.  Some fail, others gain a foothold and begin forming new connections, setting free potential for a higher order.  Through multiple tries over time, the new creeps in.  Ideas and thoughts are exchanged and commingled; differences are appreciated.  The new quickens and begins to spread. Boundaries have not been established, so conversations flow and leap more freely between ideas, process, product, short and long term.  The tight hold of beliefs that held up the old paradigm slip and the emerging paradigm escapes out of the clutches of the old,  enabling rapid iterations of experiments and ideas.  In this, the world experiences an intertwining of the moment in time of great decay and the simultaneous natural seeking of humans to create a better, more fit world.  

Oliver Wendall Holmes is said to have proclaimed, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side.” Many people do not know how to sense or see this  “other side” of complexity.  The world seems too vast, too unwieldy, too scary.  There is a belief that the old system can be fixed by hunkering down and trying harder to exert control. This results in short sighted compromises with increasing negative consequences.

Escaping to a higher order means that a new framework comes into being, a new coherence.  This is not to be mistaken for a simplifying that dumbs down, compromises, or ignores facts and realities.  We reach a higher order by working through the complexity, not eliminating it. By definition, this higher order assembles a new framework that makes it easier to create a more sustainable, fit world for all life on Earth. 

Designing a world we want means paying attention, listening, conversing, trim tabbing – all from within the long now of our future.  It is difficult work, yet playful and ultimately satisfying.  We sense and see a new order maturing.  We don’t know yet if we are assembling millions of small seeds into the new paradigm we want; if we are growing a prairie or just another variation of a weedy field.

Wayfinders inherently know that all aspects of a social system must work together and come to know each other’s contributions through engagement, finding ways where very different fields of knowledge or expertise fit together.  They don’t exert themselves by breaking down the stove pipe mentality, but rather help people reach through and across these boundaries.  They assist in finding the cross linkages and intersections. They create strange, yet vital connections and synergies between networks, willing to hold the creative tension of different vantage points together until these partners find common metaphors and create a language that makes their connection relevant.  Wayfinders dance with the flow of possibility.  They train their senses on seeing what others fail to see and on weaving these differences into the fabric of scenarios in the making. 

In her book Integral City, author Marilyn Hamilton develops the concept of "meshworking,"  which we see as similar in many ways to our wayfinding. She describes how the brain develops and provides what we think is a wonderful and accurate description of how wayfinders work:

“The brain builds itself by laying down large synaptic highways, which become the scaffold of communication corridors from which secondary and tertiary corridors emerge, until a vast “hairnet of axons” covers the brain. Once this hairnet is in place then we have a brain that is able to self-organize an infinite number of connections, thoughts, ideas, innovations and learnings while at the same time behave and direct behavior in dependable, learned ways.”

As one paradigm falls and another one emerges, tremendous transformational events and processes occur.  These changes are nonlinear, and cannot be controlled by nation states or institutional powers.  Rather they are a hairnet of axons growing throughout the global brain, taking root in the most unusual places, building and connecting entire ecosystems. Wayfinders are meshworkers, wiring and perturbing the global brain, hoping to reveal the shortest routes to a surprising, resilient new world.  As the meshwork grows stronger, more and more people recognize ways forward –  they begin to see Magellan’s ship.  As the new paradigm matures, extraordinary ideas become ordinary transactions.

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Wayfinding, part four

In which we speak of living our way into a new paradigm

In his book Out of Control, Kevin Kelly tells the story of restoring a prairie, recreating the various phase transitions that a weedy, mostly barren field goes through before it becomes a prairie once again.  Kelly writes that, “after a number of phase transitions, the prairie cannot help but become a prairie.” It knows its authentic self.  Kelly also speaks of Steve Packard, the person in charge of the restoration. He was a studied expert on “prairieness.”  Yet, in the beginning he failed to rebirth the prairie; it kept reverting back to a weedy, unspecified field. Packard then began asking the field what it wanted, what was missing. He asked questions of people with no direct knowledge of prairie restoration and through these conversations he broadened his context and began to see his own misconceptions.  Through this questioning, Packard began seeing things differently and realized he had been doing things that thwarted the prairie’s ability to grow and know itself.

Analogous to Packard’s work on the prairie, the work of wayfinding in large part rests on the ability to see differently; to identify and use new search images. Finding a healthy, resilient and shared future is less about looking for what we want and know,  but rather envisioning this future and asking what it wants of us.  What new process patterns will help us move quickly through the necessary phase transitions until the future cannot help but become what it most wants to be? Like the earliest wayfinders, what today’s wayfinders find can make the difference between life and death… breakdown or breakthrough.

We all know that prairies need more than nourishment and sequencing. Most importantly they require the right environment in which to grow.  They cannot grow anywhere.  Climate plays an essential role... the right soils, temperatures, winds, sun and rain.  When this mix is right, prairies come into form.  So too, with processes and tools.  There have been many attempts to change the course of history, to steer away from our industrial and economic drivers that form the current paradigm.  As this paradigm implodes on itself, it provides an environment for change and renewal.  It is now, in this Janus moment, that the environment becomes fertile and of particular need for wayfinding. 
 
The story has been told many times of Magellan’s sailors going to shore where the Terra De Fuego Indians lived.  The natives watched the small boats landing with strange men in them. From all their experiences with fishing and exploring the island, they knew the small boats they were looking at could not survive the seas. Where then did these men come from? They could not see the large sailing vessel out in the mist. These indigenous people were quite intelligent, but – as is human nature - they did not know how to see something so new and strange. It simply was not in their reality. Finally, over time, the tribe’s shaman saw the sailing ship and revealed it to the others.
 
Some dispute that this event ever happened but we think it likely because the story tells a truth.  We are all like this, holding hidden design assumptions about truths, about what we know, where to put our energy, our imagination, the nature of things, and how we decide. We are blind to the rest of the world. Then suddenly we hear a new story, read a sentence in a book or newspaper, overhear a conversation at a party, or share a crisis and we see anew. We see things that were there all along, but not part of our landscape.  The way we search for information changes; our context changes and in the reframing, a new reality comes into form. 
 
What we see changes who we become.  What we find and make known with each other will not only change who we become, but what the world becomes. Like the earliest wayfinders, modern wayfinders must be able to see what is not generally seen; feel what is not often felt; hear differently and refuse to stay within the boundaries of the present paradigm. 

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Wayfinding, part three

In which we tie wayfinding and this moment in time together

“What we see changes who we become.” -Peter Morville, Ambient Findability

We believe that there are definite times when shaping the future is more relevant, more urgent, and full of great possibility.  This moment in time is just such an era of urgent possibility. The world stands between paradigms: a moment in time between two as of yet, un-reconciled ways of seeing, being and thinking. It is at such times as these that the process of wayfinding is essential.

This moment in time is a Janus moment; a moment in which we see one world receding into the past as another grows bigger on the horizon.  One world is familiar, full of habits and memories and certainty.  The other, while hopeful, is unknown, unlearned, unpracticed. 
 
As we move through this present, we witness entrenched social and economic frameworks crumbling, no longer able to support themselves in a sustainable or ethical manner.  Assumptions about power and control have been usurped by reality. Mechanisms for regulation have become dysfunctional, destroying our planet.  Trust, a primary ingredient in resilient social and economic systems, is all but gone.  We can no longer count on the rules and ways of this paradigm to transition humankind to a new way of thinking, working, socializing and valuing.
 
Thankfully, and naturally, while one paradigm has been busy dying, another is busy being born.  It is immature in its ways, seeking footholds and processes that will establish new patterns and ways of thinking and being.  

Our name for this emerging paradigm is Panarchy.  A little research on this word revealed that it has been around a long time.  We have given the emerging paradigm this name simply because Pan connotes all and -archy leader, together speaking to the idea that for the first time, each of us can take an active role in helping to shape our combined future.  Collective individual power and influence is becoming requisite with the power of governments, corporations, and institutions. Humanity is engaging each other and the world around us with tools and intellect that give each of us abilities to radically impact the state of this world, no matter our title, position, culture, or inheritance. Old forms of control are giving way to community stewardship and sapient leadership.  With the help of the Internet and tools utilizing it, “We the people” are becoming a new form of super power, making it possible to release the dormant creativity of the whole and come to know each other and see our world in powerful new ways.
 
Thomas Kuhn, in his classic book about paradigms,  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, reminds us that a new paradigm is always more inclusive and potentially better than the one that it is replacing.  The new one reframes the old and enables a new way of seeing.  It normalizes what was once thought eccentric or non-useful.  In the reframing, a new coherence forms, helping once very separate ideas come together and forge a synergy in new understandings that would be impossible without this coherence.

Yet, completing the transition of paradigms peacefully, inclusively and systemically remains a tremendous challenge. Bucky Fuller said, “I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with.”  The kinds of leadership that have dominated our organizations and cultures over the past century are failing. They cannot be entrusted to create anew... to help us step up individually or collectively and pass this challenging examination.
 
What kind of leadership and processes are emerging to help find the way forward?  How do we insure the promise of Kuhn to escape to a higher order? By what means can nodes be connected, space be oriented and sense be made? This is the quest of evolutionary leadership in the form of wayfinders. 

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Wayfinding, part two

In which we define wayfinding, past and present     

The name Wayfinding was inspired by the Polynesian seamen who set forth to find new lands. Often traveling many hundreds of miles over long periods of time, these men were brilliant at finding new routes into the unknown using signals like weather, planets, sun, moon, waves, animals, and tides.  They combined and recombined elements according to their understanding of each part, bringing together - with each exploration - a new whole, a new sense of direction for safe travel.  While a vision of greater opportunity attracted them, they realized their goals through incremental steps and measures.  Wayfinding was the process of discerning “if this, then that” within every hour.  They brought the forces of their intuitive and intellectual knowing together in seemingly mysterious ways and allowed for exploration into unknown territories. They were some of yesterday’s best discoverers of new worlds.

In modern times, wayfinding has been adopted by architects, urban planners and designers to refer to the orientation and signage within the built environment. While not in any way adverse to this usage, it is not a significant factor in our application of the term.

Our concept of wayfinding harks back to the original willingness to step into the future with a sense of curiosity and adventure… a process for seeing and sensing and coming to know.  Our wayfinders use modern tools and processes but how they combine intuitive and intellectual knowledge is probably very similar. 

While wayfinders of yore often kept their knowledge private, not willing to share since this kind of knowledge was power and control, a core distinction of how we use the term is that wayfinding is, by necessity, a social endeavor, sharing and collaborating openly, knowing that it is this connecting and meshing together that brings new answers, new riches.

Wayfinders step into the future and design with it,  getting into a sense of flow and seeing all kinds of new and interesting information and patterns.  By living in the future, by engaging with it and generating many options, they can more easily see ways forward and make linkages that guide ideas and energy. Modern wayfinders are not bent on controlling the future or being right, but rather working with the future and the abundant opportunities and ingenuity that it offers to steer it toward best case.

Living within a long now enables wayfinders to see differently and make connections that few others see.  Wayfinders reach into the past and bring forward information that seemed trivial but now has new relevance and connection.  Uncovering  “hidden” assumptions,  reading between lines, constantly course correcting, wayfinders thrive on feedback, re-creation, and collaboration.  Their tools are simulations, synthesizing, storytelling, mapping and visualizing.  They connect ideas through and with individuals, governments, corporations, and communities. Wayfinders are non ideological and quite willing to play with and connect outlandish ideas to those that are most revered.  Wayfinding is an infinite game composed of finite games whose outcomes shape each moment in time.  Wayfinders place bets on healthy outcomes and then seek ways to win the bet. 

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The Way Found

What began as a one-year experiment has become a two decade career. Over the 1990’s and early 2000's, I worked with MG Taylor as we took the “system and method” global with the DesignShop process, Knowhere Stores and Navigation Centers, learning how to use it as an application or as a platform into which other processes and technologies could be plugged and to scale it from event and project design to venture design.

In 2006, I joined with Gail to be a partner with her in Tomorrow Makers. Where as the bulk of MG Taylor's work was with corporate and national government clients, Tomorrow Makers was Gail's avenue for reconnecting with the community-based organizations that she'd worked with in her years at the Learning Exchange. While we've only scratched the surface of our ambitions with Tomorrow Makers, the past several years have offered precious time and circumstance for shared reflecting, story telling, concept connecting, new practice inventing.  Our thoughts and writings on Wayfinding is one of the manifestations of our time together, and one I - we - believe to be both significant and important to this moment in time across personal, communal and global perspectives.

These writings are not an end point on the subject for us, but a birthing of a whole new context from which we can speak to and practice our design processes. What follows then are our reflections on why Wayfinding at this particular moment in time and what the process offers in creating a resilient future.

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Seeing, Feeling, and Engaging Differently

To tell the story of anything you have to tell the story of everything. Thomas Berry

I was lucky. I was naive.  When I started teaching elementary school, I didn't know what I needed to know.  I rejected most of what they tried to teach me in the school of education; I simply knew childhood and learning were far more complex and interesting than what my professors offered me.  I had no idea what education really was however until my students began to show me. 

Kids learn by doing, connecting, playing, exploring, building on each others' ideas. Failure is merely an iteration, not a bad ending. They are not adverse to learning any subject if and when they find the connection to their own lives. Another important learning for me was the larger the class, the easier it was to teach IF I was doing project based learning.  In this format, students taught each other! They fed on each other's ideas, iterating and taking ideas deeper and richer, pulling forth what mattered to each student.  Diversity of thought and ways of learning are not barriers, given the right process. 

When Matt and I founded MG Taylor Corporation in 1980, Matt brought his reading and explorations into complexity science and architecture.  I brought experiential education.  I had learned that "sitting and getting" passive learning, even when the content was rich,  was more destructive than constructive.  How can one become an expert without grounded experience and learning from doing? So the methods and processes developed by Matt and myself were highly informed by my project based learning experiences in elementary education. 

Instead of talking about the future, or how to solve problems, we engaged our participants in being the future they desired.  Instead of talking about possibilities and creating word scenarios, participants simulated possibilities, iterated findings, and discovered for themselves how projects fit together, often creating synergies and savings, not possible by other kinds of learning. Participants were learning -- through doing -- the art of design. We learned that with adults, as I had in the classroom, that diversity and large groups of people were far more able to find new solutions, to see things in ways that were not otherwise obvious. 

One effective module that took participants inside the future and helped them connect ideas and possibilities was that of creating time lines that stretched back through time and well into the future.  Participants found themselves creating a woven fabric of cause and effect ... if this, than that and challenging themselves to find places where simple actions might change the course of history (mostly within their corporations or communities). 

When Todd and I were asked to write a white paper on paradigm shifts, we found ourselves referring to many of the things we had discovered in our work with MG Taylor Corporation and how living within a simulation caused participants to see very, very differently.  The idea of wayfinding -- not as a way to find one's way around a mall or airport -- but into the future became a compelling idea for us. Creating time lines way back in the past and into future as much as 100 years is fun and rich in possibilities. 

As we move out of one paradigm and into an emerging one, we have great opportunity to help shape it. Thus Todd and I have written a paper called Wayfinding and over the next several months, our journals will be unfoding our thoughts, ending with suggestions for creating community Wayfinding events. 

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Wayfinding

Over the past several months, we—Gail and Todd, mother and son, partners in business, have been developing a long essay on what we call Wayfinding. We have been working together as collaborative process designers and facilitators for nearly twenty years.  In this time, we have jointly designed and facilitated more conferences, workshops, sessions, happenings and other forms of convening than we can count.  While we have coauthored numerous essays, white papers and letters, this may be our most substantive written collaboration to date.

As we continue to iterate, refine, illustrate and hone our writing into a form that can be independently published, we have decided to post the paper as a series of journals, welcoming your thoughts and comments to help us move and shape our ideas going forward. (Online publishing dates in parenthesis.)

I. In which we share our background and perspectives
This first section is the exception in that we have written it as two individuals. Beyond this, we’ve forged our writing into a single narrative that we believe provides a more compelling and complete picture of wayfinding that either of us could have produced on our own, or from the sum of our individual vantage points.

     Gail - Seeing, feeling and engaging differently (Nov 15)
     Todd - The Way Found (Nov 15)

II. In which we define wayfinding, past and present (Nov 15)

III. In which we tie wayfinding and this moment in time together (Nov 22)

IV. In which we speak of living our way into a new paradigm (Nov 22)

V. In which we explore wayfinding’s role in steering toward best case futures (Dec 3)

VI. In which we tell stories of wayfinding (Dec 3)

VII. In which we offer a process for the play and practice of wayfinding (Dec 17)

VIII. In which we restate guiding principles, pose questions to perturb your wayfinding practices, and offer resources for your further exploration (coming soon!)