A thread running through the topic is the importance of play and creativity in solving the problems of the world. This isn’t hyperbole — the discussion really looked at the largest issues in the world.

From Jane McGonigal: the idea that in playing games, we are using our best version of ourselves; the mindpower that can be harnessed in playing games to make the world a better place.

Her goal: to make it as easy to save the world in real life, as it is in online games. And she’s not joking. If we could increase our game playing time from its current 3 billion hours a week to 21 billion hours a week, the world would be different place.

I look at gaming in a new light.

From Michael Wesch, social anthropologist from K-State: Good questions and illustrations of the world on fire — and brilliant insights on the changes technology offers. We can’t live the next 100 years like the last.

Media uses us as much as we use it; and there is no opting out. Media mediates relationships, when media changes, relationships change — including the structure of our culture.

Technology in our hands creates new potential. Question is how will we use it? How will it change us? Wesch articulates the razor’s edge between a hopeful future and a more ominous one with new openness and freedom, transparency, mass participation vs. the potential for more survelliance and control, deception, mass distraction.

His goal is to move his students from being knowlegeable to knowledge-able. He explains we need (and need to teach) skills to find, sort, analyze, organize and create knowledge.

He told the story of when the world was on fire. All the animals running to escape, but it was impossible — the fires were raging and soon they were trapped.

One little bird had an idea. The little bird flew to the stream and picked up a drop of water in its beak, flew back to the fire and dropped the water. And again, and again, and again.

What are you doing little bird? The best I can.

The heroics inspired the rest of the creatures (or variously, the gods) who joined in to save the day and put out the fire, by working together in the example of the littlest bird.

From Francis Cholle:  We need a higher level of creativity to solve sustainability questions. Creativity will be the the No. 1 leadership competency in the future.We need to play more to become more creative — play eludes our analytical minds. Our analytical minds can be a handicap to creativity.

The most important skills to master:

• Think holistically; there’s more to consider than the P&L
• Think paradoxically
• Listen for the unusual. Or, stop thinking and start feeling.
• Lead by influence, not by control

Plenty to ponder.  Thanks, TEDxKC.

Suddenly all is transformed and the tension takes on a new dimension. I am inside the construction site of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Kansas City.

I admit to a constant fascination with the art of architecture and engineering — I’m stunned by the combination of mathematics and precision and emotion that is so evident in this structure.  Yes, emotion. You feel as thought the structure “knows” its purpose and embodies an appreciation of art and its impact on humanity.

Click on photo for a brief video

There is a tension in the structure — a struggle to balance, precisely, the engineering  requirements with the artistic goals. There is magnificence in the tension.

It’s both literal and figurative.

The physical structure relies on tension, with cables that flow from the curved shell to deep anchors. These cables support the glass atrium facade.

The imagery of the building is reminiscent of a musical instrument (a cello, in my mind). The tension wires are the strings, the arc of the structure is the sensuous body of the instrument, and its position on the landscape — the change to the horizon — is the music.

In this image, the participants who visit the building are part of the performance itself. We walk through the instrument and our movement resonates with the sense of breathing within the building. The building already feels alive with rhythmic tension.

You feel it inside the performance spaces where the beautiful woodwork is warming and comforting, where the chamber produces a cathedral-like sense of awe and grace. It’s a wonder at nature, like walking in a vast forest, but this time it’s the vast imagination, skill and mastery of the craftsmen that amazes.

The building soars and sings with echoes and self-reflections: it’s as though it folds in on itself, again creating a balance. The interior mimics the dramatic exterior, the lines of the exterior are reflected in the the parallel lines in the acoustically designed walls in the theater. The exterior curves are mimicked in the interior performance space.

Construction is change in action; transformation on a grand physical scale. Art, also, is change in action — a moment of tension, the creation of the artist conveyed through a performer to an audience. The impermanence of the moment juxtaposed with the searing meaning and perhaps, enduring memory in the minds of an audience.

This change, so welcome, so beautiful, so important to our culture. This building will play upon our identity and forever mark our commitment to our better instincts in innovation, art, engineering, craftsmanship.

It is a building of possibilities. It shows that there is unbound potential for us, as individuals and as a community.

In the corporate world, I used to marvel at the degree of specialization in the workforce. Tasks were split into smaller and smaller bits and assembled across silo’ed organizations. And leaders wondered why it was so hard to get everyone focused on the same mission.

In technology, we continue to break everything into tinier and tinier bits. Think of network technology (packet switching, dissembling and reassembling bits right this instant!), and the increasingly specialized areas of research and academics. We keep slicing our focus smaller.

It’s the same with time. We’re driven by the clock, to make use of every minute. Too bad that too often we’re just satisfying ourselves with an illusion of activity.  Hmm, do I really need to check the stock market again? Or Facebook? Am I making a connection or avoiding one?

This week I found a nice way to connect. Individually, working alone but as part of a world movement. Another form of crowdsourcing, there’s a movement to make it easy for the app-carrying masses to spend a few seconds contributing money, time or intellect to others.

It’s a kind of hive-help to museums, schools and libraries. Called The Extraordinaries, it’s an app for micro-volunteering from your mobile phone. You can select a program to support, and within seconds, you can be helping with a project — for example, translating film dialog, tagging items from historic photo collections, supporting research.

Some of The Extraordinaries’ projects:  for Cornell University, collect data on urban birds; for the Smithsonian, help build a search engine for vintage photos and artwork by tagging images; help the Bibliotheque de Toulouse or the Brooklyn Museum tag their photo collections. You can help Greenpeace or the Library of Congress. Non-profits can apply to add their work to The Extraordinaries’ portfolio of projects.

The Extraordinaries, backed by a strong investment team featuring Kapor Ventures of Silicon Valley and Esther Dyson, among others, has secured $1.135 million in funding.  The company describes itself as for-profit social enterprise and is applying to become a B-corp.  (More on that later.)

Tiny bits of time, given to a bigger cause. This can’t help but catch on.

I’ve seen it firsthand in my family under a couple of different circumstances. In his later years, my father was afflicted by a form of dementia, and it changed not only him, but also my mother, brothers and sister and me. My younger sister recognized it quickly and accepted it the easiest: “Sometimes he doesn’t know me,” she said matter-of-factly one day. She was right.

Later, near the end of her time, my mother also lost much of her memories and most of her capability to make good decisions. Slowly, she retreated into herself, her interests diminished.  But even in her foggy state, she was able to give me advice. Near the end, I was visiting her, and told her of an upcoming, exciting trip I was planning to Brazil and Argentina. “Well, just don’t get lost,” she said firmly. It made me laugh at the time, but it was still good advice — and it told me she still knew me and still cared about me.

Now, I’m starting to see the confusion touching another member of the family — my sister. It’s the unmistakable loss of short-term memory, diminishing her capacity to react and make decisions. It’s like watching a slow retreat, a slipping-away, a loss of focus that’s frightening.

But it’s frightening only for those of us around the situation — I don’t think it’s frightening at all to my sister herself. She’s happy, cheerful, laughing, mostly content with her days.  As she always has been. I don’t see any fear in her; so what brings the rest of us fear?

Change.

As one who studies change, I’m watching this “case study” with particular attention (I’m part of it, after all). But my measured assessments of the situation are filtered through my own emotions — and my own fear.  I can see the various reactions to change in others. There’s the reluctance to accept it (we can wait), the desire to avoid it (she’s still happy and healthy). I can see my own reactions.

I note that change brings lessons worth relearning, now that I’m face-to-face with my own emotions. We’re human, and we react to change with our emotions first, and with our intellect second. Emotion is the stronger influencer; I have to recognize it, accept it, embrace it and give it it’s due.

My new task list: Take heart, Have courage, Be strong, Go forward.

UPDATE May 14, 2010: Found a great post that gives another view, with a nice bit of useful wisdom for a lot of situations — instead of focusing on what’s lost, find joy and pleasure in what remains. Check it out at the KevinMD blog.

The series, conducted by Dr. Bill Ashworth, at Linda Hall Library (Kansas City’s hidden treasure) has been delightful.<Update: Maybe not-so-hidden? See November 1  NYTimes article with prominent reference to Linda Hall Library.>

Ashworth is curator of “The Grandeur of Life” exhibit and author of the exhibition catalog. He’s also an associate professor of history at UMKC and consultant for the History of Science at Linda Hall Library. Ashworth brings Darwin to life and is continually telling stories that paint the context of life and the knowledge of the day.

Darwin, I learned, really did not like his schooling — not his prep school time at Dr. Butler’s School in Shrewsbury, or his medical studies at Edinburgh University, or his clergy studies at Cambridge University. His letters talked about how boring his professors were, how dreadful the topics and, like most university guys, he even participated in a drinking club. (The club’s crest included a beer keg, tankards and a water pipe, and in Latin, the phrase “replete with barley and ale.”)

It’s not that he wasn’t curious or interested in learning. Not at all. He just wasn’t suited to the lectures and the classical training that was meted out. It was boring and outdated, and he had other interests — like exploring the estuaries at the Firth of Forth and, later, collecting beetles.

He indulged his passion for collecting things, and that changed the course of science.

It wasn’t always easy. Darwin faced some pretty harsh criticism from his father, who told him he likely wouldn’t amount to anything (I’m paraphrasing, but it wasn’t positive feedback at all). Despite his failures in school, and letting his family down by not following his father’s footsteps in medicine and rejecting a career in the clergy, he managed to follow his interests and that made all the difference.

I learned one other bit that fascinated me: When Darwin returned from his five-year voyage on the Beagle, he realized that he didn’t know what all of his collections of bones and fossils and specimens really were. He admitted that he wasn’t skilled enough to identify them.

So he asked for help.

He gave his collection of creatures’ bones to Richard Owen, famous anatomist (known as the English Cuvier), and he gave his collection of 26 Galapagos birds to John Gould, the famous naturalist painter of birds. It was Owen who identified key items in the bones, including the giant sloth; and it was Gould who told him that 13 of the Galapagos birds were finches.

What he learned floored him and led him to ask: why? The rest is history — he kept searching for answers and produced “The Origin of Species” to explain the  questions.

Darwin had asked for help and shared his collections to get it. He’d had a bittersweet experience earlier: At Edinburgh, he’d been thrilled to discover a new type of seaweed but when he told his mentor about it, the professor told him to get off his turf and then took credit for Darwin’s find. So Darwin was seduced by the excitement of uncovering new knowledge, and yet he must have been frustrated by the pettiness and unfairness of the professor who claimed it.

Still, he took a chance again. He was willing to share what he’d found. I have to believe that, even though he didn’t know what he had, his passion for LEARNING overcame the risk of losing “credit” for it.

It was risky then and it’s risky now.

It takes courage to admit what you don’t know. It’s hard to ask for help. Darwin won’t be remembered for this, but he wouldn’t be remembered at all if he hadn’t done this.

There’s a sweetness in this little backstory lesson: take a risk, share information, collaborate. It still makes sense, 150 years later.

I heard a too-brief presentation recently from Bob Johansen, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future. First off, he described his task as a futurist: to offer a plausible forecast in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. VUCO world, for short.

Then he offered a secret on how he does his job: Start by looking farther out ahead, and then work your way back to the near-future. He said things are much clearer farther out, say 20 years in the future, and much harder to specify one to three years in the future. Besides, he says his role as a forecaster is not to predict, but to provoke.

He described several future scenarios that appear certain to him — for example, connectedness will increase in importance, as wireless communications melds with sensors connected to everything. He gave a convincing argument by showing how Helsinki and Tokyo are using the combination today: you can use a cell phone to scan bar codes on products on grocery shelves, and you’ll get a read-out of consumer ratings on the product. You pick your shampoo based on its environmental, health or societal rating, whatever matters most to you.

The best sound bite of his talk (in my view) was his proclamation: The word “consumer” is obsolete. It’s almost an insult to be called a consumer.

Every person is connected in a social network, and technology has amplified those networks. It’s a participatory culture. Johansen noted that the Institute for the Future embraces this participatory and open-source culture, and uses crowd-sourcing techniques to solicit input to its forecasts. (See Open Source World and other related posts on openness.)

Back to the insult of being a “consumer.”  Johansen argued that a coming trend favors self-identification as “makers” — people who are actively contributing to society, in whatever form fits, whether it’s cooking dinner or writing a novel or woodworking. Makers are contributing, active, participating.

He has tracked the rise of the Maker movement, noting Maker Faires springing up to celebrate creativity vs. consumerism, including in the Bay Area (of course!), Austin and around the world. (Should we do one in Kansas City?)

I think he’s on to something here.

I think there is a new awareness about the negative components of consumerism.  Bill Moyers had a brilliant conversation with Andrew Bacevich on this topic almost a year ago, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.  (Among the best parts: his description of America as an “empire of consumption.”) You can find it here.

A common thread in both theses is the participation of the individual in the SOLUTION.

The future  isn’t going to come from an establishment. Nobody trusts corporations or government to create the future. No, it’s up to us.

Johansen had a sticker on his laptop that says it all: I am making the future.

I like it.

I am making the future.

More from Bob Johansen here: Bob Johansen – Book Section Brief from Institute for the Future.

The airline attendant announced that it was time for preboarding. We rose to join the line. I was still coaching her, and as we moved to join the line, we cut in front of someone.

I hadn’t seen him.

Or maybe I saw him but didn’t imagine him in a preboarding line.

Nevertheless, I stepped in front of him guiding my sister.

“I don’t mind you going ahead of me,” he said, “but I was in line.”

I felt like crawling under a rock, how stupid of me — why didn’t I see him and register that he was in line? I was preoccupied but my lack of respect was as stunning to me as a blow. How did this happen?

I apologized, but he insisted that my sister go ahead of him. Then with a big smile and gesture full of welcoming grace, he offered to help her get settled on the plane. She happily took his arm and they trotted off.

Suddenly I’m alone there, without a chance to say anything further but call out my thanks as they walk down the jetway.

Later, I replayed the scene in my mind. I had made an assumption that he wasn’t in line, my concern for my sister had propelled me to block out others — and it was exactly the wrong behavior.  I was wrong, acting without seeing and without concern for others.  It was a powerful lesson, and I send my thanks to my unknown teacher for opening my eyes with his personal coaching. It was an uncomfortable moment, but a necessary one.

I thank him because his actions changed me.

I know what it feels like to be invisible to others, to be overlooked. I pride myself on my enlightened respect for others — yet here I was, utterly blind to others in this moment. I was so appalled at myself that I have been consciously training myself to see more — to observe and watch and think and serve others more actively. To really see.

I am learning, and while I have a long way to go, I will get better at this as I practice it more.

Based in Camden, N.J., Campbell Soup is the largest soup-maker in the world. It has revenues of more than $7 billion and sells its soups and other food items in 120 countries around the world.  With a 136-year history, Campbell Soups had never before opened its doors for outside innovation.

Until now.

The company recently launched a new initiative, called Campbell’s Ideas for Innovation at www.campbellideas.com. The website invites suggestions for new products, technology, packaging, marketing and business processes.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Campbell had studied successful programs at Procter & Gamble Co. in Cincinnati and Kraft Foods Inc. in Northfield, Ill., before launching its website.

It’s not exactly a wide-open wiki, but it offers folks a way to share their ideas, with  legal protections for both sides.  It’s a start, a recognition that there are new ideas and new ways of doing business — and they don’t have to be invented within company walls to be worthwhile.

I see it as another crack in the monolithic corporate culture of closemindedness –  a little bit of openness, a willingness to listen to customers.

“Open for business” could have a whole new meaning soon.

I had the good fortune to hear Dr. William Duncan, president and chief executive of the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute, speaking at a meeting yesterday. He was talking to job seekers, professionals who were interested in learning more about the growing life sciences industry here.

The institute is the focal point in the region’s goal to attract and develop the area as a bioscience and biotechnology center of excellence, developing on the natural strengths of the region, which include the clinical research firms based here, the depth and breadth of animal health firms here (five of the top 10 companies have headquarters here, 31 percent of global revenues come from this region).

My favorite part of the discussion was his recollection of the development of the institute, which was founded in 1999, a result of engagement between the Stowers Institute, the Civic Council and the Kansas City Area Development Council (and others).

Early on, the group noted that despite the available assets, the region lacked a major top-tier biomedical life sciences university. The answer, it turned out, was to fill the gap with a collaborative effort between the existing players: the KU Med Center, St. Luke’s Hospital, UMKC, Midwest Research Institute and others.

Dr. Duncan described how the various leaders were not accustomed to working together.

“In the early days, it was difficult to get them to come to meetings,” he said. “But now, the culture has changed and there is a willingness to collaborate.”

So powerful, this collaboration.

In this case, Duncan attributed the collaboration success to a couple of key factors:

• It developed with an empowered board of leaders who set the tone. It wasn’t driven by a single institute, but by many who saw the power in building something greater than could be developed independently.
• It engaged the entire community — both sides of the state line, regional agencies and groups, government, civic groups, business leaders, academia and interested members of the community.  People were able to set aside differences (yes, border wars and deep university allegiances) and focus on building something together.

It was inclusive and that crowning philosophy was a key to the collaboration and to the early success of the region’s development — now home to more than 300 life sciences companies.

But Dr. Duncan had a caution — an additional culture change is needed here.  He described an attitude common on the East and West coasts, where a failed entrepreneur is hailed as a hero. In places like San Francisco and Boston, these types are respected and encouraged, he noted, but here, there’s a tendency to just look at the label: failure.

“We need a culture change in KC,” he said. “We need to accept failure and embrace risk.”

He is not talking about admitting defeat or taking wild risks — he’s talking about driving a change in the prevailing business attitudes here, one that would make us more open to learning from mis-steps and supporting measured risk.  Collectively. Inclusively.

Although Dr. Duncan also spoke with passion about challenges of  technical bioresearch, complex investment/profitability strategies and difficult political scenarios — this was my favorite part of the discussion.   He was just talking about how people deal with each other.

So much of our success with any initiative comes down to how folks can best work together: collaborate, look beyond a label, work toward something bigger than yourself.

I can’t help but wonder if these culture changes might be the most difficult part of Dr. Duncan’s job.

I can’t help but believe that embracing these culture changes might be more even valuable to our region than the life sciences initiative that launched them.

Hard to miss all the chatter about the pending demise of newspapers and the first to fall — Rocky Mountain News, then Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Next …?

It’s true that we are in the midst of a social transformation, driven by: the availability of information on the Internet at all times; the declining relevance of newsprint; Web 2.0 technology and new social media;  an embrace of open-source culture and mass collaboration, democracy in action, citizen journalism, the rise of blogging — add your drivers here.

These changes touch newspapers, but also are transforming public relations, marketing, branding, broadcast media (television, radio, cable), books and all publishing … maybe all relationships?

Yet most visibly, it’s the newspaper industry that’s struggling to maintain relevance.  It is time for reinvention — a news organization rather than a newsPAPER. I’m not the first with this, although I started thinking about and working on online, interactive, two-way, participatory journalism in the early 1990s. See the brilliant commentary by Tom Foremski’s Silicon Valley Watch “25 ideas: creating an open-source business model for newspapers.”

I think he’s 100 percent on target, and he hit some of my favorite hot buttons, too. News organizations have got to understand their communities, and that means being part of the community — not above it.  News organizations should be the valued, trusted source of information in their communities — deep in the neighborhoods, visible, authentic and real people, not some institution with blurry or dueling motivations.

It won’t be easy to drive change; critics are quick to bemoan the rise of “amateurs” and the lowering standards of reporting.  You won’t need proof beyond David Simon’s dead-on commentary — even news organizations and journalists aren’t as skilled / knowledgeable /aggressive as they should be.  But that doesn’t mean that a concerted transformational effort isn’t worth a shot. Let’s welcome disparate voices from all corners of the community and rather than bemoan the lower standards that “citizen journalism” implies, let’s teach the principles of the trade.

Maybe there are new ways to help “grow” the next generation of journalists … I’m thinking of organizations like the ACLU, grassroots activists, watchdogs, the schools. I love the example here from Jeff Jarvis — let the Journalism schools lead the change to drive collaboration as the valued skillset, instead of the institutional arrogance that I witnessed in J school.

Start with deep local news. Recruit the people who care about the topic, whatever it is.  Help train the next generation of newshounds — and recognize that they (we?) might well be pre-teens, retirees or the out-of-work population.

Count me in. Again.

Update:

Can’t help but add this insightful compilation on the topic, from PressThink by Jay Rosen at NYU. He’s helpfully pulled together a dozen of the best commentaries on the state of the newspaper industry: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News