Brock { Abroad }

“Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, has a great chapter called Shitty First Drafts that’s all about getting over those internal voices that tell writers that what we’re writing sucks. The essay is all about accepting those voices, realizing that they’re going to be there for as long as you’re doing something creative, and then doing the only thing you can do: press on.”                                                                                      -http://thewriterscoin.com

On that note, here is a “shitty first draft” from a recent trip I took to Rome. More to come on the venue the Short Theatre Festival was at. Called the New Economy, it was quite an inspiring location. Check out the photography from the location here. Until then, however, here are my initial impressions:

Like sardines packed in a tin can, our Easyjet landing provides me with a view of land on one side and sea on the other. Sun seeps through the window as some turbulence creates a stir in the cabin full of Romans returning home. This will also be my home- at least for the next 48 hours. The first set of boisterous laughs and raucous remarks from the cabin mark the beginning of an entirely different atmosphere. Leaving behind an already rainy and cool autumn in Amsterdam, shrub-like trees scattered along a dry landscape remind me of a Van Gogh print in my living room.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in northern Europe compared to southern Europe, it’s a certain “keep it short, simple, and close to your self” attitude. Pondering this, my first burning question of the trip has entered my brain. Thinking about the old adage,”when in Rome, do as the Romans do,”  I wonder: what is the difference between the Mediterranean lifestyle I am entering compared to the Dutch culture I have grown so fond of? My first quest? Find the Romans.

Upon leaving the hectic center of ancient Rome, I was able to explore not just what the Romans themselves actually do, but how they really do it. It was my hypothesis that they weren’t so different from their northern counterparts (minus the climate) after all. Following my intuition, I found myself wandering back to where my bed&breakfast was located in Trastavere. Upon finding said locals, I surveyed a variety asking them to describe their city in three words.

I drifted back to the previous afternoon, just minutes after disembarking the plane and getting picked up by a gregarious gentleman chatting on his cell phone holding a sign with our names on it. Smiling and waving to the distracted fellow, we passed him to avoid holding up the flow from behind us. Catching up with us, we were soon swept out of an air-conditioned airport into humid still-summer air.

Loading luggage and all piling in, our theatre troupe was heading into terrible traffic with a man I assumed was a Roman himself. Soon, after sharing scraps of conversation between the five of us and him, he quickly corrected my mistaken assumption when I asked him to be the first of many to describe his city to me.

Although a non-native, I got my answer in one sentence. It’s chaotic, fascinating and… he was interrupted by a tiny smart car almost sacrificing it’s life for our beast of a machine loaded with theatre production artillery. Shouting a loud swear word I hadn’t heard since my great-grandmother who hailed from Verona, I asked him about the third word. Shouting, he said, as we sped past the tiny bug of an automobile giving one last call in typical Roman style.

When I actually asked him if those would be the three words he would to use to describe this city, he gave a long drawn out speech, unable to keep it as simple as it was when the answer just came naturally.

Simplicity in expression, such as a short gesture that speaks sentences, isn’t the only thing the Romans come by naturally. Simplicity in their food is an act of heavy patriotism. However, not observing the siesta isn’t a complete act of treason as it used to be. Although a seemingly extravant eating culture is actually wound together by a simple web of fresh, local, and all natural ingredients that keep the Roman’s dishes not just close to their spices, but also close to their hearts. {edit}

That’s not to say all things in Rome are that simple. The word I heard most when asking the Romans to describe their city in three words was… chaotic. Although the girl who spent her whole cigarette with us after only asking for a light seemed calm, cool, and collected, she was quick to admit that she hailed from chaos.

The next morning leaving the laid-back residental neighborhood in the outskirts of Trastevere, the chaos suddenly became clear. The fountain di Trevi wasn’t as beautiful as I remembered it to be. As a matter of fact, it was downright claustrophobic.

Trastevere, however, brings the chaotic feel of Rome without the pantheon or Fountain di Trevi from clogging it’s clustred but elegant piazza. Patched along a neighborhood where the urban vibe of eclectic street art and graffiti meets gold-sheathed domes of ancient Roman churches, Trastevera is the real Rome. Eating a slice of pizza while washing it down with a cup of gelato, I listen to the soothing water of the fountain in the center of Piazza di Santa Maria. The bell of the tower strikes twelve as a flock of pigeons fly overhead.  Punk youth camped out with their dogs along the walls of the piazza frame passing tourists walking toward the attractive church, a gyspy woman awaiting them, rattling change in a cup. An Italian family next to me shares a box of pizza.

My friend’s guidebook mentioned this neighborhood as having received the biggest surge of expatriate residents in all of Rome during recent years. Perhaps this also adds to the diverse style found not only in it’s transient inhabitants, but also on it’s labyrinths lined with tattoo parlors, pizzerias, postcard shops, and even a punjabi sweet shop.

Still recovering from Roman excess as I write this my first evening back, I am reminded where it all started to go wrong. After a heavy lunch, I pass a frenetic pizza and pasta take-away shop full of screaming locals at lunch hour. I can’t help but have a taste of food that seems to be leaving the pans faster than the four scrambling men behind the counter can weigh and collect on it. Although I get the awkward stare from a man next to me as I fumble over Spanish disguised in Italian accent, I fake my way through to order a fried ball of creamy risotto. Biting through the crunchy exterior into the core, I am treated to steamy chunks of spinach scattered around the al dente pasta.

Later that evening at Cafe del Moro, a bar blaring MTV music videos from the 80′s, I enjoy free aperitivos. Enjoying Italy’s answer to tapas, I admire the place. It has a sort of nostalgic feel with only two or three tables outside lining a particularly disordered four-way curve of pedestrian-only traffic. Grabbing one of the few spots any good people-watcher would envy made us feel exclusive and the huge glasses of house red they served alongside free mini-sandwiches, chicken nuggets, olives, and other international finger foods made Trestevere seem all the quirkier for the typical Roman holiday.

After a great run at the festival, we celebrated over a bottle of bio Belgian honey beer. It was there while chatting up the locals and attempting to break a bounty of language barriers that I heard the best answer for my Rome in three words question: Love, hate, live. Hell, we may have been a little drunk, but at that moment it couldn’t have been a more logical answer to such an illogical city.

I can’t believe I’m still awake right now. Knowing I have the second day of a workshop I’ve developed through Knowmads in collaboration with the Hub Amsterdam, I am still buzzing. It’s amazing the amount of things I am able to do with an education as amazing as Knowmads. Going out into the city doing collaborations like The Knowmadic Learning Lab make me realize that there a lot of other “pop-up, start-up learning spaces” happening all across the world.

When I mention this phrase, my mind immediately goes to Frauke Godet of the Hub Berlin. An absolutely gracious presence to have attend our workshop this past Wednesday, she has a rather interesting education topic that suggests the world’s next best “dream school” may not even need a roof. Here are some details on the concept, Future at School:

Facing the global transformation process from moving from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge age. Schools need to educate different skills and competencies:

INDUSTRIAL AGE…………………………….KNOWLEDGE AGE
Interpreted data……………………………. Interpreted information
Hierarchical………………………………….. Personally-constructed meanings
Soloed jobs and roles…………………….. Network org. and Knowmads
Chaos and ambiguity are avoided…….. Chaos and ambiguity are embraced

Inspired by John Moravec, a Knowmads ambassador and initiator of Education Futures:

Accelerating complexity caused by human activity is challenging society and individuals. We need to develop people who are capable to create alternatives in the unknown, to make sense of ambiguity, and to take leadership in chaotic environments.

Vision
To develop young people world-wide who take responsibility to design and create their future!

Mission:
To create a space for cross-generational learning and collaboration to support ideas for a radically better world.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is from one of the most amazing days of my life. Taken in Stockholm, it says: “Ideas to change the world:”

You may recognize one contribution…

Another great day at Knowmads, hosting a World Cafe for idea generation on our Picnic proposal in the morning:

and, in the afternoon, dreaming up…

I think both are very much connected to the photo from above as well as the theme for this year’s Picnic event:

“The world around us is changing fast, and not all the changes are positive. We’re facing the biggest natural, social and economic challenges our world has ever seen. We’ve addressed some of these issues in the past, but the days of just talking are over. It’s time to take action.

We’re focusing on Life, Cities, Media and Design — areas that provide real opportunities to make a difference. PICNIC ’10 brings you a platform to create new solutions for a better world.

For more information on the event, click on the picture above, or check out the blog of Marcel Kampman of happykamping. Both creative director of the festival as well as ambassador of Knowmads, his website is definitely worth a peek. Thanks again to all the great guests Knowmads was able to welcome home on this exciting day!

“Recreation isn’t simply playing video games- it’s literally re-creating yourself and shedding your baggage so you can live a remarkable life.”

During the first morning of the Kennisland Social Innovation Safari, Kwela Sabine Hermanns, a personal role model of mine and also an ambassador for Knowmads, asked us all a very valuable question. She asked us:
What does social innovation mean for you?

It was an incredibly valid question. Every day in my very sheltered environment, although a school for the world, words like social innovation, sustainability, co-creation, presencing, and many others fly out of our mouths that would make most people outside the program, or at least outside social change circles, say… “what in the world…?”
Christina Jordan, another personal hero, is collaborating with many others to solve that very question. What (in the world) does social innovation mean? Co-organizer of the Cosi10, Christina is working to connect socially innovative initiatives around the world over a three month time span. In a “simple face-to-face unconference event,” they hope to create a networking and learning process that allows people to collaborate and share impact strategies, skill development resources, and even develop revenue models to build thrivable social innovations.

Still, the question remains. What constitutes a social innovation? From my extensive research on the subject, I like this answer best. Taken from the guys over at Social Velocity, they state that social innovation is…
“…a whole group of big, ambitious, new ideas and models for solving social problems. Social innovation is about changing institutions, organizations, approaches, systems in fundamental ways so that we can fix the many problems facing us. It includes things like:

• Creating new financial vehicles where nonprofit and for profit organizations that are working to solve social problems can have ready access to all kinds of funding (seed funding, growth capital, debt, etc.)
• Removing the hurdles placed in front of organizations working to solve social problems (accounting standards, IRS regulations, etc.)
• Restructuring philanthropy to be more effective at supporting real change
• Revamping government so that it can support, rather than thwart, change leaders
• Reforming nonprofit organizations to break out of the starvation cycle and become more effective at creating social impact

And that’s just the beginning.
Social innovation is big. It’s bold. It is a movement of people and organizations from all three sectors (public, private, nonprofit) who are taking a completely different approach, who are turning the status quo on its head, who are building new systems, who are asking hard questions, who are creating a new way forward.”

Finally, attempting to answer the question I first addressed, in one word, social innovation means for me connecting. It means a better connection to self and in turn a better connection to the world around you. It entails understanding that everything is connected to everything else and searching for the required passion to connect work to play.

The Knowmadic Learning Lab, in collaboration with the Hub Summer School initiative on the Knowmads platform, is my attempt to strengthen the power of connection, to be part of the social innovation movement, and to connect to you, wherever you are. We hope to see you on at the end of this month for a great day of playing with our passions at the Knowmadic Learning Lab!

The Social Innovation Safari in Amsterdam was an absolute hit. As a follow up to a week of imaginative innovations that came out of five local project-based assignments, I’m creating a blog post harvesting all the great things that came out of the Safari. Taken from the Kennisland website, here are the cases:

• Jeugdzorg Amsterdam (Office for Juvenile Care) is a looking for ways to innovate in their complex organisation. What is going wrong? Interview the people involved and design simple intervention for a complex problem.
• IJburg is one of the youngest neighbourhood in Amsterdam and already facing serious challenges: small enterpreneurs are having a hard time surviving, different social groups don’t mix. A group of active residents of IJburg want to make their neighbourhood more livable and need your help!
• Filmmuseum Amsterdam will be moving to a new location (Amsterdam Noord) and wants to involve the neighbourhood. What ways can be found to make this cultural institution part of the neighbourhood and how can the people living there profit from this and add their value?
• Mixacademy: An alternative art academy in the center of Amsterdam. What can they do to stimulate creative entrepreneurschip and offer chances to talented people without focusing on prior education?
• Weekend School: A one-day extra-curricular educational program that is looking for a way to better connect their alumni to each other and also to the school’s network.

I’m especially focusing on the project I took on with the Mix Academy.

The Mix Academy, in simple terms, is an incredibly open alternative school for the arts located in the heart of the city. Recognizing that artists need to be entrepreneurs in order to reach their public, it trains students from all walks of life to discover their true self through their creativity. Whether it is through free painting, graphic design, 3D work, illustration, or photography, Mix Academy allows the individual to build a network around them that can launch them into the world. Combining high and low art through a very mixed curriculum, the Mix academy is a concept I greatly believe in.

Which is why it was so easy to take on this assignment that combined my interest in innovative education with art. Ralph de Lange, the initiator of the Mix, is a lovable character who was an absolute joy to work with. Strongly believing in his message that he wants to spread to the world, my team of six spent three days (and nights) working in parks, cafes, and even my apartment one very long evening. Here is the presentation full of innovative ideas that we gave to a full room of guests, including the local media, on the final evening:

For the full list of presentations that came out of the week-long program, see here.

Here are some other resources I’ve harvested on the final outcomes from the Safari:

An article written by Pieter Hilhorst of De Volkskrant, an Amsterdam newspaper. (Dutch, but can be translated)

The beginning of a great blog series on the Safari by Tage Skotvold, a participant and new friend.

An article by Hannah Aukes

Photos: KL Safari First Days

KL Safari Mix Academy

KL Safari BBQ

KL Safari Closing Event

A blog on the Safari by Patrick Veenhoff

Have I missed any other good sources? If so, let me know!

Recently at Knowmads, in a day-long workshop on Sustainability, we learned about The Natural Step. Founded in 1989 by Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt in Sweden, The Natural Step has been introduced to thousands of organizations as a means of creating a more globally-conscious society. Based on theory and research of the science behind the true meaning of sustainability, it aims to apply this theory into practice using the following framework:

This framework is based on the following four system conditions that positively develop people, planet, and profit:

In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing:

1. concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust;
2. concentrations of substances produced by society;
3. degradation by physical means and, in that society,
4. people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.

With that, I close with a question that I’ve been asking myself lately:

What is the natural step for you in your journey and how can you live life more fully while making a more positive impact not just on yourself, but also for the world?

“Deep Democracy is supposed to involve openness to other individuals, groups and diversity. It includes feelings, dreams, body symptoms, altered states of consciousness, synchronicities, and an awareness of signals, roles, and the structural dynamics of the interactions between the parties involved.”                                                                     -Wikipedia

After working with this tool at Knowmads, I don’t think our group will ever be the same. It completely changed my perspective on group dynamics and processes. Especially, in regards to Role Theory.

The photo on the left shows just how much wisdom the minority of any group, or society as a whole, has to offer.

Tracing history back to empires, where about .0001% of potential knowledge is taken into consideration and feudal systems where about .0005% of knowledge is used, and even democracy, where the majority (51%) wins, these methods are just the tip of the iceberg.

Developed by physicist Arny Mindell and his process work, Deep Democracy is based off the Jungian psychology that states democracy just may not be enough to achieve a real majority that is required to ‘keep people on the bus.’ In other words, when the minority loses, they will tread the ‘terrorist line.’ A person becomes a “terrorist” when they become uncomfortable with a decision that is made. Here is a diagram that explains how a covert terror attempt becomes a full-blown war within a group:

Here are the steps to take in order to dig deeper into what is called ‘fishing.’ These steps are taken in an attempt to find those deep emotions, or “fishes” that are in the subconscious of every group.

Step 1

Don’t practice Majority democracy!

In other words, go beyond the regular majority vote. The next steps allow this to happen.

Step 2

Make it safe to say ‘NO’

When other people feel uncomfortable with their true feelings because of group pressure, they are never truly heard. Thus begins the resentment and jokes that enter the terrorist line. Once you, as a facilitator are able to make it safe to say ‘NO,’ true emotions can emerge.

Step 3

Spread the ‘NO’

Have you ever been in a meeting and been brave enough to really say what you thought and felt like a complete asshole afterwards? This next step helps prevent that brave person to not feel so alone. Role theory, which I will touch upon later, proves that these people are usually never alone. Most of the time, if you can relate to this experience,

Giving us a menu of theory, practice, tools, and exercises we could use, Moraan Gilad did a great job hosting the workshop. By using this menu full of options that allowed us to choose the structure of the workshop, we were able to practice facilitating the technique ourselves. On the final afternoon, she showed us her expert skills as we went fishing as a group using the ‘soft shoe shuffle,’ an on-your-feet exercise that magnifies the feeling people had toward the group regarding some pretty sensitive subjects. She did a great job fishing, but left me with a burning question:

Now that we’ve caught the fish, what do we do with it?

To be continued….