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Monthly Archives: May 2014

One Man’s Ceiling, Elevated Ideas of existence & the problem with Growing Up

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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70s shift dress, Cork Wedges, Creative Workshops, District & Circle Line. Glastonbury Tor, Grassy Knoll, Growing Up, Human Behaviour, Human Ingenuity, Lateral Thought, Lizard Brain, methods of Doing, My Little Pony, Need States, Roswell, sophistry, Tickle Fights

 

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As I lay on the sun-warmed grass of the south facing slope of Glastonbury Tor something struck me.

My Little Pony. The yellow-maned one.  On the side of the head to be precise.

“Tickle Fight! Tickle Fight! Tickle Fight!” The shout went up: auguring another limb flailing biff smash crash guffaw squawk celebrity smack-down between myself, my increasingly physical 9 year old boy and his highly rambunctious six year old sister.

Tickle fight is really just an excuse to roll around on the floor. Not that children need much excuse

They had been repeatedly rolling down the slope further around the Tor from where I lay for a good twenty minutes prior to this point.

My son finds any excuse to drop to the floor and roll around. To be fair they both can find themselves sprawling across the floor at the drop of a well-turned hat.

It is not just a percussive physical strike-force strategy: i.e. hit the floor often and repeat as necessary. It is a happy and safe place for them, lying, sitting, sprawled. The more deconstructed the better.

Both can be found at different times Lying inert: staring into the void beneath the bed, by the sofa, in the hall, half-way up the stairs; usually frozen mid play, off in some other universe of being: or they’re sellotaped to the floor setting up various abstract collections of small figures, bits of plastic, random findings and parts of their parent’s more precious items configured into some form of story to be told: a battle, a fairy tale, a horror show, a chance meeting, the end of the world, cosmic catastrophe.

To be part of the invention or story requires the grown up to a) get over them selves and down on their knees, b) fall forwards onto their stomach and c) get their face into the right universe – the miraculous and magical one that has just been created a few millimetres off the ground. A little like spiritual scuba diving, the wonder in their world is a few atmospheres of imagination below us.

Grown ups know this place. Or we should do.

We once spent hours there: whether the ground in question was covered in carpet, straw, wooden boards, grass, earth, pine needles, gravel or even tarmac. (I remember as a child lying on a tarmac road on a hot day and pressing my face to its surface and using a small pen knife to lever out the small lead balls that had been set into it – miniature cannon balls for later use in some fantastic battle scene.)

It was a place of wonder, the ground; where you could still feel the gravity pull you towards the spinning orb. Where you could turn on your back and watch clouds scud above. Where bugs crept up blades of grass. Small pools of dew and rainwater hid. Where the earth smelt real and close: and yours. You knew where you were when you were on the ground.

Anything could take you there. Sometimes it was dramatic: your body suddenly and brutally pulverized by the imaginary film baddie’s automatic pistol/phaser/laser/RPG, at which point, juddering in percussive stunt man slo-mo fashion we would launch off the edge of the bed to land, in continued fake slo-mo, face crunching, on the ground. To then just lie there because it was quite a nice place to be.

Other reasons for being floor or ground bound?

The turning upside-down while sliding off a bed/bench/swing/wall/step like a slithering lizard, lower body still suspended or supported by the thing one has just slid off while the head shoulders, and most importantly, the face, come to a friction-stop, to end up adhered to the floor or ground beneath.

The siren call of a floor-based feast would signal the gathering of twigs leaves, divots of muddy stuff and strands of grass to be confected into a fresh baked pie or meal laid out in the middle of a damp rain flecked piece of grass or in the cork-muffled floor space under the climbing frame. To be sat around and tuned to perfection.

There’s the rolling-down-grassy-knolls reason of course (the non JFK type – though the presence of two small children flailing around on that one might have led history in a different direction!).

Collapsing modes of expressive dance offers many opportunities for floor bound adventure – where a few random balletic moves deconstruct downwards until the small person slumps to the floor like a pile of dropped clothes. Face pressed against the sprung floor of a dance studio or school gym (a nostril of dusty motes and the faint vibration of the boards is one of the happiest places known to man!).

Or at a really base level, you can’t make all of the subterranean tunnels, underpasses, secret doors and undercrofts required to make a killer sand castle until you get your face in the grains and GET IN!

In short, the thing that crossed my mind (just after the small yellow plastic pony) was the thought (one I have had previously and forgotten about) that the main problem with growing up is perhaps that we do exactly that. We grow up and away from the ground, elevating ourselves out of the rare and other worldly atmospheres of the imagination and the visceral experience of the planet on which we exist to take some higher plane of consciousness. We both intellectually and physically start to ‘get above ourselves’.

In growing up we move up and away from our primal connection to the natural landscapes of the imagination and the storytelling nature inherent in all of us.

Our ability, left to our own devices (and closer to the floor) to create or navigate worlds so real that we could attach quite clear cognitive and social principals to them: develop their cultures, languages and rituals: in ever increasing and ever more complicating detail, was and is for those children still doing it quite astounding.

If we weren’t creating floor-sprawling stories from scratch (which takes on a whole new meaning in this earthy atmosphere), we were navigating and revealing to ourselves the ones that already existed there in front of us: between the bugs and the blades, across the mulch under our nose; in wind as it bumped and popped our ears and rolled the blanket of sunlight backwards and forwards across the grass on the common: and in the sky above us in the shapes of the clouds and the velocity of the rain drops that dropped out of the universe to travel through science fiction to arrive as a fact, splat, on our forehead.

And I wondered what robs us of this facility to look in wonder at the simplest things? What interrupts or obscures our ability to see ‘creatively and inventively’, as a rite of human passage to a better existence or a more enlightened and joyful experience? Especially in the context of improving our immediate existence – in our ability to look at our work – is systems its processes its people and its material self.

What diminishes this almost lizard brain mechansim? Of course life sends us tests and brutal realities that knock the ‘stuffing’ out of us and pop our little balloon. Yes, the cynic must play some part in removing the infantile nature of some of the things we explored as a child.  And sticking to a stubbornly naïve and willfully childish perspective (as opposed to child-like one, which we like) only serves to exacerbate the problem with those of us more partial to sharp cornered and wholly reason based perspectives.

But it seems that as some of us become increasingly more ‘grown up’ we become increasingly ‘shut down’ in our liberal creative ‘gut’ abilities – and decreasingly capable of allowing facts and reason and myths and storytelling to exist next to each other without feeling compromised and compelled to ‘choose’.

The rigour of reason and sharp cornered fact is essential in ridding the human race of the kind of voodoo puffery and hocus-pocus to which the more marginalized and frankly dangerous freaks, socio and psychopaths, manipulators, tricksters, megalomaniacs, zealots and fundamentalists flock.

In far more inane terms, frameworks structures and methodologies of Doing are critical to keeping the wheels of human existence turning. But the rote systems that prepare us for participating in their systemic truths are just that.

Systems of Thinking to fit Systems of Doing – manufacturing, trading, building, maintaining, powering, growing, stewarding, managing – allow communities and collectives to be resourceful, resilient, adaptive and endure – a primary imperative

But they are not the source of the wonder of human existence. Human ingenuity, the elevator and slingshot of all we are stems from a curiosity and a wonder of all that exists: both materially, spiritually and inventively: the collision of which creates our sense of What If?

Our frameworks of thriving seem to discount imagination and the storytelling structures it uses to exercise and process cognitive truths as broadly dangerous, fruitless or feckless.

It is as if the cool lucidity of reason can be brutally and eternally extinguished by fairy tales and myths – and anyone partaking of the Kool Aid of lateral creative and deconstructed thinking and any exercises that promote it will be rendered deaf dumb and blind to danger and threat: to risk of any sort; and fail to see the mammoth/meteorite/fight/war/financial-crash/virus coming. Strangely, as I write those out I see that the source and purveyors of most of these bar the mammoth and meteorite are the consequence of wholly sharp cornered reason minded individuals and collectives exercising their needs and desires in the world.

Put some scientists, analysts, mathematicians, engineers in a room with a creative exercise and suddenly we’re all feeling that someone is about to sell us Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny wrapped up in an “I’m a Roswell Believer T Shirt”.

In the hierarchies of need (with which I have been a little loose and free) the engineering mentality of the Surviving With Stickers and Early Thriving stage seems to have overwhelmed our ability to just Be with our most inventive self

BEING – unfettered from burdens – luxury of conscience – What If? – life’s mysteries

Thriving – accruing STUFF, plentiful, stable, secure and expanding life

Surviving With Stickers – stable, secure, comfortable with shiny treats every so often

Surviving – stable secure fixed – a happy grind, power of the collectives

Struggling – unstable, volatile circumstance, financially socially

Flailing & Failing – pick a skip, any skip – includes ‘Scraping’ – the bottom of the barrel – and reaching up to do it: the relegation zone of existence. Struggling to fulfil basic needs – food, warmth, safety.

Sometimes, when running creative exercises in workshops specifically designed to unlock the more lateral out of the ordinary parts of a person’s brain (a part that they most patently have) it is astonishing to find how many supposedly confident and rooted adults are so easily made to feel unsteady and uncertain – and not just as part of the exercise. Even though everyone knows that they will return in a matter of hours to the very narrow channels in which to reapply the relative rigour and specificity they need to do their job successfully, even a small number of hours applied to deconstructing the frameworks they know seems to leave them terrified that the process will render them a useless engine, unfit to ever apply the strictures and applications of the more engineered mind ever again.

If we had dressed grown men in a Floral Shift Dress and 1970s Cork Wedges with Roman sandal ties they would have probably felt more comfortable than they did when asked to undertake the simple act of thinking What If? for 3-4 hours (though that may say more about the latent joy the average professional UK male finds in the ‘cross-dressing up box’ than it does about their ability to unlock their lateral creative gene without a fixed outcome to aim for).

Sadly I sense that it would just be seen as some retrograde hippy exercise but I would love to just once take every super C Suite member of the Private Sector and ask them lie on the ground for an hour (the type of which they can choose of course and face down or up is up to them) and then ask them to write a short ‘ what on earth…?’ piece where they have to relate their time on the ground to some aspect of the business they run.

What on Earth does lying on the bloody floor have to do with my business? Exactly.

I feel that perhaps, in getting closer to the ground is a good thing: not because it allows us to act like a 6 year old (though to be frank I’ve seen some supposedly grown up masters of the universe types or ‘heavy-hitters’ demonstrate behaviour that make my 6 year old daughter look positively sage-like, balanced and calm).

But because it does exactly what the phrase says on the tin: it grounds us. Takes us to a simple point of interrelation, perspective and interpretation. It is hard to maintain the toxic affectations of grandeur and status while lying on the ground. The values and behaviours set alters.

Humility becomes primary: prostrate, genuflective.

Connectedness is mandatory: because more of you is in touch with the living floor of the planet on which we live.

Calm is compulsive: lie down on the floor and see how fast you decompress. It’s measurable – a flashback perhaps to the time at the end of PE at primary school where everyone lay on the floor (long before the ‘stretching’ cool down was fashionable) to just calm down after all that running about.

Consideration becomes reflex: surprising what fills your mind when all the other junk gets pushed out of the way by the smell of grass or the dusty floorboards of an exercise room.

In much the same way that we are apparently far healthier in our minds when undertaking manual constructive and generative tasks – from gardening to DIY to dry-stone walling, I feel we also become far healthier in our minds with a little ‘floor action’.

Getting ground-bound is something I would suggest we all do every now and then, not because it makes us infantile or regress to some ‘creatively compelling’ state of deconstructed dribbling being, but because it reopens some of doors that are of enormous value to our cognitive and effective states of being.

And also a change is as good as a rest.

In the same way that an ascent to stand on a desk to the chant of ‘Captain My Captain’ compelled the schoolboy characters in Dead Poets Society to change their perspective – their way of seeing – by elevating it: I would suggest for Newtonian balance that the same is true for the ground. With stickers.

As unlike its loftier cousin ‘all the way up there’, the ground down here doesn’t just connect us to a different vantage point.

I believe it also connects us to a part of ourselves and our latent social and individual memory that we tend to keep filed away or have perhaps forgotten.

So Double Bubble.

There is something poetic (both spiritually and literally) about how sounds travel through the ground. From the imperceptible nature of the earth turning to bigger things like passing lorries on a motorway, the coming storm of the buffalo, the District & Circle Line.

So lets hear it for the floor, and our connection to it. If it ensures that we ‘get over ourselves’ for ten seconds and catch ‘the elevator down’ from ‘above’ ourselves all power to it.

It might also just be the most powerful HR weapon in the armoury of reinventing C Suite propensities for invention.

Or just be a tickle fight. In which case. Who cares?

Man vs. Breakfast & A New American Dream-like-Breakfast-Burrito-thing-kinda.

03 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Bacon, Bagel & Lox, Breakfast, Burrito, Celebrity, China Dream, Christ In Concrete, Cornbread, Dr Suess, Dream In A Box, fast Food, Food As Fuel, Grapes Of Wrath, Grits, Ham, Hollywood, Identity, Immigrant nation, industrial farming, Jerry Springer, Midwest Farmers, Motor City, Native Americans, New York, Occidental College, Over Easy, Peggy Liu, people Powered Behaviour Change, Pietro Donato, Reframing the Language of Sustainability, Reimagining Prosperity, Route 66, Sam I Am, Sausage patties, Skyscrapers, Steak & Eggs, Steinbeck, Sunny Side Up, TEDx, the American Dream, The Great American Song&StoryBook, The Great Depression, The US Constitution, water stewardship

sir grapefellow

Someone was going to do it. Someone was always going to think it was a good idea to eventually bite the bullet and look the

frickinfrackinlipsmackinallbeefpattyonasesameseed

sunnysideupfried4wheeldriveovenbakedstuffedcrust

justlovinitgasandoilmeupandputmytrash

intheringerjerryspringer                                                                                      

beast of the all consuming American Dream in the eye and say Whoa buddy! No buddy. The time’s they are a changin’.

Someone was always going to go to the dark heart of what has got us all junked up on toxic fantasies of infinite everything and stick a sign on its door that simply says ‘obsolete’.

On March 29th 2014, Peggy Liu of JUCCCE and a fellowship of like minds found themselves doing just that at TEDx Occidental. They had an inaugural ‘You are Here!’moment. A first step towards pouring some cool crystal waters on the seemingly unquenchable fires of the old American Dream.

Peggy gave a deeply-felt entreat for why we might ever choose to set about re-imagining something as unwieldy as the American concept of Prosperity. It’s not just a big challenge. I’d say more planet-sized and very very defensive, aggressive and grumpy.

I understand the power of the ambition and how it could shift more paradigms towards improved human existence than we could reasonably count. But the biggest thing for me is – Where the hell would we begin?

Where do we start the journey to a more enduring aspiration for every American? Especially given how entrenched, sprawling and absolutist the old Dream has become and how resilient its ability to seduce still is.

Where do we even begin in unpacking the old one to get to the new? The Constitution? Hollywood? Skyscrapers? Motor City? Fast Food? Celebrity? Route 66? The great American Song book? Jerry Springer’s underwear drawer? the NRA?

The first stage of the Dream in a Box methodology that I developed with Peggy imagines that you will need to include all of them – the more diverse the collection of mindsets, values beliefs, ambitions, truths, myths, inspirations and provocations the better. The Frame The Dream stage actively encourages them.

The Frame The Dream stage endeavours to explore and curate the most diverse cultural levers – beliefs, insights, idioms, visualisations and language – in such a way as to identify some themes or ideas – something human and everyday – that might help can-open the topic in a productive creative and constructive manner. Because you’re going to need a super simple ‘something’ – a word, a thing, a ritual, a truth, an insight, a moment –  that helps everyone to make a very complex thing simple and engaging.

And given that the American Dream sprawls across a collision of cultures, tribes, myths, histories, lifestyles and beliefs all wrapped in a star spangled constitution, it needs to be a ‘something’ that is both broadly representative and quite singular at the same time.

Your ‘something’ will need to be representative of what is, informative of what can be, and illustrative and what might be.

Furthermore, the Dream In A Box methodology is constructed for and committed to making sure that whatever that ‘something’ might be, that it is culturally rooted and relevant – inextricable from the society it is supposed to grow out of.

So lets just cat’s paw around what that might demand of the ‘something’ that might give us a starting point in this journey.

Well, we’d need a ‘something’ that sits at the heart of every American movie, myth and icon, written into the Great American Songbook; something that builds skyscrapers; with its toes in the red-earth of the native and its fingers touching the craters on the Moon; something that stands as an inalienable right of every American and sits at the heart of the great American pioneering spirit would be great; something that feeds the soul and raises a barn; tells you you’re Home and reassures you when you’re away. And hell while we’re at it let’s expect that it has to be a something that is as much of the Corn Belt as it is of the Montana Mountaineer, New England Fisherman and the Mexican ranch worker. It’s got to be quick slow big small light n heavy. As happy on the front seat of the Caddy as it is on the Stoop.

If it is to help inspire the beginnings of re-imagination and the multiple strands that would need to fall out of that, the ‘something’ needs to be multi-talented – a prop, a firework a lever and a pulley. It has to inspire as much as it deconstructs, elevate to the same degree that it mines, and unify as much as divides.

What’s more, to do that authentically and with meaning it has to have an authentic people-powered everyday language of its own; authentically written through the cultural vernacular of the tribes and lives we are trying to inspire. It must enable us to mine insights; and help us ask the right questions by being something that people talk of without ‘side’.

Most importantly the ‘something’ must come from a happy place – be something that people engage with easily and on which they will happily venture an reasoned opinion.

It has to be something people look forwards to, love, fetishise, pore over, chill with, feel protective of, and loyal to; a powerful signature of their identity and a seamless pillar in their everyday

Only a ‘something’ like that will allow us to exit the Glass Half empty world of mitigation and reduction and allows us to enter the Glass half full world of celebration and aspiration.

So no pressure then.

With all of that in mind, my starter for ten against that small list of needs based criteria: my small suggestion for the room.

Re-imagining The Great American Breakfast

The Breakfast of champions – the Great American Breakfast – legendary output of every diner from Montana to New Mexico and Mississippi, via NYC to LA and Chicago and back.

Movies are written around it. Pictures painted of it. Love is made both before it and after it. Lives complete themselves through it. What fuels the Dream? Oil? Wheat? Gold? Nickel? Gas? Perhaps. Breakfast? Always.

Hash browns, three eggs sunny side up or over easy. Sausage patties. Hickory smoked bacon, grits, cornbread, beans, breakfast burrito, Bagel Lox and cheese, 3 egg omelette, steak and eggs. The list is endless. And it comes fast and it comes big. All in or on the side. This is the corner stone of the old pioneer/engineer/farmer America.

Railways may well have been built upon the idea that a businessman in Chicago could eat a fresh caught Maine Lobster for supper in the dining carriage on his way to San Francisco!! But the railways were forged around the great American breakfast (with an Irish & Chinese twist to be fair).

Big dreams are built on big breakfasts in the land of plenty. Scrawny beaten underfed workers don’t build dreams.

So I say if we’re going to re-imagine the American Dream and build a new one – lets start with the right breakfast.

If we’re going to show how a glass-half-full approach allows us to re-imagine something people will turn towards as opposed to away from – lets use the great American breakfast as an illustration of how we move from hectoring and depressing mitigation strategies of more sustainable living plans – relentlessly obsessing on energy and emission reduction, recycle reuse mantras, calorific intake and portion control – to one of celebration.

We love the Great American Breakfast as the foundation on which American Dreams are built. Every great American breakfast type was built and fit for calorific contextual and cultural purpose. It is deeply etched with physiological and psychological truths.

In sustainability, CSR and responsible living terms the breakfast is a road that can lead us to everything – diet; wellbeing; performance; healthcare; social cohesion; myths and rituals; provenance; water stewardship; energy consumption; land crop and livestock management; logistics; pulp, paper & card packaging; pretty much everything.

We could potentially use the popular people-powered culture of the great American breakfast to start to unpack the old dream to shape a new one based around a more enduring aspiration built of people sized values, not corporate sized imperatives. We could start to see that Green Eggs & ham Sam I Am is a far more productive and sociable lever to get everyday people into talking nutrition, ethics, provenance, traceability, consumer bullying, and the caprices of 6-foot tall Cat In a rather special hat and its role in the Great American Child’s dietary intake!

Let’s use its role in the American Dream to frame the American Breakfast as a fluid concept rooted at the very heart of an individuals concept of Prosperity

Use smart savvy storytelling to go on a journey – show why the vast expanse and sometimes behemoth portions sizes of the American breakfast have evolved; its scale and purpose fuelled both by the original immigrant poor seeking the world where they would never put an empty plate in front of their child or scratch another breakfast again – like the Italian Immigrant Construction workers building the skyscrapers of New York in Pietro Donato’s book, Christ In Concrete. Or the transient and vagrant farming poor of the Midwest walking through the flatlands of the Great depression and the pages of The Grapes Of Wrath. Lets celebrate those reasons for being, not throw stones at them.

Lets look at the breakfast culture of the German and Dutch farmers and their substantial daily foundations of steak cheese and eggs, The lox and cheese of the New York Jewish disapora and the Bear Claw pastry commute. let’s get us some of that Southern grits soul of a Cat On A Hot Breakfast Roll Baking Tin Roof and the sleepy spice of a barrio breakfast burrito signorito.

Why?

Because the Great American Breakfast could be the doorway into scaling the conversation – through stimulating the myths and storytelling of individuals and their relationships with their breakfast.

We can introduce the joy of collaborating across the social networks to co-create the Great American Breakfast of the 21st Century – what is it made up of? Who’s represented in there? Is their a hybrid? How do we socialize around it? Use it as a lever to open up the deeper insights of being belonging and thriving.

In scoping a new model for what the great American people need right now, for how they live and work – framed in terms of dietary needs (energy/nutrition/format), wellbeing, balance, speed of life, community and identity – we can start to engage in conversations around calorific intake, obesity, balanced diet, fuel vs. flavor, provenance, quality as a proxy for resilience, and the role of tribes and communities in reshaping the new dream of prosperity without starting with the don’t do this eat less of that, trash fewer of these, torch less of those and stop frackin that speech.

A chat about the Great American Breakfast as a metaphor for the joy, wellbeing, balance and thriving ecosystem of interrelatedness and mutuual respect of all things good at the heart of the New American Dream just might Switch them on and not turn them off.

DISCUSS (over breakfast perhaps?)

 

 

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