Endless Knots

Lifetime Learning in Newton -- beginning Sept 16

I got one of those delicious little gigs this summer, the kind that's satisfying to do, short in duration, and which puts you in touch with great people. Such was the situation when my friend, Ed Hauben,director of Newton Community Education (my hometown, the one and only Garden City, Newton, Massachusetts, just outside Boston for my global friends), asked me if I could find speakers for Newton's Lifetime Learning program.

The Dr. George Altman Distinguished Speaker Series has been going for 34 (!) years, drawing scores of local notables and listeners from 40-some surrounding communities. The program is aimed at the "older folk," people from their late-60s to late-90s, and it draws crowds up to 250! Former Mass Governor Mike Dukakais is emblematic of the type of person who speaks. And, the program is paired with the Harriet Altman Classical Music Performance Series. Here's a link to the brochure, which includes the music program as well.

So if you fit the profile (Gen W? or before, i.e. boomer and beyond), mark your calendars for Monday mornings, beginning Sept 16, and head for Wilson Chapel at Andover Newton Theological Seminary. For the record, I "sourced" the speakers through networking: first I wrote to a handful of friends whom I knew would be great; then I wrote to another handful of people whom I knew would know great speakers. Kudos to Ray Elman, who recommended two of those below: Denise Blumenthal and Stephen Kinzer. Ed Hauben knew Bob Gerst; Ruth Nemzoff and Judith Kurland are friends of mine; and Marion Stoddart is a friend of my sister-in-law, Susan Stamps. Here's the list of speakers -- all very interesting! I'll be there for some if not all of the sessions. See you there?

• Ruth Nemzoff, Brandeis Scholar and author, on intergenerational relationships
• Judith Kurland, Director, UMass Boston Center for Community Democracy, on what to look for in candiates
• Denise Blumenthal, Director, WGBH Education Department, on educational technology
• Bob Gerst, Mass College of Art, Liberal Arts Chair, on the movies
• Stephen Kinzer, veteran NY Times correspondent and author, on the Dulles brothers
• Marion Stoddart, 85-year-old activist, on "The Work of 1000" 

 

"Collective Sensemaking:" Author Nancy Dixon looking for participants

My colleague, Nancy Dixon, author, knowledge expert, and insightful thinker, is writing a new book about "Collective Sensemaking," which happens, she posits, as part of the perpetual motion of teams -- sometimes together, sometimes apart -- and is looking for teams to interview. I asked her to send a few paragraphs re: what she's looking for. Sounds like an interesting book!

"If an organization wants to be agile, which requires employees to quickly change what they are doing, they will have to make employees a part of creating the change rather than trying to “sell” it, or implementing lengthy change management processes, to try to convince employees to change.  Making employees a part of creating the change has the great advantage of accessing their collective intelligence, thus increasing the likelihood that the change is both in the right direction and implementable.  Collective Sensemaking is the conversational process of employees thinking together about where they are and where they need to go. Depending on the size of the unit that needs to change, Collective Sensemaking conversations can take place in a team, department, or whole organization.  There is skill in creating the structure of Collective Sensemaking conversations, it is clearly not a series of presentations, typical of most quarterly or annual meetings.

A number of virtual teams, distributed project teams, as well as whole organizations, have found advantage in oscillating between distributed work and coming together for Collective Sensemaking.  I am writing a book about this pattern of oscillation and about how to make Collective Sensemaking work. I currently have cases written about three  organizations that use this pattern, a consulting company, software project team, and a government agency.  I am looking for positive examples from other industries.  The process I use to develop the cases is to interview 5-12  employees over Skype or Google Hangout, write the case based on the processes they describe and connect those processes to Collective Sensemaking concepts and research that helps to explain why it works.   I  return the case to the interviewees to review and correct. I give the organization and individuals the option of using real or fictitious names in the case. The benefit to the organization is a deeper understanding of their processes and the opportunity to review the cases from other organization which can provide them new ideas to support their own work.

If your organizations does this kind of oscillation, even if you don’t call it Collective Sensemaking, :) I’d be very interested in have an exploratory call with you. You can reach me at [email protected]"

 

Here's a way to start the Peace Talks: See MetroPAL.IS.

On a recent road trip, we broke up hundreds of miles of driving by stopping at a few museums (including the admission-free/don't-miss-it-next-time-you're-there Cleveland Museum of Art) and visiting a few campuses we'd never seen before, namely University of Kentucky, Berea College, and "The" Ohio State University.

OSU has a little gem of a gallery in the Wex Center for the Arts. We didn't take to the current exhibit but the gallery itself is cleverly designed with skinnny hallways, short staircases that go somewhere and sometimes nowhere, and, in the vestibule, theatre/video/politics in the round so moving, so pertinent, and so poignant that I'm posting an abbreviated version of artist Shimon Attie's MetroPAL.IS., which is nothing like the experience of standing, turning, and turning again in the middle of this immersive performance to see who just said what. Everyone sitting at the Peace Talks Table (beginning tomorrow) should be required to see this piece.

 

 

What makes MetroPAL.IS. so remarkable? Simplicity and synchronicity. Attie takes two seminal documents, each belonging to the other's enemy in the form of its country's Declaration of Independence, and has them read by New Yorkers from "the Palestinian and Israeli communities." The eight characters read separately when the words are different and together when they're the same. The inevitable conclusion? The two independence declarations of mortal next-door-neighbor-enemies are pretty much identical. 

I don't think I've ever before recommended that anyone drive to Columbus, Ohio, to see a video. But now I am. If you're within a few hundred miles of this gallery, go. You will embed an unshakable idea in your consciousness: a work of art stitched with a conundrum and you may even become like me, wondering why can't we just get along again if our fundamental beliefs are identical, I mean, so similar.

Here's a description from the gallery's website:

Shimon Attie’s MetroPAL.IS., an immersive, multiple-channel video installation, dramatically tackles the complex and intensely problematic Arab-Israeli conflict with characters cast from the Palestinian and Israeli communities in New York City. Dressed in outfits that reflect their varied lifestyles and professions, each of the performers reads from a document created by Attie that combines sections of the Israeli Declaration of Independence (1948) and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence (1988). This hybrid document reveals a surprisingly significant overlap between the two original texts.

Eight 65-inch (vertical) monitors encircle viewers with one larger-than-life-size character on each screen. The characters appear in poses reminiscent of classical sculpture or baroque painting, with an almost orchestral flow of sound and text among them, enhancing the dramatic impact of the work. The complex editing and post-production work integral to creating this symphony of voices and the interaction among the individual monitors was completed during Attie’s residency as a visiting artist in the Wex’s Film/Video Studio Program in 2010.

[And from the artist himself] Attie notes that video, as a time-based format, “lends itself to the kinds of conflation of past and present which is central to my work. In addition, creating multiple-channel, immersive works allow me to activate a given space, which is also something central to my artistic sensibility.”

MetroPAL.IS., a video installation by Shimon Attie, with Vale Bruck, was commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

 

Office 365: "This will take 45 minutes"

Although I won't post any more about my hard drive crash, I do have other sequella to report. For example, if you are like me, i.e. you don't travel with all your applications in your suitcase, then when you restore your files, you'll have everything except your applications.

Thus, I signed up for Office 365 as a way to be able to work with my documents until I have Office reinstalled on my machine. Office 365 is inexpensive and it seemed to solve my immediate problem.

However...I can't get past the first step, customizing my email address. I've spent about an hour so far trying to figure out how to do this, which involves logging into my domain server, adding a DNS address, and shuddering because of the warning message that says that if I do this, I will permanently move my domain to a different server. Alas! Microsoft instructions say just to hit "cancel" at that point.

I know I don't have a degree in computer science and thus am ill-equipped to do anything fancy but can someone at Microsoft please explain to me why the conclusion to a warning is "cancel" and how that makes ANY SENSE WHATSOEVER? By the way, there is no obvious cancel button on my domain server site where I'm supposed to hit cancel.

What's the subject line, "This will take 45 minutes about?" Yes, that's what the Microsoft site and the explanatory video says right up front. If when using Office 365 you want your email address to say [email protected] rather than [email protected] you have to go through this process.

I wrote to Microsoft of course but haven't had a reply. Meanwhile, I'm using Google Docs/Drive, which is a workaround but not a permanent solution.

Back up, backed up, and, whew, my mail...

Four weeks (it all began on July 3), a new hard drive (OWC solid state replacement of solid state that failed in 8 months), a new logic board, and $420 later, my adored MacAir is working again, thanks to Craig Marin at Computer Loft and Carbonite. 

Incredibly, all of my files are now restored from Carbonite including such a large amount of mail that I cannot bring myself to reveal the number. OK, I can bring myself: 12K messages. Please hold all comments on why I'm not a better deleter. I also have every letter that anyone wrote to me from the time I was in fifth grade forward.

Once all the hardware was fixed (it was a cascade of failure, lucky me), the restore took a very long time.

As in over a week. And not just because of the messages. I had approximately 500K files. Is this a lot for a person? A person with a business? A person with a business who is a writer. Hang on, anyone wanting to bust into my machine. Financial files are elsewhere so, snoops, go elsewhere.

My files have accrued just in the normal course of being a person who works. Documents, meaning research, reports, memos, articles, books, proposals, contracts, etc, stuff I write or that I've gathered in the course of writing or doing business or that others have written (somehow I also end up editing a lot of other people's writing) or, you know, the endless stream of attachments. Spreadsheets to keep track of all manner of thing, from how much time I spend on projects for billing purposes to data for OrgScope to...so many things. Pictures, but not an excessive amount by some people's standards. Very little music by anyone's standards (thank you, Rhapsody). And on and on but...500K? That seems like a lot.

But regardless of the size of my backup, over a week seems like a painfully long time to restore especially because the backup was being done via a direct connection, not wirelessly. Is there a faster way to do this? If not, BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY AWAITS YOU!

Just a few more words and then I'm done and I hope I'll never have to post on this again. I do also have a nifty little portable terabyte hard drive backup. I used it religiously (well, regularly). Until about two months ago when I put it somewhere when I was going on a trip and didn't want to have to schlep it along. Of course, I put it in the perfect place such that I wouldn't ever not know where it was and... I haven't been able to find it since.

So now I have a second terabyte hard drive. I have now attached it to my wrist. I know. I look funny but you'll never heard me screaming again, WHERE IS MY G.D. HARD DRIVE!?!"

Finally, and perhaps the most important lesson from all of this: I was lucky to have an old computer that still works, a MacBook Pro, purchased in 2007 or 2008 that I used until Feb 2011 when I got my MacAir. It is still working pretty admirably when I moved to the Air, which I wanted for its speed and its weight (details included in many posts from that period). Between downloading files from Carbonite on an as-needed basis and being willing to kludge together emails based on memory, including some guesses as to people's email addresses because I was unable to access my old mail through Carbonite during the restore, I kept working. I'm not sure my colleagues would have known that I was taking the bus everywhere rather than the bullet train.

And, oh, why am I including this picture of Daughter #2 with her two nephews who happen to be my twin grandsons? Because as frustrating and swear-inducing as situations like this are, they ain't nothing, really, when I stop to think about the wonders of life. This picture was taken at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art just days before the crash. The boys became enamored of a film that was being shown on a loop alongside the Barry McGee graffiti show, which they watched three times. The room was a little cold so we threw this scarf around them.