The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.William Blake (via @timoreilly)
Showing only Notes & Links tagged change
Contact Me
hello@caseyagollan.com
@caseyg on Twitter
“The change you experienced last night at midnight is available to you every moment of every day. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.” —@danbenjamin
(via Zeldman)
We need to get used to the changing nature of the internet. It’s no longer about a bunch of static documents connected by links. Our profiles and statuses will update, we will friend and un-friend, and occasionally we will suffer loss.Leah Culver
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.Charles Darwin (via brocatus)
Notes: Project M, Pie Lab, Thinking Wrong
Just got an email from a friend encouraging donations to Project M, a group of people changing on the world through design, and their newest venture: Pie Lab.
Pie Lab serves new life into communities through pie. Savory or sweet – pie is loved by all. As something that is loved by all, Pie is common ground and can be used as a tool for social change. Pie Lab brings joy, prosperity and social transformation through a channel of dynamic ideals that revolutionize the way business is done. At Pie Lab we are not interested in competing in the rat race. At Pie Lab we are interested in stimulating a new challenge: business that promotes a more nourishing future. Pie Lab is all about the interaction of a community with business where business responds to the needs of a community as they change. Pie Lab is real people with the goal to galvanize positive change in communities.
John Bielenberg, leader of Project M, on his philosophy of “thinking wrong”:
Thinking wrong is really about challenging our conventions, processes and orthodoxies, especially during the idea-generation phase of design. I believe that the process of thinking wrong is an antidote to how our brains create synaptic connections, or heuristic biases, to efficiently function in the world and produce predictable, but expected results. It’s about generating a huge number of possibilities, before selecting or executing, and is based on the assumption that creativity, invention and innovation are good things. At Project M we use a variety of exercises to short circuit our biases and connect things that wouldn’t normally be connected. It doesn’t mean that the final project looks or feels “wrong.”
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.Bertrand Russell (via butdoesitfloat)
Consider for a minute the pivot points available to you:
Keep the machines in your factory, but change what they make.
Keep your customers, but change what you sell to them.
Keep your providers, but change the profit structure.
Keep your industry but change where the money comes from.
Keep your staff, but change what you do.
Keep your mission, but change your scale.
Keep your products, but change the way you market them.
Keep your customers, but change how much you sell each one.
Keep your technology, but use it to do something else.
Keep your reputation, but apply it to a different industry or problem.
Seth’s Blog: The power of an algorithmIdeas that spread, win. Sometimes ideas get changed in transmission, and sometimes those changed ideas spread even farther and with more impact than the ideas that came before them.
In business, if you lock down ideas, make them difficult to change and spread and have impact, you fail. If you accept the fact that change is real, that there is competition for your ideas and that amplifying the good stuff works, you can grow and thrive.
Seeing the algorithm in action (which the Net makes easy) helps you understand the notion of failing fast, of exposing ideas to the real world with a posture of perpetual beta. The clothing store Zara doesn’t have clothes for a particular season, they launch clothes for a particular fortnight. They watch and measure and adjust and then repeat.
Your organization (and your career) either embraces change and turmoil and sudden shifts in the rules or you fear it. In times of rapid change (that would be now), embracing the algorithm of the evolution of ideas and systems is a significant competitive advantage.
DesignAday - Truism“Broken gets fixed. Shoddy lasts forever”
When deadlines are tight, and there is more work to get done than there are developers or hours in the schedule, it’s not the squeaky wheel, but the jammed one that gets the grease. The lesson, then, is to make sure it gets done right the first time. You never know when you’ll have the opportunity to revisit it.
Clutter and Change
There is a Buddhist parable (which I can’t find right now) about a man who wants a larger house. He goes to his mentor and asks him what he should do. The mentor says, “bring five goats into your house”. The man is confused but follows the directions. He says to the mentor, “now my house seems even smaller!” The mentor tells him to bring five more goats into his house. Now the man’s house is bursting at the seams with animals, so there is hardly any room. He returns to his mentor who tells him “now take all the animals out of your house.”
The man is amazed at how large his house was, though nothing had actually changed. He had simply stopped taking the space for granted.
I thought of this because today we finally took down our Christmas tree and decorations, leaving what seemed like a gaping hole in the living room, and a lot of empty space around the house. It reminded me of how much we so easily take for granted, even something as simple as an object filling a space, and how strange it seems when it’s gone. We get so used to our own clutter that we start to have a hard time even noticing it.
When we don’t facilitate change, we have a hard time staying aware.
Note to self: rearrange furniture often so I don’t stagnate.
