Social Artist Virtual Knowledge Cafe

Sketchnotes are a visual form of note-taking that can include drawings, various lettering sizes and styles, color, icons, arrows, boxes and more - whatever works for you.

This idea of wayfinding and making spaces user-friendly seems like a social artist kind of skill, although applied differently than in finding your way around a city. I wonder how we might be able to borrow some of these concepts though to help people navigate new environments?

Sebastien Paquet writes eloquently about and practices powerfully many skills of the social artist though he doesn't call it that. He talks about "networked cocreation."

Candy Chang uses art to explore ways to make cities more comfortable and contemplative. She really feels like a social artist in action to me!

Jane Hart clearly makes the distinction between social learning and Social Training. Her work and the work of her colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance are informing me about social artistry in the workplace. I discover better strategies to work with organizations as I learn from Jane and those at the ITA. Anyway, this type of informal learning happens individually - as people go about their daily tasks - as well as socially - when we are with others. Social learning is therefore not a new term or training trend, it is something that has been happening since time immemorial - both inside and outside organisations - as we learn with and from others. So we might learn from others (intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously) by asking questions of our colleagues,  through discussions in meetings , or even in casual conversations by the proverbial watercooler.  And, it is also in social learning that powerful insights to problems often arise that have been generated by the collective wisdom of employees

I think Jay Cross has his finger on the pulse of dying systems and knows the antidote that can prevent decay and irrelevance. I like his blunt words and the ease in which he tells it like it is. Those qualities inspire me as an aspiring social artist. A sustainable social business provides the means and motivation for workers to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networks, blogs, and wikis. Organizations must provide the scaffolding that focuses on discovery, practice, sharing, and reinforcement. Organizations that lack a clear understanding of their learning architectures are doomed to descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat. Facebook-itus.

Note the use of a narrative grid artifact for eliciting input.

Panarchy shows how changes flow through a system over time. In http://gavinkeech.com/mememachine/ an interactive model is shown. Other interesting articles on Panarchy here and here

In the referred blog, Esko writes: "...communities seldom grow beyond the group that initiated the conversation, because they fail to attract enough participants. Many business communities also fall apart soon after their launch because they don't have energy to sustain themselves...". Are there any known mechanisms or techniques that help in sustaining community energy?

I think working from a complexity framework is necessary in a world of rapid changes and uncertainties. Dave Snowden's Cynefin model can give us a useful lens for understanding and practicing  social artistry.  "The major difference between systems thinking and complexity thinking is that the former focuses on defining an ideal future state and seeks to close the gap, whereas complexity seeks to manage the evolutionary potential of the present.  Systems approaches range from three year plans, through idealised process designs to agreeing common values.  These approaches have dominated management in industry and government for the last three decades and draw heavily on engineering metaphors of the organisation.  Complexity theory offers an evolutionary alternative".

These 8 Fearless Questions from Meg Wheatley seem like good ones for social artists to ask themselves and the people they work with.

It appears that Barbara Ganly is interested in so many topics that I love to learn about. I'm glad she has joined our social artistry group and I'll have a chance to learn more from her. "After all, a healthy community is a basic premise through which deep learning and meaningful work come to life.  And yet it has been the messiness, the shifting, emergent nature of geographic communities and online communities outside the structure of semesters, grades, classes, disciplines, departments and majors that has really brought home for me how and why we need story to make sense out of the maelstrom of sensation and information-to slow down the rush of impressions, to make us confront our biases and fears and habits, and how we need storytelling to connect us and to build trust and curiosity and to push us past the façade of what we think we know so we can immerse ourselves in meaningful, creative work to bring better worlds into being".

Being present is part of being a social artist. Great post from Marion Chapsal who is participating in the Virtual Knowledge Cafe

I was totally enraptured with the video from Patsy Rodenburg on the second (of three) circles of energy. Being present is a game changer Michele. Great example of social artistry skill.

I learn so much about story telling and presentations from Nancy Duarte. Her company and team is leading the field in transforming organizations and individuals.