For liminality I can’t much improve on the wikipedia entry, but I thought I’d try and illuminate both principles in practice by talking about a piece of product development we did not so long ago.
We ran a small, highly participative product development process with a client and I thought it might be useful to reflect on a few of the tools used to make participation possible in a more directly solutions driven culture and see how they make a safely bounded space in which to take risks and use transition well.
1 | take one maguffin
“In crook stories it is almost always the necklace,
and in spy stories it is most always the papers.”
A maguffin (McGuffin, MacGuffin) is a term popularised by Alfred Hitchcock for an element in the story that both helps and distracts the viewer, orients them but serves no direct purpose. Think Ellen’s green raincoat in Damages.
Sometimes it’s not shown but referred to. For any nomadic product development community, it’s useful to have a maguffin that’s an object to provide place, memory and a thread of continuity. You can find a lot more about this here and here respectively.
Our maguffin was a cowbell that we took from session to session as we work with our participants on developing our product:
2 | add a strong beginning and a stirring close
For each of our working sessions we made sure we opened and closed well. For example, trying out a speed mentoring technique that we wanted to include in the product we were making to open one session; closing with a ritual circle at each of the sessions (more mnemonics, ritual experiences felt in the body that help strengthen the synapses of long term memory); opening another session with making our own organizational tweets of 140 character introductions as we’d put them into the team collaborative space by way of invitation to others to know how to approach us. Tiny but strong moments of invitation and arrival, farewell and departure.
I’d been bashing away at liminality as a concept for a while, thinking I was well ahead, and I discovered William Bridges and his extraordinarily useful Managing Transitions where he talks about the importance of good endings (losings, letting goes), strong beginnings as a way of bounding and then managing the transition space between. Bridges refers to the same theories of liminality as I have been in Van Gennep’s three part structure for rites of passage. The startling echo had me jumping up and running round the room metaphorically naked for joy at discovering he’d got there first. ‘It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions’ he says.
True that.
3 | fold in a cup of the remembering self
Alim Khan put me onto the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman and his wonderful TED talk on the riddle of the experiencing versus the remembering self:
Now, I’d like to start with an example of somebody who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures reported a story. [unclear …] He said he’d been listening to the symphony and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound.And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn’t. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience.He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.
What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. .. And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life…Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self and getting confused between them is part of the mess of the notion of happiness.
Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories — it starts immediately. We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences
He also mentions that a very important part of the story is how it ends, which loops back round to Bridges in fact.
Now this insight is vital and leads us to really work at anticipating the construction of memories by the remembering selves of our participants. How can we make moments of joy, profundity, laughter, pause and aid the remembering self, mmenomically, to start to form a story of each working session that builds to a narrative trajectory for the whole experience so that the memory of the experience of participation is amplified and so creates the threads of connection between events and between participant and each other and between process and product.
So we both seek to orchestrate these moments, and improvise them and then to amplify their effect in our curation and documentation. Pictures taken with a big visible camera, flip video interviews, big posters printed and graffitied, photoed, maybe left in situ, recordings with iphones, then transcribed. The products of curation become the raw material that’s threaded into blogs and stashed in shared, labelled folders. Great.
The performance of curation matters to, heightening the awareness of participants of each other, themselves, their own voice. More than one person rises to the occasion, starts to play with the objects we are using to curate - a thumbs up, a striking pink shirt and tie at the second meeting. So the means of curation also become props in the performance of curation. This reminds me very much of the Reuters archivist, whose story is told in Getting down to business who paid great attention to his bow tie, his choice of coffee mug, how he dressed the part of archivist so that he’d be a living representation that reminds people daily of the archive and of the values of Thomson Reuter at work.
4 | wash down with lashings of sparkling crazy
And then there’s the need for madness, madness in the method as opposed to method in the madness, you could say.
At one of our product development sessions there was a moment when one of the participants expressed delight, tempered with a bit of alarm at the excitement of not being afraid. Somehow we’d worked towards, and found ourselves in, a space where people stopped being frightened of being stupid, but able ‘to go a bit crazy’. This release from the day to day culture was extraordinarily liberating, and a bit threatening. We agreed that Sparknow’s reputation was really useful here: go as mad as you like, outsource the consequences to Sparknow if something lurches in the wrong direction and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. Would I had time to go into corporate jesters at this point, but instead, I’ll end with something that has just sprung to mind from my late night trip to the National Portrait Gallery last week (which I plan to blog separately in my own Shed blog as it’s way off the Sparknow piste). There was a little booklet with portraits of philosphers and quotes from them. This, then from Edmund Burke to round this off, making the case for the sublimeness of the fear felt when going in search of meaning.
Beauty produces pleasure. But some situations and views that have the potential to terrify, and are even dangerous, such as a thunderstorm at night, a raging river, or a vast craggy cliff face, affect us in a different way.
They produce a special visceral response that is not pure pleasure, but rather includes an element of fear. These are sublime. Beautiful objects tend to be small, delicate and smooth; sublime ones are large, awe inspiring and threatening. They have such a profound effect on us because our bodies are finely-tuned in response to possible pain.
victoriaward
