The pic pretty much speaks for itself? Students from ten middle schools across Portland and Central Oregon are participating in Caldera’s Hello Neighbor project. Along with photographer Julie Keefe, the students have begun to identify, interview and photograph diverse people of all ages in their neighborhoods.

From their work, the Caldera students will create photo-and-word portraits to be displayed on large, 7 foot by 5 foot banners throughout their communities.

We love this kind of stuff!!

 The Global Oneness Project is a wonderful web-based video initiative exploring how the simple notion of oneness can be lived in our increasingly complex world.They are traveling the globe interviewing creative and courageous people who base their lives and work on the fundamental understanding that we are all connected and thus bear great responsibility for each other and our shared world. Their living library of films is available for free from their website or on DVD for events and educational use.How fantastic!

Human Rights Posters

 This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, and Designmatters is commemorating with a public education exhibition at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris as part of the annual UN Department of Public Information/Non-Governmental Organization Conference.The posters were designed by a hand-picked team of students at the Art Center College of Design (where Designmatters is a “college-wide initiative enabling students to develop “real-world” solutions to critical contemporary issues.”)View all 25 of these beautiful posters on the Design 21 site.

Our society, especially in business, seems fixated on “behavior” as a magic solution.  For example, recently I was talking to a potential client about a leadership development program and he wanted to know what “EQ behaviors” the participants would learn.

Talking about the behavior is an easy short-hand.  We want leaders to be proactive, to engage, to give feedback, to listen, to hold people accountable, to execute.  All behaviors that sound great on the surface - but  the HOW is essential… and maybe even more essential than the behavior itself?

My belief is that we need to look more deeply at what DRIVES the behavior.  One can execute a certain behavior in so many different ways – and thereby create completely different results.  Just imagine all the ways one could say the words “thank you.”  If the underlying feeling is gratitude the same words have a totally different impact than if the underlying feeling is irritation.  Thus the emotion that’s “beneath the surface” drives the result.

Emotional intelligence lets leaders see beneath the surface of their own and others’ actions.  To focus on the HOW - on the alignment between the behavior and the underlying intention.

  Very, very sadly Randy Pausch succumbed to pancreatic cancer on Friday at home in Virginia. Randy’s bravery during his illness captured the admiration of thousands of people. The personal wisdom that he conveyed in his Last Lecture, which has been watched by 4.5 million people, is inspiring. The book of the same name is available on Amazon.

 A couple of the winners of the RSA Design Direction caught my eye, although all the winners and entrant’s work seems amazing.Alex Ostrowski approached The Frenchay Brain Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Bristol to see how he might use design to help in some way. It emerged that all patients suffer from post-traumatic amnesia and experience confusion in their sense of time, place and person. The term for this lost understanding is disorientation, something the unit is responsible for regaining with patients. Alex worked closely with staff to establish an appropriate colour system to bring holistic navigation to the unit, which we could apply to patients’ timetables, orientation boards, and the building itself and the project resulted in a book entitled ‘I am here’. Jim Rokos designed ‘Mind-plan’, a tool that captured the user-centred nature of the brief, to help patients recovering from mental illness and who find it hard to plan a balanced life and fulfil their daily needs. A healthy balanced life allows recovery to continue and reduces the possibility of a relapse. Mind-plan is based on Maslow’s psychological theory, Hierarchy of Needs, which many people perceive as the definitive set of five human needs.

           One of the most difficult things these days is to establish some truths about the state of the world. What really is happening? I read so many research papers, books and news stories simply in an effort to keep up and try to get a proper, realistic view…. an in-depth, informed perspective.Research is so complex, but it can lead to simple and powerful insights. This morning I was really thrilled to read a new research paper on happiness and wellbeing. The World Values Survey is publishing the results of a longitudinal research analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science (July, 2008) Development, Freedom, and Happiness: A Global PerspectiveData from representative national surveys carried out from 1981 to 2007 show that happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries. The country rankings showed that USA was 16, Britain was 21, Zimbabwe 97.Democratization and rising social tolerance contributed even more than economic development to a growing sense of free choice, and thus to rising levels of happiness. 

“The strong version of the hedonic treadmill model was supported by three arguments: (a) individuals have a long-term happiness set point to which they readapt, despite changing circumstances; (b) this set-point is largely genetically determined; (c) societies’ happiness levels remain fixed over time. Recent research argues that the first two points should be re-interpreted as strong tendencies and not iron laws. The findings presented here support this reassessment, and demonstrate that the third point also needs to be modified: the happiness levels of nations can and do change.” “Taken together, these findings suggest that the hedonic treadmill model should be revised but not abandoned. The twin studies provide convincing evidence that genetic factors have an important impact on subjective well-being. And there is abundant and equally convincing evidence that people adapt to Development, Freedom, Happiness changes, so that subjective well-being levels tend to fluctuate around stable set-points. But these factors are not as dominant as earlier interpretations suggested. The hedonic treadmill model is a tendency that prevails only when other factors are constant.”  

This paper questions some of the methods of previous happiness measurement data, but also within their conclusions they write: 

“We would not expect subjective well-being to continue rising forever. Even apart from ceiling effects, recent years have seen a conjunction of favorable factors. Many low-income and middle-income countries experienced exceptionally high rates of economic growth, in the range of 4 to 11 percent annually. Rich countries had relatively little economic growth (in the range of 1 to 3%), but they experienced remarkable rates of social liberation, with hard-core opposition to gender equality and homosexuality falling by roughly half since 1981(Inglehart and Welzel, 2005).”  

“These findings suggest that subjective well-being has important social consequences: Falling levels of subjective well-being were a leading indicator of the collapse of former communist systems. These findings also have important implications for social scientists and policymakers, for they imply that human happiness is not fixed, but can be influenced by belief systems and social policies.”

A wonderful art installation wishing for peace on the Korean peninsular, at Imjingak, near the demilitarised zone which separates the two Koreas in Paju, about 55km north of Seoul, on Friday.

The Harvard Business Review has just published a really fascinating article by Tim Brown CEO of IDEO on Design Thinking. Brown describes the personality of a Design Thinker, and it is a very coherent joining of creativity and emotional intelligence. Here are Brown’s characteristics to look for:

Empathy. They can imagine the world from multiple perspectives—those of colleagues, clients, end users, and customers (current and prospective). By taking a “people first” approach, design thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs. Great design thinkers observe the world in minute detail. They notice things that others do not and use their insights to inspire innovation.

Integrative thinking. They not only rely on analytical processes (those that produce either/or choices) but also exhibit the ability to see all of the salient—and sometimes contradictory— aspects of a confounding problem and create novel solutions that go beyond and dramatically improve on existing alternatives. (See Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking.)

Optimism. They assume that no matter how challenging the constraints of a given problem, at least one potential solution is better than the existing alternatives.

Experimentalism. Significant innovations don’t come from incremental tweaks. Design thinkers pose questions and explore constraints in creative ways that proceed in entirely new directions.

Collaboration. The increasing complexity of products, services, and experiences has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator. The best design thinkers don’t simply work alongside other disciplines; many of them have significant experience in more than one. At IDEO we employ people who are engineers and marketers, anthropologists and industrial designers, architects and psychologists.

Via Bruna Martinuzzi - Thanks Bruna  

I feel that emotions are adaptive, and so, that means all emotions. Anger, for example, rises from a sense of injustice, or from a goal being blocked. Anger can be quite adaptive, such as when it fuels people to seek change. The problem is that this message is sometimes heard in a way that allows people to justify their petty tirades, disrepectful behavior or angry outbursts. I try to balance the message by indicating that anger is the most frequently expressed emotion at work and that happiness and other emotions are adaptive because they increase cooperative behaviors, idea generation, etc. But all too often the message does not get across. I would like to find a way to communicate the idea of emotions as adaptive, that anger has its place, but only expressed in a smart way in certain, limited situations.