You, Me and Pictures, Part 2: Making Thinking Visible's Collaborative Aspect

Me.
We.

-Mohammed Ali

The educators of Reggio Emilia, Italy tell the story of pre - kindergarteners waiting for after school pick-up. Carlo, admiring the colorful tee shirt of his buddy Enzo asked his teacher if he could try it on. Her okay made Carlo wonder "Whose head will pop out from Enzo's tee shirt, mine or his?" The teacher suggested trying it to see so Carlo asked "If Enzo's head pops-up will you put mine back before my mom arrives?"

The experiment began: what a relief for Carlo and the watching children when his head came out of Enzo's shirt! Soon all the kids were swapping tee shirts.

Part of small children's charming power is living between fact and imagination. Yet Carlo's concern applies to adults - in competitive environments collaboration entails risk and pleasure.

A wave of design thinking is altering the empirical world of work, pulling us up to speed on collaborative intelligence as never before: monologue replaced by dialogue, uniformity by diversity, talking at by talking with.

In the politics of dense, layered organizations Making Thinking Visible catalyzes collaborative competencies aligned with childhood: openness, transparency and, for long moments,
putting judgment on ice.

1. Making Thinking Visible is Collaborative and Transparent

In this article I identify the "putting people first" aspect MTV has no matter application: from design and presentation of case studies, prototyping, testing products and services, deepening reflective action to meeting facilitation.

MTV is a documentation model driven by the needs of the organization, community or site it serves. It is human centered research for existent, newly formed or multi-disciplined teams. Transparency is a strategy of MTV that lets us follow the footprint of another's thinking. It cultivates individual voice.

MTV underscores collaborative intelligence by giving people smart tools to "speak" in ways supplementing the spoken word. It furthers thinking by making it visible yet art, visual or even digital skills are not required. It catalyzes deliberate thinking so people leave a session with clarity. Time is energized.

In A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainer's Will Rule the Future and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything the authors identify, respectively, emergent creative and collaborative economies. The saying "the MFA is the new MBA" demonstrates the business community's growing understanding of these economies. In September 2008 California College of the Arts is launching the first Design MBA in the U.S. (emphasizing sustainability). Within a year we will see other art and design colleges offering MBA's.

Change is not linear. Neither is design thinking making it the prefect match to address change. Design thinking - mixing logos (logic, a tendency towards the cut and dry), ethos (character) and pathos (emotion) - is a living environment and the future of work.

2. Making Thinking Visible is Engaging

Heard of the trend of people standing in meetings to think clearly or prevent someone from going on forever? Not to mention getting us up from the screen. In painting class students stand for similar reasons. Animated people belong to engaged minds, hands, hearts and guts.

Ask the spoken word to do its stunning labor - not more - and let a host of design languages loose to accomplish the job in tandem with text. Analytical skills are necessary but no longer sufficient. The adventure has a different texture now: the mechanical mind is inadequate to the global task and playing by the old rules depletes people's thinking, energy and interest.

Choose a topic, service or product to investigate; utilizing multiple forms of representation is a breeding ground for trust by showcasing individual contributions to the whole. There's a tipping point where visual evidence invokes cohesion more effectively than argument. Reading documentation collectively breaks tension allowing the bartering, marketing and exchange of ideas.

We each desire smart ways to bring more of ourselves to work. In MTV training walking through 19 Non-Tech Ways to Document offers everyone an individual approach to the zone of design thinking. In this model one size does not fit all. MTV suggests a question is better answered when lots of people answer it in many different ways.

3. Making Thinking Visible is a Tangle of Spaghetti

To complicate things we collaborate not only with people but with materials, objects, tools and environments. Pioneering psychologist Loris Malaguzzi called this jumble a "tangle of spaghetti".

Pictures transform social interactions. Research where "images and symbolic presentations infringe on the rule of the spoken word" relax us away from habit. Documentation is a soothing agent undermining dialogue resistance; the graphic "stuff" is go-between for your talking head and mine, pitting strategies not people against one another. As an MTV participant said "it effortlessly encourages engaged listening".

Going through MTV experience together we are privy to how someone else puzzled through to solutions and can more easily stand in their shoes. MTV takes the heat off any one person as tricky topics are considered. People can compete and cook side by side too. Design thinking conjures the funny.

4. Making Thinking Visible Values Equivalency

Steve Seidell, Harvard Graduate School of Education, compares this approach to a jazz ensemble replete with independent and interdependent riffs of inquiry while being consistent to a through-line of the larger goal. Participants play equivalent roles as documenter and interpreter of the evolving archive. As in jazz, ensemble research entails dexterity in coordination and collaboration. Others have made this distinction:

Coordination We work together without having to change much; the exchange has a mechanistic quality. The business community excels here.

Collaboration A different animal altogether! The risk is we will be changed by what we listen. The upside is individual learning accelerates and there is relief and integrity in belonging to something larger than ourselves.

While MTV makes clear individual contribution to the whole the paradox is resilient teams take pleasure in not knowing who generated what - ownership is collective and given away. And it all sounds better.

(c) 2007, Linda Yaven. All rights reserved. Want to use this article in your e-zine or website? Yes, you can, provided you make all links live and include this copyright and by-line below.

Linda Yaven, Design Thinking Catalyst, provides visual presentations and interactive services on MTV and Collaboration. She has spoken at Harvard, AIGA, Innovation Immersion Fortune 500, Home Schooling Network and Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. Linda is on the Design and MBA Faculty of California College of the Arts. She is completing a documentary "Teach Us Something in 7 Minutes". For a PDF of this article with images visit www.lindayaven.com , elle@lindayaven.com, 510-594-3602

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