J20 waiting for the beers to arrive after a tough day of saving the world of WoW
Yesterday I was looking through some pictures for my cycle report and ended up flipping through some of my WoW screenshots. It got me thinking about how this program all started and how transforming a process this has been. When I and my merry band of marauders from District 15 stepped into the alien world, we had no idea what we were in for. What seemed like a sleepy grove of trees around the Abbey, turned into an all out war with all kinds of aggressive creatures. We were supposed to learn how the game teaches you how to play but for most of us, it was a matter of survival. Soon it became clear that WoW was a game best approached in community. Jason, Matt, Jean-Phillipe and Haley and I easily took down those forest spiders and Kobold miners that had seemed so intimidating by myself. Just a reminder that one of the greatest parts of this MALT experience is the power of the community. Of course there have been the normal set of misunderstandings and lack of communication you would expect in a group of 19 innovators, but I can see the greater value in what we do together collectively than individually. In the book, Group Genius by Keith Sawyer, he documents a number of fantastic organizations that have benefited from how they leveraged the community and empowered the group to own the process. It is encouraging as I look back on those early WoW forages and see how the collaborative force has been unleashed among us.
In this process of looking for cycle report graphics, I also came across some Cadre camp pics and I was immediately transported back to that crazy chiffonade activity. I think it was there that what has become know as the "leath" principal was born. Our group initially had all these grand ideas about how to present, but we were brought back to a different reality by a wise New Yorker and we rallied around the "leath" principal of keeping it simple. This concept has guided our group designing in all three strands before we knew it was "zen" to do so. We have all been lulled to sleep by presentations that include way too much detail and charts and words to ever allow the point to get through. While it is good to consider the big picture when ideating with a group, it is also helpful to work within constraints that keep the ideas or concepts from being so broad or clutter with detail that they never really get any traction. The book we read on Presentation Zen really resonated with me on this and reinforced the Leath principal. Reflection on this MALT process has reminded me today that it is true that … what I don't know about what I don't know is what I really don't know. Looking back to my early views of this journey, I can see how they have impacted my innovative designer's mind. I may never play WoW again and I am not a Zen expert but these both will forever be sign posts on my journey to discover what lays outside my front door.