Asli Ors
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Rethinking organizational & personal transformation for creative problem solving 

Day4: The Gift Of Four Directions

4/29/2017

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Today, I learned the Dance of Directions with a group of amazing women from Sunray Meditation Society who have been practicing the teachings of Venerable Dhyani Ywahoo (Eastern Cherokee) and her ancestors more than 20+ years. We gathered on a beautiful garden surrounded by giant redwoods, over marveling the Bay from East hills, accompanied by deer, blue jades and the scent of magic. 

Each direction has heavenly teachings that are available to us right now. The question is can we make the space and time to be in communion with these energies?

NORTH is Ideal
What qualities I would like to bring forward at work?
What is my unborn potential?

EAST is Inspiration
How can I open myself to inspiration at work?

SOUTH is Abundance
What are my inner conflicts and confusions?
What possibilities would open up if I did not feel conflicted?

WEST is Transformation
How can I keep my ego out of work place?

Realize that we are all connected and part of something bigger than us. So why suffer?





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Day 3: Find Your Gremlin's Trigger Response

4/28/2017

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I have my fear patterns pointed at me by amazing Paula Colletto in her clown mask workshop last year in San Francisco. We were working on a trust fall exercise as a group. As actors, our task was to fall back behind, fully committed, trusting  that our exercise partner got our backs for life. Most importantly, we were to make sure to keep an eye contact with the audience while falling back like a graceful swan. Let me tell you, it was not a piece of freshly baked artisan loaf of bread. (I don't like cake.) Each time my partner increased the distance, thus raising the stakes, I either barked like chihuahua, annoyingly loud or completely went silent, closing my eyes and disappearing from my own body. Months later, I am realizing that getting loud and angry or disengaging and ghosting from the scene are two ways how I protect myself when a stressful event happens. This is very true for work or my improv scenes. Ten thousand light bulbs fusing through my brain with this amazing discovery!!! Thank you Paula for seeing my inner child through the veils of fear.

Realization is the first step to healing. I believe actualization will come by sharing this insight with my coworkers, family and friends, so that they can be compassionate and loving to my scared little child and not take it personally. Understanding my own patterns are helping me be more understanding with others. I inadvertantly am now noticing other people's fear/stress patterns and I say with my inside voice "Oh poor little one is just scared. It is going to be ok little one. I am here with you and we will figure things out. We have [few more days] before we hit that [deadline] and together we will make magic happen." 

Professionalism does not mean to act like a numb robot at work and suffer through a career and make others drawn down to Pacific Ocean with you. We are in this together. My healing is your healing. Your healing is my healing.

What are your patterns when compost hits the fan? If you find them, will you reveal them to everyone for the sake of global healing?
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Day 2: Give More of What You Got Juicy Going On

4/26/2017

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Improv For Agile Retrospective Meetings

Improv for Agile all got started when Ana T. our Product Owner asked me "Would you like to facilitate our agile retrospective meetings with improv?" I said "Oh my yes, and I would love to!" Have I led groups through agile retros before? Nope. Have I played many many many many hours of improv games with my troupes? Well, yes!
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I have been facilitating our group retrospectives utilizing improv games, design thinking and energy medicine to identify very specific things in 2 week Sprints:
  • Things we liked
  • Things we wished/wanted/needed 
  • 3 Things to improve in the next Sprint
We had a blast. Result was filled with jolly laughter with tangible things to work on for better Sprint Experience for the next two weeks. Team promoted me to CEO a.k.a Chief Energizer Officer and I humbly said "I take that!" :)

This experience made me realize that I need to offer more of what I do "best" or what comes to me as natural: Improv, Design Thinking and Energy Medicine. I am no longer dwelling on what is lacking in my company "defined" role as a user experience designer at the very moment. No more playing the victim of gazillion constraints that does not allow me to follow a "proper" user experience practice. I am excited about facilitating and solving problems to improve my coworkers work experience. If people are happy at work, they will be happy at home, if they are happy at home, their kids, partners, pets will be happy, too. Butterfly effect!

​RETROSPECTIVE CHALLENGE
Over and over what came up in our agile improv retros was the challenge of cross team communication. Team members were struggling to get the answers they needed from other teams on a timely manner. As a result, some of their tasks were blocked and they were stressed.

PRODUCT OWNER'S PROPOSAL
Ana T. 
asked "Asli, do you want to help us come up with a solution to solve our cross collaboration problem?", I jumped up and down with joy uttering "Yes, and let's do a Design Thinking Hackathon!" 

Design Thinking Hackathon

Yesterday, we commenced in San Francisco office to hack the team cross communication challenge. I walked the team through each step of design thinking activities:
  • Empathize: Engineers learned to empathize with the end users by interviewing their team mates and they learned to draw insights from unexpected and emotional information.
  • Define Problem: Each person defined the particular need for their partners. Then we formulated a common need based all the data we gathered.
    • Trailblazers need to find a way to provide the right amount of context easily, so that other team mates are encouraged to provide the exact information that they are looking for complete their tasks timely.
  • Ideate: I have provided unconventional prompts to stimulate creativity and subdue fear, so that group can come up with lots of lots of ideas. It was so much fun. And, it was very powerful to prove to engineers that they could be design thinkers and creativity is not only entitled to designers. The energy in the room was so good. We truly felt the flow in this step.
    • Arrange work visits across Big Data Tribe 
    • Assign a weekly Goalie for each Big Data Tribe Team to track questions
    • Get funding to send incentives to thank helpers. from other teams
    • Design a  request form to utilize when sending questions. (See prototype)
    • Peer review the request form before sending the request
    • Build a repository for helpful people
    • Link Flowdock with Rally
  • Prototype: We brought down our fun and amazing ideas down to earth and decided to focus on one simple idea we can solve in our near future. For the long term, we can start a Start Up if we want to, because some of our ideas  are so good :) 
  • Test: Team is looking forward to get feedback and improve the process once they implement our idea on how to improve cross team communication.
I had a long happy and productive day today. We solved a big problem,
​Sweet dreams are awaiting...
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Day 1: Fighting Evil Spirits

4/25/2017

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    Let's Fly!



    ​WHAT
    This is an experiment to redesign the work experience  by design thinking, improv and energy medicine.

    WHY
    Because, I feel a call to help to those who are amidst an existential career crisis. ​We are here to share our gifts with the World by becoming more of who we are. We are not here to force fit our lovely essence into prescriptive roles and to act like productive unconscious drones. We are here to co-create!

    WHO
    I invite YOU to join me to open your wings wide & fly with me... 
    - if are not waking up with joy to go to work
    - if you feel like a fish climbing a tree  at work most of the time
    - if you feel the same call, yearning to help others who are silently or loudly suffering at work

    EVENTS
    Join my Play at Work Meetup
    to attend a workshop. 

    BACKSTORY
    I have spent 9+ years wasting energy on blaming everything that made me miserable at my oh so perky tech jobs in the Valley. I truly felt like a fish climbing a tree 99.9% of the time. There were many urgent episodes to quit just like that with no backup plan. Many sleepless nights with tears, googling when to quit your job inquiries that returned no relief, but more frustration. I have come to realize that no matter where I go, I will probably feel this way, unless I reprogram the way I response to stress triggers at work.

    ​Phew.... 





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  • Hello
  • FACILITATOR
  • Design Thinker
  • IMPROVISER
  • THE WING OPENER
  • Contact Me