Asli Ors
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Rethinking organizational & personal transformation for creative problem solving 

Day 11: Dancing Alone & Together With Your Pack

7/6/2017

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I recently dropped into a more than a move your booty dance class called Soul Motion in Berkeley (Thank you for inviting me dear Safoura!) Soul Motion is a conscious dance practice, where one dances intimately with the Self, acknowledges the resonance of other Bodies dancing around them, becomes a Solar System with the Community of Dancers and the Community finds their place within the Infinite Potential of the Universe. This magical formation is gently and humbly guided by a SuperNova-esq dancer Valerie, who is a subtle, loving and tells you specifically and concisely what you need to hear at the right moment facilitator. As I was reflecting on how Valerie made this orchestration made feel effortless, I bookmarked my observations for a great facilitator and leader. I also pondered on how these trades can Empower Agile Teams and Product Design as a whole:
  • Subtle Directing: Trust your group's psyche and intelligence. Be subtle and gentle in your management. Open up to possibilities and surprises. Always ask what surprises are appearing in the field and what is needed now? 
  • Loving Care, Respect & Allow Creativity to Flourish: Genuinely care about the individual Stars in your Group. Creation is all about the people and not the Product. "Product" is a byproduct of what can come to fruition with the Seeds of people. The best contribution that your group members can bring into the party is their creativity and ideas. If group members are encouraged to BE more of who they are and appreciated and welcomed to bring in their UNIQUE GIFTS to the process, they can make something awesome happen together in harmony. When the energetic field is set with loving and caring INTENTIONS, an extraordinary, creative love child Product would be born naturally. If people are happy, feeling loved, and trusting one another, the process you set to get to the finish line will be joyful and hurdles can be tackled with more ease and harmony.
  • Be Specific and Focused: Be specific and be focused in your requests. This is about YOU committing to be in Service to the group of people you are managing/facilitating and trusting their potential. Also, this is about you supporting them with focused information in order to help solve what they are committed to solve. Commit to setting YOUR TEAM for success for extraordinary results.
.MY DANCE (My Intimate Star): As my lady feet (also pet named as my elephants sometimes) hit the shiny hardwood floor, the dance ring became a mirror to my Soul's yearnings. The lessons to be learned started to mirage in my body. Gliding with the rhythm, exchanging moves with other Bodies and dancing with the Energy thought me so much more about the things I would love to work on and grow to become a Whole Experience in this Body than a life lived in My Mind. Funny how that​ works. Body has it's own divine intelligence. Always listen to your BODY and other BODIES in Space! 
  • How can I notice my fears and limitations when I am working and come out of that constricted state quickly, so that I can be in Service of the Creation at work? 

OUR DANCE (Two Stars in Solar System): Every single interaction with another Body shed light into my insecurities and fears. I learned a big deal about what I fear and what I go after through moving in space with another Body. I was VERY surprised how much judgement I carried. Or, shall I say how much judgement my EGO has. This made me think of work place as the dance floor and the Energy I am bringing into my work:
  • What if emails, meetings, work sessions, kitchen chats, lunch outings, basically all business of conduct are our dance together?
  • How can I be in discovery with another person in every step of the way in our process?
  • How can I give and take in our dance together?

GROUP DANCE (All Stars in the Universe creating Magic): This was the part of the dance that required opening up my view to see and to feel what moves and what rhythms were around me. The idea of being in hard and soft focus made me think of working in a team as part of an organization. Team members need to be in focus while working on their tasks, but they also need to keep an eye on the bigger picture to make sure that their piece of work fits in organization's jigsaw. 
  • How can my work can fit in the formation?
  • How can I quickly and organically shift focus between my work and the work at large?
  • What is needed?
  • What can I give more of in my own unique way?

In conclusion, all our interactions are as part of a Big Dance Party called Life. The key to have a good time at work and at home is to be aware of our own party poopers. If we can ease into those parts that are limiting, we can grow, flourish, create and love what we do. Most importantly, it is crucial to be able to bring our unique gifts to the dance floor, so we can boogie with each other. If you want to experientially answer some of the questions that are suggested above, come to the Meetup that I am co facilitating with my friend Sean Halle on July 11th at 6:30pm in Berkeley Sports Basement. We will make work tangle with play and make magic happen!





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Day 9: Channel Your Inner Cat

5/30/2017

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We all experience the boiling soup in our heads when an agreement on a delivery with a teammate manifests itself as a completely different outcome than the originally discussed idea. "Wait. Whaaat? Didn't we agree on so and so? I thought we were on the same page when they left the room galloping full gusto!!! I thought they were going to come back with what we finally agreed on... Arghhhhhh.... Why? What? Whyyyyyyy?"  I get how annoying this is. When I am in a state of what feels like my ideas are discarded and disrespected, my inner child starts screaming all tones of screams. Highs and lows. No medium range notes. Nada. I first doubt myself, then start either feeling angry at the person or I give up on the battle completely, because I have no more energy left to discuss the project any further. So, what to do?
  • Take a deep deep blue breath and go back to the original meeting minutes to remember WHY the original decision took place at the first place.
  • Then, imagine as if you are a little cute kitten. So cute. Once, you connect with your cute little inner kitten, get curious like a playful kitten would, WHY this person/group took a detour from the original agreement? Please really embody the kitten in your being. Otherwise, you will still be under the influence of your angry inner child. You might find out that the person generates ideas more comfortably when they work alone.
  • Play a yes, and game to find the middle way to draft a new agreement and help and encourage the person to be more collaborative. Give yourself a pat on the shoulder, because you are helping someone grow.
  • Record the new agreement.
  • After everyone finally agrees for reals, just keep coming back the agreement notes for each iteration. Breathe, persist, repeat.
Persistence is a lesson I learned from MR. Claw. When he wants something, first he gets closer to his want. For example, he would go by the door and start staring at the door knob in silence. Then, he would make eye contact with me. Then, he moves his gaze back at the door knob, then looks at me, then looks at door knob again, then looks at me. He does this with patience and persistence. The moment I tell him he needs to use his cat door, he starts meowing at me persistently. I roll my eyes and open the door for him. So you see, he is a master persister. 
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Day 5: 3 Things I Learned Today That Thought Me How To Save The Day When Someone Throws Curveballs At My Inner Child

5/1/2017

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Greetings from Portland, Oregon. I am here to attend the User Experience Engineering: Interaction Design Conference (#UXInteractions) this week. As advertised, we are learning to sail beyond our limits in Interaction Design. My first session for the week was Hagan River's Enterprise Apps: To Boldly Simplify Where Nobody has Simplifies Before. Her lecture was engaging, funny and made me reminiscence about the bloody usability battles I lost negotiating with stakeholders and also reminded me of the ones that I won that made our users go merrily on their paths. Merrily merrily merrily song goes here...
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3 Takeaways from Hagan's workshop:
  • Arbitrary iconography sucks
  • Pagination is evil
  • Best Practices for form, navigation design and goals for style guides.
However, today's gift writing is not about the design principles that would help us sail in the muddy waters with less mud with clear blue skies. I think we would all like the coordinates for those waters. Please keep reading on.

Design Exercise That Switched The Lights on On My Bulb

Exercise: Design a homepage for the library.
User: Patron of the library
Needs: A visitor who wants to find new books, see what she has checked out or overdue, see what is in on order....
Time: 5 minutes
My Sketch:
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I realized what made me feel at ease after I sketched my mini design challenge. Here are the 3 things that might help bring harmony in your being in times of an urgent request.
  1. 2Cs and 3Ws: Exercise instructions are very clear and concise. There is no question about the direction, or who the end user is for this design. Often times this is never the case for software development. It generally feels like, the person who is writing the requirements does not have time to fully bake the bread. It feels like one of those take home and bake goodies, but without the knowledge of what it is exactly that we are baking, who we are baking it for and why? So, instead of engaging with unproductive inner dialog, help the person who throw you the red ball answer 2Cs and 3Ws as soon as possible. 
  2. Trust and embody that you are absolutely doing your best within the time you have. It does not matter if you have 5 minutes or 5 hours. Refer to project management triangle and tell the requester to pick any 2 in the triangle to set expectations. It is better than asking if they would you like fries to go with that?
  3. No matter what it is that you are doing, do it with a joy and curiosity of a clown by sneaking little gifts that maybe no one else would ever notice. Perhaps a little smiley face is hiding somewhere in the page... :)
If you experiment with these 3 things, will you let me know how your inner child reacted to this?
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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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    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