Liminal states

Judy Dubin of the Cramer Institute suggests looking at a meeting as a musical performance of classical music.   Via that lens, the asset-based thinking discussion list’s last conference call for 2009 was a work for guitar, four voices, and keyboards.  It featured a prelude (Eve and I chatting while waiting for others to show up), three movements titled celebration, brainstorming, and anticipation, and a coda (this post and the ongoing discussions).

For abtdisc’ers who couldn’t be there in person, here are some of the highlights.

Whether or not you were there, please share any additional celebration, anticipation, updates, and brainstorming thoughts in the comments … and have a great holiday season, a wonderful end to 2009, and an even better start to 2010!

jon

Celebration (aka updates)

Eve talked about the session that she, Michael Foster, and Iris Lemmer did for the Pegasus conference.  She also told how she and a different Michael used ABT techniques from “Change the Way you See Innovation” to wow a state agency into funding the business analysis for his new startup.

Lori talked about the upcoming release of “Change the way you see sales — for women” and her fabulous 50-50-50-50 project, including a 50-city book tour and her skill as  a non-profit auctioneer.  The idea’s taken on a life of its own, with people inspired by the idea to do things related to their own life milestones … such as a woman making a documentary of 50 50-year celebrations.   Very exciting!

Mary Alice shared her recent longest gig yet, an hour-long performance with lots of improv in front of her favorite kind of audience.  Her younger daughter is turning 7 tomorrow, can you believe?  She’s giving “Change the way you see everything for teens” to her nieces and nephews and precocious nine-year-old daughter.

I talked about Qworky and the upcoming “Change the Way you See Meetings”.  By the end of January, we hope to be at the point where we can host ABT meetings.

Brainstorming

We came up with some great ideas.  Here are a few highlights:

• We have some great opportunities to target conferences and media.
• To get better at sharing assets and having online discussions, we’ll investigate Central Desktop, Basecamp, a Sharepoint site hosted by Telstar, and potentially other options.
• Qworky and Lori and Eve are all targetting the small business audience, and so there are great synerges — e.g., #smallbizchat on Twitter
• What about packaging “Change the way you see …” books as mobile apps (iPhone, Blackberry, …)?  We have great content, design skills, and potentially could find programming resources.
• With so many connections to the Girl Scouts, and a great match to their motto of “encourag

Anticipation, aka next steps

A couple of specific action items

• Lori will think about doing a blog post on “Change the way you see cookie sales for Girl Scouts”, or something like that.
• I’ll take a quick look at the technology options for resource sharing and communication and come back with a suggestion, and then take the lead on seeting things up for whatever direction we go

Looking forward to 2010, the biggest short-term Q1 events are Lori’s 50-50-50-50 project, Qworky beta and launch, Eve’s baby, and girl scout cookie sales. A mobile app timed for Qworky’s launch could be a big accelerator.  By Q2/Q3 we could start seeing results from conference and media outreach.

Coda (at least for now)

From a meeting perspective, it’s interesting to think about the musical flow of this meeting and brainstorming meetings in general.  Of course different teams might prefer different styles of music: a capella, bebop, free-form jazz, rock and roll, hip hop group,  …

And in time-honored musical fashion, let’s end the coda by repeating a theme from earlier in the work:

Whether or not you were there, please share any additional celebration, anticipation, updates, and brainstorming thoughts in the comments … and have a great holiday season, a wonderful end to 2009, and an even better start to 2010!

jon