Poetry Exchange

End of the year I got an e-mail with the following text:

Dear friends,
We’re starting a collective, constructive, and hopefully uplifting
exchange.
It’s a one-time thing and we hope you will participate. We have picked
those we think would be willing and make it fun.
Please send a poem to the person whose name is in position 1 below (even
if you don’t know them).
It should be a favorite text/verse/meditation that has affected you in
difficult times. Don’t agonize over it.
…

I am really not a fan of mails like this and some people reminded me that this is just a chain letter. However I did not agonize over it 🙂

Here are the poems, quotes, text, or whatever I could collect so far. They are in four different languages sent by people I know and some total strangers. In any case an interesting read!

Our Deepest Fear (by Marianne Williamson)

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us;
It’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

‘True Belonging’ a quote by Brene Brown

(from the book: Braving the Wilderness)

“True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing
in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can
share your most authentic self with the world and
find sacredness in both being a part of something
and standing alone in the wilderness.

True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you
are. It requires you to be who you are”.

Please Come Home (by Jane Hooper)

Please come home. Please come home.
Find the place where your feet know to walk
And follow your own trail home.

Please come home. Please come into your own body,
Your own vessel, your own earth.
Please come home into each and every cell
And fully into the space that surrounds you.

Please come home. Please come home to trusting yourself,
and your instincts and your ways and your knowings,
And even the particular quirks of your personality.

Please come home.
Please come home and once you are firmly there,
please stay home awhile and come to deep rest within.
Please treasure your home. Please love and embrace your home.
Please get a deep, deep sense of what it’s like to be truly home.

Please come home.
Please come home and when you’re really, really ready,
And there’s a detectable urge on the outbreath, then please come out.
Please come home and please come forward.
Please express who you are to us, and please trust us
To see you and hear you and touch you
and recognize you as best we can.

Please come home. Please come home and let us know
all the nooks and crannies that are calling to be seen.
Please come home, and let us know the More
that is there that wants to come out.

Please come home. Please come home,
and when you feel yourself home, please welcome us too.
for we too forget that we belong and are welcome,
and that we are called to express and fully and be who we are.

Please come home. Please come home,
you and you and you and me.

Thank you Earth for welcoming us,
and thank you touch of eyes and ears and skin,
touch of love for welcoming us.

May we wake up and remember who we truly are.

Please come home. Please come home. Please come home.

Das verlorene Paradies (by John Milton)

Doch wen, zunächst, wen senden wir dorthin,
Um diese neue Welt zu suchen, wer
Soll würdig unter uns befunden werden?
Wer soll den bodenlosen, unermess’nen
Und finstern Abgrund zu bewandern wagen
Und einen unbekannten Weg sich bahnen
Durch das massive Dunkel, oder wer,
Auf luftigen Schwingen durch die leeren Schründe
Im Fluge unermüdlich fort sich tragend,
Auf der glückseligen Insel schließlich landen?

Demain dès l’aube (by Victor Hugo)

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.
J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.

Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et, quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

‘Style’ (by Charles Bukowski)

“Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art

Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art

Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca.

I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.”

Epiphany 2019 – Limitation as creativity trigger

Now nine years in a row I did not send any Christmas cards or new years wishes. As my friends know I use the 12th and last day of the Christmas season to wish you all the luck for the new year. Happy Epiphany!

For all of you who hear the Epiphany story for the first time, below is a copy from the last years with some explanation and examples of Epiphanies.

Look back to 2018

The last year was a year of full-swing creativity and many activities, here I want to just mention a few.
The highlight was the publishing of the Music Thinking Jam Cards by BIS publishers and the launch of the new Music Thinking Website with the music thinking framework and a blog. Followed by a music thinking masterclass at the design thinkers conference and an evening for the designers DNA (creative leadership platform). All of this was a real boost of Music Thinking, and as an effect, we got a lot of response and reactions even until Japan. Hope this will lead to new developments.

After nearly 3 years I stopped as Chief Design Officer at the Design Thinking Center in Amsterdam to focus more on Music Thinking and other activities. I did so many workshops, design sprints and training in the last 3 years (maybe more than 250 workshops days) it needed a break.

Further, I started the collaboration with Faebric a cooperative focused on crafting value systems with blockchain and did some training for the Design Thinkers Academy (Paris, Amsterdam, Dubai).
Let’s not forget the two concerts of Raum-Musik für Saxophone on the World Saxophone Congress in Zagreb and a lot of other musical collaborations.
At the end of the year, we moved into a new house and said goodbye to gas and oil – the new full-electric car will be ready next week.

Wishing you many Epiphanies in 2019

The epiphany story of this year is about limitations or better the possibilities that appear if we are open to focus and make the best of all the limitations.
And I think there will be many because the way we live is not compatible with nature and the planet. I would like to inspire myself to see the limitations as new starting points for great things. I wrote on the music thinking blog a ‘behind the cards’ story with the Limitations card as the trigger. Read the story: Limitation as the starting point for creativity

Hope you like it!

All the best for 2019, have a great year
Christof Zürn

---

A collection of different meanings of Epiphany:

• EPIPHANY is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.
• PHILOSOPHICAL meaning: having found the last piece of the puzzle and suddenly seeing the whole picture.
• ARCHIMEDES Eureka! I found it!
• EINSTEIN was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realizing that some unseen force in space was making it move.
• DARWIN An example of a flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind was Charles Darwin’s “hunch” (about natural selection) during The Voyage of the Beagle.
• JAMES JOYCE Referring to those times in his life when something became manifest, a deep realization, he would then attempt to write this epiphanic realization in a fragment. Joyce also used epiphany as a literary device within each short story of his collection Dubliners (1914) as his protagonists came to sudden recognitions that changed their view of themselves or their social condition and often sparking a reversal or change of heart.
• In RELIGION it is used when a person realizes their faith or when they are convinced that an event or happening was really caused by a deity or being of their faith.
• WESTERN CHRISTIAN Religion: The adoration of the magi, represented as kings, having found Jesus by following a star 12 days after christmas.
• HINDUISM epiphany might refer to the realization of Arjuna that Krishna (a God serving as his charioteer in the “Bhagavad Gita”) is indeed representing the universe.
• In ZEN kensho describes the moment, referring to the feeling attendant on realizing the answer to a koan.
• BUDDHISM Buddha finally realizing the nature of the universe, and thus attaining nirvana.
• WILLIAM BURROUGHS is talking about a drug-influenced state, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of the fork (naked lunch).
• EPIPHANIES is the thirteenth episode of the second season of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series.
• EPIPHANY is a web browser for the GNOME graphical computing desktop.
• HIERONYMUS BOSCH painted the adoration of the magi around 1495.
• HOMER SIMPSON has an epiphany, after visiting a strange Inuit shaman, and realizes he has to save the town from Russ Cargill’s plans to destroy Springfield.
• The last page of THE WIRE magazine with surprising sonic stories about music is called EPIPHANIES.
• Interesting: if you search for Epiphanies or Epiphany on TWITTER many people talk about that they (just) had an epiphany, but don’t exactly say what it was.

A tactile approach to Service Design Thinking – Design Thinking & Lego Serious Play

Service Design Thinking is an approach to problem-solving that allows individuals to rapidly identify challenges and then go big on ideas before picking one or two to ideate, test and evaluate. 

Principles are:

• Holistic – seeing the big picture in relation to details
• Empathy – human-centered focus on real needs
• Co-creation- iterative approach with stakeholders involved

At the intersection are ideas that last, ideas that are surprising, ideas that work. Before moving into the solution space of the Design Thinking process we heavily rely on words: spoken or written.  But words have two inherent limitations.

1. Firstly most of us filter what we say, only articulating things that will make us sound smart, intelligent and well educated.
2. Secondly, the part of most necessary for Design Thinking to work, the Limbic System where passion, music, creativity, and love sit – does not have any language capabilities. In other words, it’s almost impossible to articulate love, music, feelings and conceptual ideas.

One of the challenges in Design Thinking is to visualize all the words people use and make them meaningful for everyone involved. We use a set of tools, canvases, visual techniques and a lot of different materials to play with possible solutions and tinker with a prototype. One of the materials we use in prototyping is Lego.

Service Design Thinking and Lego Serious Play

But there is more to Lego than just playing. Lego Serious Play, the methodology created by LEGO over ten years ago, is an approach that allows teams to find creative solutions to open-ended challenges. The real strength of Lego Serious Play is that we don’t use words, we use ‘art’ and creativity to express something – in this case Lego. It allows for more complex and creative concepts and ideas to be modeled.

Building models with Lego Serious Play

Together with Ben Wickham we thought about how we could combine the strength of Design Thinking and Lego (Serious) Play to design ‘a tactile and playful approach to Service Design Thinking’.

We are going to crash these two concepts together: taking Design Thinking as the roadmap and Lego (Serious) Play as the way we execute. The result is a tactile approach to Design Thinking, for those groups and challenges that require a more intensive and deeper approach.

On the 28th & 29th March, at the Design Thinking Centre in Amsterdam, Ben Wickham & myself will lead a two-day workshop to help you get to grips with the basics of both approaches and their collaborative power. To help us, we have identified a global challenge to address: that of urbanization. If we can fix that – we can fix anything…

We would love to see you.

Click here to book, or if you have any questions, drop Ben or me a line.

See you end of March.

Serendipity & Strategy – Epiphany 2018

Also this holiday season I did not send any Christmas cards or new years wishes. As my friends know this is not about being impolite, but a tradition to do a mailing on the 6th of January and not earlier. 

Today is Epiphany day – the 12th and last day of Christmas. For me it is also the day of changing perspective – a magic pivot. The holiday season is over and we can focus on the coming year.  A good moment to wish you many Epiphanies in 2018!

Epiphany is not only the last day of Christmas, but also stands for an experience of sudden and striking realisation. The word epiphany originally referred to insight through the divine. Nowadays this concept is used much more often also without such connotations, but a popular implication remains that the epiphany is supernatural, as the discovery seems to come suddenly from the outside. More on this see below.

Serendipity & Strategy

The last year was full of epiphanies for me – some good, some bad. Some came ‘all of a sudden’ and some were a logical change that ‘step by step’ approached without noticing in the first place (or wanting to notice ;-). In any case at the beginning of this year I got my freedom back to work again independently as Creative Companion.
And this also gave a boost to finish an idea that too long was postponed: to create an Inspirational Card Set based on Music Thinking principles (as presented in October last year) and the Music Thinking Framework.

First prototype of the Music Thinking Inspiration Cards for Serendipity & Strategy.

In december we started prototyping the Music Thinking Inspiration Cards and this January we will iterate to a set that can be tested in workshops. The idea is to use the cards in very different ways ranging from Serendipity to Strategy in direct connection with the Six Music Thinking Cues from Empathy to Remix of the Music Thinking Framework. The intention is to have the set ready for purchase after the summer vacation.

have a great year
Christof Zürn

PS: an extra project will be the relaunch of both sites:
www.creative-companion.com and  www.musicthinking.com

---

For all of you who hear the Epiphany story for the first time, below is  a copy from the last years with some explanation and examples about Epiphanies:

A collection of different meanings of Epiphany:

• EPIPHANY is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.
• PHILOSOPHICAL meaning: having found the last piece of the puzzle and suddenly seeing the whole picture.
• ARCHIMEDES Eureka! I found it!
• EINSTEIN was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realizing that some unseen force in space was making it move.
• DARWIN An example of a flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind was Charles Darwin’s “hunch” (about natural selection) during The Voyage of the Beagle.
• JAMES JOYCE Referring to those times in his life when something became manifest, a deep realization, he would then attempt to write this epiphanic realization in a fragment. Joyce also used epiphany as a literary device within each short story of his collection Dubliners (1914) as his protagonists came to sudden recognitions that changed their view of themselves or their social condition and often sparking a reversal or change of heart.
• In RELIGION it is used when a person realizes their faith or when they are convinced that an event or happening was really caused by a deity or being of their faith.
• WESTERN CHRISTIAN Religion: The adoration of the magi, represented as kings, having found Jesus by following a star 12 days after christmas.
• HINDUISM epiphany might refer to the realization of Arjuna that Krishna (a God serving as his charioteer in the “Bhagavad Gita”) is indeed representing the universe.
• In ZEN kensho describes the moment, referring to the feeling attendant on realizing the answer to a koan.
• BUDDHISM Buddha finally realizing the nature of the universe, and thus attaining nirvana.
• WILLIAM BURROUGHS is talking about a drug-influenced state, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of the fork (naked lunch).
• EPIPHANIES is the thirteenth episode of the second season of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series.
• EPIPHANY is a web browser for the GNOME graphical computing desktop.
• HIERONYMUS BOSCH painted the adoration of the magi around 1495.
• HOMER SIMPSON has an epiphany, after visiting a strange Inuit shaman, and realizes he has to save the town from Russ Cargill’s plans to destroy Springfield.
• The last page of THE WIRE magazine with surprising sonic stories about music is called EPIPHANIES.
• Interesting: if you search for Epiphanies or Epiphany on TWITTER many people talk about that they (just) had an epiphany, but don’t exactly say what it was.

Creativity, Music and E-learning

Today I got my official statement of accomplishment from the Stanford Online course led by Tina Seelig, Executive Director, Stanford Technology Ventures Program. It states that I have successfully completed, serving as a team leader and with distinction, a free online offering of Creativity: Music to My Ears by Standford University through NovoEd.

This six-week experiential course focused on opportunity recognition, reframing problems, challenging assumptions, connecting and combining ideas, working on creative teams, and mastering a mindset of innovation. It was also a good opportunity to work with the e-learning platform. I would recommend it for another course.

Here is the trailer:

Creativity: Music to My Ears from Stanford Tech Ventures Program on Vimeo.

And here the final class video.

Creativity: Music to My Ears, the final photo project montage from Stanford Tech Ventures Program on Vimeo.

It was fun to do this online course together with more than 20.000 participants from all over the world.

Here is a selection of some material from the course for inspiration, including some old time classic of creativity like The Powers of Ten, or The 6 Thinking Heads:

YOUR INNOVATION ENGINE
Introducing the Innovation Engine by Tina Seelig

LISTENING DIFFERENTLY
with the key concepts: The importance of active observation, Noticing opportunities around you, Capturing your observations.
Video: 5 Ways to Listen Better by Julian Treasure

CHALLENGING ASSUMTIONS
with the key concepts: Framing and reframing problems, Tools for changing your point of view, Going beyond the first answer, Brainstorming guidelines, Team challenge.
Powers of Ten – Ray & Charles Eames (1977)
de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats
Video: How NOT to Brainstorm
Video: How to Brainstorm

CONNECT & COMBINE
with the key concept: Engaging Your Audience and Telling Your Story in a Creative Way.
Designing Music
Video: Everything is a Remix

CREATIVE MINDSET
with the key concepts: The importance of experimentation, Learning from failures, Mastering a mindset for creativity
Treat Life Like and Experiment– Tom Kelley, IDEO
Life Lessons Through Tinkering – Gever Tully

 

Dad’s Disc Delights – 15 seconds to get the essence

This is a wonderful and charming visual storytelling site on Instagram by London photographer Zoë Timmers. The visual attraction of the vinyl albums helps to tell the story and the love for the jazz heritage. Their challenge is to get the essence of a piece of music across in 15 seconds.

Great ‘Music Thinking‘ learning for all of us!

Zoë’s father has worked in the music industry most of his life and fell in love with jazz early on. Zoë takes all the photos, and her dad writes the captions after their conversations about which records to feature in what order. Zoë publishes to Instagram, and her dad responds in comments.

For more from Zoë and her dad, follow @dadsdiscdelights
Go to their Instagram site:  http://instagram.com/dadsdiscdelights

Hope this will inspire more people to share their musical stories!
This is a picture from approx. eight years ago. There should be more.

The Soundtrack of my Life in 5 Records – Christof Zürn

Epiphany through Empathy – wishing you many Epiphanies in 2014!

The sixth of January is epiphany day – the 12th and last day of Christmas. The holiday season is over and we can focus on the coming year. A good moment to wish you all the best for 2014!

Epiphany through Empathy from CREATIVE COMPANION

What epiphanies would we get, if we could see through the eyes of another person? I made a presentation under the title ‘Epiphany through Empathy‘ and hope you will like it.

Good luck, health and I hope you will have many epiphanies in 2014!

Why should I back Ubuntu?

After reading ‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek, I was wondering if the Why concept can help me with decision making.

In short the concept of the ‘Golden Circle’ by Sinek is an idea, an alternative perspective, that explains why some people and organizations are more innovative, more influential, command greater loyalty and are able to repeat their success over and over. The fundamental idea is that Why a company is doing something is much more important than the How and the What (although this has to be in sync!). Sinek is using the Apple-Why a lot in his book and presentations: “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently.”

When I heard about the Indigogo crowd funding campaign of Ubuntu Edge  – ‘the next generation of personal computing: smartphone and desktop PC in one state-of-the-art device by Cannonical’ , …

… I started to make a list of the why-how-what to make a decision to back this project or not.

WHY

“Ubuntu is an ancient African word / philosophy meaning:‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers.”  from www.ubuntu.com

• More about Ubuntu the philosophy with a Video from Nelson Mandela on  Wikipedia
• Book: Ubuntu!: An Inspiring Story About an African Tradition of Teamwork and Collaboration
• Book (dutch): De kracht van Afrikaans Denken

HOW

The company Canonical has set up the biggest crowd funding challenge ever with a target of $ 32.000.000 to come up with a smartphone/computer that will challenge the big players like Apple and Samsung. Here the CEO explaining a lot of What and How, e.g. that the car industry has  Formula 1 to innovate and test new cutting-edge technology and that the mobile development is missing such a platform … Shuttleworth (CEO Canonical) says he wants to push developers to test the limits of processing power, storage, and screen technology. “It’s sort of like a concept car,” he says. “But instead of waiting three years to see if something like it gets built, we’re going to try and build it now.”

This is an interesting experiment to first finance the phone with enough followers and then just produce it. Would it be possible that Apple or Samsung would do the same?

WHAT

Is the combination of smartphone and computer and the innovations that come along with it challenging enough? How will this work e.g. in Africa where more and more people get connected to the internet – not via PC but via mobile phones? Will there be less waste when we have more phones and less PC’s/Laptops?

I asked some friends to check the technical specifications of the new device and all of them were very positive, here is a list to compare:

For me the WHY the HOW and the WHAT seem more or less in-sync with each other, although I would wish that Canonical would stress the WHY more in communication and action.

As Sinek puts it: WHY is  the believe, HOW are the actions we take to realize the WHY and WHAT are the results of those actions.

That’s why I backed Ubuntu Edge. Whether they make it or not, it feels good to back this experiment.

You can back until 21st August 2013: http://igg.me/at/ubuntuedge/x/1633526