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Paradigme reflections

Last night I read the first chapters of Steven R. Coveys world bestselling book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". Actually I bought it quite a while ago – mainly because I was fascinated about the fact that the book has been sold in 200.000 copies in Denmark and more than 15 million copies worldwide… What’s with all the fuzz?

Normally I never start reading a book like that - just the title is kind of creepy to me. It’s not that I am against personal development, but my life should not be run like a company. I really believe you can have too many goals and plans for your future. In my experience, what give meaning to my life are the people around me and those journeys we are on together. If I should make a great plan for my life, shouldn’t I make it with them?

Anyway… With all those reservations I read the first chapters. And it was inspiring, of cause, because it gave room to reflect upon my own life and situation, although much was really basic stuff. Like when the author talks a lot about paradigm shifts. “To make large changes in our lives, we must work on the basic paradigms through which we see the world.”

And here’s my point:

Travelling makes me feel so alive because it is the way I am pulled from my well known comfortable life and thrown into a context where everything is different. I open up to the world. My senses get focused and everything blossoms. I am in travelling mode.

Meeting people in this mode, makes me open to paradigm shifts and great changes. Maybe I have prepared the journey for a long time. And almost certainly it lasts long becayse I keep fysical memories, souveniers and pictures.

To me that is the perfect design of an experience. It changes me.

But how the h... do you communicate that? That is interesting!
We almost certainly can't get people to feel what we felt outhere. But could we make a greater room for them to have their own experience?

Folkekirkens Nødhjælp

Yep, Maria... The journey has begun and - wow - our first meeting generated SOOO many thoughts concerning communication and travelling. How is it possible to examine new ways of communicating the great things we experience along the way? Important matters. Genuine relations...

These are truly big questions, and my first reaction would be... "HEEEY - THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE"... The world gets relevant only when you've been there, met the people, smelled the dirt and... And you really can't communicate that experience. That is why loooong travelling letters are often so exhausting and why its generally very hard for me to get inspired by personal stories from the world. Unless, of cause, they are really short and fact heavy: "Samuel Rachlin, TV2, Washington..." Or that it's me who have personally chosen to be entangled by a good book from the world - such as "The Kite Runner" (Drageløberen) by Khaled Hosseini.


The other day we talked about NGOs such as Folkekirkens Nødhjælp - and how they choose to communicate their really important work in the world. As I see it they have (at least to some extend) given up trying to really engage us. Instead they focus mainly on facts and results.

Their member magazines NØD is fact heavy with short stories about the work of Folkekirkens Nødhjælp. This is what we do. These are the obstacles. Here are the results. They use personal stories because they appeal to our feelings, but the main focus seems to be about communicating results. Not that different, actually, from the annual reports of companies such as "Lundbeck" or "Carlsberg".

I remember General Secretary Henrik Stubkær once saying that perhaps the most important argument for distributing the magazine is, that people actually use the payment form (girokort) in the back page. It generates money. And that helps the poor.

That makes sense.

However, last week an article also appeared on the front-page of "Kristeligt Dagblad" under the headline "Succes truer indsamlingsarbejdet". Here former General Secretary Peter Lodberg argues that NGOs working with aid today are operated as multinational corporate businesses, - and therefore it is of huge importance to keep their good relations to puplic. In the article, another guy - Stig Fogh - also says (in Danish...):

"Kun mellem 15 og 20 procent af befolkningen giver i dag fast til nødhjælp. Men med flere forskellige koncepter kan organisationerne få flere mennesker med. Der skal varer på hylderne, om det så er geder, gaver, genbrug eller koncerter. Men nødhjælpsorganisationerne skal bare huske at have sjælen med, for folk vil gerne spejle sig i det, de giver penge til."

People want to be able to relate to the cause...

The Journey has begun

A design process is like a journey into an undiscovered land. Sometime one might have to turn around and create another possible path, only this time wiser, but as you go along you learn, discover and create.

Our journey of this new design process has begun today. It is not clear where the journey will take us, but we know there are a lot for us to discover and create.

On this indecisive winter day in December thoughts and ideas of this new design process have been thrown between ears and walls.

The first angle we want to investigate is chosen on a basis of our backgrounds. It has to do with the experience of communicated experiences. The idea rose from the way different Third world nations organisations and NGOs communicate their work and experience in different countries. Often these magazines end up in the trash bin unread. We asked our selves if there are other ways to communicate these stories. Isn’t it possible to make the stories more relatable? We also talked about the difficulties concerning communicating ones experiences on a journey? We ask ourselves; how can a reader be engaged in the experience of another country without being there physically? Is it possible to transfer a part of the experience to someone else?

These were some of the many random thoughts. We have taken the first step into this field the next will be to investigate in some of our own travelling writings. Peter will look into the communication of a journey he recently took to Cuba. He wrote about his experiences with Cuba on a weblog belonging to an organisation for young people. Maria will dive into her old travelling journals to see how she has articulated her travelling and experiences.

At one point in today’s meeting, Peter took out a bunch of different things related to some of his travels. Pictures from Mongolia, a calendar from some mountains, a moleskin journal and so on, these are Physical artefacts that bring memories of a certain journey – a certain experience. Based on the fact that a lot of people have memorabilia’s from a journey we will both try to investigate this. We will look at some of the artefacts people bring with them as a memorabilia of a journey. Why are these things important?



The way we work
There are already a few things we find important in the way we work. From past experience we know how beneficial it can be to relocate every new meeting. Changing location is a great instrument when remembering different decisions at different stages in a design process. Therefore we will try to incorporate this in the meeting culture.

Another important point is to constantly search for the most interesting thing to do. To let the material speak and come alive as we follow the most interesting paths. This will be our driving force.