COCOONERS - Making It Happen - No 4, March 2018

Cocooners - n° 4 - March 2018
Cocooners - n° 4 - March 2018
WHAT’S UP
I
want to tell you a story.
My first passion since I was 10 years old has been the gymnastics
and when it was the moment to choose my job, I decided to
become a gymnastics coach.
We trained for many years, among the others, some young girls.
Everyday we learned something new growing up together and day
by day, slowly, I saw the group turning into a team. The highlight of
this beautiful path was when we decided to perform a blindfolded
exercise.
Yes, they couldn’t see anything for 3 minutes while they shared the
space moving and collaborating.
The music, the energy and their breaths were the only things that
led them.
When I’m thinking over the training aimed at the performance, I’m
sure about one thing: the experience would not have been possible
without trust. In each moment, every girl was responsible for herself
and for the others and, at the same time, totally certain to be in a
comfortable and protected space because they relied on the team.
When we work with people, we experience the same situation. We
have a common goal but everyone takes care of a part of it. Often we
don’t see the whole but if there is the trust in the team, we can let
go the control and open the mind to new unexpected possibilities in
order to achieve a bigger purpose.
Not understanding/seeing everything isn’t a limit, it is an opportunity.
When we lack something, the other senses expand and new
ALESSANDRA
CIANCHETTINI
feelings appear.
To perform blindfolded wasn’t easy but it
was amazing. Let go the control and nurture
the trust!
Are risk and fear still everything most of managers
can focus on? Or is it just laziness? After all the
world-wide work done for 3 decades in understanding
complexity, uncertainty and adaptive systems, it still
seems nowadays most people in the “business world” are looking
for precise instructions on what to do and reassurance that they
will work. Even if reducing risk were the best focus to have, still
can’t these people see that the only risk this approach reduces is
that of thriving? All the off-the-shelf “solutions” and “models”
sold out there prêt-à-porter presume that context doesn’t matter,
that identity doesn’t matter. They all are about certainty indeed,
certainty to fail though. They’re about certainty to give in to fear,
constrain emergence, and kill the beauty of creativity that any
human system carries within.
Imagine you could wake up every morning knowing exactly
everything that will happen in the rest of your life. Every day.
Is that a life you’d want to live? No surprises? No derails? No
discovery? No hope? I would not. Actually quite the opposite, I long
for novelty. I use to keep and grow a collection, my collection of
first times. Once you start collecting first times you begin to see how
easy and interesting it is to live them every day. The first time you
walk, you fly, you visit a half-built house, the first time your new
colleague laughs, the first time your project takes off, the first
time you overcome fear and feel what freedom really is. The first
time you let go.
Here’s my entreaty to hordes of managers supposedly leading
companies of any size in every country of this planet: stop looking
STELIO
VERZERA
for a prêt-à-porter work. There is no prescriptive solution to evolutionary
challenges. It is your life, you can live
it much more than that. It is our world, we
should love it so much more than that.
There is an important shift in the way people work and
live together. A shift that is only a matter of awareness,
because in its very nature it is well known by the human
kind (even if not by every human).
I’m talking about the shift from ego-istic behaviours to eco-istic
behaviours.
And it is not related to a quality of the person (there is not such
a thing like “being an egoist”), but to complex interdependencies
with the context that allow or not the rising of certain behaviours.
Everybody, and you can recognize it in yourself, sometimes acts
selfishly and sometimes acts altruistically. It is perfectly fine and it
is a good thing having both behaviours. But there is a third possibility,
represented by what I called “ecoism”. Ecoism means deliberately
acting for the advantage of the ecosystem(s) in which we
live, not just for a personal benefit or an altruistic aim but because
of a deep understanding of being at the same time an individual
and the system itself. Even if it sounds like a very complex definition,
everyone knows what it means to act ecoistically: think about
a mother with her family. It is not egoism, it is not altruism, it is a
deep feeling of uniqueness of her with her family.
I’m talking about it in many places and I’m going to write more
extensively about this topic, but the point is: it is time to become
aware of the power of our ecosystems, and we need to uncover our
natural ability to work and to live in this complexity.
EMANUELE
RAPISARDA
CUSTOMER PROJECTS
13 ITERATIONS
17 FACILITATORS
5 COUNTRIES
TALKING ABOUT US
FACCIAMO
L’EVOLUZIONE
Ecoism is a first important step in this
journey. The possible results are unknown
but it’s definitely worth it.
It is normal for children to ask questions. Asking is one of the
most natural ways to explore what we do not know and thus
build an understanding of what surrounds us.
As we grow up, however, we tend to lose the habit of asking to discover
and understand who or what we have in front of us.
Avoiding generalisations, and bearing in mind that asking is allowed
or even encouraged in some contexts, it is nevertheless often seen as
a disrupting element. In school it is not always allowed to interrupt
in order to ask questions, and those who ask too much are often seen
as the “difficult ones” who do not get it the first time. Even at work,
asking too many questions can be interpreted as a sign of incompetence.
As adults, in short, we run the risk of becoming used to asking
just for the sake of conversation, losing the excitement of discovering
through our questions.
SOME OF OUR HIGHLIGHTS FOR THE 2ND HALF OF 2017
COCOON LABS
5 ACTIVE LABS
18 PEOPLE INVOLVED
5 WORKSHOPS
THRIVING FIVE: MULTIGENERATIONAL
WORKING BY DESIGN [3RD HANGOUT]
And yet, people like me, whose job it is to design services, know very
well that asking questions is crucial in order be able to design something
that really meets the needs of its users.
In a broader perspective, complexity is increasingly becoming an
integrated part of our professional world and society, and even in life
in general it is important to have a beginner’s mindset, which is the
key to discovering, learning and adapting to change.
To do so, however, we need to be able to question our own certainties,
make room for new information and be able to empathise with
GUIDO
MARTINI
others.
Therefore, let us remember not to be afraid to
ask and to try and keep that curiosity alive, like
when we were kids.
CP OPEN GOVERNANCE
12 NEW CONTRIBUTORS
14 PEOPLE SHIFTS
TRANSITION TO WELO COMPLETED
EODF ITALY FIRST COUNTRY MEETING,
25 OCTOBER 2017
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