In Twitter co-founder Evan William’s TED talk last month, he talked about the unplanned and unpredictable uses of the 140 character real-time update application, Twitter. It’s been used by newspapers to update readers on real-time stories, by over 40 congressional members, by crisis fund raisers, and by an LA Korean BBQ Taco truck that Twitters its next stops that draw lines around the block. Third-party applications include devices that allow your plants to Twitter you when they need water.

Most interesting is how the company is designing evolving features based on the innovations of users, like using key word tags to facilitate searches and creating replies to tweets. This is organic design in action, where design follows the pull of actual user needs rather than the push of designer imperatives. More software innovators are relying on blog dialogues and tweets to inform and inspire their next moves in design. May this trend spread to all dimensions of design including the design of consumer products, public services, public media, and community architectures.

Across industries and venues, the leading edge methodology today for project management is the “agile” approach. It’s based on the principles of resilience, collaboration, and transparency.  Starting in 2001, agile models have been a transformative and radical manifesto of principles and practices that feature Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, Working software over comprehensive documentation, Customer collaboration over contract negotiation, Responding to change over following a plan.

Learning and applying it was natural for me since I saw these principles in action in the ’60’s and ’70’s. I’d visit my electrical engineering project manager father and see him in action at work  with his 200-300 team of engineers working on international industrial projects. I interviewed him again this week about his experience of using “agile” principles in his stellar career of being one of the few in his company to consistently meet and exceed project requirements.

Setting aside rooms full of rolled up detailed plans, he and his teams would make sure every project engaged people’s strengths, connected people with interdependent tasks, and improvised quickly and proactively to change. This was radical back then and remains a radical departure from traditional models that used planning as a tool to prevent change, interaction, and consideration of strengths.

So now we’re finally being honest about the futility of change and learning resistant project plans. We’re finally seeing improvisation for its timeless value in innovation. Instead of wasting valuable time putting together “plans” we’re action-learning our way to faster and better deliverables.

Museums have long been institutions of passive consumers that need to be reinvented in this age of participation and engagement. How could visitors become more engaged in the design of museum exhibitions, spaces, programs, and benefits? For that matter, how could any institution become more engaging of the questions and passions of its members? How could museums become more open source about the experiences they create?

In her Museum 2.0 blog, Nina Simon talks about the power of participatory design in museums:

Participatory design can help museums match the demands of an increasingly empowered culture in which people expect to spend less time consuming and more time creating and discussing. We’ve known for a long time that visitors “make their own meaning.” Participatory design gives us a way to support and integrate that meaning-making into the larger museum experience.

Participatory design can help museums deliver on the oft-repeated but rarely demonstrated desire for museums to become essential civic spaces, social environments that encourage the democratic process. The “cultural town square” is more likely to come out of the models of the social Web than the city hall meetings you don’t attend.

Participatory design can bring in new audiences from the “creative leisure class” of adults 18-40 without children. These are people who are highly engaged in cultural activities, but are doing so through non-museum venues like Maker Faire, Burning Man, blogs, activist groups, knitting circles, coffee shops, and online communities. Most of these venues are event- or Web-based and their users are in need of open, flexible locations in which to express and share their interests.

Participatory design can convert “underserved” audiences who do not feel welcome in museums into passionate advocates and partners. This only happens when the participatory model involves deep connection with these audiences in an ongoing relationship, but it is notable and significant.

Participatory design is supported by a new staff/business model in which the museum brokers ongoing relationships rather than supplying fixed experiences. While this new model may prove more expensive in operation, it is more flexible and low-cost on the experience development/capital side.

In a sociological climate that values personal perspective and relativism, participatory design platforms can serve as an engine for intelligent, well-designed multi-vocal exhibits and programs. Note that institutional subject matter affects the extent to which perspective is valued; your opinion on the history of your tribe is more likely to be engaged than your opinion on the history of the universe.

In a networked digital age, individual subject matter expert librarians are replaced by networks of experts that libraries create and make available to the community. Librarians are network weavers.

Instead of better answering people’s questions, they help people ask better questions. And they create and populate online course and webinar sites with links.

Instead of handing you a stack of printed materials, they help you make sense out of multi-media and diverse sources. They trade in blogs and books, wikis and zines, tweets and texts, films and face2face connections to new sources of knowledge online and oncommunity.

They facilitate the transition from users being simply being consumers to being creators and contributors of knowledge through blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, tagging and content annotating. The footprint of libraries become truly boundaryless.

Robin Dunbar at Oxford is well known for his research in the social brain hypothesis where he suggests that because of our brain’s capacity for social complexity, we can manage about 150 meaningful relationships.

The implication is already a part of Gore Associates (Gore-Tex) policy where they start a new factory when a factory’s population gets to 150. If this is an ideal number for high quality connections, what are the implications for religious communities, neighborhoods, government entities, schools, and online networks? What are the implications for architectural design, funding policies, and the massification of anything?

There is a new iPhone app in development that allows you to see the profile of people around you who also sign in and ping them for a chat. This is the future of social phone media that allows instant connections in geogrpahical locations. Think libraries, pubs, conferences where social media can “close traingles” in invisible social networks. What else should we think about in this kind of application?

In Alvin Toffler’s vision of the next generation of schools, there are a few features in his manifesto:

• Open twenty-four hours a day
• Customized educational experience
• Kids arrive at different times
• Students begin their formalized schooling at different ages
• Curriculum is integrated across disciplines
• Nonteachers work with teachers
• Teachers alternate working in schools and in business world
• Local businesses have offices in the schools
• Increased number of charter schools

It was interesting a couple of weeks ago talking with people from the world leader Boston Foundation who indicated that in Boston, the data clearly underscores charter schools outperforming public school models. Then this past week in Washington DC, I talked with a charter school expert who, like Toffler, rails against the massification of education, arguing that charter schools do not need to be the “one true model.”

What seems to be true today is that learning how to learn in multi-disciplinary ways is one of the most important competencies in a connected and complex world. What percentage of any student’s day should be dedicated to learning how to learn across disciplines? 10, 50, 80%? In the world we’re preparing students for, there is all kind of math in art, all kinds of history in science. Online research, in the forms of passive web searches and collaborative twitter and blog searches, is a meta-competency within the domain of learning to learn. And to Toffler’s list, this can happen in many of the approaches he suggests.

Is he right when he says that we need to replace current models rather than fix them?

Now that jackzen.com is shifting into a dedicated focus on the future of everything, we should talk about what the future is starting with a view from the present.

From a zen perspective, the present is the future moments we once anticipated in the past. When we look around the present landscape, we see things we allowed to move into the present from the past. These are things we did nothing to change from the past. We also see in the present things we intended to make possible in the present. They are here because we did something in the past to create their being here in the present.

By definition, we do not experience the future in the present. No amount of thinking about, speculating or debating about, anticipating about the future ever makes it possible for us to escape the present. Likewise, we literally cannot live in the past, we can only repeat it in the present.

Our experience of the future in the present is through images we repeat, create, and alter in the present. Our images of the future become a lens through which we see the present. Our view of the present evokes the actions we take that create the possibilities that become our future.

This is what happens in every instance of design by the designers of architecture, medical products, information technologies, consumer products, social programs, organizations, networks, and communities.

When it comes to the future, we are all designers. The more intentional we are about how we imagine the future, the more new possibilities we create. Our individual and collective unwillingness to imagine a different future makes a different future less possible. As the Buddha once suggested, everything we will see starts in the mind’s eye.

My intention here with jack/zen … zenext is to talk about how people are imaging a future different from the past in every dimension of living we can imagine. Join me, make this an open space of sharing what we’re all seeing. With gratitude, Jack.

Jack/zen has been a zen-perspective inspired daily blog since the summer of 2002, launched as a way for me to do a daily writing practice and archive life through the zen lens.

It’s interesting in my travels to come across a variety of reactions to mentions of zen.

For some, it infers minimalist design perspective. For others, it’s an alien reference to esoterica, possibly related to things ungodly spiritual. And for people who practice Zen, it’s the Buddhist practice of presence, being in the here and now.

What Zen shares with other ways in Buddhism is a way of life that requires no specific beliefs, positions, ideologies, or theologies. It is a way of life based on attention to life’s intrinsic passion for impermanence, interdependence, and uniqueness.

The idea of zenext is a focus on a zen approach to how we think about the future of everything, the zen of next.

I like the apparent paradox that intersects the practice of presence with the future of everything. The irony came up in a workshop I did on the East Coast last year where a sustainability leader questioned by passion about the future in the context of Zen Buddhism. I untied the gordian knot easily by suggesting that in my practice of things like strategic doing, the purpose of futuring is simply to see present possibilities more clearly.

After engaging countless varieties of people, networks, and communities, it’s become clear to me that two people can stand in the same place and time and see two different sets of present possibilities and that the difference in their experience is the difference in how each envisions the future, the difference in how they dream.

So starting today, jackzen’s focus will be on a zen approach to futuring in every context imaginable. It will be an exploration of the future of the planet, our common resources, our sense of what’s spiritual and intangible, the design of our communities and spaces and products, the future of education, work, health, growing, dying, connecting, learning, and governing.

I think we need to think about how we future, the kinds of conversations we have the questions we use to frame our crafting the future of anything. We need to invite and evoke imagination and courage and listening to what’s possible. We need to hold the tension between the impossible and the practical and live in that dynamic and boundless space of both-and. Looking forward to joining you here in this new iteration of jackzen. With gratitude.

Dinner tonight in Philadelphia with friend and green social entrepreneur Scott Anderson (@greenskeptic), 3 hours of non-stop reflections on the sustainability space, transformation, poetry, food, love, and twittering, among other things. It is a boundaryless conversation when two renaissance souls intersect with passion for making differences.

One of the metaphors that emerged was that of hives. The message: when you’re standing in a garden and you want to find the bees, don’t run around after them, just build a hive. The implication: when building a critical mass of support, don’t chase people for their support, build a space of action where people are instantly clear they can connect with those they’re looking for. Thanks man.