Today I’m doing a workshop teaching project managers how to manage projects from the simple to the complex. We will talk about respecting change as both the point and context of all projects. If you are change-phobic, I will argue, do yourself and the planet a favor and avoid being a leader in projects - you’ll only succeed in crashing the project and annoying the daylights out of the people cursed to be in your project.

I will make the case as I like to do, that project management in the simplest of pragmatic terms comes down to this:

Inviting right people
into the right conversations
at the right time.

If you think there’s more to it than that, like laborythian charts, deus ex machina machinations, and saddle strapping cowboy heroism,  think again.  There isn’t, actually. And so what do we do for the other 7.9 hours in our 8 hour workshop? Get people to unlearn all the crap they learned that gets in the way of the blinding flash of the obvious!

Saw a reference recently to people who have little memory of their family’s roots being clearly identified with any specific cultural associations. Whether they call themselves “mutts” or “Heinz 57″ folks, it raises the question of how important cultural identity is in the quality of life and community, particularly in very heterogeneous and diversified societies. Should we happily let cultural artifacts, practices, and perspectives recede into history?

Should we craft a common future of people with only historical or artistic interest in the cultures and traditions of the past? Are we better off in a future without them? Are they more constraints than liberating structures? Are they crutches for people afraid of creating their own myths and new practices and perspectives?

The important thing is perhaps not what we decide, but how well we have the conversation together.

If the climate watchers are even close to right, all coastal areas on the planet will be at risk in the next decades. The population of these areas add up to roughly 40% of the world’s population, so we’re not talking about a small scale issue.

How many of these regions are designing preventing and resiliency into their instituting building policies and practices? More importantly, what if the global design community led the conversation now where we decide together on the “definitive early warning indicators” warranting new approaches? Seriously. Should we postpone premature action and investments until a certain number of structures, lives, or regions are destroyed by a rise in earthquakes and rising tide patterns? And if so, what is the “right number” that makes the whole matter actionable? It may not be too late, or too early, to be this preemptive, and yes, it will take the design community to take leadership on it, fortunately or not.

Every organization, and community, I work with on strategy is very relieved when I liberate them from the inane practice of traditional academic language in the process. I refuse to allow them to waste valuable time debating over the distinctions of: goal, objective, strategy, tactic, and night maneuvers. (I throw in the military reference to “night maneuvers” to inject humor into what is usually a very humorless and uninspired process - and it works.)

What do we do instead? We replace these never-agreed-upon jargon with complex words like: where, why, how, and what.

To be strategic, which is to in plain English is to say, proactive, is to talk about 4 things:

Where do we want to be in 20 years?
Why does that matter to us?
How do we want to get there in the next 2 years? and
What would be wise for us to do in the next 2 quarters (and weeks) to get there?

These simple and powerful questions give people a remarkable kind of alignment, velocity, and traction they are not used to in the process. What can I say? It works.

For my money, there are fewer examples of great food gurus on the web than the New York Time’s Mark Bitten. His blog videos and print articles are honest, pragmatic, and friendly in design and useful to anyone who wants to make the intimidating and unusual accessible.

So many people approach cooking as an alien art when it can just as well be one of the most available pedestrian art forms on the planet. What I most appreciate about his approach and tone is that he presents everything as option and possibility for exploration and delight rather than the source of the drudgery of dogmatic compliance. In Mark’s world, every dish is beautiful and every meal balanced. You get the combination of spicy rapport, salty banter, and complex wisdom of good design, which is always simple.

Former Bogata mayor and civic innovator Enrique Penelosa continues to speak worldwide with the mantra: “Economics, urban planning, ecology are only the means. Happiness is the goal.” His approach to designing cities for happiness realizes the intersections of social and environmental justice that he instituted as mayor with countless public spaces, miles of walkable streets and huge impacts on Bogata’s carbon footprint.

What would happen, economically and civically, if the ultimate metric was the happiness of a neighborhood, city, or region? Imagine the leap in imagination beyond the anemic strategies of improvements on deficiencies. If any community wants to accelerate its trajectory toward communal happiness, perhaps all it needs to do is make it the central design principle in the future vision and present actions.

I’ve stopped counting how many times I’ve heard 60+ people in visioning conversations say something to effect of, “If we’re talking about what we want to see in 20 years, we should have people here in their twenty’s.”

Given the fact that a 70-something may live 20 years longer than a 30-something because life is not a guarantee or given, combined with the fact that the purpose of visioning is to see present possibilities more clearly, there is no excusing oneself from the freedom to vision. None.

Every community that visions into the future can consider a variety of economic growth indicators (metrics) in how they frame their vision statements. Here are just a few for consideration:

1. Number of new college-degreed & non-degreed jobs created by current organizations in each sector
2. Number of jobs created by new organizations in each sector
3. Number of new organizations coming to locate here from outside in each sector
4. Number of new organizations started from within the community in each sector
5. Number of new product and service lines offered by community organizations in each sector
6. Number of people in the community less or no longer dependent on public services and aid in each sector
7. Number of businesses performing better in each sector
8. Number of organizations with successful strategic processes in each sector
9. Number of residents with increased housing value in each sector
10. Number of students graduating to the next levels in each sector
11. Number of students starting new businesses and organizations in each sector
12. Number of employees re-skilled for new industries in each sector
13. Number of consumer dollars shifted from non-local businesses to local businesses in each sector
14. Number of businesses and organizations shifting to local suppliers in each sector
15. Number of people whose health care, education, and energy costs have decreased in each sector
16. Number of children with reading, writing, research, financial, and cultural literacies in each sector
17. Number of older citizens living longer and with few costs of living in each sector
18. Number of employers satisfied with the local pool of talent for open positions in each sector
19. Number of organizations winning grants, awards, and funding for local projects and efforts in each sector
20. Number of occupied commercial and retail spaces in each sector
21. Number of employee owned businesses that spawn new businesses in each sector

You are likely one of the people on the planet who completely take for granted continuous daily access to a toilet. If so, while we here in the States go to war over things like human rights and health care access, what percentage of people in 2010 do not have access to something as basic as a toilet?

If you guessed 40%, you’d be right. Billions of people daily have only the option to amass pollution in their communities. Now Swedish entrepreneur Anders Wilhelmson has developed a 3 cent bag that can both accommodate a single toilet use and with the aid of crystals, biodegrade into disease-free rich soil for growing gardens and farms that would otherwise lack proper fertilizers for the process. The closest innovation on the problem so far has been toilets that can be as inexpensive as $30, but this approach is both affordable and contributes to the food growing possibilities in communities around the world.

In a recent interview with The Journal, innovation strategist,  Larry Keeley, unveils the myths and mechanics of innovation, specifically addressing education innovations, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron for you. Among other examples, he suggests the elimination of grade levels.

Students enters high school, let’s say, and have to achieve so many competencies in a set number of academic areas. Students progress through them at a self-determined pathway and rate, and ultimately graduate. The benefits include a larger community of learning wasting less time in anxiety about “passing” to the next grade level, leaving the energy to learning. Keeley is a big fan of developing “a few big ideas” over “many small ideas.”

While we’re at it, let’s replace academic tests with community based projects that can demonstrate the exact same competencies and provide value to the community at the same time. Want a big idea? How about a world where the result of any students doing math, reading, geography, arts, and science results in a loaf of bread or 3×3 garden of herbs! This isn’t hard. It just takes complete disruption from the past 100 pathetic years of “education.”