What Is Playful Inquiry?

InquiryInquiry is the science, art and spirit of imagination. We naturally associate Inquiry with the logical mind’s intent to satisfy curiosity, solve problems, and explore ideas. Inquiry helps us connect our prior understanding to new experiences, modify and accommodate our previously held beliefs and conceptual models, and construct new knowledge.

Antonyms found in the dictionary: Answer, reply

Playful

Playful describes a state of surrender. It involves being open, letting go, and embracing unexpected direction or results. Being playful has positive effects on the body and the brain. Problem solving ability increases after a person has spent some time laughing. This works because laughter turns off the posterior hypothalamus and allows the cerebral cortex to focus on a given task.

Antonyms found in the dictionary: Earnest, serious-minded, sober, humorless, serious, working

4/13/12

The Importance of Activity and Movement

When we facilitate a group, we mix it up. John Medina's brain rules at the bottom of our site here, reminds us that we don't like to sit around for long periods of time; we get bored because our brain is craving involvement. Part of re-integrating that knowing is modeling and practicing it together with Playful Inquiry.

One of our activities is Whoosh - Bang - Pow, which we found nicely described in a YouTube video:

By keeping movement woven throughout the day, our body's circulation is stimulated, which increases our opportunities for insights, retention, and integration. Movement is one of the things that improves our creativity and allows us to maximize our intellect. Playful Inquiry is simply the active practice of several principle ways to improve brain power, combined with articulating situations in the form of a question.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Inquiring About Serious Play

In spring, 2012, Lori began to inquire about the application of game design in helping whole communities and cultures shift to their desired vision for their community or organization. This inquiry looks at the structural aspects, which include purpose, rules, protocols, expectations, member/participant behavior, environment, roles, controls, types of feedback and how feedback influences choice and outcomes; basically systems based views. Gamers are very open about their behavior; they don’t waste time hiding the fact that they may be using cheat codes. They’re more concerned with doing whatever it takes to reach their goal. They dedicate full resources to their mission and work under intolerable conditions; focusing on task often for hours and hours without breaking for anything beyond essential physical biological needs. Compare this to the secret life of organizations in corporate culture (a phrase borrowed from Dr. Ariane David), where people spend more time and energy hiding their true motivations, avoiding authenticity, and unintentionally misunderstanding almost everyone around them. Lori found herself becoming more and more vocal, saying essentially, “Most will acknowledge that organizations are dysfunctional, but can we please move beyond creating comic strips, embrace our intelligence, and accept responsibility for our collective experience?”

Lori quickly found the Serious Play Conference, scheduled in August 2012, and realized this would be a superb environment for immersion. This sparked the desire to interview the conference presenters, and those interviews are being shared here on the Playful Inquiry site. Whole fields and disciplines are merging in some of the work and research being done; it's fascinating. While the sectors of education, public health and public defense are certainly engaged in the Serious Games and Serious Play dialog, Lori is keenly interested in the conversation on behalf of the collections of individuals that are coming together looking to collaborate on co-creating better communities and a better world. How can we improve connecting talented individuals with the work they are good at and love to do? How can we support the individual and independent people who want to contribute and are looking for a place to plug in and “play” in real life? How do we more effectively allow the innate desire in people to make the world a better place to be realized? How? By realizing why.

"We've seen what the Gaming Guilds are capable of in terms of their ability to form teams based on strengths as well as their completely organic models for shared leadership," says Norma Owen, who, along with Lori Sortino, is holding regular conversations about the applications for the Future of Work and Nurturing the Essence of Community. Lori claims "If we watch what's going on in the gaming community, and ask ourselves what it would take to bring those conditions into the world of work and community, we will accelerate the shift to our collective desired reality. If we can become a talented orchestra with the structure of music composition, the playbook of sheet music, and the discipline of practice, then we can borrow the process and play with games and simulation until we practice ourselves into better ways of working and being."

The momentum behind this inquiry for Lori includes her work with Lyn facilitating Playful Inquiry, and also her work with the Future Working Together Guild, which is a Network of consultants, teachers, coaches, and other professionals who are bringing new models of working together to the world of work, offering conferences that border on simulation and are the bridge to introducing new creative models to existing communities and organizations. In addition, the systems thinking background that Lyn and Lori share provides a structure for studying systems in the process of inquiring about how to change any aspect of our life experience; work, relationships, education, our health, etc.

Lori’s work with facilitating community groups, designing events, and connecting groups and individuals for collaboration has placed her in countless intimate conversations; a sort of un-reportable yet very real research that results in a knowing about what’s deeply important to people; what they’re yearning for and where our collective hope resides. Our experience with any aspect of life is somewhere on a continuum. Playful Inquiry is the invitation to look at our own individual approach, our unique experience, our current challenges; the things we are trying to change or bring into our life, and the level of importance.

What does it mean to be serious? What does it mean to play? Serious Play, in essence, points to an emotional connection with an outcome. It indicates that people are concerned about how things turn out. Why? Because they believe the outcome matters. They have identified a need and have connected to a calling to meet that need somehow, and this creates a focus and an intention. We view focus and intention as serious rather than playful.

The art, though, is noticing when the focus and intention becomes attached to the "how". Playful Inquiry invites us to let go of the how in order to reconnect with the why. Why do gamers spend hours and hours on line playing games? What are the very real needs that get met with this activity? Grab an open mind and take a look: community, recreation, immersion, strategy, problem solving, competency, belonging, accomplishment, autonomy, self-reliance, collaboration, completion, respect, opportunity to lead, celebration, creativity, exploration, and more.

These are real life basic needs that everyone has to some degree and so many of these needs are met in reality via on line gaming and are largely NOT being met in mainstream educational and work environments and cultures. Part of the shift in consciousness being explored by hundreds of groups is acknowledging the power and importance of these basic human needs and harnessing that awareness in the designing and nurturing of community going forward.

To play, or not to play. Observe or participate. It’s your life. If you’re not happy with recent outcomes, do some research for yourself and play it a little differently.

Lyn & Lori

Ipanema Beach, Rio de Janiero

Biographies

Lyn Wiltse (left) and Lori Steed Sortino (right) are passionate about helping individuals and teams ask the right questions to achieve their goals. They will no doubt tell stories about their trip to Brazil and want for you similar experiences in life: The opportunity to immerse yourselves in a different culture, language, and political reality, the ability to recognize the truth of who you are, and the realization of how you can best contribute to the world.

Lyn Wiltse is the founder and president of PDSA Consulting, Inc. She is a graduate of Willamette University and holds a Master’s degree in Educational Policy and Management from the University of Oregon. She has over 25 years of experience facilitating process improvement and interest-based collaborative initiatives. She demonstrates empathetic listening which creates a trusting environment for relationship-building and consideration of new ideas, especially regarding the potential impact each person has on surrounding systems.

Lori Steed Sortino facilitates groups and mentors leaders with an emphasis on individual growth and transformation that supports and encourages our capacity for embodying authenticity. Key themes in her work are transparency, awareness, aligning with core beliefs and core values, and integrating what we do well and what we most love to do. Her diverse background includes corporate management and training, continuous improvement, project management, and solution discovery. She's a starter, innovator, designer and photographer with a focus on celebrating life.

Contact

Lyn is based in the Seattle, WA area.425.822.3549

Lori is based in the Central Coast, CA area.805.286.4457

Which statements are TRUE for you?

Quotes

Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Steve Jobs

In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones, we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.

Sam Keen

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

Tuli Kupferberg

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

Henry Miller

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

Japanese Proverb

On with the dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto, whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

Mark Twain

Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will insert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safer, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Cecil Beaton

Viola Spolin:

Play is democratic!Anyone can play!Everyone can learn through playing!Play touches and stimulates vitality, awakening the whole person – mind and body, intelligence and creativity, spontaneity and intuition, when all are attentive to the moment.

Intuition bypasses the intellect, the mind, the memory, the known.Using intuition cannot be taught.One must be tripped into it.

There is, clearly, a strong resemblance between improvisation in the theater and jazz.Art Farmer, the jazz flugelhorn player, says, “You can never force what you’re doing.The harder you try, the less happens.At the best time, it’s as if you had been taken over by some other power.This power plays you and you become the instrument.”

The heart of improvisation is transformation.

Creativity is not rearranging; it’s transformation.

The Spolin theater games are artifices against artificiality, structures designed to almost fool spontaneity into being – or perhaps a frame carefully built to keep out interferences in which the player waits.Important in the game is the “ball” – the Focus, a technical problem, sometimes a double technical problem which keeps the mind (a sensoring device) so busy rubbing its stomach and its head in opposite directions, so to speak, that genius (spontaneity), unguarded, happens.”Film Quarterly.

When we are conditioned to look to others before we can respond, a time-lag is established, a space, a gap, between query and response, which allows the approval / disapproval syndrome to show itself.There is no integrity, no honesty in the reaction of someone debating, “Should I or shouldn’t I?”

Play experience can prepare the student for purposefulness in non-play activities, for true play creates the incentive to use one’s best ability.

Neva Boyd

Excitement and enthusiasm are a precondition to breakthrough.

Schiller taught us long ago that we are fully human when we are at play.

Gwen Gordon on Play

Lucy and Ethel at the Chocolate Factory

Lucy with Harpo: The Mirror Routine

Tips from John Medina’s Brain Rules

Twelve Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School:

1.Exercise boosts brain power. Brains are built for walking 12 miles/day. To improve your thinking skills, move. Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting. Aerobic exercise twice a week cuts your risk of Alzheimers by 60%.

2.The human brain evolved too. We have 3 brains: lizard brain to keep us breathing, mammalian brain, and the thin layer of jell-o known as the cortex. This is the third and powerful “human brain.” Symbolic reasoning is uniquely human

3.Every brain is wired differently. Our brain changes as we learn. No two brains store the same information in the same way or in the same place. We have a great number of ways of being intelligent, many of which don’t show up on IQ tests.

4.People don’t pay attention to boring things. The brain’s attentional “spotlight” can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking. We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail. Emotional arousal helps the brain learn. Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion.

5.Repeat to remember: Information enters the brain and gets split up and stored in different areas of the cortex. You can improve your chances of remembering something if you re-create the environment in which you put it in your brain in the first place.

6.Remember to repeat: Most memories disappear within minutes. Those that survive the fragile period strengthen with time. Improve long-term memory by incorporating new information gradually and repeating it in timed intervals.

7.Sleep well, think well: The brain is in a constant state of tension between cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and cells and chemicals that try to keep you awake. The neurons of your brain show vigorous rhythmical activity when you’re asleep – perhaps replaying what you learned that day. People vary in how much sleep they need and when they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal. Loss of sleep hurts attention, excessive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and motor dexterity

8.Stressed brains don’t learn the same way: Your body’s defense system – the release of adrenaline and cortisol- is built for an immediate response to a serious by passing danger, such as a saber-toothed tiger. Chronic stress, such as hostility at home, dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short-term responses. Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling your ability to learn and remember. Individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem – you are helpless. Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on children’s ability to learn in school, and on employees’ productivity at work.

9.Stimulate more of the senses at the same time. We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight, others from sound, etc.), disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event as a whole. The brain seems to rely partly on past experience in deciding how to combine these signals, so two different people can perceive the same event differently. Our senses evolved to work together – vision influencing hearing for example - which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once. Smells have an unusual power to bring back memories, maybe because smells bypass the thalamus and head straight to their destinations, which include that supervisor of emotions known as the amygdale.

10.Vision trumps all other senses. Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain’s resources. What we see is only what our brain tells us we see, and it’s not 100% accurate. The visual analysis we do has many steps. The retina assembles photons into little movie-like streams of information. The visual cortex processes these streams, some areas registering motion, others registering color, etc. Finally, we combine that information back together so we can see. We learn and remember best through pictures – not through written or spoken words.

11.Male and female brains are different. The X chromosome that males have one of and females have two of – though one acts as a backup – is a cognitive “hot spot,” carrying an unusually large percentage of genes involved in brain manufacture. Women are genetically more complex, because the active X chromosomes in their cells are a mix of Mom’s and Dad’s. Men’s X chromosomes all come from Mom, and their Y chromosome carries less than 100 genes, compared with about 1,500 of the X chromosome. Men’s and women’s brains are different structurally and biochemically. Men have a bigger amygdale and produce serotonin faster, for example – but we don’t know if those differences have significance. Men and women respond differently to acute stress, Women activate the left hemisphere’s amygdala and remember the emotional details. Men use the right amygdala and get the gist.

12.We are powerful and natural explorers. Babies are the model of how we learn – not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. Specific parts of the brain allow this scientific approach. The right prefrontal cortex looks for errors in our hypothesis (“The saber-toothed tiger is not harmless”), and an adjoining region tells us to change behavior (“Run!”). We can recognize and imitate behavior because of “mirror neurons” scattered across the brain. Some parts of our adult brains stay as malleable as a baby’s, so we can create neurons and learn new things throughout our lives.