Jen Briselli & Kyle Godbey: Participatory Design & Complexity Science

Tales from the Swamp

The Complexity Lounge invites you to participate in a discussion about the practical application of complexity science in American organizations with two seasoned experience designers, Jen Briselli and Kyle Godbey. We'll explore the reality of working in the messy, human landscapes of everyday practice through stories of success, failure, translation, compromise, and potential.

We'll explore what Donald Schon called the "swampy lowlands" —where the clean lines of theory and frameworks get dirty in the murky terrain of unresolved tensions, improvisation, and sense-making on the fly.

This session is for anyone trying to practice around complexity-informed design, leadership, innovation, or facilitation, right now, wherever they are... (and occasionally feeling like the only one who isn’t “doing it right” while secretly hoping that's ok). It's for anyone recognizing that their problem is unique and no one has invented an equation to solve it yet. And, it's for anyone who has exhausted every tool in their toolbox and struggles with the same thing again and again.

We invite The Complexity Lounge audience to experiment with a new type of event, focused on practice and formatted for conversation. Come with questions, complaints, curiosity, and gnarly problems. In turn, we offer case studies highlighting past successes, hard learned lessons, and some of our own cheat codes. If it's useful, we may just make it a semi-regular occurrence.

Expect nonlinear meanderings, more swamp metaphors, and maybe a music reference or two. We’ll talk about:

• Finding (and losing) our way into “this work”
• The importance of unresolved-ness, mistakes, and making space
• Anti-gatekeeping and community as complexity practice
• What’s resonating, and what’s just really hard right now

Bios:
Jen Briselli is a strategist, designer, researcher, and educator who helps teams realize the transformative potential of risky play and transdisciplinary collaboration. Driven by a deep curiosity to find the hidden patterns (and anomalies) across disparate domains, and the desire to empower other humans with these insights, Jen helps co-create services, experiences, and conditions that enable people to live well—on their own terms. As co-founder of Topology, a systems-oriented experience strategy firm, she's especially into creating safe spaces for dangerous thinking.

Kyle Godbey is an ex-sound designer and recovering process engineer, currently working as a service designer facilitating methods based on complexity science, sense-making, and narrative research. He has worked in the darkest corners of organizations like Capital One, Circuit City, the U.S. Department of State, Home Depot, IBM, and Labcorp. He is a maker of messes and loud noises, tireless interrogator, abstract cartographer, people weaver, and an instigator.
Together, Jen and Kyle facilitate the Sense Maker's Community of Practice which makes space for practitioners with resonant curiosity to support each other on their journey, wherever that's taking them.

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This event will be recorded. The event link will be published on meetup.com 1 hour prior.

Please note the time slot- this is an afternoon event for those of you on EST (12:00 pm to 2:00 pm).