Vision in 5–7–5
Using Haikus to align teams
Today we’ll explore how you combine ancient Japanese collaboratively linked verse poetry with getting a clearer sense of direction for your team or project. Now tell me that’s not a phrase you don’t hear every day (and don’t you just love double negations)…
So you’re starting a new endeavour, say a project launch or setting up a new team. You’ve done a bit of immersion, got some guest speakers in to do inspiring and informative lightning talks, maybe had a go at a team taxonomy using the Babel fish exercise I outlined in a previous post, and you’re starting to think about the end game.
Why are we doing this? Where do we want to get to, both in terms of the steady run-state of whatever we’re developing and delivering, as well as the longer term formulation of what we’re hoping to achieve?
This is where a lot of teams and departments jump to “we need a vision!”
I have worked with brand strategy for some 30 years, and I fully know the value of having a clear great engaging vision that articulates your place in the world in say 5–10 years, still I’m personally slightly allergic to everyone and their dog needing a ‘vision’.
There is a risk that as an organisation you end up with lots of lofty bland (yes bland is the dark side of brand) statements by committee that don’t align with other teams, and worst case scenario end up contradicting and confusing.
You do need a shared sense of purpose, a collective idea of where you’re headed, and what it might look and feel like when you get there. It shouldn’t be the work of a single mind, rather a mosaic of shared dreams, aspirations, and fulfilled objectives.
So fast backward to 14th century Japan.
This is when an art form known as renga took off and became established (earliest examples are from as early as 8th century), a genre of collaborative poetry. Centuries later the surrealists utilised the overall modus operandi in the 1930s and some Americans claimed to invent ‘chain poetry’.
In Japan, verses were composed and linked in live gatherings by multiple poets, who took turns providing alternating verses in the format of three lines with 5–7–5 sound units for each line (mostly corresponding to Western syllables but not quite). Traditionally the most honoured guest would compose the first verse, and the more interesting that poets could make the link between the subsequent verses, the higher their ability was rated.
Later this developed into haikai no renga (“comical linked verse”), a more playful approach often combining traditional elements of poetry with humour and new more vulgar expressions.
In the 17th century, it eventually evolved into what we today know as haiku, which gets its name from the starting scene setting verse of renga, referred to as hokku, slightly rebranded to haiku. Prominent poets began to publish these as stand alone independent poems. The most famous master of this era was Bashō, who composed poems like the famous
古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音
Furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
An ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water
So haikus use a few words to capture a fleeting moment in time, a connected frame with lots going on, creating an almost dynamic image in the reader’s mind. It’s like a tiny window into a scene much larger than itself (maybe a precursor to the Tardis lol).
In traditional haiku, there is massive depth and width of symbolism, e.g. with references to seasons suggesting entire mental states, or to certain aspects of nature like animals conferring parallel thought processes. This allows you to pack a lot of meaning into those precious syllables, which also puts the onus on the cultural ability of the reader to unpack it all again.
There’s an analogy with good branding I always thought. You wrap a multitude of value and values into some core positioning and expressions, and then consistently give your audiences and users time and opportunities to experience and unwrap what it all means.
On that note, back to service design activists supporting teams capturing brief fleeting moments of a yet unexperienced future.
I like to run an exercise during kick-off week, facilitating a discussion on the potential value of having a clear shared idea of where we as a team want to get to. And the downsides of not having this. Mostly it’s a bit of a no-brainer that a shared sense of ultimate purpose is likely to be useful.
To help people think a bit more laterally about it, beyond “we need to cut costs and improve the quality of XYZ” kind of statements, I ask everyone to write a haiku (or by all means several, five is the record by an individual so far, who also translated one of them into Japanese).
Quick brief. What will it look like when we’re done? What will it feel like? What will be different? What is success, for whom and from which perspective? Are there things we can’t live without? Is there more than one way to do it? What’s the core of it all, the thing you’d like to communicate to the CEO if you had them for that infamous 30 second elevator pitch (wouldn’t they be surprised to get a haiku instead…).
You could do this on a ‘jamming meets improv’ basis and make people write it on the spur of the moment on the day, but if it’s the first time (as the traditional Japanese greeting phrase goes hajimemashite, “it being the first time”) it’s usually nice to give the team the chance to reflect a bit.
And quite often to get their heads around designing with constraints (another topic for discussion as you go), to be forced to express yourself in 17 syllables, no more, no less. Gotta love constraints as a driver for creativity.
So,
“there’s your homework for the next two-three days. Come back and we’ll put them up on the wall, compare notes, try to guess each other’s meaning and metaphors, and what we individually and collectively think we are actually here to do.”
Results can vary from the sublimely abstract to the refreshingly hands-on. It is all about the discussion and exchange, creating a shared space of mind rather than slick presentation decks - although when you do get around to the corporate communications pieces later this will provide a good foundation.
Oh and we vote for everyone’s favourite, there’s nothing a like a bit of competition to get people motivated…
Ideally, by the time you’ve had the coming together again session you’ll be off to a good start on the road to alignment and collective insight, you know a bit more about what others think is important, and they have a better idea what you think. I marvel at how often people seem to think telepathy is a real thing, as if we could magically divine what others think about stuff…
A nice side-effect of this exercise for me is the identification of potential co-conspirators with an open mind who may be called upon to support in co-creation further down the line.
I’ll leave you with another lovely example of Bashō’s poetry:
初しぐれ猿も小蓑をほしげ也
Hatsu shigure / saru mo komino o / hoshige nari
The first cold shower / even the monkey seems to want / a little coat of straw
