Humans (and we believe all organic intelligences) take advantage of the context set by space and time to both remember and organize ideas. “Where It Is Is What It Is” is shorthand for understanding a bit of this. Where something is–whether its halfway down a pile of papers on your desk, or to the far left on a whiteboard, or on that shelf of your bookcase–is what it is, in your mind. Barbara Tsversky, a leading cognitive psychologist who builds on early work into what’s known as “grid cells” and “place cells” in her book, Mind in Motion, posits that humans moving through the physical world has given us fundamental tools for reasoning and abstract thought. In some ways we are repurposing the embodied intelligence that evolved eons ago from cells to cephalopods to children and communities.
My own journey of understanding began when I met Joe Ballay, one of our founding partners at MAYA. He was an amateur archeologist and had seem these ancient spaces built down into the earth by early Native American tribes in the southwestern United States. They were round rooms where the entire community would get together (often climbing down a ladder through a hole in the ceiling) and have collective conversations. They were called “kivas.”
When he teamed up with Peter Lucas, one of the other founding partners at MAYA–who was himself a pioneering cognitive psychologist that studied perception under JJ Gibson–they explored the idea of the kiva in our first studio space. They believed that the space remembers for you. Humans can only remember about 7 +/-2 things in short term memory (at least in western languages) which means you can remember a phone number and keep it looping in your head until you find a piece of paper to write it down. But we’ve found that humans can remember 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 things in spatial memory. Any invariant in nature like space and time (two pretty solid and trustworthy phenomena burned into the source code of the Universe since the Big Bang) can and often is exploited by natural intelligences. Why keep some complex equation in your head if time always ticks away a second per second and space stretches off in the distance in a predictable way.
Herb Simon, a colleague of Joe and Pete at CMU and a Nobel winning economist and pioneer in complex systems once pointed out that a mind is like a pair of scissors. One blade is the brain running the algorithms (think ants looking for sugar), the other blade is the environment the brain pushes against (think gravity, and physics, and the dirt the ants move within). The richness of an ant hive that creates cities, fights wars, and farms fungus can’t be found in either blade of the scissor but in the emergence of something greater as both blades–the brain and the environment–push against each other. Just as one blade doesn’t make a pair of scissors, a mind can’t be seen without looking at both the brain and environment in concert. Our identity is not all inside our head, we are–in some deeply seated way–ourselves plus the world around us.
At MAYA (now a part of BCG X) we had various places to encode your ideas in space and collaborate with others around concepts. In a call back to the Native American structures, our spaces were called “Kivas” as well.
You can still drop down a projection screen but as someone explains an important point on a slide, someone else can draw what it means on the walls. Three hundred and sixty degrees of whiteboard. Notice what else is different about this environment. There is no central table. Everyone sits around the periphery, within arms reach of an area to draw. We’ve actually tried to build kivas with big circular tables and you can watch people anchor themselves to the table, hesitant to get up and roam around the room to add to the conversation.
Ideas have a chance to live and breath, and over the course of the day team members mix it up and find new forms of equilibrium. Where ideas end up on the wall turns out to be what they are. Often we’ll find people walking back into a Kiva after having had a meeting there year’s before. They’ll walk right over to a part of the wall and say something like, “remember that iceberg we drew over here?” and everyone in the team will be right back there with the person.
When environments become a part of your team, new things pop out. Here is a team that built something they called a “Conkiva” in the center of the room. They brought it in on the last day of their session so that they could break into four sub-teams. The teams could each step back and see all that they had worked on over the course of the week long session. But then they could step in and work on their part of the challenge.
At the end of the day they moved the Conkiva to one side so that the entire team could see each sub-team’s pitch. The team leader told us afterwards that the session was one of the best in their entire career.
Another interesting thing that happens when the space starts to play a role is something we call “when it was is what it means.”
As people build a shared idea about a particular challenge the concept unfolds around the room. Time is another one of those invariants in Nature and no surprise human’s don’t really remember free floating facts instead they remember stories.
Ultimately we build a bridge from what we know to what we don’t know.
Stories help us frame our understanding. When you have enough space to build a story it frames the team’s understanding. New concepts can be added to the existing framework to accrete knowledge over time.
These spaces shape and help us hold far more information than we can hold at one time and review in our individual and collective minds. Often these spaces are used over the course of a month or more to expose and synthesize larger thematic ideas and concepts and find ways they “fit” together.
Over time we even experimented with miniKiva’s for two or three people to camp out in and explore ideas together, they were small collective intelligence memory palaces. For a fun exploration of the idea of memory palaces and how to build your own memory using stories and spaces from your own memories, read this lovely book called, “Moonwalking with Einstein.“
At the BCG Pittsburgh office you can still find a Kiva or two floating around. The MegaKiva is the largest we built and has floating walls that can slide closed for private sessions or open up to let in the light from the point streaming in through the windows as the three rivers converge off in the background.
You can also find Kiva’s hidden away in other places. At Georgia Tech Mickey and Joe sent blueprints for some “insta-kiva’s” made from CNC cut plywood and shower boards and challenged the students to make a space for us to present and play.
When Joe hosted a series of sessions around the morphology of form he encouraged Virginia Tech to build a permanent Kiva within the product design and architect studio space. Students and teachers have experimented with numerous ways to use it for their work.
And former MAYAns have encouraged the construction of Kivas within various studios they’ve had. If you look closely in Scottsdale AZ, Orlando FL, and outside of Boston, MA you can find them lurking ready to unlock collaborative adventures.
Of course there are future generations of MAYAns that have been raised within kiva environments, we don’t know where they are now but we suspect they’re super powered wonderkinds.
1 comment