Transcript

Patterns of Possibility: Ivy Ross at TEDxRVA 2013

Thank you. So, as one of my teachers, Don Estes, has said, "Every person and object is only partially actualized or made real. The other part is hidden behind our own perception of consciousness. Most of our mental life lies in a world of possibility. But when that thought is expressed, it sets everything in motion to manifest what we imagine. I believe this is what the act of creating is really about. One of the mechanisms that we were given to express is our voice. Our greatest power to create comes when we are speaking our truth. I'd like to share with you a time I experienced that to be true. It was back in 2003 and I was head of design for Mattel Toys of the Girls division. I had about 300 creative people working for me, engineers, designers, sculptors. I looked out on the sea of them sitting in little gray boxes and I thought there's got to be a better way to be working together. Um, I knew that it was not about calling in a consulting company and having them re-engineer the process because we were not a machine. We were people. Um, and by the time I was 28, my metal work had been in about 10 museum collections. And by the time I worked at Mattel, I had worked at companies ranging from Swatchwatch to Calvin Klein. So I spent a lot of time thinking about when I was my most creative, what was I doing both internally and externally and how could I give that gift to the people that worked for me. So, I took a diverse group of 12 people temporarily out of their jobs, created a new space in a different building for them to work, and insisted that they check their egos and titles at the door. I called the project Project Platypus in honor of nature's most unlikely animal. Um, the goal was to create breakthrough products and brands that didn't just anniversary the realities, but celebrated the possibilities. And in the first 12 weeks of the program, I took the first two weeks and asked nothing of the employees other than to give them the gift of input. Not too dissimilar to what a TEDex experiences. The first week of the two weeks, I um looked at the subject or problem we were about to tackle. So, for example, at one point at Mattel, it was what if Mattel had a brand that was funny? And I thought, what is the input that I want to give these people for them to think about Mattel having a brand that was funny? So I found a professor of laughter at UCLA who actually came and talked to us about how laughter actually began. I found Moisha the clown who goes to third world countries and teaches people how to laugh after war. And um you know just like with a computer, we don't ask for any output until we give input. I couldn't understand why we wouldn't be giving this gift of inspiration like we're doing today to our own employees. Then the second week of the first two weeks, I brought in um people that could give us all new skills. So, for example, a woman who has something called matrix works, which teaches people how to work as self-organizing systems and talks about um living systems theory. Through improv, we learned how to build on each other's ideas and how to be vulnerable in front of each other. Um, these are just a few examples of the kinds of people I brought in. But most importantly, we set up different rules and rituals for how to work and create together every day and explored the problems by asking the right questions. The team was free to play. And I want to spend a few minutes on play because a lot of my um actually between Kevin and Andy, I met both of them during this time period. And play was the center of how we operated for eight weeks. The team played with each other and played with ideas, suspending judgment and deadlines for those first eight weeks. You know, you know what Kevin didn't mention, it was an incredible list of what play is, but the thing I did want to add to that is people think the opposite of play is work and it's not. It's depression. So many people came in during those first eight weeks and what they saw was chaos. But without fail um thank God those last four weeks of the session it was amazing all the dots that got connected because during these speakers uh during those first two weeks we had what I would call the desk of 12 brains where after every speaker spoke we would just throw up stream of consciousness ideas that struck us and then throughout the eight weeks we would walk up to that wall and start to connect the dots. I was also fearless in bringing into the program everything I had studied in the past 20 years. Um I have hobbies and I studied sound vibration and psychology and I knew it was imperative to create the conditions in this program that um really got people into that zone of creativity together. So, one of the ways I did that was by having a sound chair on site where the platypi as I called them uh would listen to CDs encoded with binal beats that would bring the left and right half of their brains together more often. We also found the fundamental tone at which the 12 participants resonated together and I'll talk more about that later. and we played and we we took that tone and embedded it in music and played it at many octaves up and down when we worked together. But most importantly, I really looked for where the passion showed up in each of these people and then put them on that task um where I saw the passion, no matter what their background or past experience was. and we used the principles of play building on each other's ideas in a culture of trust and most importantly I believed in them individually and together as a group. So project platypus created award-winning products and brands and I actually won the chairman's award for sustainability of the company that year among other honors and I was invited to speak at the Fortune magazine's 500 most powerful women summit about the program I created. So here comes my moment of truth. The conference asked me to present what I had done in a case study format in a PowerPoint. I didn't know how to do that for project platypus because it didn't come out of a case study. It wasn't a business initiative. It was very intuitive and it leveraged the knowledge from both my heart and my mind. However, I really wanted to take up on this opportunity to share what I had created with a team of people because it wasn't just the great product that came out of it, but it was how happy the employees were working that way. In fact, the a lot of the women in the program got pregnant. And the big joke was, oh, if you want to get pregnant, go to Iivey's Project Platypus. And it wasn't because we were having orgies over there. It was because women who were happily married that could not conceive after 12 weeks of being in this environment where they felt valued and less stressed were able to conceive. Um, so I bit the bullet and my partner at the time, David Keeler, who was working with me on Project Platopus, we wrote a quote unquote business case backwards about Project Platypus reluctantly. and I go to this uh conference and I step out on the stage and froze, which has never happened to me before. But I think I was extremely intimidated by all 500 of these most powerful women, many of whom were CEOs and presidents wearing tailored suits, which was not my style. After a few seconds, I kind of unfroze and went through the presentation. when I came to this slide which really um listed all the feedback when we asked the platypi what is it about this program that was so successful I froze again and I felt this swell of emotion come over me and some tears emerge and instead of my kind of rehearsed line um I told this audience of the 500 most powerful women in business some of whom were dressed like men that in that very moment I realized that what Project Platypus was really about was about being fearless to be a woman in the corporate world. Bringing all that the feminine has to offer unapologetically, including nurturing, connection, inspiration, and relationship all within a safe environment. That moment actually changed my life. Stating my truth, which I didn't know at the time was my truth, in front of this intimidating group changed my biology. I got a huge response from many women. They came up to me afterwards and told me how long they had been waiting for another woman to say what I had said. I've since come to understand even more from a scientific perspective what I was doing intuitively. Uh most people today are walking around in that in companies are walking around that fight orflight response which is staying in the limpic brain which is not where creativity happens because it happens in that frontal cortex. So one of the ways we collapsed that fightor-flight response between the participants so that there was an environment of trust um was actually to use sound waves. [Music] [Music] So, what you just heard was actually 12 of Mattel's employees singing a frequency that had been scientifically determined using a medical monitor to drop the barrier between each other at the level of the nervous systems. And then we took that frequency and embedded it in different octaves again into music which we played in the background when we brainstormed together. This was done by Dr. Jeff Thompson, whose bioic process enabled him to resonate everyone's brain waves at the exact place where there's zero stress between people in the group. People were able to be exactly who they were without being in that fear and flight response, bringing their full gifts and talents to the project with creativity being at the highest level. So at Project Platypus, we set up the environment, communication, and relationships so that the team's brains functioned optimally and were in create mode most of the time. Love, trust, and respect without fear were in place, which created the conditions for cooperation, connection, and creation. Okay, so I'm up here again 10 years later and speaking my truth fearlessly. I know the world is a non-material energy consisting of pattern generated from frequency in a constantly shifting state. Everything owes its existence to sound. Sound is the basis of form. If everything is energy consisting of pattern originating from sound, then we can create new patterns together by changing our tone or frequency. I believe that the frequency of the earth is increasing and therefore our world or patterning is getting more complex. This idea or possibility becomes apparent through this film I saw 25 years ago by Dr. Hans Jenny, a physicist. He uses a steel plate with sand on it attached to a frequency generator to make the phenomena of vibration and pattern visible. [Music] All that is is sand on a plate. People are also doing now this with a violin string and you could play the steel plate and different frequencies will basically arrange the sand in mandala patterns. Um so essentially I've seen a lot of people exploring this since Hans Jenny did in the 60s um playing with the simatic principles. However, a um John Stewart Reed who's an acoustics engineer in England has taken simatics to the next level. I believe in 2002 he and his co-inventor began prototyping something called the simoscope which is a scientific instrument that imprints sonic vibration on a membrane of ultra pure water making the invisible visible. This instrument I believe is going to prove to be as important as the microscope because of the implications it has for all branches of science since vibration underpins all matter. I'd like to share with you the geometric beauty of the human voice making vowel sounds made visible for the first time on this simoscope. [Music] [Music] Hey, when we speak, sing or chant, we bathe all those around us with our unique patterns. No two are alike. These next two images I think are absolutely beautiful. They are two different images of two different individuals voice um as a colored uh simoglyph. This is one and this is another person. Um, you know, our voice is created by tonalities that are act is actually created by the interplay of different factors such as our tongue, teeth, lungs, and those are all projecting aspects of our DNA. So, when a group is working together, we're actually participating with the DNA blueprint of each other because sound is not just taken in through our ears, it's taken in by our entire body. So picking up on the energy of people is a real science and picking the people you work with should be a real art. Now I would like to take you zooming up from individual patterns to something called the Murion pattern. This was made visible for the first time in 2012 by the simoscope after 20 years of work by a woman named Lynn Claire Dennis. There'll be a 500page book coming out in May by the Oxford Press this year, written by seven authors, many of whom are leading edge in math and physics. The book is called the Muran Matrix and will explain the science behind this pattern that is believed to be the energetic pattern that resides at the heart of creation. So it makes sense that this pattern is not too dissimilar from the pattern made visible from the frequency of the human heart. So I believe the world is a vibratory pattern of energy and light. We're all playing out a pattern each individually as well as within the whole. It is by understanding patterns of possibilities that we get to our full potential. I believe our job as human beings is to understand our potential and to be fearless in expressing it through whatever medium is appropriate for you. I'd like to end with a piece by Sasha Raphael Vomdorp who's a multimedia artist working with light and sound. In this piece from his light bending his soundbending light series, he illuminates sound waves using both natural sunlight and tone sensitive LEDs. What you're about to see is an exact representation of what this piece of music looks like when seen through the medium of water. Keep in mind all the imagery in this was created in real time by the music itself. He actually has built a container with a speaker underneath. He has a a thin space where the water floats with LEDs around the rim and um collaborates with someone to compose the music that comes through the speaker. And this is the result. Heat. Hey, Heat. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Hey, hey, hey. [Applause] [Music] [Music] Yeah. Heat. [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Thank you.