Dasaratha Rama: Growing Systems of Success

It has been my honour and pleasure to share time with author and systems architect, Dasaratha Rama. Welcome to our first session exploring her work, Growing Systems of Success (GSS).

Rama and I have connected through several Facebook groups, and are developing and creating peer-created media. That means we co-design and participate in recorded conversations to share our work and discover where we can help each other — in Rama’s terms, playing it forward.

Rama is a lifelong learner and professor, and home-schools her son — so has a rich body of experience to draw from. You’ll learn about the Phd project, Growing Systems of Success, and the Six Cs: conversation, clarity, choices, connections, coordination and competence. Rama has identified these six elements as core competencies that grow our abilities to succeed in any endeavour. I’ve been inspired by her demonstration of these in her own work.

You’ll also learn about zoom, plectica, thortspace and whatever other tools we use along the way. We are using these different tools to create maps, show connections, and use what works best as a transmedia mashup in a creative process.

Rama has been kind enough to profile my work within the GSS, and we had our first collaboration session today: this helps us both to build our competencies, share our work, more clearly see how we can help each other. There is tons of overlap, and I’m excited for the journey. Here’s a section of our video!

What struck me about Rama’s work is that it is applicable to many different groups of people, especially anyone that wants to have an impact or affect change.

One of the big takeaways from our session is the importance of working with the small pieces of the work, as the big picture with many elements is often daunting. I’ve certainly wrestled with that, on both edges: as a person sharing and as a listener, wanting to wrap my mind around a body of work.

We’re going to work with each other to explore this practice further. Two initial projects came to mind: to have a group conversation with some key influencers in the GSS network she has been orchestrating, and to work on a collection of small segments that each represent a single piece of her work, to create shareable pieces of content that Rama can use in multiple ways. We get to evolve forms of community generated media, and have fun in the process!

This way of helping each other directly and specifically is a core competency that can transform how people work together, mentor each other, and share our best practices as a movement of do-ers. Yes!

I invite you to explore Rama’s work on her website, and her well tended and quite engaging Facebook group. Below, you’ll see an infographic that Rama has created that gives us a window into her work:

Growing Systems of Success: Add it together

There is a phrase I recall from an acting class, ‘show, don’t tell.’ Essentially it is to model doing as a form of teaching. I’ve learned so much from watching how Rama orchestrates conversations and spaces, how she engages her network in collaboration and dialogue. So awesome.

Thanks Rama, and for all those who have contributed to this work. Looking forward to our continued learning and sharing, and we look forward to getting our hands on your forthcoming book, Growing Systems of Success — a rich resource!

This process, open source styles:

• find someone whos work inspires you
• ask them if they would be open to share their work with you in a recorded session
• connect using your preferred video conference software — we used zoom
• choose person to record
• consider ‘good beginnings, and good endings’. This means that both people are ready, know who will introduce the piece and as you come to the end of your session you have a wrap up, with appreciation and next steps
• ‘shoot for the edit’: if you are the recorder, count down so the participants are synchronized and connected going into the session, and give a beat at the end of the session before you stop recording. The goal is to have a complete piece that doesn’t need editing
• warm up with a check in, decide the flow and focus of the session; choose who will record, and who will speak first
• if you are following a discovery series format, one person will explore the other’s work, and then switch roles
• aa checkout is very useful for this work. This is a harvest of the learning, and is rich because we are still in the flow of it all. I record the checkins and checkouts as separate segments… and often there are amazing nuggets in them
• make an agreement about where to upload the media; make explicit if you want to review it first, what level of privacy or openness you would like to use; if you want to share it broadly, within a small group, or privately for development purposes
• Upload; gather any links or images you may want to share with it
• Write a blog embedding the video, links and images. You can pull a frame from the embedded media for a banner, or you can hack a banner from photos of the participants by laying them out on your computer and taking a screenshot; and of course you can be creative with what you may have
• if the person wants to review the media first, wait for signoff; share the draft blog with them for any changes or additions; then share as agreed!

The style of this article is open source: if stolen, built upon, and further developed, awesome. Let your creativity run wild, and have fun with it!