Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

/
"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the...universe."  R. Buckminister Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969

Gail_longhair.jpgI met Matt in 1976. He had created Renascence Library and was teaching a course called Redesigning the Future. It was there that I was introduced to Buckminister Fuller by reading his book, Intuition.  Matt had a long list of books, more than 500 that he believed necessary to read and understand if one was to successfully navigate the future and thrive well into the 21st Century.  His course brought the contents of these books alive and always he gave credit and recognition to the authors and their bodies of knowledge.  Some of the books explored ancient histories and others forecast futures.  The list recognized every field and every religion. Some were fiction, others non-fiction.

While my field was education, I had come to know that as a teacher, I should be reading a vast variety of books outside of my field.  Through the Learning Exchange, I was introducing teachers and children to a world of ideas and linking these ideas to their work, showing how ideas build upon each other.  Nothing came from nothing, but rather through the assimilation of a collection of thoughts and ideas perturbing our minds and catalyzing new ideas... perhaps higher order ideas.  I take much joy in this reality.

Read More

Diversifying Diversity

/

Inevitably, at any community event focused on catalyzing change or improving the quality of life within the community, "diversity" - and the lack thereof among the existing body of participants - is pointed out as a key ingredient in success - or failure. I found this to be true whether the group gathered numbers five or 50, and whether the participants know each other or are new to one another. "Diversity," as I hear it used in these instances, refers pretty much exclusively to race, ethnicity and gender. Occasionally, age and economic status are included.

Acknowledging the essential role that these kinds of diversity play in community building and collaboration, other means of identifying and cultivating diversity may have an equally important place. Indeed, diversities are like dimensions - they exists in multitudes, yet at any given moment, we typically 'see' only a few. In addition to those mentioned above, a few lenses of diversity that come readily to my mind and seem important to a communities self awareness and ability to transform include: kinds of intelligence, family size, work/job experiences, time lived in the community and places traveled to outside the community. Granted that on a national or global scale, these measures of diversity may not cut as deep into what makes a person who they are, I believe at the level of local communities, measures such as these provide context and information that can be every bit as critical to catalyzing change.

 

follow up: Creating A Cultural Shift

/

Following up on a previous post, further evidence of the cultural shift within the World Economic Forum:

  • I see that they have selected "The Power of Collaborative Innovation" for the theme of their 08 Annual Meeting in Davos - a theme well outside the imagination - collaborative, collective, or otherwise - of the Forum only a couple of years ago.
  • The WorkSpace has continued to get prominent placement and widespread engagement this year, with return deployments to the Middle East and Africa, as well as inaugural trips to China (including sessions entirely in Mandarin) and India (coming in December).
Read More