Obama has a birthday, and here are some wishes for him: Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable–indeed he will refuse–to seize the radical moment at hand. Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is …
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Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity. At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes: Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the …
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I love Bobby McFerrin, and I love what he does with music. Watch in this video how he pulls out of an audience their inherent collective talent. Beautiful! Thanks to Thomas Arthur for the link.
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Fresh from the feed garden: Ria Baeck on collaborative classroom design. George Por on his contemplative co-tweeting experiement, Parts 1 and 2 Geoff Brown continues the holding questions thread. Euan Semple on what constitutes radical action. Mushin on living social fields. Johnnie Moore on Dave Snowdon and complexity in government Rob Paterson has a TED talk from Stewart Brand on environmental heresies.
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From a fictitious conversation that Dave Pollard hosted between two competing sides of his personality – the expert and the generalist – comes this gem on invitation and teaching: Your job as an ideator is just to articulate the idea, as coherently and compellingly as possible, which is generally best done by telling a story. It’s not your job to research its plausibility, to become enough of an expert to know whether and how to make it happen. You just tell the story. Then the responsibility for implementing is left to each person to accept, or not. If the idea …