Every year I am reminded that the work is never done. Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student …
Somehow that statement is worth keeping nearby in my work. For me and everyone I work with. I spend a lot of time working with people who need or want to do something new. And no level of new work – innovation, boundary breaking, next levelling or shifting – is possible without failure. A lot of it. Much more often than not. Today, working with 37 leaders from human social services and government in our Leadership 2020 program, Caitlin asked a question: “How many of you have bosses that say it’s okay to fail? How many of you have said …
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago This. And a small vignette. In our circle yesterday, Caitlin arrived a little late, and took a seat on the outside of the rim. The one who noticed was a Chinese-Vietnamese woman who had come to Canada as a child refugee in the 1970s, stuffed into a dangerous boat with hundreds of others fleeing …
Thanks to a rich conversation with artistic researcher Julien Thomas this morning I found this video of Olafur Eliasson at TED in 2009. In this presentation he talks about the responsibility of a person in a physical space, and discusses how his art elicits a reaction beyond simply gazing at a scene. It address one of the fundamental problems in our society for me: that of the distinction between participation and consumption. So much that happens in physical spaces and in our day to day lives has been geared towards gazing and consuming and away from participation and responsibility.
A beautiful quote from Douglas Adams via whiskey river: “The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, its just wonderful. And the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.” – Douglas Adams I think there …