Here is a case of getting seduced by the numbers and sucked into the wrong thinking. This article is looking for interesting ways to measure the growth of the global middle class. It does a generally poor job of it. The whole article is a bit of a dodge. Using made up numbers to render a quantifiable mark for an abstract concept, concluding in a blithe statement about a billion car pile up. But the money quote I think is in the conclusion, about what this materialist and upwardly mobile trend in the world says: The people of this burgeoning …
At our art of hosting water dialogues this morning, several insights on the four fold practice of hosting: on hosting ourselves, one of the participants who used to work in emergency medicine shared his team’s mantra: in an emergency the first pulse you take is your own, participating means coming to any situation with curiosity and an ability and desire to learn something the practice of hosting doesn’t mean you need to be an expert. To convene you simply need the desire and courage to call and hold. the practice of co-creation is born from generosity and sharing resources, skills, …
First of all there is no such thing. Second, a friend asked me the question “What is the idea group size for collaborative process?” and in trying to answert the question I emailed him the following (please note that this is all off the top of my head, and in practice I usually go with intuition, relying more on patterns than rules): Innovation generally starts with individuals, so I like to build time into to processes for people to just be quiet and think for a bit. Small groups can help refine and test good ideas, and large groups can …
Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent …
The Cynefin framework is helpful in making a distinction between the worlds of complicated problems and the worlds of complex ones. One simple distinction between these two worlds is the extent to which they can be known. In a complicated domain, the parameters of the problem can be known and several good practices can be hammered out, with largely knowable results. In the complex domain, the initial conditions are unknown and the results are unknown which is why small experiments designed to tell us more about what is going are very useful for creating emergent practice. Financial markets are famously …