08 Saturday Jun 2013
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This morning I was flipping through the book Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, and came across this great list of principles for how to transcend ego and bring a group to greatness via collaborative thinking. The following passage is from an excerpt titled Thinking together without ego: Collective intelligence as an evolutionary catalyst, by Craig Hamilton and Claire Zammit.
18 Friday Jan 2013
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I just got done reading Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities that Can Save the Planet, the new book by futurist Alex Steffen. He says that climate change is here, and we have a choice to radically rethink the way we live in the built environment, or face catastrophic impacts. He proposes that we need to bring our global climate emissions to zero, asap, and the key to doing so is to reinvent our cities.
He discusses our challenges and opportunities through the lenses of clean energy, urbanism, shelter, consumption, and sustenance. While he did cover many ideas about green infrastructure, district systems, networked technologies, and restoration, I enjoyed looking at the models for future cities through the lens of cultural innovation and lifestyle design. Below are some of the principles and concepts I found particularly inspiring, supplemented by some additional links for further exploring.
The Kindle edition of Steffen’s book can be purchased here.
24 Monday Dec 2012
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Can we design for breakthrough innovation?
I posed this question about a week ago on twitter and facebook, and you shared back some amazing gems!
The resounding response was “yes,” we can create conditions so that innovation is much more likely to occur. Themes included creating cultures of play and emotional safety, challenging assumptions, giving permission to try new things (and fail), and using storytelling to spark new thinking and locate yourself in an emergent narrative.
Below are the thoughts and references you shared – thanks to all contributors!
Continue reading
19 Wednesday Sep 2012
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Last week was spent in Philadelphia and Boston, attending the Agile CULTUREcon organized by André Dhondt and Dan Mezick of the Agile community.
Dan materialized in my twitter feed earlier this year, having noticed my interest in exploring the edges of _<insert discipline here>__, and has been generously exposing me to people and events focused on shaping the future of work.
He gave me the opportunity to participate in a Core Protocols BOOTCAMP back in February, an event led by Jim & Michele McCarthy, authors of Software for your Head. This led to an invitation by the McCarthys to spend a week with them in an immersive personal/business development experience. These were both eye-opening opportunities to understand more about the power of coming into personal alignment, in being able to be explicit about intentions, and generally to become more effective in communicating with others and taking ideas to action. (if you want an overview of the McCarthys’ work, here’s a video interview I did with them last month).
Between then and now, he’s introduced me to Dave Logan of Tribal Leadership (blog post about his 5 Stages of Tribal Culture here), Traci Fenton of Worldblu, Eric Raymond of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Doug Kirkpatrick of the Self-Management Institute, and a handful of others that I got to spend time with in person last week.
So thank you Dan for bringing me up to speed on the who’s who of the future of work!
Now, on to CULTUREcon….. Continue reading
07 Friday Sep 2012
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I’ve been brushing up on the work of Eric S. Raymond, an open source software advocate and author of ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar,’ in preparation for meeting and interviewing him at next week’s Culture Conference in Philly and Boston.
Raymond has written extensively about the attitudes and ethos of hackers, the mechanisms of open-source development, and the relationship between motivation and reputation in a gift economy.
As I read his stuff, I see a strong parallel between how hacker culture can apply to culture hacking, and functionally accelerate personal and social evolution at scale. Continue reading
16 Thursday Aug 2012
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How do we form learning cultures in times of accelerating change?
What tools and practices can self-organizing structures implement to become more agile and adaptive?
I just received a copy of a new book by Dan Mezick called The Culture Game, which is all about answering the above inquiry. It touts itself as “the reference manual and toolbox for management “culture hackers,” those innovators and change-makers who are focused on creating a culture of learning inside their team…and the wider organization.”
I’ve known Dan now for the better part of this year, and he’s been feeding me these tips, which are totally changing the ways I approach my own personal growth and development, as well as how I’m interacting with others.
For me, the culture hacking movement really gets to the essence of how to build/become a learning organization and transform the future of work.
Below are the 16 learning practices outlined in the book, and a brief description of each. Continue reading
28 Thursday Jun 2012
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this is a review of Tribal Leadership. much of the content of this post is taken directly from the book
Birds flock, fish school, people “tribe.”
I just finished reading Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, an amazing book that teaches how to build a better organization in which the best people want to work and make an impact. The book is based on a 10-year research study with 24,000 people across two dozen organizations from around the world.
A tribe is a group of 20 to 150 people who know one another enough that, if they saw another walking down the street, would stop and say “hello.”
What makes the tribe more effective than others is its culture.
Culture is a product of the language people use (words create reality), and the behaviors that accompany those words. The words we use to describe ourselves, our work, and others, creates the world we live in.
Tribal Leaders are the people who focus their efforts on upgrading the tribal culture. (upgrading the words we use to describe our reality and the behaviors we practice that shape the direction of our lives)
They set the standard of performance in their industries, from productivity and profitability to employee retention, and attract talent. Most of all, they help bring groups to unity by recognizing their ‘tribalness’ – getting people to talk about the things they really care about, coming together around these common causes, and forming missions to make something great happen, and to live in greatness.
The goal of Tribal Leadership is to learn how to get people ‘unstuck’ – from unhelpful language and behaviors, so we can level up and transition into higher-performance, less stressful, and more fun states of Being. Continue reading
18 Monday Jun 2012
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via Bonnie E on pinterest
this is a cross-post from the blog of Olaf Lewitz.
People Like Us
Some people—few people—have a sensibility of others
that is more than
gradually higher than the average. Continue reading
16 Saturday Jun 2012
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just a mini mindgrape this afternoon…
We’re tired of attending conferences and being talked at, when just about anyone in the audience could themselves be a speaker.
Unconferences are nicer, because we can all self-organize and make the event our own.
But there’s a next stage we’re ready for.
We want something action-oriented, and by this I don’t mean something where we create a plan of action.
It’s more about embodiment.
We want embodied experiences.
We want embodied action. Continue reading
03 Thursday May 2012
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I’ve been tracking emerging trends for a while now, exploring the co-evolution of humanity and our technologies, and building visions of the kinds of futures I’d like to see. Lately, I’ve found myself a bit restless, wondering “what’s next?”
The conferences and gatherings I’m attending are beginning to feel stale, the conversations needing new framings and lenses through which to look at our world and ourselves.
I’ve been on the hunt for a word or phrase that can encompass the essence of what feels important and resonates with me right now.
The search has been prompted by my decision to start a new project — writing my first book. (yay!)
I’ve spent the past few weeks reviewing everything I’ve written so far on the blog, reflecting upon what I’ve observed, what I’ve learned, and identifying the deep values I’ve chosen to serve as a compass and foundation for what is meaningful and significant.
At the same time, I’ve been surveying the landscape to get a sense of what’s being constructed out in the global mind, and see where the two intersect.
The general narrative is that we‘re facing increasing complexity and uncertainty in the world, information overload, distraction, shallowness of critical thought, and a lack of foresight. On the silver lining side, we have an overstock of creativity and imagination, sufficient to level up humanity and change the world and our crumbling systems, if we could only figure out how to unlock and unleash it from our billions of minds.
While some will posit that the ‘solution’ is technological (better algorithms! quantifying trust and reputation! big data! innovation!), I lean to the side that our breakthroughs will occur when we acknowledge and confront our most raw and human issues. Continue reading
emergent by design 