Many people who have experience with collective presencing either in a spiritual community or organizational setting, report that when the collective processing faces phases of intense and chaotic discomfort and passes through, that the transformation on the other side is relative to the amount of tension that is able to be processed. Groups that self-select by … Continue reading Keeping it Real

For the past 17 months I have been running an on-line experimental adult learning course called The Magellan Courses. This experiment in self-organizing co-creative education was the basis of my presentation paper for the ITC 2013 Conference. Here is an excerpt talking about some of the meta-design lessons we learned: Over the course of our first … Continue reading In-sighting Emergent Capacities

Principles of a Genereative Meta-Design   Auspicious – focuses on the affirmative, optimistic, serendipitous   Indescribable – seeks to make the unthinkable possible   Self-steering – adapts by re-inventing its own working language   Fractal – making complex systems navigable through pattern-familiarity   Holistic – delivers complex, comprehensive and self-aware outcomes   Synergistic – cultivates … Continue reading Principles of a Generative Meta-Design

Saying what we think and thinking what we say. Hidden in our language is a basic story about the way we think things work. Often, the words we use do not accurately represent this hidden story, while people who use the same general systems terms may be implicitly thinking of a totally different kind of … Continue reading Generative Process Analytics

It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. ~ Buckminster Fuller The philosopher Roy Bhaskar writes about theory-practice inconsistency. He likes to use David Hume as an example. Based on the implications of his idealist philosophy, Hume made the statement that it actually made … Continue reading Theory, Practice & Innovation

One of the obstacles in the way of creative thinking is the way we limit ourselves with conceptual categories. There are two most common habits are We put physical or constructivist constraints on conceptual (epistemic) tools. We associate categories within exclusive sets. These habits can be quite subtle and nuanced, but they appear everywhere in … Continue reading Entangled Categories

As we sit in a circle together, we can watch how thought arises. Noticing, we can make distinctions between categories of knowing-thoughts, fearing-thoughts, and questioning-thoughts. As we sit in a circle together, noticing, and allowing all knowing, fearing and questioning thought to pass, without holding or offering, or saying -- just noticing -- as we … Continue reading Knowing, Fearing & Questioning