shift and share

This piece was co-authored with Jodi Engelberg. You can’t force someone to innovate, nor can you tell someone to learn. Demanding creativity usually results in the opposite, and expecting opposing parties to agree on a solution rarely ends well. But innovation does happen, and somehow, people learn. Great ideas do come to people, and against […]

Canada’s former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page made the distinction between his office and that of the Auditor General as a matter of perspective and direction; Auditors go back an analyze what is done, whereas his office was meant to look forward, seeing if the government’s projections for the future added up. This requires a […]

I see it in every company or organization that I work with; lots of money spent kitting out meeting space or collaborative space so that people can work together. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the space is terrible, and largely unsuitable for collaboration. If you’ve ever wondered why it feels so good to sit […]

I’m recently taken with the idea of “liminality” in the concept of community formation. Taken from readings in Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process, liminality is a central component of an individual’s passage from one state to another, referring to the middle condition where the person is no longer who they were, but have not yet transitioned […]

As part of our work at The Value Web, we’ve been involved over the years working with various communities – such as The World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders community – to organize numerous community gatherings and create processes that achieve particular outcomes or explore areas of interest. More and more, however, the creation of […]

As part of my work with The Value Web, both as a knowledge worker, and as a board member, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the model which underpins it – the “Value Web” or “Business of Enterprise” model developed by MGTaylor. At the core of the model is the concept of working […]

Here in Bologna with my fellow members of The Value Web board, I have taken this first cut at crafting a manifesto of sorts for our group…more to come, but for now: Complexity; it is a product of a riot of influences coming together, each representing  – on their own – a web of interconnections […]

“For the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.” – Plato, Phaedo Too often in problem solving, we become fixated on the answer, and in the single-minded pursuit of that answer – that one, […]

Another excellent post on the Knowledge Games blog by Dave Gray working to answer the question, “What is a Knowledge Game?” The post is a wonderful exploration of the nature of knowledge games, but begs the question of how to go about designing these interactions. This is something I started to write about here, but […]