Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

	July 18, 2008

Join Me September 28-October 1 in BC Bowen Island by Richard Smith I'm going to be on Bowen Island, near Vancouver BC, September 28 through October 1, for an Art of Hosting event. The program teaches several interactive meeting and facilitation technique skills -- World Café, Circle, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry -- and it would be great to have the chance to meet with as many of you as possible while learning something new and useful (and inexpensively!) together at the same time. Please look at the invitation, and if you decide to go, let Chris and me know ASAP -- it's not a large venue, though it is astonishingly beautiful. Hope to see you there! PS: If you can't make that, I'll be in San Jose September 23-25 for KMWorld & Intranets, Quebec City August 8, Montreal September 18 and Vancouver September 26-27. Let me know if you're available for a meetup! 4:03:33 PM  trackback []  comment []

Friday Flashback: Twelve Ways to Think Differently In May 2005 I wrote this post that, after it was picked up months later on Digg and other popularity lists of web articles, turned out to be my most-visited article ever: Our minds are like our bodies -- fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws, religions, 'best practices', systematization, uniforms, and monolithic architecture and design -- all tend to reinforce 'one right answer' thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and memory rather than broadening our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually. There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout. Read the Twelve Ways 4:01:41 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2008 Dave Pollard. Last update: 01/08/2008; 7:04:23 PM.