As the inner climate villages unfold here and in Copenhagen, the Europeans have cracked a simple set of practices. An email from Toke Moeller in Copenhagen this weekend: Toke, Ulrik, Lisa and I were part of a workshop at yourclimate.tv today on inner climate. A great experience! The young people were excellent facilitators. They asked us to brainstorm guidelines (Toke reframed this into practices) that could immediately help people to clear the inner climate. First we were asked to brainstorm onto the whiteboard table in silence, then to walk around in silence and make additions and then to talk about …
My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa. He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building. He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim …
From How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”: The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by …
Today John Inman had a great post on using the world cafe for a five hour strategic planning session with a non-profit. His process works as follows: First I asked that the whole system be in the retreat. We had board members, a customer, grant writer, community member, and contractors. 1. Introduction in group setting 2. Introduce the process 3. Pose the question 4. Three cafe tables with three people each, start the cafe 5. Three rounds of conversation each 20 minutes 6. Returned people to original table and asked them to capture the main themes at each table. 20 …
Adopting change as the point of working together. When so many efforts seemed aimed at preserving the status quo and mitigating the results of things that change and are not the same as before, what would happen if we adopted change as the point of things? Jack Ricchiuto on working with a group using this principle: As usual they are amazed at the pragmatism, efficiency, and wisdom of treating change as a tool of project success rather than a risk, liability, and cost. When change becomes key to how we design future projects, we work with an infinitely greater sense …