This past week I have been in Minnesota working with colleagues Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles and Mandy Ellerton. We were conducting a second residential training in collaborative leadership with a number of planning grantees working in communities to make impacts on the social and economic determinants of health. In this residential we spent a fair bit of time working on tactical community organizing, exploring how to teach this from the perspective of the Art of Hosting. The traditional tactics of Alinsky-style community organizing operate by creating strategic targets for action and mobilizing community power against those targets. It’s a zero-sum …
From Kelly’s excellent new book “What Technology Wants”: “The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same number of neurons in you brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain. It has three billion artificial eyes (phone and …
I continue to learn about the effect of the feminine. Today I was walking with friends by Bridal Falls on Bowen Island where I live and we stopped at the waterfall to reflect on the nature of flow. This standing wave caught our attention and it immediately drew me into thoughts on the complementarity of the masculine and feminine. For a long time I have been a student of the Tao, understanding the relationship between yang and yin. In Taoist thought, these two conditions exist in everything and are in constant and dynamic relationship. Yang is usually thought of as …
Last Friday night, beneath the lights on the Bowen island football pitch, my co-ed soccer league team won our Cup Final 5-0. We played the best team in the league for the Cup and although were prepared for a tight game. we were rather stunned with the result. What happened far exceeded our expectations of what was possible. We played unbelieveably well. Football (I use the global term for “soccer” here) is a team game that is much like other team games in life. It features constrained action, bounded and with a purpose. It requires different people to perform different …
I’m at a Casey Family Programs conference in Seattle that is looking at applying science to early learning in kids. The people here are learning about brain science and the results of early adverse childhood experiences and what the science can tell us about how we should react in the policy sphere to create healthy kids, families and societies. The keynote is by Jack Shonkoff, who is a leading brain researcher in this field and who has been sharing some of the basics of what we know about brain science, relationships and healthy societies. Here are some of his key …