Column / August-November 2015
Lisa Norton
…“Jazz is not a what, it is a how.” Bill Evans
“One Halloween, our group is excited to do a scary Halloween show. To start our play we ask the audience to give us an example of something that scares the living daylights out of them. I’m eager to get started, imagining suggestions like spiders, snakes, or zombies. What suggestion do we hear? “Commitment.” …What is happening is not what I want to have happen. I’m invested in
Column / August-November 2015
Robin Lincoln Wood
This series of articles is intended to illuminate how an integral approach to leadership can help us meet the critical leadership challenges of the 21st century. We apply the perspective and frameworks of ThriveAbility to gain a unique vantage point on how integral leadership embedded in a Thriveability approach offers powerful advantages to those seeking to ensure a thriving …
Column / April - June 2015
Lisa Norton
“ How can one design or manufacture in a way that loves all of the children, of all species, for all time?” William McDonough and Michael Braungart
To understand the consciousness of violent designing, walk through any dollar store anywhere on the planet. Here, productive forces, harnessed for the sake of production itself, find their anticlimax. The conversion of finite resources into cheap commodities, worth less than the packaging they come in, is a pervasive type of violent …
Column / April - June 2015
Alfonso Montuori
Back in the late 80s and 90s I ranted and raved in print and off about the fact that our understanding of creativity in the US was focused exclusively on individuals—inevitably the lone male genius–and there was no recognition of creative interactions, of musical groups, theater productions, movie making, and the performing arts in general, let alone women (Montuori, 1989; Montuori & Purser, 1995, 1999). A few decades later, the trend has shifted. Collaboration is in, lone geniuses …
Column / January-February 2015
Lisa Norton
Peter Jones is Associate Professor at Toronto’s OCAD University (Ontario College of Art and Design), an author and consultant in the emerging field of systemic design, and runs the innovation research firm Redesign Network. Peter spends his time balancing between teaching in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation graduate program in OCADU’s faculty of Design, pursuing collaborative research toward the redesign of social systems, and continues to redesign information services for medical and scientific clients.
Leveraging systems …
Column / August - November 2014
“Shut up,” he explained.
Reflections on generative and not-so-generative communication in academia.
Alfonso Montuori
When I first came to the US to go to graduate school, I spent hours and hours in heated, coffee fueled discussions in the patio of the university cafeteria with just about anybody I could find and often continue late into the night. These conversations were central to my decision to stick with this academic stuff and forget about my previous life in music for a …
Column / August - November 2014
Lisa Norton
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Herbert A. Simon
Every human being is always-already a designer but the affordability of 3-D computer prototyping makes that fact more obvious. Over 5 million guns are manufactured each year in the US alone. What’s new is the intersection of the Maker movement, the diffusion of computer-aided rapid prototyping technology, and ingenious tests of Constitutional definitions of defense, liberty, and the right to …
Column / April- June 2014
Alfonso Montuori
In August of 2013 I had the pleasure of attending the Integral Theory conference in the Bay Area. I was delighted to see the spirit of openness, inquiry, curiosity, as well as the warmth and collegiality of the event. I confess that I am generally not much of a conference goer. As we all know, academic conferences can be deadly dull and are often rather closed to diverse perspectives. The focus can be hyper-specialized and hyper-disciplinary, drilling deeper …
Column / January-February 2014
Lisa Norton
“The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression” – Steve Keil
I recently had the chance to learn more about the work of Philipp Guzenuk, the creator of “Happiness in Action: energy sources for peak performance” an innovative approach to leader and organizational development when I interviewed him as part of an online summit on new entrepreneurship. For four days in November, some 30 pioneers of generative and creative enterprise …
Column / August-November 2013
Alfonso Montuori
A colleague and I were recently discussing texts for an upcoming course. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein’s Sparks of genius: The thirteen thinking tools of the world’s most creative people came up, and excellent choice. My colleague replied glumly that she liked the book a lot, but students would inevitably get all riled up about having …