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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 […]

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 […]

It’s hard to stay out of interesting conversations, and Dave Gray has a great one going on his Knowledge Games blog. The question is on fuzzy goals, how they relate to knowledge work, how to navigate towards them, and just how fuzzy goals can be in creative work. There’s an extra image on Dave’s flickr […]

Now having had more time to reflect on Dave Gray’s talk on what he’s calling “Knowledge Games”, I’ve put together a few thoughts that were niggling in the back of my head. I think that, for those of us working in the collaboration space, the concept of knowledge games is a great way of encapsulating […]

Blue Ocean? SWOT? I found myself in an interesting conversation this weekend about what tools are best for developing strategies, and in classic fashion, I am living up to the saying “Repartee is what you think of on the way home.” Picking a tool for strategy development is, to me, an exercise in doctrine and […]

We explain our approach to facilitation as coming from the roots of the word: to make easy. This really runs back to the roots of the method, which is grounded in part by the writings of Christopher Alexander and his concept of patterns in architecture which either encourage or inhibit a natural flow. It’s a […]

Maybe it’s just me, but I derive a lot of inspiration from food, and do some of my best thinking in the kitchen. And so it was, on the weekend, when I found myself trying out a new mortar and pestle (much different from the other two I own!) that I started thinking through what […]