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A Theory of Community Formation

As part of our work at The Value Web, we’ve been involved over the years working with various communities – such as The World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders community – to organize numerous community gatherings and create processes that achieve particular outcomes or explore areas of interest. More and more, however, the creation of […]

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So Much for The Wisdom of Crowds

It is somewhat vexing to see the hounds jumping on Alan Greenspan in the rush to assign blame for the financial crisis to a single individual. That’s the way of politics, I suppose, that many feel the need to find someone to single out, someone towards whom we can all point an accusing finger so […]

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Prototypes, Visuals, and Taking Concepts to Reality

I know I shouldn’t be as excited as I am, but I can’t help it. Making something that was ethereal, theoretical into something physical and tangible is, well, exciting. Last week, I got my book in the mail. Not just any book, but my book. The moment I clicked “buy” on lulu.com, the hundreds of […]

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Dificilitation…a challenge to our Pattern Language?

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 […]

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Collaboration: A Dirty Word?

I read a wonderful book not too long ago entitled “The Culture Code”, which had, as its thesis, the concept that each culture has a “coded” set of primal affinities and aversions. Through group regressions, the author – Clotaire Rapaille – claimed to be able to distill the essence of a culture’s feelings for a […]

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Sleep on it

We know that having time to sleep on something often gives us perspective, but this article in the New York Times goes a long way to pull together some of the research on why that is. It offers a lot of specific insight into the idea that a good deal of information sorting takes place […]

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On Intelligence – Feedback, expectation and event design

I’ve been reading Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence, and have been itching to put up a post about it…trouble is, that a quick review really wouldn’t do justice to all that’s in there and all the touchpoints the book has with our process. One of the concepts in the book that has gotten me thinking […]

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Unconscious influences…

An interesting article in the New York Times today about unconscious reactions to stimuli has a lot of connections with our work. The article talks about a number of fascinating studies which trace the effects of events as insignificant as being passed a hot or cold cup of coffee, which in the end have a […]

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