A couple of weeks ago I got into a Twitter conversation with my friend Therry de Ballion. He had mentioned branding as becoming so pronounced, so prominent that brands eventually serve as a “catalysts” for both customers and businesses eliminating the need for organizations. The implications didn’t hit me immediately.
I think I replied that [...]
Individuals and Community —
the age-old trade-off of maintaining both individualism and community
Category Archives: Individuals and Community
An organization-less church? Possible?
Joseph K. Hart, too contrary for Vandebilt
I came across an index card last week. It must have fallen out one of the books we’ve been carrting around for years and have begun to weed out. It was a reference to a “Hart, J. K.” and a book, Light from the north with the notation, “1926. folk high schools in Denmark” and [...]
Attractors in community healthcare
As you know I’ve been attracted to attractors recently. I’ve found an example of attractors in patterning improvements in community settings. Russell Gonnering has a post over on the Cognitive Edge site on amplifying positive “attractors” to benefit community healthcare. He cites work by Marian Zeitlin and Jerry and Monique Sternin.
A Tufts University nutritionist, Dr. [...]
A video story of “the boy who harnessed the wind,” William Kamkwamba
is on YouTube. William Kamkwamba was 14-years-old when he built his first windmill from a picture in a library book. Thanks to David Brush and Fast Church for their Tweets on this inspirational story of a young man in Malawi.
A primer on emergence/complexity on the Fast Forward blog
A Rob Peterson is doing a three-part series on emergence on Fast Forward. He’s posted parts 1 and 2 which I found helpful as I try to get a handle on complexity or complex adaptive systems (cas) as an evaluator.
He uses this video clip from a Nova program. It conveys a little bit about [...]
Grab the current news stand issue of the Atlantic [Monthly] & read …
the article by Mark Bowden, “Behind the story,” starting on Page 47. The cutbacks in staffs of journalists and the demise of newspapers and the demand for 24/7 news by cable, networks, Internet has left the public vulnerable to operatives on the Left and Right pushing their take on things.
After tracking down the sources of [...]
“The moral core of the health-care debate”-From Jim Wallis’ blog
From his Hearts and Minds blog for today:
With all of the shouting, the fear, and now what often looks like hatred — we are in danger of losing the moral “core” of this health-care debate. That core, quite simply, is that many people are hurting from a broken health-care system. They include the [...]
Intuition plays a major role in making decisions in a parallel process
We are getting closer to finding out how our mind (in the broadest sense) operates in making decisions. And intuition plays a major role. For sometime now we have had Epstein’s dual processing model of rational and experiential cognitive systems and now we have a summary of the three decades or more of research by [...]
Ah Ha! I’m on the track: Complex Adaptive Systems and Evaluation, Part 2
I had success this weekend Googling in hunting links between complexity theory and evaluation. First I found a publication of a foundation which has centered its funding strategy around complexity and something called the panarchy cycle. And for evaluation it recommends “development evaluation.”
The publication is on the web. Search for Katharine A. Pearson. (2007). “Accelerating [...]
What’s the witness of your “domestic” life?
I’ve been dipping again into the Anabaptist record. A piece by Alan Kreider took me particularly hard. He wrote, “The church has nothing to offer to the world other than what it has learned to live in its own ‘domestic’ life.”
It isn’t information; it isn’t principles; it isn’t laws and regulations that’s going to make [...]