A friend of my daughter’s–Mimi Law–had an idea: that a group of women metal workers assemble a show. The proposal was accepted by The Pendulum Gallery in Vancouver; the exhibition is runs from a few days ago to July 4, 2009.. One of the women said that she hoped this exhibit would provided each artist with the […]
Archive | Systems & Complexity
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A comment in twitter by Luis Suarez got me thinking about the fact that some communities of practice spend a lot of time in dialogue or debate about definitions. Sometimes I value the deep dives in which theoreticians work to solidify a discipline. At other times I am irritated by the balance between these discussions […]
X-disciplines or lose relevance?
News and conversations are filled with challenges that cross disciplinary divides: climate change, poverty and effective education to name a few. In my consulting practice, I work with leaders who are struggling with complex, knowledge-related challenges. As a researcher, my scholarship hovers around the intersections of leadership, complexity theory and knowledge management. Increasingly, I appreciate […]
Metadata on Steroids
Recently, Lisa Petrides posted this tweet: “listening 2 interesting talks on metadata (really!). we have 2 get away from narrow def of it, to include user-generated, annotations, etc.” This reminded me of a work I had done with Andrew Faulkner in which we used data warehouse infrastructure (his specialization). I created views of data integrated […]
On Synchronicity
We’re trained—as Rupert Sheldrake points out—to treat what we might call synchronicity (or coherence, or connection and alignment, or the power of the mind as something larger than the brain, or the power of attraction) as coincidence. That may be true. Yet I have had that experience that many of us have had, where if […]
Horizontal & Vertical Collide
As I was fine-tuning my dissertation about how respected leaders work in horizontal, boundary spanning environments, I read a story in the Washington Post. In Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages, Kornblut writes “Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints […]
The Scope of a Blog
I hear colleagues talk about the importance of scope decisions in a blog. Some create separate blogs–or separate twitter identities–for different topics. Others write about a wide range of professional and personal interests in the same forum. I assume these decisions involve several elements: What is my identity as a writer, communicator or blogger? What do […]
