On the reality tv show Top Chef, the competing chefs can’t refuse to work with a particular ingredient. The chefs that have the most “well-developed palettes” are the ones who go on to win the competition. Over my years of academic teaching, I’ve sometimes had Ph.D. students who resisted reading some of the literature I [ Read more … ]
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Breakthroughs happen when we open spaces we didn’t know existed
No matter how much we push, intend and effort, it’s clear that we don’t often have all the answers that we seek. But Something else does. We humans are brilliant when we’re aligned with Something greater than ourselves. We don’t get breakthroughs by thinking harder or better. We get breakthroughs when we open spaces we [ Read more … ]
For meaningful change we need the potency of the creative.
Artists have always been at the forefront of anything new. Freud confirmed this when he said that no matter where his research led, a poet had already been there ahead of him. When I work with clients, it’s so apparent that deep creativity is not of the head or thinking mind. It comes from an [ Read more … ]
Pay attention to the spaces
In music, the space between the notes is what creates the melody. The beauty of a piece is formed in the pauses, the spaces in-between. I’ve always been fascinated by these “spaces in-between” and have explored and written about them extensively in teaching (check out my book Getting Messy), art (check out my book Deep [ Read more … ]
How can the wisdom that emerges through a group process serve the collective?
In a letter to the president of the Fetzer Institute, Jacob Needleman wrote: “[I believe] that the group is the art form of the future. In our present culture, the main need is for a form that can enable human beings to share their perceptions and through that sharing, to become a conduit for the [ Read more … ]
