Category: Articles
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Alfie Kohn on love, motivation, and self-esteem
Alfie Kohn is the author of Punished by Rewards, which is a book about the damaging effects of rewards. Here are his thoughts on motivation, love, and self-esteem (my emphasis in bold): Motivation “When we deal with people who have less power than we do, we’re often tempted to offer them rewards for acting the…
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Carol Black on the wildness of children
Carol Black writes the following in On the Wildness of Children (my emphasis in bold): When we first take children from the world and put them in an institution, they cry. … But gradually, over the many years of confinement, they adjust. … The same people who do not see themselves as “above” nature but…
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Beth Tener on working together
If you want to arrive at a shared vision and a plan that integrates and builds on the breadth and depth of expertise and perspectives of the group, it has to be developed together. The challenge is that in order to get to that, there is a time early on where you have to bring…
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George Monbiot on destroying autonomy
The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear. 1 — George Monbiot Notes: 1 Sick of this…
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Holding space
Heather Plett writes here what it means to “hold space” for people, and how to do it well. It’s something all of us can do for each other. She writes (my emphasis in bold). “[Holding space] means that we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making…
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Joseph Campbell on following your bliss
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life…
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Bonnitta Roy on an open architecture for self-organization
Bonnitta Roy describes in An Open Architecture for Self-Organization how to “to distribute management responsibilities into self-organizing teams, without losing strategic performance“. She calls this “The Open Participatory Organization“, or OPO for short. The governance of an OPO is CriSP, or “continually regenerating it’s starting position“. This means that the form of the organization “takes…
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StreamMode vs. StateMode
Mike Caulfield writes about StreamMode vs. StateMode in this article about What Iterative Writing Looks Like (and why it’s important). In StreamMode you organize your thoughts in a timeline or sequence of events. Twitter is an example. In StateMode there’s a body of work at any given moment. It’s not a trail of the path…
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Self-driving cars are involved in twice as many accidents
Self-driving cars are involved in twice as many accidents as ordinary cars1 because they always obey the law. People just don’t expect anyone to actually follow all rules without exception.2 Notes: 1 Brandon Schoettle & Michael Sivak, A Preliminary Analysis of Real-World Crashes Involving Self-Driving Vehicles, The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, October 2015.…
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Indaba
“Indaba” (pronounced IN-DAR-BAH), comes from the Zulu and Xhosa people of southern Africa, and is used to simplify discussions between many parties. When things got tricky at the climate-change summit in Paris, indabas where held at all hours of the day. An indaba is designed to allow each part to speak personally and state their…