'If you never change your mind, why have one?' – Edward de Bono There is a story that is told about a wandering stranger who once stopped a king in the street. Furious, the king shouted, ‘How dare you, a man of little worth, interrupt the progress of your sovereign?’ The stranger answered: ‘Can you [...]
As celebrated thinker Edward de Bono notes: ‘If everyone is going in the same direction, then anyone who is going in a different direction is “wrong”. The other direction might be better – but it is still wrong.’ Such is the powerful pull of social conformity. People cannot be fully trusted to say and do [...]
There is a famous 13th Century Persian poem that tells the story of an old woman whom upon encountering an eagle on her window sill captures it for she has never seen an eagle before. The old woman looks at the strange bird and finally says ‘what a funny-looking pigeon’! She then proceeds to clip [...]
The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges once famously wrote of a great Empire that created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map itself grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire finally crumbled, all that remained was the map. [...]
The manufacturing of consentis endemic within modern societies. Throughout history, the need to "persuade and influence" has always been manipulated by those people in power as a means to maintain authority and legitimacy. In more recent years, the overall manipulation of the mass public mind has become less about making speeches and more about becoming [...]
These days many of us feel as if we are drowning in information. Is our world not awash in a new fabric of communications, most of it digital? Google Chairman Eric Schmidt famously said by 2010-11 the human race was generating as much information every two days than it had from the very beginning of [...]
In a recent essay -- "2012-2020: Where Mythologies Clash" -- I wrote of how the decade ahead will be a testing time as it marks the peak clash between two mythologies. Or, rather, two defining eras. I wrote of how the "old" system, which is still incumbent, reflects a vertical top-down structure that is heavily [...]
The decade ahead will be a testing time as it marks the peak clash between two mythologies -- or rather, two defining eras. The outgoing mythological era is the one which has largely defined the recent century and a half of unprecedented growth and technological advancement and discovery. The model for this era consisted of [...]
As a civilization we are in the throes of living out an "endgame." No, not the endgame of our species or any similar dire situation, but the endgame of an era. For many of us living in the developed nations, we are witnessing the endgame of the Second Industrial Revolution. Yet overall, this endgame concerns [...]
The world we live in now is changing rapidly. The normal state of affairs is not the static and stationary that we sometimes view our lives to be, but of flux and flow. The sayings of Heraclitus remind us of this process: ‘Nothing endures but change’; ‘There is nothing permanent except change’; ‘All is flux, [...]
Let’s be clear about this - humanity is in danger of collectively suffering from a lack of vision concerning how to approach the future. This lack could prove to work against us in that we have yet to exercise the necessary perceptual skills to visualize or conceptualize how to prepare not only for the immediate [...]
The world systems for a new era will be more likely not to emerge from an elite center, like the Renaissance that sprung up in Florence in the late Middle Ages, but from a groundswell of people-centred change. The "new renaissance" will come from the periphery or from the bottom up, a distributed and networked [...]
