“We want desperately to take the uncertainty out of the future. But when we take the uncertainty out, it is no longer the future. It is the present projected forward.” –Peter Block from Community: The Structure of Belonging By Abby Straus We are living in exciting and challenging times. Until recently, strategic planning during a […]
By Abby Straus A client once told me how stressed out she was by watching the news. “What’s preventing you from turning it off?” I asked. To which she replied, “I have to stay informed!” This began a conversation about whose script she was working from, hers or someone else’s. Her story went something like […]
It reads like a scene from a movie you don’t want your children to see: Global pandemic. Racial killing in cold blood. In public. By an officer of the peace. Followed by riots. Followed by… But wait, this isn’t a movie, and there’s no one coming to save us! That’s our job, you and me. […]
As we discussed here on May 5, the consensus seems to be that there’s no “going back to normal” after the COVID19 disruption. The ways we work and live will inevitably be changed. The question is how, and what role each of us—and all of us—will play in determining what comes next. A psychotherapist friend […]
On April 30th, author and New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about “weavers” and “rippers”: those who actively seek to find the ties that bind us together through good and bad times, and those who look for—and enlarge—divisions that separate us from each other and our common humanity. He cites multiple polls that show […]
The world as we knew it has changed. We are navigating an unprecedented global health crisis. We are also navigating fear, fatigue and disruption. Fear can run amok in the midst of chaos.
We ask you to pause for a minute. Stop! Breathe! Inhale! Exhale! You have weathered the storm so far. Sometimes you felt overwhelmed, but you are still here. And you are thriving in the midst of enormous uncertainty.
As many of us hunker down in virtual work environments to try to keep each other healthy, our long-time collaborators, David Emerald and Donna Zajonc at TED* (The Empowerment Dynamic), send us all a wonderful reminder: … social distancing does NOT mean social disconnection. We can all do our part to stay in touch with […]
Just when some pundits were announcing the demise of the public library, and politicians are trying to defund them, libraries are undergoing a major revival as centers of community re-invention. You can call it Carnegie 2.0. It is 88 years since the last library was built with funds from Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist, […]
In our work in economic development and complex project management, we often encounter failed projects and programs, that came to grief due to community opposition to the proposals, and which we are sometimes asked to resuscitate. One of the causes of failure is the long standing engineering practice of first designing a project and then […]
Two hugely influential leaders in economic affairs, on opposite sides of the planet seem to be lacking a good model of the system to help us navigate more successfully to a brighter fiscal future. Nobel prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, was honest enough to say he did not have a good […]
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