My friend who writes about parenting, bullying, and schools wrote an article called, Parenting a Life of Meaning, In it she asks: Is it really normal that children should hate school? Should we as parents and society tolerate that children spend 6-8 hours a day bored, uninterested, and uninspired?”

There’s a lot written now about the crisis in our public school system. But is it a crisis, or as one author writes, just a bit “like democracy itself, loose, shaggy, and inefficient, full of redundancies and conflicting goals?” Whether crisis or not, right now education is in need of innovation and I don’t just mean technology. Real innovation, and not just sustaining innovation is needed, starting with the goal of education.

The folks at RSA put out a video well worth the 12 minutes to watch. Changing Educational Paradigms asks some very simple yet disruptive questions about education

I can’t say for sure, but I’ve either developed a competitive spirit as I have gotten older, or, I’ve just become less self-conscious about it. It’s become most evident when I cycle in large group events. While some riders have to tune out the others and focus on their own pedaling speed, I do the opposite. I quickly notice the more competitive riders and pace myself according to their speed.

In some areas, competitiveness is seen as a good thing. But where I come from – the peace and love era of the 70s, a progressive liberal college, the experiential psychotherapy culture – competition was a bit of a no-no. So noticing my burgeoning competitive spirit made me curious. What is it? What does it do for me? (more…)

I’m doing my end of year planning for 2011, and as I do every year, I struggle to carve out time for creative work, while trying to satisfy the demands of my work life. Writing, for instance, requires a lot of time for cooking and cogitating. It just can’t be done between 2 and 3 on Thursday afternoon. It needs long stretches of uninterrupted time.

There are some wonderful sites out there that offer tips on productivity, not just how to get things done, but how to carve out time for creative work, work that requires time to think, ponder, stew and meditate. The site http://the99percent.com/ is full of articles on creative productivity, or how to make creative ideas happen. Another great source of inspiration is the work of Jason Fried, co-founder of 37Signals (I’m a huge fan of their web-based applications Basecamp for project management and Backpack, their tricked-out to-do list application). Fried is also something of a social activist intent on changing the landscape of the work place, and challenging the status quo on how work gets done, and how it can be restructured to allow for more creativity and productivity. He wrote Rework, and recently gave this Ted Talk on “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work.”

What are your secrets for being more creatively productive?

In the wake of the recent G20 in Toronto, my friend Annahid and I were talking about the state of social change movements today. Annahid has been on the front lines of social change her whole life, and is founder and senior partner of Anima Leadership Institute in Toronto, which offers leadership programs for individuals, teams and organizations in support of transformative change, so she’s got a pretty good perspective on the movement. She was disheartened by what she saw as the same old divisive rhetoric, and the tendency to “battle might with right.” In an email exchange, she wrote, “the complexity of our current environments and systems means that no one individual or group can possibly have all the answers required. Our strategies and solutions instead must innovate in their ability to integrate different perspectives and knowledge.”

Annahid is hosting a series of talks on Animating Social Change, and asked me to speak about Deep Democracy. What social change innovation does Deep Democracy offer, she asked? Not so easy to say as I first thought, I discovered. Is it the creative techniques for working with conflict? The teleological view of disturbance and conflict? The embrace of non-consensual experiences? The way it views marginalization as both an inner and outer process? All yes, but something else, something’s missing. Then it occurred to me, Deep Democracy is not just an innovation, but a disruptive innovation. Clayton M. Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, differentiated between sustaining and disruptive innovations. He describes disruptive innovations as ones that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Deep Democracy is disruptive because it puts individual development back in the center of the conversation on systemic change. The split between inner and outer, personal and political is radically revisioned in Deep Democracy. Here’s how I see Deep Democracy’s disruptive innovation: (more…)