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Greetings!
This newsletter is prepared monthly by volunteers of
the In2:InThinking Network. Content comes from
volunteers. We invite you to help develop our
Network by sharing this newsletter.
Why settle for the prevailing style of thought?
Be a leader. Improve your thinking about thinking.
| Member Highlight - Debbie Brown |
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Meet Debbie Brown, our first network member from
General Motors.
The Facts:
Leadership position in General Motors Engineering
department. Resides in Detroit, Michigan. Have lived
and worked for GM (4 years) in Japan. Variety of
work experiences ranging from electrical engineering
, industrial engineering, component sales, strategic
planning, and operations manager for some of the top
executives in GM. Outside of work my passion is
horseback riding - dressage.
Network Participation:
Involved on and off for about 4 years in the Ongoing
Discussion conference calls. Diversity of
topics presented, very fresh thought process and
views about current issues, excellent food for
thought, and opportunity to keep my somewhat "out of
the box" thinking going by interfacing with groups
well outside of the company I work in.
Tell us about a recent "a ha" moment.
In a recent Ongoing Discussion call the presenter talked
about allowing thoughts and ideas to penetrate and
"digest," rather than forcing decisions too quickly. The
thought was too many times poor decisions are made
because of the unconfortable feeling we have when
something is not resolved and our sense of urgency
to "fix" it. I had a major issue to be resolved and
shortly after hearing that discussion, I relaxed and
even walked away from the issue. In a more relaxed
setting the answer became very clear and even
simple. The implementation proved the answer to be
the right choice.
What book are you reading now?
Not reading a book at the moment - but read almost
cover to cover of Fast
Company magazine.
What recent book have you read that you consider
both beneficial and readable?
Good
to Great by Jim Collins.
What advice do you have for people new to the
In2:InThinking Network?
Enjoy!! Be open minded and allow the thoughts
provided to gel and you will find they are amazingly
applicable to your own environment.
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| Member Highlight - Kris Bergstrom |
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Meet Kris Bergstrom, founding member of taiko group
On Ensemble,
which will join us again at the
In2:InThinking Forum in 2007.
The Facts:
Taiko performer living in Los Angeles. Very
interested in the Free Software and Free Culture
movements. Trying to apply the ideals of sharing and
collaboration to music.
Forum Attendance and What Inspired You to
Attend:
My taiko group, On Ensemble, performed at the 2005
In2:IN Forum. Before this, my father, Jon Bergstrom,
was an enthusiastic participant for a number of
years.
Tell us about a recent "a ha" moment.
I realized how lucky I am *not* to be wealthy. I am
growing ever more "counter culture" (veganism,
dedication to using only Free Software,
everything-I-own-I-must-make-myself ethic etc.) but
money is one of the things that keeps me connected
to and dependent on others. I'm paid for teaching
and for performing my music, and it feels great to
have such a direct connection to my supporters.
Rather than working at a company where the money
filters down to employees, I'm paid directly by
students and audience members who appreciate my
services. I don't make much, and it's very high
pressure (a paycheck is never guaranteed), but it's
extremely rewarding. Were I to be very wealthy, I
would lose this connection to my community. (Though
don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind making a *bit*
more money. :)
What book are you reading now?
Principles
of Digital Audio
What recent book have you read that you consider
both beneficial and readable?
Principles of Digital Audio :)
It includes very technical and detailed information
about the encoding and error-correction methods used
in digital audio, but to me it reads like a novel
about creative problem solving and untiring
dedication. The chapters on the CD are fantastic,
inspiring even. The genius of the CD design gives me
the same rush I feel when I hear a great new song or
see a good movie. I'm trying to tranlate some of the
most interesting technical concepts into music in a
new composition I'm working on. For me, there is no
division between science and art.
What advice do you have for people new to the
In2:InThinking Network?
Get to know Bill Bellows!
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| Program and Project Management Seminar with Russell Ackoff |
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This debut seminar has been postponed until
2007.
We continue to be excited about offering a course
which differs from the conventional courses on
project and program management (PPM) in that,
whereas they work from the inside out, this course
works from the outside in. It takes a systemic
rather than an analytic approach to the process.
Rather than work on aspects of PPM taken separately
and then trying to synthesize them into an overall
approach to the process, this course starts with the
effect of the organizational context within which
PPM takes place. It shows that without changes in
this context, PPM is severely
handicapped. The problem then, for those who cannot
control the organizational context of PPM, but can
control such management itself, is how can they
approximate the types of context changes required to
make PPM effective? In this seminar, our aim is to
show you how to achieve these results.
Visit our website
for additional seminar details, including a
downloadable brochure.
Schedule: Dates TBD in 2007
Location: TBD
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| Book Review |
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Critical Thinking:
Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and
Personal Life
Author: Richard W. Paul and Linda Elder
Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2002
Length: 310 pages
Reviewer: Jon Bergstrom
This book provides insights about ways to become a
better critic of your own thinking in order to be
more fair-minded, reach greater self-understanding
and make more intelligent decisions about your life
and work. I rank this as an extraordinary reference
to assist in gaining better understanding and
control of our thinking.
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about
any subject, content, or problem - in which the
thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking
by skillfully taking charge of the structures
inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual
standards upon them." Critical thinkers strive to
develop essential characteristics in their thinking
patterns. These traits include intellectual
integrity, humility, sense of justice, perseverance,
fair mindedness, confidence in reason, courage,
empathy and autonomy. The book describes how we can
develop these characteristics through practice.
One of the most important traits of critical
thinking is the ability to assess one's own
reasoning. The book recommends that at least nine
intellectual standards be considered in our
reasoning. These include clarity, relevance,
logicalness, accuracy, depth, significance,
precision, breadth and fairness. As critical
thinkers, we can think about our thinking (is this
"InThinking"?) with these kinds of questions in
mind: Am I being clear? Accurate? Precise? Relevant?
Am I thinking logically? Etc.?
We can apply these kinds of question to our own
thinking and ask questions of others that bring
greater clarity to the issues at hand. These will
help us examine and evaluate assumptions, identify
relevant facts, recognize contradictions, explore
implications and consequences, compare perspectives,
explore beliefs, evaluate credibility, assess
solutions to problems and read and listen
critically.
This book will challenge you to gain much greater
understanding of your own thinking and to apply this
in every aspect of your life. It requires us to
become thinking "black belts" through sustained
practice of these concepts and tools. Perhaps "blue
belts" would be more appropriate for enterprise
thinkers in the In2:InThinking Network.
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| How Are Computers and Networks Changing How We Think? |
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by Haydn Shaughnessy
This is the second installment of Haydn's article.
If you would like to read the entire
article, click the link at the end of this section.
For more insights from Haydn, visit his blog.
The Flexible Brain
From an evolutionary perspective people don't change
much. At the level of our DNA we're not vastly
different from Palaeolithic humans. We need to eat
the same diets, more or less, and should follow
roughly the same patterns of exercise. We are rigid
and inflexible in these genetic matters.
The circuitry of our brains on the other hand is
infinitely flexible. Martin Seligman's work on
failure reflects the downside of this. People who
repeatedly experience failure will learn how to feel
helpless and fail even more. The reason isn't just a
learned pattern of responses but a chemical
reworking of the brain that predisposes people to
giving up.
The upside, as positive psychologists and cognitive
psychologists know, is that if people begin
implementing patterns of behaviour with positive
outcomes, the brain will rewire for success.
That principle lies behind many of the major changes
in the communications landscape over millennia - the
evolution of the alphabet (and the development of a
phonetic symbolism for experience), writing (and the
evolution of abstraction), printing (and the birth
of objectivity)... Computing?
I think the issue has to be addressed along three
main lines of inquiry and we touched on them above:
- Memory and collective reflection
- Creativity
- What we know
And the principle we bring to those issues is the
simple one that whatever else stays constant, the
brain will always adapt.
First though, a few words on what is changing in
communications.
The Changing Media Landscape
The 21st century has seen the proliferation of media
types. If we go back over the past 500 years we can
ascribe some form of categorisation to this change.
The printing press gave us books, pamphlets and
political tracts. It led in time, once there was
adequate distribution with the arrival of the train,
to newspapers.
The invention of telegraphy eventually gave us the
telegram and the telephone and as technologists
played around with the wireless possibilities we
were treated to the radio and then the TV. And in
the meantime film was born.
There are a few major innovations behind the
evolution of a media landscape many of us grew up
with. Printing presses, trains,
telegraphy/telephony, moving picture capture, and
radio-diffusion.
What difference does the Internet make?
In terms of distribution the Internet takes the cost
of picture/video distribution close to zero to the
end-user/content producer. If that was its only
contribution to change it would be a substantial
one. It also makes distribution instantaneous. It is
we rather than the product that is often not
available.
In terms of content production the Internet and
advances in processing technologies (not just the
chip but also the algorithm) the current media
environment now consists of around thirty
innovations including podcasts, vidcasts, blogs, RSS
feeds, aggregation of content, automation of content
production, online classifieds, new forms of search
and search result visualisation, personal TV
stations, social bookmarking, social networks,
Wikis, mobile content (two minute movies), SMS of
course, mixed media productions, virtual worlds
(Second Life), start pages.
The list is so long that it begs a little
understanding. What does it mean? The reality is
only a few things are happening though they are
happening in many ways.
- The fact is everybody (within sufficient media
literacy) can create a content object that can be
freely distributed to everybody. This is the flat
earth syndrome. There are going to be no media
hierarchies, we think.
- That in turn means traditional media companies
are threatened, though they have audience loyalty
and should survive that threat.
- Many of the people who create media objects like
blogs, vidcasts etc., have them aggregated by others
(so there is a hierarchy!). Aggregation simply means
a site that compiles extracts from other sites/media
objects and presents that aggregation as a new media
object.
- Search becomes more pressing and important as do
social networks which collectively bring some sense
and order into the content ocean.
This is not like a revolution but in its essentials
it signals dramatic change.
The "media" for over 150 years have acted as a
mediating power between corporations, politicians,
authorities and the population at large. They are
the cornerstone of the societies we have known and
lived in.
They make compromises to stay in business but they
have also executed successfully and maintained
themselves in this mediating position, reporting
news on corporations, politicians and authorities,
while earning ad revenue and staying out of
gaol.
We are taking that cornerstone away. The result
might simply be that corporations, politicians and
authorities have to go out seeking more mediating
points to maintain their presence and
credibility.
The result might also be, though, a profound loss of
certainty, a loss of societal identity, the
breakdown of what limited commonality societies
enjoyed.
Perhaps it impacts memory and patterns of
remembrance. Our appreciation of creativity and its
purpose might also be changing.
The next part of this article will ask if so, how?
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| Ongoing Discussion Preview |
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The Ongoing Discussion (OD) for November will
feature Jane Lorand, co-founder of the
GreenMBA
program. On Monday and Tuesday,
November 20th and 21st, Jane will engage us
in a dialogue on her thoughts on why The
Impossible Has Become the Inevitable.
This month's OD announcement will be released on or
before Wednesday, November 15th.
For those readers not already on the OD mailing list
- click below.
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| Thoughts from the Deming Learning Network |
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Contributed by Gordon Hall of the Deming Learning
Network in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Process Improvement is essential but not
enough
Continuous or process improvement is essential but
not enough. These projects provide excellent and
often dramatic pictures of improvement, which can be
used to launch into the next stage, i.e. the
transformation of the thinking of the whole
organisation. But this next stage invariably proves
infinitely more difficult as we are moving into the
area of the underpinning theories of the whole
organisation and the concepts of organisational
learning.
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| Making a Difference from Where We Are... |
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Many of our "Network Members" pride themselves in
making a positive difference in the world.
Check out John Dowd's
Asia Times article on Dr. Deming's first
visits to Japan in a recent article in the online
Asia Times.
Read David Train's latest letter to Parliament here.
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| Forum 2007 Announcements |
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Mark your calendars to join us for our Sixth Annual
Forum, to be held in Los Angeles, beginning on
April 12th and ending on April 17th.
Confirmed conference speakers include Diane Beakey,
Micah Fierstein, Ann Majchrzak, Paul Morgan, Joseph
Parent, John Pourdehnad, Bob Pratt, Sheldon Rovin,
and Lyn Wiltse.
Watch this spot for coming Forum details.
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| Partner Events and Resources |
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- The Deming Learning Network is offering a
six-session course on Breaking Down Barriers to
Higher Performance To Align and Enable staff
from November 7th to December 12th. The
Course Leader is Dr. Tony Miller of Robert Gordon
University. See more information here.
- The August Ongoing Discussion Thought Leader, Anna
Maravelas, has a feature article in the October
issue of O
Magazine. Read more on Anna's website here.
- Network member Margaret Morgan invites you to
the EarthShine Institute Annual Symposium featuring
the poetry of her aunt, "Anne Morrow Lindbergh: The
Woman, the Words, the Life and the Legacy". Find
additional symposium details here.
- The 16th Annual Pegasus
Conference, "Leading Beyond the Horizon -
Strategies for Bringing Tomorrow into Today's
Choices" to be held November 13-15, Waltham,
Massachusetts
Participants in the Pegasus Conference often feel
that it is the most extraordinary learning
experience of their lives. Each year this gathering
of innovative, daring, like-minded people - from all
sectors - creates an energetic field of inquiry that
results in transformational insights and lifelong
connections. Bring your own questions and challenges
into this mix, and you and your organization may
never be the same.
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| Ideas to Ponder... |
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This month's idea to ponder comes from member Cindi
Manning who stumbled on this quote on Google by an
inexpected author...
"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand
fibers connect us with our fellow men." -Herman
Melville
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Partners InThinking - North of England Transformation Network |
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In this feature, we highlight a Partner
Organization of the In2:InThinking Network. We
believe the resources of these organizations will expand
your thinking about thinking... This month we are
featuring the North of England Transformation
Network (NET2), whose mission statement is "NET2
Creating Impulse for Change."
The Facts:
We aim to make the workplace a better and more
productive place to be - for the benefit of everyone
in the system. Members meet on a regular basis four
times a year. The usual venue is the Kirkdale
Conference Centre just off junction 25 M62.
How does your organization compliment the
In2:InThinking Network?
We are a not-for-profit network of individuals who
share a common interest in organisational
transformation in the geographical area of Yorkshire
and the North of England. NET2 members have been
regular attendees at the In2:IN's annual Forum and a
number have presented papers. We have also hosted
presentations by Bill Bellows on a number of occasions.
Tell us about your membership. What does it mean
to be a member of your organization and how does one
become a member?
Our members represent a wide spectrum of
organisations such as engineering, Local Government,
building materials, Civil Service, leisure/tourism,
education, banking and retailing. Many perspectives
are brought to the network; owners, managers,
employees and consultants. "The effectiveness of a
network is inversely proportional to its formality.
It needs a spider not a chairman, a list of members,
not a set of by-laws, groups not committees and a
phone number rather than a building" - NANCY FOY -
THE YING AND YANG OF ORGANISATIONS - 1980. When
Nancy Foy wrote the quotation above she could not
have known about the Internet and the opportunity it
would give a group such as ours. We think that Nancy
Foy describes our philosophy well. We like to think
that NET2 is effective, but informal. Text based
email is the primary form of communication. The web
site contains information about the regular
scheduled meetings, dates of forthcoming special
events, reports of previous meetings, useful
resources and links to member's web sites.
Information about how to become a member is
available on the web site.
What resources does your organization offer its
members?
See the web site for various papers and links to
member sites.
What exciting developments are on the horizon for
your organization?
Future meetings include a report from the four
members who attended the WEDI Fall Meeting at
Georgetown University Conference Centre and
presentations about setting up a new business along
"Deming lines".
Visit NET2 on the web...
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