Writing

One of my most influential teachers was Moshe Feldenkrais. He had deep insights into the neurology of improving human performance. He proved their worth by helping people with all sorts of movement difficulties such as cerebral palsy, recovery from accidents and ordinary back problems.

However, the applications of Feldenkrais’ insights go far beyond helping people move. They can be applied to any skilled performance including creativity training, psychotherapy and even large-scale social change.

My own thinking has also been greatly expanded by working with Matt and Gail Taylor’s DesignShop approach to creative group facilitation. They not only help come up with innovative approaches to thorny problems, they create the space to think through the action plans necessary to make the innovations work.

All of this adds up to a new paradigm for thinking about social change. This new paradigm is about enabling people to think more comprehensively and insightfully about the great issues of our time. The following articles introduce this new paradigm.

 

Feldenkrais and Transformative Social Change

 

This article introduces the core ideas of the Feldenkrais approach. It is based on enabling people to think better, where thinking is understood to be the purposeful functioning of the central nervous system.

The article goes on to show how this approach to enabling people to think better applies to large-scale social change.

Creativity and High-Performance Team Collaboration

This article introduces the idea of ‘functional analogues’– the notion that we can develop skills in one area of activity, such as improvisational acting, that can be spontaneously applied in other areas such as collaborative team meetings.

It presents in a simple form the neurology of the Feldenkrais approach to improving human performance, and gives many interesting examples of applications.

Applying Design Thinking to Large-Scale Social Change

In my observation most thinking about dealing with climate change and other environmental and social issues is woefully incomplete. Is it arrogant to assert this when there are brilliant writers and presenters such as Paul Raskin, David Korten, Bill McKibben and Al Gore?

Their thinking is incomplete because they have either not thought through the deep systemic changes necessary to actually  ‘solve’ these issues, or, beyond producing their own writing or films, they do not have a well-thought-out model of how to inspire mainstream commitment to transformative change.

Applying Design Thinking addresses both these gaps. Here is what a friend – and now a colleague in the Great Transition Initiative – commented when he first read it: Read More

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