My wife got tickets for us a couple of weeks ago to hear Chris Botti (prounced like boat-ee).  (A clip from youtube is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RkdWBiZSmI&mode=related&search= )  There were several interesting things to note about the performance, not the least of which is that it was a really enjoyable evening. 

My youngest son is one year away from being old enough to drive, so I’m starting to think about next cars (on the assumption that he’ll inherit my current one to get himself back and forth to all of his activities.)  It’s an interesting time to consider this because of the technological cross-roads where we seem to be at the moment. 

Karl Rove leaving the White House as President Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff raises interesting questions about power and influence.  As the campaign strategist who put George Bush into the Governor’s Mansion in Texas, before putting him into the White House twice, Rove has become the icon of political strategy.  Clearly, he was able to set goals and get results.  Along the way, though, he seems to raised the bar the idea that “winning is the only thing that counts.” Being divisive is extremely effective when you have only two choices (one party versus another, one candidate versus another, yes or no on a bill that is hundreds of pages long and filled with details and nuances, etc.)  It works even when you claim to use it to be more inclusive (meaning getting a larger variety of people to vote for your side.) 

The most essential concept of systems may be that of an entity in context, for instance, an object of study or subject of interest in relation to its larger environment.  This is in contrast to the idea that things (e.g. objects) have absolute and essential, even eternal and absolute, properties. 

This Wordpress installation was installed and configured by David Ing, as he wrote the instructions on the Coevolving Innovations blog.

A great deal of the consulting work that I do lately has to do with fixing problems, even if the work is called leadership development. (Maybe almost all consulting work comes down to problem-fixing.) Even with Federal executives, where the coursework is part of a four-week program geared specifically to individual development, it’s clear that most participants are interested in ways that they can simply get more done. (There definitely are exceptions, but the current administration’s business approach to running government has made the exceptions far fewer.)

Weeks of intense interaction with people, especially when combined with extensive travel, tend to make me weary. And in the quiet after catching up with backlogs of work left undone at home, I sometimes wonder “why do I do this work? This work, meaning Systems work.

Many of the people involved in systems organizations are academicians. For many long-term academicians, their primary orientation to group process and decision-making seems to be faculty meetings, in which reaching clear conclusions or consensus are seen as signs of utter defeat.

What drives and constrains academicians are are the things that count in universities. In

Why is it that we are so fascinated with mathematics and measurement? It’s much more than mathematics in science and research, of course. It’s the idea that only numbers and measurement can be trusted. It’s partly the divide between opinions (which everyone has) and facts that can (theoretically) be substantiated and are harder to refute. It’s also often considered the divide between intelligent and less intelligent people — those who “get” math, and those who can’t seem to.

I had a chance recently to visit the National Training Lab in

My first real career was as a clinical social worker, doing family systems work in a short-term shelter for adolscents. The weekend at NTL brought back a lot of memories about group process and the importance of paying attention to the ways in which we as humans interact with each other — and how regular and predictable many of our actions and reactions are.