Archives
The more we get together
Posted on June 18, 2016
As we forge ever-greater connections online to each other and the world of ideas the thinking was that we would be far better off, more tolerant, educated and wise and yet there is much evidence to suggest this isn’t the case. What does it mean to come together and how can we do this that […]
My troubled relationship with social media
Posted on April 1, 2016
Do you care about donuts? I did, once. I’m not so sure anymore. I used to love donuts, was passionate about donuts and spent the better part of my early career looking at the power of social media to transform our understanding of and engagement with donuts. Just this week, I had a paper published that […]
Frogs, Pots, Blogs and Social Media
Posted on December 30, 2015 5 Comments
Our information landscape has been compared with our diets providing an ample opportunity to compare what we ‘consume’ with how we prepare food and perhaps draw on the analogy of the frog and the boiling point of water. Are we slowly killing our ability to produce independent thought through vehicles like blogs as we draw […]
Public Health and Social Media: Catching Fire From Small Sparks
Posted on July 24, 2013 4 Comments
Public health is regrettably not a field that I often think of when I consider powerful examples of using social media for change and impact, but every so often something changes that. Monday something changed. Toronto Public Health, one of the largest health units of its kind in North America, took to Twitter to voice […]
Complexity and the Senseless Marketing of the Future
Posted on July 16, 2012
Futurists take what we know now and project into the future ideas about things will be like years from today using the models that have worked consistently up to now. Those models applied to human systems are changing quickly making marketing the future based on them senseless and potentially dangerous. Earlier this past week a […]
Wet and Dry Design for Social Innovation
Posted on May 28, 2012
Create systems that are too bounded (dry) and we risk sucking the moisture from the human elements (the wet) that make real social innovation happen. Our challenge is finding the right balance between the controlled, stable environments that these new technologies afford and the self-organized, emergent and innovative environments needed to implement and scale our initiatives more effectively.
Common Sense, Complexity and Leadership
Posted on January 23, 2012
By recognizing that common sense is less than common and is certainly not consistent, program designers, developers, evaluators and other professionals will be better positioned to provide true leadership that addresses challenges and complexity rather than adds to the complexity and creates more problems.
Innovation, Networks & Design
Posted on July 12, 2011
The terms innovation, networks and design are becoming “hot”, although nothing compares to what could come from bringing these three ideas together. But what might that look like and what ought to be considered in moving these three ideas closer? Innovation is on the brain for business, health, and social services. Productivity, creativity and strategy […]
Social Insularity and the Not-So-Wide World Web
Posted on July 16, 2010
The Internet holds promise of connecting people together in diverse celebration of knowledge. This dream hasn’t been realized and may not be unless we transform our technological networking tools with our psycho-social tools.
Wayfinding in Complex Systems
Posted on May 8, 2010 2 Comments
Finding our way in a complex system is tricky. Social network maps can provide a way forward, but only if viewed as tools for complicated problems and not as true wayfinding solutions for complex ones.
