Brock { Abroad }

So, I’ve decided it’s about time to put up another blog post. The first draft of this has been sitting in my drafts folder on my blog for weeks, since I last blogged. For many reasons, I just haven’t made updating a priority in the past few weeks. It’s ok to take a break, of course, but what I’ve come to realize is that not everything can be perfect. I admit this isn’t the perfect harvesting example, but I’ve decided to just let it go and stick to my blogging rule #1: It’s ok to be shitty.

Not everything I do can be perfect and I think that’s what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur. The ability to try, or prototype, something and know that it will be better next time. Maybe it won’t, but either way, if I did everything perfectly I’d never get a blog post done. Not to say that this harvest is horrible, but….

I am currently reporting from Paris, where I was sent for 24 hours to experience the KLM flying experience for our current project with them on the extended office. It’s been a period of extreme acceptance, growth, and challenge. I’m beginning to regain my strength. I will elaborate more on this as well as the KLM assignment in the next days. For now, however, I continue with a blog post that I started weeks ago. Like many things that have happened to me over the past few weeks, I feel a great weight lifted after pressing the publish button.

In a not so recent World Cafe , a social technology similar to Open Space and the Art of Hosting, Knowmads was honored to have as a special guest/host/learning sojourner Pieter Ploeg a.k.a. pietradelmundo.

As a collective intelligence tool, World Cafe was created to to create and harvest conversations that matter.

The first blog post introduced the creation of the space, this blog post focuses on what’s left of the beautiful conversation that was created. Here is a visual of what we harvested:

Based on the question: Given the state of the world, what and how do you want to learn for a better future?

Starting with ourselves, we harvested what we knew:

There lies a continuum, or flow, in how we see time. Initiating change within ourselves, and growing out into the world seems to be the recipe to approach a complex world. We found value systems to be extremely important. Building from the bottom up with a focus on process instead of result seemed to be a more relevant approach to a rapidly-changing world. It appears to me that there lies a certain and very important comparison to the process most artists undertake when approaching the creation of art. Basing action on a more hands-on, multi-sensory approach based on trust in the unknown versus the fear, or unwillingness, of it.

We then looked at what we saw in the world around us. In economical, environmental, and societal aspects, we saw a problem with “energy resources.” Looking at a bigger, interconnected picture, we saw economical systems crashing, climate and natural resource change and depletion, and an emerging globalized society that fails to be categorized. Eco-systems are becoming extinct. There is a soaring population growth. This growth moves toward even bigger globalized mega-cities.  Add an emerging middle class in developing countries, to boot. In society, technology both online and offline, is affecting our way of life. There is a widening gap in class, but our generation attempts to tackle this disconnection by valuing status more than class.

Furthermore, the vision of what status means has changed ever since Facebook started asking for yours. We are becoming a more open-source generation based on pure, simple, and basic authenticity and transparency. So, I have to ask: