When I was working on my PhD in Rural Studies in Guelph, Ontario at the turn of this century, Wendell Berry was a beacon of light in the dark stacks of the library. (Don’t I sound ancient?!)
Anytime I came across his work in the rabbit trails of my research, I could feel my shoulders dropping — he was reliably calm, sensible and hopeful when many others weren’t.
Continue reading “In Wendell Berry’s Honour”Recently, my niece got angry at her younger sister for interrupting her. Except that she hadn’t been talking at the time. At least not out loud.
“She interrupted the story I was telling in my head!”
Not much I can do about that one.
Or is there?
Continue reading “Make the Implicit Explicit”Specifically what do you love?
I often ask participants in workshops to share something they could talk about for hours. (Sometimes I must add the caveat that I’m not inviting them to talk about it right now — just to name it for the rest of us! And if they struggle to think of an answer, it can help to mention that it may be the thing that makes their kids roll their eyes and say, “Don’t get them started on that!”)
Continue reading “Ten-Year Time Travel”I’m curious what your visceral reaction is when you see “AI” in the title of something these days.
My own reaction oscillates between being impressed by the timeliness and put off by the click bait. Not addressing it feels oblivious. Tackling it head-on feels like bandwagon behaviour. And I’m getting tired of the binary, potentially exhausting messaging of either “Get your head out of the sand,” or “Learn Markdown, deploy dozens of agents, subscribe to the pro versions of several LLMs and have you tried the latest xyz yet?”
Continue reading “AI and I”During COVID, I remember coaching leaders not to open a meeting with some variation of “I know we’d rather be meeting in person, but here we are…” (or any sentence containing the word “pivot”). It immediately sucked out of the room whatever little energy was left. The tone of scarcity was set.
Continue reading “An Uncomfortable Both/And”