Hello! You're getting the email because you've either (1) joined The Mighty Minds Club, (YAY!!) or (2) asked to be notified about The Might Minds Club at launch.

Welcome to 6th Mighty Minds Newsletter!

A few quick updates & announcements:

📣 ONE:

Part 2 of the "Exploring Alternative Futures" report is still work in progress. I hope to publish that later this week. In the meanwhile, here are a few more teaser images:

📣 TWO:

Save the date 📆 👈👍
Thursday, August 27th. Noon CST. I'll be hosting a Q&A with John Willshire, as he shares not one but several frameworks that you'll find absolutely fascinating. And useful. You won't want to miss this! I'll be sending a registration page tomorrow.

📣 THREE:

Mighty Together? 👀
(To the tune of Happy Together by The Turtles)

🎶

Imagine me and you, I do
I think about you day and night, it's only right
To think about complexity and how to be
So mighty together

🎶

So, here's the deal. I felt some isolation last week. While a big part of me cherishes quiet, productive time alone to think and work, I also know the value of community. And dialogue. And the potential for great things when you gather 2 or 20 or 200 people together. I had a few great 1-on-1 meetings last week, meetings that left me all the more energized and inspired. But how can I do this for all of us? Or, how can we create more of a community? There's a possible future where I just publish reports as an online lesson every few months, minus all the club stuff. But, I doubt things would be as good without human interaction. I can also host webinars and fikas and other online gatherings, but is this what YOU want? I can switch from Slack to something like circle.so, but will this encourage more dialogue? So many questions and ideas, but—I'd like to just listen. Listen to what ideas you have to make this more of a club. In terms of community, what are you expecting from a Mighty Minds Club? Or maybe, you like the passive reading/watching experience, and a community here just isn't for you. That's fine, too! I'd like know that. So, no survey, or form to fill out. Just, send me an email ( stephen@poetpainter.com ), with your ideas and concerns and thoughts thus far… :-)

📣 FOUR:

Mini-presentation on Alternative Futures? 📆 ❓
I suspect many of you are still working your way through part 1 of the Exploring Alternative Futures report. Would you enjoy an online webinar where I hit the highlights? To be clear, I doubt I'd share anything NOT already in the written report, but… I know it's sometimes nice to (1) clear time in our busy schedules, even for things we value, and (2) it's nice to hear the narration of stuff, even if we could read the same thing. If this sounds like something you'd like, for this report and future reports, just let me know! ( stephen@poetpainter.com )

Interesting things I've been reading / learning about:

Designing and Differences

Last week started off with several threads threads hating on design 🤨. One thread stuck out for me, as, well… I'm not entirely sure I agree with how nearly everyone responded. I might generalize things and say it was a narrow response to a poorly written sentence taken out of a broader context. Read it, and the comments, and see what you think.

Here's my 2¢. I absolutely believe in the "distinct value of difference" as one person commented. "Colonial design" practices are a bad thing. Design that is not inclusive, or comes from a place of white male privilege, is not good design. We are all unique and diverse as human beings. This brilliant 1 page 'comic' from Nick Sousanis illustrates this point quite nicely.

Now that you know where I stand, here's why the reaction concerns me:

1). As an author, I try to be incredibly thoughtful about what I write. But, some thoughts take more than a sentence or paragraph to unpack; I fear that someday, someone, will take something I've written out of context and mischaracterize my intentions.

2) Back to Norman's point about "fundamental principles of designing for humans…" I believe there are both social constructs (that we're often not even aware of) and more fundamental human universals. In my book Figure It Out, there's an entire chapter about colors. But it's not necessarily about colors. I mean, yes, on the surface it's about colors, because (as I state) color is "without a doubt, the visual element that is most often misunderstood and misused." But the chapter is about more than colors. While writing about color, I somehow backed into Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate. The essential question is this: Do we all see the same colors in the rainbow? A universalist would argue yes, what we see as colors are the wavelengths of light visible to the human eye, so why shouldn't we all see the same colors? (With exceptions made for color blindness.) A relativist would argue that what we see correlates with what we think, and what we think correlates with language; if we don't have a word for a particular color, we might not see that color. We see what we've named. And here's the conclusion: It's a both/and situation. As I write in the book:

We see in our exploration of color this pattern: While many of the absolutes we cling to are social constructs (varying across cultures and over time), behind these changing constructs we also find some universal human constants.

With Figure It Out, Karl and I both wanted to dig deeper, and unearth those mostly timeless, fundamental ways of working with information—ways that don't change across time and culture. Ways we use space to hold meaning. Timeless ways we interact with information. When analogies work, or don't work, across cultures. What we see when we see colors. Fundamental things! And the conclusion? Human universals fall up and down a zoom level, from things we all share in common by nature of being bipedal humanoid creatures to the peculiarities of being born into a particular culture and community at a particular point in time or the peculiarities of being wired or created differently.

On Democracy

We'll soon be talking about "both/and" tensions. So naturally, this tweet from Adam Grant stood out for me:

Great societies offer quality of life, not only economic growth. Opportunity for all, not only some. Collective purpose, not only individual freedom.

This is in reference to "The Unraveling of America: How Covid-19 Signals the End of the American Era", an article that Grant calls "the most thought provoking piece of 2020" (whether you agree with the thesis or not). I'll confess something: Part of the reason we started with Alternative Futures was a selfish one—as an antidote to the kind of future described by articles such as this one. As a 'designer,' I'd like to imagine—and build—a future other than a 'collapse' scenario.

So here's where the week got more interesting. I co-presented at a meetup last Thursday. The topic? "Reinventing Organizations for a Better Future." We were looking at organizations where you see things like self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. Think Patagonia, Morning Star, etc. As if there was some cosmic thread (or pattern recognition) stringing things together, one of my co-presenters kicked things off with this slide about… 🥁 democracy!

This made me pause, and reflect: If Inclusive Authority, Relational Parity, and Social Involvement are "founding principles of our democratic way of life," how are doing? If this was a scorecard, how would we (USA) score? For that matter, how would a lot of countries score? 🤔 And maybe it's the cynic in me, but I want to ask when (throughout history) have we ever scored high on these principles?

Onto something lighter…

Creative Differences

As some of you know, I'm a huge fan of the TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender. For all my enthusiasm for the show, I had serious concerns when Netflix announced a live action adaption of this anime series. But, these fears were somewhat assuaged when I also learned that the show's creators would be at the helm. Well, that's no more. In an open letter to Avatar: The Last Airbender fans, showrunner Michael Dante DiMartino shared what has to one of the most eloquently written "creative differences" announcements I've seen. 😢

Quadruple Loop learning

In my SXSW talk on The Future of Design, I briefly mentioned double loop learning (it's near the bottom). Well, forget double-loop, or even triple-loop learning, here's a thread from Pavel A. Samsonov on quadruple-loop learning!

Clever Graphic Design

Do you love clever graphic design? I love clever graphic design. Check out these creative "Wear A Mask" posters from Eric Berlin.

2020 Tech Trends

The Future Today Institute's annual report on tech trends is now out. I've only had a few minutes to glance at the trends and highlights, but… it's more alarming than exciting. Time to put those design and futurists muscles to work, to think more broadly about the kinds of futures we'd like—and not like—to build.

Personal Matters:

Wow. What a rollercoaster of a week. So much I could share. With such a mixed bag of wild events and emotions, any one of which might turn into a long, rambling post, I'm going to stop myself. Besides, haven't I already injected more than my share with longer than usual commentary on things I read this week?

I will say this:

Wednesday was a great heads down time. Wednesday was great. I got a lot of work done on Wednesday. 😬

And this:

Back in May, I decided to start a thread of little things that I'm either grateful for or that bring me joy. It's been fun to add to this thread over time, and later revisit all the many things for which I'm grateful. Behind the scenes, I suspect there's a correlation between difficult circumstances and me adding to this thread. 🙃

Random:

• Fangates!
• Fruits & veggies, before and after
• "Coddiwomple"
• Math Cartoons

Quote of the Week

"All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life." —Wade Davis [source]