January 17, 2010

Proper title when finished

This introduction is still in progress. I hope to have it finished later tonight (Sunday), but wanted to get it up to a location other than my hard drive. Comments, on everything from style to content, are appreciated on what is already here.

You wake up one day and the world is different. You may not be able to pin down in what way it is different, but you sense it. Maybe there is a plan that is about to come to fruition. Perhaps it is merely a shift in personal perspective that has opened up thought of new possibilities. A view point has shifted in some manner and the way you apprehend and anticipate the world has changed. Or someone else’s apprehension of you has changed which forces a corresponding change in your interactions. You have an intuition or a hunch and it mediates how you go about your day. You may never discover the cause of the shift and it may, with time, amount to a mere blip as the sensation sinks back into a prior status quo. Yet the cause may also seem obvious even if there does not appear to be a drastic difference with the day before. There may have only been gradual shifts that you could perceive that have, through some manner of consideration, amounted to more than you originally expected. Small, subtle differences suddenly seem gigantic in their compounded effects.

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January 7, 2010

Thinking difference

In July, 2003, the 9/11 commission released its final report. In it, the commission stated “[t]he most important failure was one of imagination.” (Executive Summary, pg 9) Although mentioned in news reports at the time, this statement was subsumed by an understandable desire to identify more concrete and specific failures within government agencies. But despite, or perhaps because of, the abstract quality of imaginative failures, it deserves greater scrutiny and understanding. After all, and argument could easily be made that all problems faced in this age are the result of failures of imagination, be they an inability to think of the unintended consequences associated with changes in scale or an inability to move beyond entrenched modes and models of what and how the world is and could become.

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