As individuals, we all have some healing to do as we emerge from the pandemic. The same is true of organizations. I’ve been reading Stuck?: Dealing With Organizational Trauma by Phillipe Bailleur, an organizational consultant who works with a living systems...
Nature can teach us a lot about the difference between facilitating organization and controlling a system. In fact, there seems to be hardly any controlling energy in nature at all. That’s because nature really doesn’t need a CEO at all. In nature, we...
My name is David Erskine and Dr. Kathleen Allen asked me to write a guest blog from just ten minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco since, seven Bay Area counties were the first in the country to shelter in place on March 15th, 2020 or The Ides of...
I read an article recently from the Human Adaptation Institute. They created a Deep Time experiment where 15 volunteers spent 40 days in a cave beneath the Pyrenees with no natural light or clocks. I was fascinated with this article for two reasons. The first was I...
Randori is translated to the term “taking chaos ” and it’s the final sparring test before an Aikido student becomes a master. The student starts at one end of the dojo and is given the task to get to the other end. Standing in between the student and the goal...
What can nature teach us about resistance? In nature, the species that gets to pass on their DNA to the next generation is the one that adapts to the changing external environment. It is survival of the “best fit” with changing conditions – not survival of the...
It is traditional to define an organization’s health by the amount of profit it makes. But how does nature define profit and what lessons and implications might it have for how we lead our organizations? In nature, profit is defined by the evolution of the system. As...
As we move through what seems like continuous disruption, I am developing short handouts to help people pause and check their default behaviors. The form below is a quick assessment to help you examine some of the leadership questions you may be using to frame an...
Babies can teach us a lot about a more natural way to learn, adapt and experiment. There isn’t one right answer, and perfectionism can’t be achieved in an ever-moving, living system. Nature is always experimenting, learning, and adapting. This always...
In his book, Physics of the Future: How Science will Shape Human Destiny and our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 Michio Kaku writes “…the future is already here; it is just unequally distributed.” In Physics of the Future Kaku shares his vision for AI, computers,...
