Backstory

Many different people and experiences have influenced me. Here are some highlights from my backstory.

Adventure Playgrounds
There was a movement out of the UK in the 60's led by a fascinating character. The idea was to create playgrounds for children that would promote real learning by providing opportunities for serious exploration, role-playing, and group problem solving.

The playgrounds were usually built as a communal project and included some of the same things we still find in "ropes courses" designed for team building exercises - platforms connected by rope ladders with ramps and bridges over streams and all sorts of other intriguing objects and the tools to move and change them. I did research on this approach as part of my graduate work in cognitive development. I found that children in these environments tended to create wonderfully imaginative games - much more so in comparison to traditional playgrounds, which typically had basic equipment like swings or literal set-pieces like a cement fort where variations in use were limited. The slight element of risk (which would make it impossible to get an Adventure Playground "approved" in today's culture) made it much more exciting and motivating for kids and I observed that it tended them toward playing WITH each other against the challenge of the environment. I think this gives us a lot to think about vis-à-vis most of the environments we provide to work and think in. Are they evocative? Do they provide opportunity for creativity and adventure? Can people in them change and build in them?

Performance Art Online
David Rodale was the first person I encountered who used the medium of the net as a venue for interactive performance art. It was on The Source, one of the first commercial services to support an online community. It totally changed my concept of what was possible. David created a kind of net version of participatory cinema verite at a time when we were logging into text-only environments at 1200 baud. I wrote about The Longest Weekend as a tribute to David, who sadly was the first person I knew to die of AIDS. I think I only met David in person once, maybe twice. But I connected with him at a deep level online and I considered him one of my dearest friends. I think of him often and what he might have been able to do with the web medium today since he was a great graphic artist as well as a gifted writer. Missing him still makes me cry. And the power of the net to support that kind of relationship still amazes me.

Systems Thinking
I had a fantastic opportunity during the Carter Administration to be part of a team to create a program to select, train and support a new Federal Senior Executive Service. As part of our research, we interviewed top performing executives in all the different Departments and agencies to identify characteristics associated with effectiveness. Why were some able to achieve great things in spite of all the constraints of policies and inadequate resources while others made excuses? The one factor that seemed to make the most difference was something we called "systems thinking." The high performers understood the complex dynamic within which they were operating and could create and work with those dynamics to make things happen. I was fascinated by this notion and later explored this systems thinking construct in my doctoral research. One of my conclusions was that "systems thinking" was not just some kind of style or preference but was instead a fundamental form of cognitive processing. It makes sense that, if the universe were structured as a system at all levels (which is what I believe), our brains would be naturally wired up to comprehend things in terms of systems. While some people have developed this capacity to a greater extent than others, the ability to see and understand systems is part of all human cognitive development. This has fueled my interest in discovering ways to identify the extent to which someone has developed their systems thinking capacity already and what kinds of experiences and learning activities can help develop this capacity further.