Glamour girl

Glamour used to mean "a magic spell".

That was a century ago. Today glamour is that elusive essence shared by famous people and beautiful objects. Cary Grant. Marlene Dietrich. Arches with stained glass windows. Apple electronics with not a cord in sight. Sleek powerful motor cars. Flights to exotic destinations.

Wearing a pair of sunglasses, which is, of itself glamorous, Virginia Postrel, explores what contributes to this elusive quality.



Glamour is about transcending the everyday, to live in a different world, a little distant. That's why the subject is looking elsewhere in glamorous photographs and paintings. A bit above and beyond the ordinary. But not too far above, so we can still identify with the subject.

Glamour can be the myth that grows up around the founding of an empire in a garage, like Hewlett Packard. Or the stunning beauty and expanse of outer space. The sleek, sweeping lines of a locomotive or airplane. Retouched. Stylized. Sometimes in false colors. As in fabulous books. Or architectural photography. Or stark landscapes.

It's falsification for a purpose. To illuminate. Glorify. Idealize. Dramatize. To create an illusion. Perhaps a little dangerous, because the magic spell is not in your interest. Or Sprezzatura, the art that conceals art.

So here is a workshop to explore the world of glamour:

1. What for you are the qualities of glamour? e.g. perfect beyond belief.
2. If "glamour" is about transcending "the everyday", to live in a different world, to be mysterious, a smidgin beyond the ordinary, in an idealised perfect place, explain how each one of these is glamorous. Nicole Kidman. Cary Grant. Tiffanys. 5th Avenue. Aspen. Airline pilot. Couturier.
3. Describe a holiday destinaton that is glamorous.
4. What lifestyles/work are glamorous, extraordinary, exotic and perfect and why?
5. Choose a product that could benefit from some glamor. What can you do to make it more ideal, extraordinary or mysterious with sleeker lines and a perfect skin.
6. One of the original meanings of glamour was "a magic spell". If you could cast a spell over your life so it was more glamorous, what would you be/do?
7. Recall and describe a landscape or cityscape that felt glamorous when you were there.

The seventh kingdom

For someone who writes about technology, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, seems somewhat ambivalent, especially when he takes the cynical view that "technology is anything invented after you were born" or "technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet."

To better understand technology he poses the question "what does technology want?", the topic of his forthcoming book, and asks us to think about the parallels between technology and life.

At the Big Bang, everything was squeezed together so much there was no room for any difference, but as the universe expanded, the space for variation increased dramatically. Life has explored these emerging possibilities, and is now found everywhere on earth, even in cores of deep-drilled rock, under miles of ice or in the driest deserts.

He presents a concentric model of evolution on planet earth. More like the spreading ripple on a pond. Each and every organism highly developed. Not the climb-the-ladder-of-life model which leaves our simpler cousins on the bottom rungs.

Each form of life has experimented to the same degree about "how to do life". Our fellow organisms have explored every possible nook and cranny. They have developed a seemingly endless variety of body designs that range from the simple to the complex, the bizarre to the beautiful and from the minute to the gigantic. Each has developed it's own specialized way of earning a living or reproducing.

There are six kingdoms - plants, animals, fungi, protists, bacteria and the archae bacteria. Archae bacteria were first detected in extreme environments such as volcanic hot springs, but have since been found in many other environments. Protists are simple cellular organisms such as single-celled protozoa which are animal-like or plant-like such as algae, or fungus-like such as slime-molds.

As life has evolved it has become more sociable. Rather than merely living off an inanimate substrate most life forms are now surrounded by and interact intimately with other life forms as symbiants, hosts, predators and prey.



Kelly explores how technology has evolved and shows that just as life experiments with new possibilities, technology allows us to do the same and has the same general features. Technology is everywhere humans go. From the simple personal to the complex planetary-wide. Tools have become adapted to all kinds or human needs. And just like life, tools designed for yesteryear, live on alongside more complex and powerful technologies. And from new combinations of the old and the new, new stuff emerges.

He argues that technology should be regarded as the seventh kingdom as life and technology share five key features - ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity and socialization. A powerful cosmic force that helps us accelerate evolution. That obliges us morally to invent new technologies so everyone can express their "true difference: with others. And become more than we could otherwise be.

So here is a workshop to explore some of these ideas:

1. If technology is anything that was invented after you were born, what is technology?
2. If technology is something that does not quite work yet, give examples of technology?
3. If we look at the world through the eyes of technology, what does it want?
4. Ubiquity: Make a list of all the different kinds of technologies in your home or office, think doors, beds, toasters, pens, photocopiers etc.
5. Complexity: Give examples of how technologies for cooking, writing, travel OR entertainment have evolved and become more complex.
6. Specialization: Give examples of how technologies have become more specialized e.g. different kinds of technology for entertainment, travel, conducting/observing experiments.
7. Socialization: Give examples of how technologies depend on their connections and interaction with other technologies for their existence e.g. motor car, freeways, gas station, shopping mall, hotel/motel.
8. If technology is becoming more sociable, forecast some of the consequences of this e.g. machines talking directly to other machines, exchanging information.
9. If technology can be regarded as an accelerator of evolution, what might be in store for the human race?

Happiness for all

If you're angry, anxious or depressed, there's new hope. Richer, happier lives are now possible thanks to a new approach to mental and emotional well being called positive psychology.

And there are better days for the rest of us who live normal or contented lives. We too can now become happier and more successful. All thanks to Dr. Martin Seligman, who founded the field in 2000.

It's goodbye to the old disease model that dominated our thinking for much of the 20th Century. Back then we treated alcoholism and depression just like any other medical problem, as victims of pathologies rather than life choices. With drugs and psychological methods. The best we could hope for was to reset our misery clocks back to "zero" to live "empty", inert and unfulfilled lives.



Seligman discovered there are very few differences between happy and sad people. Happy people are not better looking, richer, fitter or more religious than miserable people. Just very social, with secure romantic relationships and a rich repertoire of friends.

And there are three kinds of happy lives, in ascending order of enjoyment:

* the pleasant life. We enjoy as many pleasures as we like, but be warned. The effects wear off through frequent use (or over indulgence) via a process of habituation. And because 50 per cent of the benefits are genetic or cultural -we get that from our parents - there's not much you can change.

* the engaged life. We become so absorbed in our work, parenting, leisure activities, games or romance, we enter a state of peak experience called Flow, where time flies and we are completely in harmony with the world around us.

* the meaningful life. We pursue relationships that make a difference to our lives. We apply our best strengths in the serv ice of a purpose greater than ourselves.

So here's a workshop that prescribes some of Dr. Seligman's positive approaches. The activities draw on skills quite unlike the expert-driven disease model:

1. Fun - Brainstorm a list of fun activities. Design a day when you can enjoy them all.
2. Gratitude - Write a testimonial to a person you have never properly thanked who did something enormously important that changed your life.
3. Build on strengths - Make a list of your five greatest strengths and your life partner's five greatest strengths. Then design/describe an evening/date with your life partner where you can make use of them.
4. Serving a higher purpose - Think of someone or some group in need. Design/describe what you will do to help them.
5. A beautiful day - Design yourself a beautiful day and use SAVOURING and MINDFULNESS to enhance the pleasures that flow from it.

Dire and not-so-dire-tribes

David Logan has been researching tribes for the past decade. Not the ancient or nomadic, but the tribes that dwell within 21st Century organizations.

He is the author of Tribal Leadership, the co-founder and senior partner of CultureSync, a management consulting firm. He also teaches management at the University of Southern California.

Logan says each of us lives in a tribe of 20 to 150 people. It's where all our work gets done and societies are created. Or so says his extensive research program involving 24,000 people in all kinds of organizations.

The yawning chasm between our widely differing tribal beliefs leaves organizations wide open for failure. It's no wonder we struggle to create new knowledge that is aligned with the emerging future. It's no wonder the collective jigsaw we create is often missing vital pieces. It's no wonder many people feel their opinions are never heard or acted upon. It's no wonder the future turns out to be different to what we expected. It's no wonder that some are able to say, "we told you so."



There are five tribal stages. Stage 1 (1% of us) is "Life sucks". Our members are desperate people who do whatever must be done, including bad stuff, in order to survive. Think gangs and prison inmates.

Stage 2 people (21%) believe "Our Life sucks". It's life on the treadmill, barely making ends meet, surviving by the skin of our teeth, the fun is always had by someone else.

Competitive, self-centered narcissists occupy Stage 3. That's 48% of us. We see the world through an "I'm great and your not" lens. It's all a zero-sum game. We believe that for some of us to gain, others must lose.

At Stage 4 (22%) "We're great". Our kind of people value creativity, having fun and "being a little bit weird". We find something to unite us, start doing stuff together, then we click as a group, and transform to a "we" kind of world. We shift from being motivated individualists to a tribe that performs remarkable feats. We are the first of the tribes to see ourselves as a tribe.

Just 2% of us ascend to Stage 5. For us, "Life is great". What we do is change the world. Our actions are determined only by our values. We serve a purpose, higher than ourselves. We comprehend all the levels, whereas lower level tribes can only understand the stage above or below them.

Tribal leaders have a role to play in expanding the influence of their tribes, nudging them forward to the next level. We also expand our influence by introducing other tribal leaders to each other.

The toughest task is to nudge Stage 3 tribes to Stage 4, from a zero-sum world to a world of abundance. For the fun-loving and creative stage 4 tribes there's not much incentive to go to the self-less noble life of a stage 5. Few make the journey anyway.

So here's a workshop to explore this space:

1. Brainstorm examples of each of the tribal stages. Stage 1 (Life sucks). Stage 2 (Our life sucks). Stage 3 (I'm great but you're not). Stage 4 (We're great). Stage 5 (Life is great).
2. What kinds of tribes live in your organization? Give examples.
3. If we believe "Life sucks" or "Our life sucks" why might our beliefs constrain what we can do with our lives/with our work?
4. You have the task of designing a corporate brainstorming event. All the tribes are mixed for maximum creativity. What must you do to ensure everyone "hears" each other?
5. How might tribes choose to differentiate themselves from tribes immediately higher or lower on the scale? Think about language, symbols, signs...
6. What kinds of cultural/communications difficulties might you encounter with a roomful of all the tribes?
7. Brainstorm a list of ideas to help/encourage/nudge Stage 3 (I'm great) people to explore the Stage 4 (We're great) tribal belief system.
8. Thinking about each of the stages, Stage 1 (Life sucks). Stage 2 (Our life sucks). Stage 3 (I'm great but you're not). Stage 4 (We're great). Stage 5 (Life is great), how could you get each stage to understand the beliefs/attitudes of the other stages?
9. You're the leader of a Stage 1 tribe, and can speak all the levels. What's stopping you from ascending to other levels?
10. What life circumstances might cause you to migrate to an early and unhappier stage of tribal development?
11. When you randomly introduce one person you don't know, to another person you don't know, how does that expand you and your tribes influence? Give examples of the possible effects/outcomes.

Mutual dependence or slavery?

Joshua Klein asks whether crows could be enlisted to do stuff for us like recover the millions of dollars worth of coins humans lose every year.

Or perhaps crows could learn to collect and dispose of garbage, the billions of pieces and tens of thousands of tons of packaging hurled out of car windows, that despoil our freeways and roads.

Thanks to us, crows are thriving. They have adapted, like rats and cockroaches, to benefit from human activities. They live everywhere that we do.

Crows are really smart. Really, really smart. Klein demonstrates how they quickly learned how to operate a "crow vending machine" that dispensed food in exchange for loose change.



Crow power presents a unique opportunity to offer a universal, standardized service, wherever they are located, which is everywhere, just like the internet, electricity and roads.

Perhaps crows could be enlisted to perform the repetitive and scalable tasks that we don't want to do. Collect certain kinds of bugs that eat crops most prone to attack. Trim hedges. Weed gardens. Harvest crops. Or clear gutters.

But the question remains, would such a relationship be really equal, one of "mutual balance" between humans and crows? Or would we humans be guilty yet again of enslaving a fellow species for our benefit.

Here's a workshop to explore the issues:

1. What other smart creatures could we enlist to help us perform useful roles for humans in a kind of "mutual interdependence"?
2. What are some of the repetitive tasks that crows could be enlisted to perform on our behalf, with a little training?
3. What is the boundaries/differences between "mutual independence", "slavery" and "service"?
4. What might be the possible consequences of enrolling many more other animals to become our servants of "mutual dependence" in addition to dogs, pigs, horses, cows and ducks?
5. What ethical issues does this idea of new "servant animals" raise?
6. For a long time, humans have asumed that what makes us different from other animals is our ability to evolve culturally as well as genetically. If crows clearly learn from each other (as do dolphins, monkeys etc), what differentiates us from these animals?
7. If we are only different from other animals by a matter of degrees what gives us the right to enslave/co-opt other species? Give your reasons why or why not.

Something out of nothing

Authors create their own universes, their own cosmology, says Amy Tan the mischievous author of The Bonesetters Daughter, The Joy Luck Club and Saving Fish from Drowning.

Which begs the question, "if there is a creator of the universe, is she a writer?"

Tan explains the ambiguity of the creative process to the TED crowd using a curiously warped interpretation of modern day physics. She equates the nebulousness or indeterminism of the creative act with the uncertainty principle of quantum dynamics and the "11 levels of anxiety" experienced by a writer with the 11 dimensions of string theory.

Tan jokes that creativity has three sources. Nature, nurture and nightmares. Nature involves some inherited genes. Nurture is a dash of childhood trauma. And the nightmares are the psychoses, depression and the temporal lobes seizures she personally has experienced.



Encouraged as a child to become a doctor or concert pianist, Tan chose to ignore her teacher's assessment of her literary talent of B/B+/B- grades and become an "artistic arranger of words".

On stage she is a living, breathing version of her own story telling process. She starts with nothing except some ambiguous concepts which seem unconnected - accidents, serendipity, ambiguity, balance, intentions, and peripheral exploring - then weaves them into a compelling narrative.

The creative act, she says, is about answering three questions. Why do things happen? How do things happen? How do I make things happen?

She asks if ideas turn up serendipitously just when you need them or do artists simply discover new ways of seeing the world and become aware of patterns that were already there.

She surmises the answer could be either/both, (just like the famous experiment where light passing through a slit behaves both as a particle and a wave - my words, not hers).

Tan also reveals that as she writes a story, she learns from the "life" experiences and interactions of the characters, and in doing so, she "becomes the story".

Over time, each story develops it's own internal consistency. She tells the story of meeting a man who created towers of rocks, large and small, perfectly balanced, one of top of the other, who explained the principle that "there is a place of balance" for everything in life.

But Tan also says that a light touch is required. Push too hard and creativity is stifled. Write around the periphery of what you don't know and something new emerges.

So here's a workshop to explore some of Amy Tan's ideas about the creative process?

1. What is the something in your nothing? What unusual pattern or thing have you observed/noticed or been amazed about lately to which you are attracted? e.g. the chewing gum stuck to the pavement.
2. Thinking about your unusual pattern/thing, in what other situations have you seen such a pattern, and why might it be interesting to others? e.g. the mess we humans leave behind, which we ignore in our daily lives.
3. Create a minor solar system of characters, and a scenario, to explore your interesting pattern/thing. e.g. the derelict sleeping on the pavement with accumulated junk/garbage all around, who dreamed of being a.....
4. How did your character get to be in this stuation?
5. As you start creating your character and the story, what can you now observe around you that you did not see before?
6. As you start creating your story, what do you learn from the character, and especially how does this learning enrich who you are?
7. If you were now faced with death, what stories do you now feel compelled to tell, as urgently as possible to your friends, family, the world?

Compassion and peaceful co-existence

Religious Historian Karen Armstrong made a 2008 TED Prize wish that has resulted in thousands of people around the world joining together to collectively create a Charter for Compassion so we can live together in peace, and leave the world in a better state for our children.

At the heart of all the world's religions is a Golden Rule, to "always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself. Yet religious people often ignore the Golden Rule at the heart of their belief system and define themselves by how different and right they are compared to others, rather than what they have in common.



When we don't live a compassionate life and go back to being thoughtless, selfish, spiteful and egocentric, we ignite the flames of hatred or mistrust. Such differences become a major source of conflict between the world's people. Then, when we discriminate against people on the basis of some perceived difference - their sexual orientation or gender - we become less than what we can be.

Living the compassionate life is not about feeling sorry for another - a narrow interpretation of compassion - but having the ability to to stand in another person's shoes and know how they would feel, and to be sensitive to how they see the world. When we live the compassionate life, we somehow transcend or transform ourselves, and become of greater value to each other and to the world.

Here's a workshop to explore the issues:

1. Describe how you like to be treated by others.
2. Describe all the the different ways you would NOT like others to treat you.
3. Give examples of what Rabbi Hillel, the contemporary of Jesus Christ, might have had in mind when he says "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor" when describing the Torah and all its ramifications.
4. Think about someone special who is very different to you. Step into their shoes. Describe them, their mental models, and how they might interact with the world.
5. Imagine yourself standing in that other special person's shoes, how might you now perceive your own mental models/world view?
6. What can you and that special person focus on jointly, to become friends so you and your two worlds can live in harmonious co-existence?