Seeking Transformation? Study for an interdisciplinary PhD at the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability

Our Campus resides near this Lake

“Education is the science of relations”

Charlotte Mason,

the founder of our Lake District Campus in 1892

Next year the University of Cumbria launches the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability. As Director of the new Institute, I am currently welcoming inquiries about potential PhD research. We will accept six PhD students, whether full time in residence (typically 3 years), full time away (typically 4 years) or part time (residence or away (typically 5 years). There is one opportunity for receiving a bursary to cover fees. The Institute is based in the heart of the beautiful Lake District in the UK, in the village of Ambleside, with Campuses also in Lancaster and Carlisle.

The Institute has a specific research focus, about which it welcomes proposals.  This is in the field of “transition”. All our work on leadership and sustainability seeks to enable personal and collective transitions to living in harmony with each-other and the planet. Leadership that makes a positive difference to communities and environments is the only leadership worth practising or learning. To us, sustainability means that everyone thrives in harmony with the biosphere and future generations. That does not mean maintaining or spreading a particular way of life, but a transition from behaviours and systems that are destructive, towards those that restore the environment and support individual rights, wellbeing, and community. It implies a systemic shift; large numbers of persons and organisations acting in a significantly different way. A transition to sustainability involves promoting ecological integrity, collective wellbeing, real democracy, human rights, support for diversity, economic fairness, community resilience, a culture of peace, compassion and inquiry, and the appreciation of beauty.

Studies of positive transformations suggest this shift will require interacting cultural, economic, technological, behavioural, political and institutional developments at multiple levels. Leaders during social transformations appear to have transcended a concern for self, yet sufficiently sustained their wellbeing, and empowered others. Therefore our work seeks to connect the systemic and the personal, and mobilise insights from diverse schools of thought on how transformations occur. Consequently, our research focuses on actionable knowledge, action research, combining diverse disciplines, linking local with global, and learning from old and new teachings that arise from diverse cultural settings. With us, you will not gain a straight-jacketed PhD in management, or politics, or sociology, but produce insight that is highly relevant and interdisciplinary.

Within the framework of transition, we are particularly interested in three areas.

Transformative Leadership: how to encourage the attributes and competencies that enable someone to participate in social transformation; how organisational and societal transformations occur; how to encourage personal transformations and wellbeing through learning experiences.

Innovative Resourcing and Exchange: innovative ways for people and organisations to share, swap, rent, or exchange, with or without official money; sharing economy, collaborative consumption, complementary currency; implications for business development, international development, and policy; implications for donors and foundations, including more catalytic and transformative philanthropy.

Scaling-Up Transitions: approaches that hold potential for the scale of change required by current global challenges; public policies for scaling social innovations; transformative cross-sectoral alliances; disruptive innovations in existing markets and industries.

If your research interests relate to this, please read on about our approach, to consider whether to submit an initial inquiry.

At the Institute we will combine what is normally expected for PhDs, with our own particular emphasis on purpose-led inter-disciplinary actionable research. Many people are unaware of what researching for a PhD involves, and mistake it for the writing of a thesis/book, or the winning of a credential. The thesis and the credential are the results, but the PhD process is about becoming a reflective and skilled researcher and communicator of research. Therefore PhD research with the Institute will involve the supervisor helping the doctoral candidate with most of the following elements:

• developing and applying professionally ones sense of social purpose and without a completely fixed view. Specifically, we are interested in inquiries in personal and collective transition to fair and sustainable societies (broadly defined)
• learning how to research (how to turn ideas, beliefs or doubts into inquiries with suitable research; which means learning about ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies, methods)
• learning how to assess existing intellectual disciplines for the way they can both inform and restrict inquiry on the chosen topic; some sociology plus at least one other social science discipline are expected (relevant subjects include management, design, international development etc)
• unlearning some existing assumptions in ways that help one to become critically reflective yet action-oriented in all aspects of life and work
• learning how to analyse primary “data” of forms relevant to one’s chosen inquiry and to develop findings that are relevant to broader contexts (data can include lived experience; but then one needs to learn how to analyse ones experience, not just re-tell or re-articulate it)
• learning how to identify findings that both contribute to existing fields of knowledge, but also a particular field of practice (i.e. to seek both academic and non-academic relevance for ones work)
• learning how to communicate findings in ways that reach people in academia and beyond, including presenting findings in ways that can inform education (such as online or in-person lectures)

Proposals need to reflect some of this journey, and a thesis will need to demonstrate these outcomes were pursued and somewhat achieved. Myself and my co-supervisors will help doctoral candidates along this journey: you don’t have to have everything mapped out already, but be open to this depth of inquiry. Information on what I do is on the University website.

Still interested? Then please send me some information about yourself and your idea in the following format, by December 17th 2012.

Your Idea: Tell me in half a page what your area of research is, what your overall research question might be, why it is relevant to leadership or sustainability or transition, what existing research you have done on it, what stakeholders you have engaged about your research idea, and what existing theories/disciplines (if any) you think are relevant to it. If you have a provisional research question, then include it.

Your Motivation: Tell me in half a page why you want to explore this, in terms of your personal and professional development. Also explain how you will fund, or seek to fund, yourself, and what format you would go for (full time, full time away, part-time)

Please attach a one page CV and a sample of existing writing, ideally already published.

That is 2 pages in total (1 on research and 1 on CV), and a piece of writing.

Provide a skype ID or google talk ID so that we can interact more easily (my skype: jembendell).

I will contact you within one month of you submitting your information, potentially to discuss further your ideas and help you prepare a full proposal to the University.

Please note that information on our Institute is not yet available online – by joining the Institute you will help to shape our emerging programmes.

Sincerely
Dr Jem Bendell
Professor of Sustainability Leadership
Director, Institute for Leadership and Sustainability
University of Cumbria, UK

jem dot bendell at cumbria.ac.uk

What has Wikileaks got to do with sustainability?

People working on the environment, human rights, and social progress have not always had an easy relationship. The idea of “sustainable development” that first became popular 20 years ago was meant to bring them together. Instead, it has enabled an obsession with profit making to creep into thinking and practice in most areas of environment, rights and social progress. On the positive side, that has led to business and banks engaging with these issues more than they might otherwise – something Ive been involved in for the last decades. But what might have been lost in that process?

A speech on rights and media freedoms was the keynote at a festival to celebrate what an amazing future we have ahead of us if we embrace the transition to sustainability. In Sweden, at FuturePerfect, Wikileak’s editor in chief, Julian Assange, delivered a recorded speech from the Embassy where he has been given asylum by Ecuador.

SBS TV focuses in on laptop as Assange audio address played at FuturePerfect Festival

What has Wikileaks got to do with sustainability? Here are some highlights from the talk, and some reflections on what they mean for the “sustainability profession”, by which I mean those of us who have day jobs working on the social and environmental aspects of business, finance and economy.

Assange believes free media is critical to us understanding our society and what challenges we face. Thats key to enough people organising to promote sustainability:

“there is no civilisation, there is no society without media. That is: let’s take away all media, let’s take away all mediums, let’s take away all ability for humans beings to communicate with each other in the present and also it will learn from past experiences to teach the future. If there is no communication between people, if every person is entirely isolated like a tree in a forest, then clearly there is no civilisation and there is no society.”

“With the best possible communication, with the best possible ability to learn from our experiences, we have a chance of not simply doing the dumb thing. We have a chance of being more civilised to each other, we have a chance of avoiding pitfalls that have been discovered in the past.”

He also explains that our media is now so controlled by incumbent interests, that it marginalises critique, or those who want to see a transformation in society, such as towards a more sustainable one:

“Now the [corporate] media insofar as it is successful and is profitable and widely distributed, as an industrial body is inherently corrupt. And to understand where the corruption comes from, first of all see that an industrial body, an organisation that becomes powerful in influencing others, is able to manufacture consent and suppress dissent. As a result, the people who work within it, and those proprietors who own it, are invited to sit down at the table of power and are given certain concessions in their life and their business practices. They thereby become part of the very establishment that they are meant to be policing.”

The internet provides us with an opportunity to communicate and better understand our common predicaments, but not one that isnt being counter-acted by the amount of content produced by mainstream media:

“it is clear that most of the mainstream media outlets in Sweden are able to publish a truthful article on even perhaps the most controversial issues. But what they cannot do is show any sign of an institutional agenda to do so. They cannot publish in volume on those issues. Of course, when we are dealing with politics, we are dealing with perceptions en masse. And perceptions en masse are affected by communications en masse. It is not enough to simply reveal the truth in one isolated article or one isolated tweet; what is important is to have the truth revealed en masse, where people can see it en masse and where opinions can be affected en masse.”

The answer, Assange says, is therefore for all of us, in our personal and professional lives, to become engaged in developing and scaling up alternative media. Many people working on sustainability are working towards a better future, and can sometimes forget that may be taking for granted existing hard one freedoms and situations. Assange reminded participants at the conference of the situation facing many people today:

“We face a choice of  whether we can have something not just for our grandchildren but even  something for ourselves,” he noted. “We are rapidly approaching continuous war, in fact most of the Western countries have now been involved in war over 10 years and are being
increasingly involved. We see a tremendous increase in the size of intelligence agencies; the border between police and military is starting  to collapse, with the weaponisation of police; increasing amount of body armour that police have. Across the world we see a collapse in the rule of law, politicised and arbitrary justice, with U.S. assassination lists approved by the President in secret with no due process; the continued  detention without charge of children in Guantanamo Bay for over 10 years with no prospect of release.Mass surveillance being introduced into every country with no effective oversight by the population.  The linking up of international companies and networks of influential people of the banking people, all these people lifting up the democratic and electoral control of their respective population bases.”

In the past decades “sustainability” has become a profession, with people working in business, government and civil society on various aspects of the agenda. It is useful therefore, to be reminded of the insights of those who are activists, people who take personal risks and do not have to worry about their employer or client.

“We face a serious global crisis, so we must understand that this is not a choice about doing the right thing, this is not a choice about whether we
appear to be moral, this is not a choice about whether we make friends, or are approved as an effective member of society. We face a choice of whether we will have a civilisation that is civil or not.”

So what should sustainability folk do?

“first of all we must understand the problem, we must understand the severity of the problem, we must tell the others the severity of the problem, we must explain that it is not a choice, that is not something we could get out of, that there is a very real chance of a global technological and political dystopia appearing…”

Thats an useful reminder of speaking it as you see it, rather than worrying about how to frame your message in a positive tone that will help sell some products or votes.

“Then we must link together with people with a similar understanding, we must invent new technological means to fight fire with our own form of fire, we must have absolute unity and determination in the response. If we look back at the previous resistance struggles, similar phenomenon that occurred in the past, that is what has held the day in the end. Unity, determination, understanding and creativity, looking for every possible venue where the forces of darkness can be held back, that is the only way that we are all going to survive that ongoing threat that is against everyone.”

So what has Wikileaks got to do with sustainability?

In a field in Sweden, I learned that we should, sometimes, ditch our silos, labels, and professional affiliations in order to get a better sense of the interconnected causes of the various problems we face. If sustainable development is to be a true integration of social, enviornmental and economic priorities, then we need to lose the blinkers that our desire for an easy life have given us.

You can hear the speech or visit the organisers of FuturePerfect to see more about this great festival project. Im proud to have been associated with the organising of it, and look forward to more conversations and celebrations of how to be fully awake, connected and hopeful in our work at these critical times.

Elegant Disruption

Just over five years ago I began working on the luxury industry.  I thought, why cant these elite brands not excel in social and environmental performance? I researched, wrote and produced the report Deeper Luxury for WWF-UK, and it triggered a bit of a furore in the fashion press and wider luxury industry (about 8000 sites now link to the report). 5 years on, I’ve helped some luxury companies with their social and environmental impacts. But I havent seen much change. Some large firms like PPR have embraced the agenda, although we wait in anticipation for more results, in terms of positive social and environmental outcomes. In the 5 years, what inspired me the most were the entrepreneurs I met. People who were creating businesses to address social and environmental problems, and targetting the luxury segment as a way to do that. I began to realise something might be in this – that these entrepreneurs might be shaping the future of luxury, and that they might be revealing a new way we can engage in social change. In the new study, I profile sustainable luxury firms Elvis and Kresse, Tesla Motors, Shokay, Source4Style, Rags2Riches, Positive Luxury, Timothy Han and Nue Luxe… It’s called “Elegant Disruption: How luxury and society can shape each-other for good”. It took about a year to write, as it involved a lot of conversations to understand just what the potential of luxury might be to influence social change. Ill be presenting it at conferences in Brisbane and Barcelona in the coming weeks.

Abstract, August 2012.

From http://www.griffith.edu.au/business-government/asia-pacific-centre-for-sustainable-enterprise/publications/working-paper-series/issue-9
This paper outlines the contemporary luxury sector, showing it is global, thriving and influential. It shows how creative destruction is typical in most industry sectors, including luxury, and how disruptive innovation by entrepreneurs is key to that process. It proposes that the current time is potentially disruptive for incumbent luxury brands and groups, due to five key trends that are beginning to re-frame the markets that luxury brands sell to. Sustainable luxury entrepreneurs from USA, UK, Philippines, India, Argentina, China and Hong Kong are profiled and described as  pursuing “elegant disruption”: a well-designed intervention in markets that both uses and affects aspirations in ways that change patterns of consumption, production or exchange, for a positive societal outcome. The paper reviews the response of mainstream luxury brands to the sustainability agenda, proposing some possible reasons why they appear to be encumbered in embracing this agenda fully. Some of the paradoxes in the notion of “sustainable luxury” are described, in order to draw implications for both the luxury industry and people interested in positive social change. The paper draws upon the authors five years of interaction with the luxury industry on sustainability issues, and is therefore written as a “first person inquiry” and draws upon principles of “appreciative inquiry” in documenting the breakthrough approaches of some sustainable luxury entrepreneurs.

Download PDF (3.1 MB)

Award for Outstanding Paper 2012 on Scaling CSR Standards

Yesterday I was awarded a prize by Emerald publishers for Outstanding Paper 2012. Here is my recollection of I said during the cocktail party at the EABIS colloquium, IMD, Lausanne, July 3rd, 2012 (minus the dirty joke).

Getting grips with the mic before remarks at EABIS/IMD

Thank you for the Outstanding Paper award 2012. The paper is about mainstreaming innovations in sustainable and responsible business; about ways governments can help to scale up positive innovations. In the aftermath of the Rio conference, talking about progress in government policy could seem rather naïve. However, this paper shows what some governments are already doing with innovative policies to scale voluntary initiatives. Since the first Rio summit 20 years ago businesses and NGOs have worked together to create innovative certification systems. They are widespread, but they are not mainstream. For instance, the certification system of the Forest Stewardship Council, which was the focus of my very first job after leaving university, now accounts for about 11% of the world’s trade in wood and wood products. That is great, but it also means that 89% of wood products could come from trashed forests. Some governments, from all continents of the world, have been adopting innovative policies to help scale such voluntary initiatives, to achieve public goals. We present a typology of those policies.

The paper grew out of a UNCTAD study I worked on, which also informed the G20 discussions on greening international trade. So I thank my colleagues at UNCTAD who are coauthors of the paper. The support from Griffith helped me to re-purpose the research and set it in a wider context to share with academe. My research has always been shaped by what I considered relevant to change, whether in policy or practice. I haven’t always been able to have it published academically, and have previously been rejected for being too interdisciplinary. So I’m grateful for this new journal and the accolade from Emerald publishers. I supports the notion that theory should be the servant, not master, of our inquiry, and that disciplines should be our foundations, not cages.
—

The Outstanding Paper 2012 is available for free download for another month:

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/authors/literati/awards.htm?year=2012&journal=sampj

Jem Bendell, Anthony Miller, Katharina Wortmann, (2011),”Public policies for scaling corporate responsibility standards: Expanding collaborative governance for sustainable development”, Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, Vol. 2 Iss: 2 pp. 263 – 293

The answer to financial chaos lies on an island in Sweden

The financial crisis is actually a monetary crisis, and you can do something about it now.

On an island next to Stockholm, leaders in systemic solutions to financial chaos are gathering at a sustainability festival. Join them at the Future Perfect festival in Stockholm on 23-26 August, and hear a panel on monetary reforms and innovations for sustainability, and a workshop for executives who want to start, scale or participate in alternative means of exchange.

Panel: “Currencies of Transition: monetary reforms and innovations for sustainability.”

Chair: Professor Jem Bendell (Lifeworth Consulting, Community Forge and Griffith Business School)

Ben Dyson, director of Positive Money, which campaigns for a systemic solution to monetary crises, by full reserve banking.

Josh Ryan Collins, New Economics Foundation, the Brixton Pound and co-author of “Where does money come from?”

Lynnea Bylund, Board Member, Ormita, the international business barter network.

Matthew Slater, Board Member, Community Forge, a leading provider of open source software for community currencies, and editor of Community Currency magazine.

The panel will address the questions: Is a fair and sustainable economy possible with our debt-driven money system? If not, what needs to change? What is being done already? What can we do to get involved, personally and professionally? How can we make this a movement? What mistakes can we avoid?

Workshop: “How alternative exchange systems work and how to get started”

Trainers: Professor Jem Bendell and Matthew Slater

The trainers work with Community Forge, which provides free open source software for community currencies. This video explains why, what and how Community Forge operates.

You will be able to interact with these experts and others attracted to the topic, at a world class music festival! To book your tickets to the festival, visit http://www.futureperfect.se

The workshop will also be offered in Greece in the second week of October. Contact the European Sustainability Academy for more information.

Fixing the Global Jobs Crisis: time to leave assumptions behind

Mass unemployment is becoming a headache for all world leaders. At the World Economic Forums (WEF) in Davos, Bangkok and Istanbul, people were talking about how to address growing unemployment.

To find real solutions to this global jobs crisis we need to be clear on the cause of the problem. The conversations I heard at the WEF revealed widely shared yet false assumptions about key causes of unemployment. The key myths are, as follows:

Myth 1: “Unemployment is due to falling demand.”

Are people’s needs really falling? Or just the amount of money in circulation to employ people/assets to meet those needs?

Myth 2: “Unemployment is due to technology displacing human labour.”

Could we not design systems of ownership and revenue distribution so that the income from technology frees us to work creatively and caringly for each other? How can we govern technology to release us to a world of service, not a life of redundancy?

Myth 3: “Unemployment is due to the cost of hiring and firing.”

Why then do some countries with high wages and labour standards, like Scandinavia, have less % unemployment? Where would competition between nations to lower costs of hiring and firing lead us?

Myth 4: “Unemployment is due to a lack of skills and appetite for the new types of work.”

The world has more skilled labour than ever before, and more labour mobility than ever before, and many people with Masters degrees can’t get a job.

Myth 5: “Unemployment is due to the option to claim benefits.”

Why then was the existence of benefits not keeping people out of the workforce before the recession? Why do some countries with the most supportive welfare states, like Scandinavia, have less % unemployment?

These assumptions arise from a general lack of understanding about the first key function of a currency, which is to help connect assets, including people’s time, with needs. If a currency becomes scarce in an economy, then there is less ability for exchange. That means needs go unmet, and assets go underutilised. Its called unemployment.

I recorded a short interview for the social media corner of WEF in Istanbul to explain where we need to start looking for real solutions to the global jobs crisis.

Collaborative Consumption and Beyond

Do you have a car pool at work? Car-sharing revenues in North America have been predicted to reach US$3.3 billion by 2016. There are many start-ups in this field, including Zipcar, which floated last year for US $174M. Enabling the more efficient exchange and sharing of products and services, in order to increase human well-being while reducing the consumption of natural resources, is a key dimension to the sustainability transition. The increasing penetration of the internet means new systems of exchanging and sharing products and services, are growing, in many areas. Facebook’s CEO has even emphasised the potential for developing new sharing enterprises as key to its future financial success, after floatation.

These developments in “collaborative consumption” bring a new dimension to the existing forms of alternative exchange systems, such as business barter networks or countertrade agreements, and community currency systems that help connect underused assets with unmet needs. Countertrade accounts for around 20% of world trade, while one national barter network now involves 1 in 5 small or medium sized companies in Switzerland, amounting to over US$1.5 billion a year. The new sphere of peer-to-peer financial-lending has taken off, and predicted to reach US$5 billion next year. It appears to be a time of disruptive innovation through new forms of sharing, exchanging, renting and co-owning.

Some of these activities are important to sustainable development, and, therefore, to the broad field of responsible enterprise (whether we label our work corporate social responsibility, sustainable business, social enterprise, shared value, responsible or impact investment, or some other term). For business executives to contribute to a positive sustainability outcome from these developments requires enhanced understanding of how to explore ways to become involved, including by adapting their own business models.

Which means there is an educational need, for those of us interested in enabling the sustainability transition. Lifeworth Consulting is conducting research on these developments, for presentation in July at the EABIS colloquium at IMD (in Lausanne), and in September at the Necessary Transition conference at GBS (in Brisbane). So, if you are currently employed, and would like to receive the results of this research, please participate in our 5 minute survey, it would really help:

http://www.lifeworth.com/survey-responsible-enterprise-collaborative-consumption

Please, click that link!

Thanks, Jem Bendell

Lifeworth founder and Adjunct Professor @ GBS

Dear Economists – please throw new light on money

Dear Economists

It has come to my attention that you’ve taken a battering in the last few years. Apart from a handful of you, the massive failure to predict the financial crisis, and the peddling of tried-and-failed theories of how to get out of said crisis, seems to have diminished your profession’s standing. Some politicians are even listening to sociologists, who say you have have nothing useful to offer on systems for achieving greater well-being, rather than mere economic growth. Perhaps rather unkindly, some now wonder whether your assumptions about self-interest have been a severe case of projection.

I don’t like to see anyone in such a bind. Especially when I sense there is major opportunity for a turn around in your fortunes. Although I’m one of your poor-cousins (i.e. a sociologist), for the past couple of years I’ve been reading some economics, mostly on monetary systems, and mostly by those I think you call “heterodox economists.” As an active reader, I jotted down some questions that I wanted answering. As I read on, it seemed that these questions were not yet answered! I looked everywhere (well, at least not just on wikipedia) and could not find data on them. So if you work on the following questions, not only could your answers become seminal, secure yourself tenure, you might even gain a spot in the next ‘Inside Job’ movie! I hope you read on and come back with peer-reviewed articles in the coming years.

1) How much money is there is in the world, and how much debt? If the amount of debt is much higher than actual money, what mathematical models can you offer for how this will be resolved, and with what implications for overall utility?

2) Which governments do not issue bonds to private banks, or to (semi-)privately owned central banks, but issue their own money (or issue bonds to government-owned central banks that do not then sell those bonds on to private banks – the same as issuing their own money)?

3) Which governments used to issue their own money, but no longer do, and when did these changes take place?

4) How do the non-GDP aspects of the Human Development Index correlate with the periods and places of governments issuing their own money? (Just take out the “income” component from the HDI and if you have got the information on monetary policy and central bank ownership, then bingo).

I realise some of you may have a more neo-institutional approach (dare I say sociological?!), and are interested in how economics is discussed in the media, or used in public policy. So for you, I also have a couple of research questions to suggest:

5) Of the news coverage since 2008, what % of the coverage on “financial crisis” also mentions “monetary reform”? I ask, as when searching on Google, only 3% of websites mentioning “financial crisis” also mention “monetary reform”. If you find similar statistics from trawling databases of news coverage, could you create follow up questions to reveal why there is this lack of analysis?

6) How are countries receiving advice, assistance and training on monetary issues, and what interests and evidence are involved in that advice?

7) How many economists does it take to change a light bulb?

“As many as need the light.”

Ok, so I knew the answer to that one. But could the answer instead be “as many as know the light is needed?”

I’m asking these questions as they relate to my own interests in sustainable enterprise, exchange and development, and I’m not about to retrain in your wonderful arts (sorry, “science”). If you want to know why more non-economists would like you to research these issues, you can view my TEDx talk on the “money myth.” For some output from economists already engaged in related matters, I recommend “Where does Money Come from” by Professor Werner and colleagues. Other, fairly elementary, resources Ive listed on my blog.

So, dear economists, please throw new light on money. I’m waiting for illumination. Posting links to peer-reviewed work in the comments section below would be great.

Sincerely,
Professor Jem Bendell

Adjunct Professor at Griffith Business School
Distinguished Visiting Professor at IE Business School

In your town soon?

In 2012 Ill be in the following cities, so if you could organise a talk or seminar, please get in touch (more info on Lifeworth website)

Abu Dhabi, Bangkok, Beijing, Brisbane, Dubai, Hong Kong, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Paris, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, or Zurich.

The Word (cloud) on Davos 2012

It’s a packed agenda at Davos. So what does this elite multistakeholder gathering tell us of what leaders are thinking about? Its impossible to go to everything on the schedule, so I put the agenda through Wordle to get a sense of the topics. Unfortunately the word “Occupy” only appeared once, so didnt make it to the word cloud.
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What do you think? Something important missing from the agenda?

The content doesnt indicate the level of interest in the topics; and some sessions are so full I missed the sign up. A session on the art and science of happiness filled up super fast, yet the mental health session still languishes with single figure sign ups. Yet might our collective insanity be the one unifying thing we can start working on to create a better world? Or are we just too busy getting on getting on? I rest my case.

Later on I’ll do another word cloud, excluding the procedural words, to reveal some key themes. But now, time to run madly to the next session…