How images of Climate Change influence our perceptions

Where is the climate changing? If you put the words climate change into your search box and look at the images. We suspect that often you get images of polar bears standing on a small iceberg surrounded by open water, images of dry soil with cracks and crusts, and dramatic images of hurricanes, storms, bleached …

Global Warming -Thinking in Relations

We assume that the cause of the Global Warming and reduction of sustainability lies in typical Western mono-causal, unilateral, individualistic thinking. New concepts as have emerged in biomedical sciences and cellular biology as in physics are currently lacking in business and the public domain, let alone on an individual level.

Global Warming and Economic Theory

Fortunately, there are some initiatives to arrive at healthier economic theories. With difficulty, because there are hardly any media that write about these new quests. Names such as ecological economics, bio-economics, eco-economics or eco-capitalism characterize them.

Eco-conversationalists or Eco-mechanisms?

What have we taken for granted the last 50 years in the way we thought about how to counter global warming and increase sustainability? What can we learn from that to NOT do? What can we learn from that to do otherwise? What has been a seemingly ineffective mechanism for change?

Thinking about the Spread of the Coronavirus (2) – Concepts

In the crucial month of February, in those weeks before the major outbreak in Europe, there was still room to stock up on protective equipment, to scale up the laboratories, to expand the purchase and production of test materials, to prepare for the removal of serum with antibodies in healed patients. Only, it didn't happen. …

The Dominant Designing Idea in Organisations and Public Administrations

Managing organizations are in essence establishing coordinating mechanisms. Below we argue that most organizations use Control, that is setting up formal processes of assigning, evaluating, and regulating resources in order to accomplish an organization's goals. This is the generally accepted standard approach to organizing. But can we escape from that? Standard Thinking: Control Most organisations and governments …

Growing Up with Connected Private Watson Machines – Meaning of Life

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. In our post The 4th Industrial Revolution and the Meaning of Life we suggested some thinking steps …

A Totally Misused Concept: the Average

In our Thinkibility nibble What Is An Interesting Book? we suggested that books with intellectual value should be categorized by the publisher into categories: Mainstream Improvement Criticism Provocation and Alternatives We propose a strong candidate for category 4: Provocation and Alternatives: The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness Subversive Dispels a …

Thinking in Analogies

Many teachers in analytical/critical thinking and writing clearly forbid students the use of analogies, because, in one sense, all analogies are faulty. However, as George Lakoff,  known for his thesis that the lives of individuals are significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena, convincingly argues  that all our thinking is metaphorical. …

The Brilliant Failure Award – Thinkibility Nibble

Earlier in the post The Charm of Imperfection we wrote about figure-ground reversal or negative space: in art it is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space occasionally …