Accidental conversations

Valdis' brilliant reminders here about the capacity for resilience through net diversity remind me of a point I made in "Accidental Conversations" a few years ago, that we need to practice diversity in our conversations as well.This is the practice of sparking and nurturing tangents and lateral inquiries in conversations. Lateral inquiries are questions that take the conversation in new directions. Some of the best are questions like who you've seen lately, what you've been reading or listening to lately, what you've seen on Ted.com or YouTube lately, what you've been up to lately.These have the potential for a whole vibrant ecology of new discoveries and connections that we could never possibly anticipate, predict, or pl...

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Those close by, form a Tie

Birds of a feather flock together... so do entrepreneurs.Ed Morrison found some interesting research that examines the dense clustering of successful economic neighborhoods/clusters. This research is similar to that of Thomas Allen @ MIT, who studied how engineers and scientists worked, and from that came the Allen Curve, which shows the correlation between distance and frequency of communication in organizations. Both sets of research support what I have observed in social network analysis projects: those close by, form a tie -- and as a result get things done. In the age of the Internet, distance still matters! From Washington University...

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Bridge Art Fair, Miami, 12.08.07.

Special Thanks to Bridge Art Fair & Orleans Street Gallery for making this a possibility, and to Irene P�rez for photographic documentati...

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