"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the...universe."  R. Buckminister Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969

I met Matt in 1976. He had created Renascence Library and was teaching a course called Redesigning the Future. It was there that I was introduced to Buckminister Fuller by reading his book, Intuition.  Matt had a long list of books, more than 500 that he believed necessary to read and understand if one was to successfully navigate the future and thrive well into the 21st Century.  His course brought the contents of these books alive and always he gave credit and recognition to the authors and their bodies of knowledge.  Some of the books explored ancient histories and others forecast futures.  The list recognized every field and every religion. Some were fiction, others non-fiction.

While my field was education, I had come to know that as a teacher, I should be reading a vast variety of books outside of my field.  Through the Learning Exchange, I was introducing teachers and children to a world of ideas and linking these ideas to their work, showing how ideas build upon each other.  Nothing came from nothing, but rather through the assimilation of a collection of thoughts and ideas perturbing our minds and catalyze new ideas... perhaps higher order ideas.  I take much joy in this reality.

So when Matt and I formed MG Taylor Corporation, we were careful to provide the genesis of our thinking... what was it that perturbed our minds to  create our body of knowledge?  We continued the 500 reading list, updating it as appropriate; we created models and methods, giving credit to the thoughts or work of others.  In many ways what we created together was totally unique to anything else happening around design, collaboration, group genius, probable futures, and systems theory, yet we recognized  these ideas were sparked from the thoughts and readings of others.  What we bought to them was our unique way of seeing the universe and how we could effectively contribute to the creation of a healthier world.  Our concepts were original and authentic enough to receive a patent for our work in 2001. More than twenty years had passed since the inception of MGT, and yet our body of knowledge was still original.

Today, more than 40 years have passed since we began our explorations, first separately and then together. Our ideas and work have mixed with other bodies of knowledge and spread throughout the world.  We have educated and trained thousands of people, and many of these early students have trained hundreds of others.  Many of these individuals have added to our body of knowledge and enriched it. Indeed, our work is succeeding in our original mission to change the way of working. This is goodness. 

What disappoints me, however, are the growing number of practitioners who claim to be leaders in the knowledge economy.  How can an individual or organization say they are doing knowledge work when they others work without giving credit where credit is due?  This does a huge disservice to those they are "imparting" their knowledge to.  They are simply providing information ... and the concepts cannot go deep and connect to an entire ecosystem of thought.  The ideas cannot grow and take root and create lasting change.  There is no knowledge or wisdom in this way of working.  The ideas will not be sustainable. 

Jonas Salk defined sustainable as "Are we being good ancestors?"  Simple.  It demands we ask ourselves to reach further into the past and the future than the moment of short-term profits. It is true that in a world of increasing mashups and Internet story circulation, it becomes more and more difficult to seek and recognize the history of ideas and give credit where credit is due.   Take MagicWorks, for instance.  I stumbled on this site and was disappointed that this site offered our body of knowledge as theirs. No where on the site was there an acknowledgement of our work.   (NOTE: MagicWorks founders have since apologized and explained how and why they avoided recognizing MGT's body of knowledge and established a reference page to the MGT body of work.)

It is such a joy when people write or call and ask if they can reference a Journal page or some work from my body of knowledge.  The simple request back is "Yes. Please tell me how you used it and the reactions from your participants or audience."     Matt and I, individually and together, developed MGT to be transformative ... to provide  synergies created through designing and crafting  environments, processes, and tools  to help shape a better, more just world. Buckminister Fuller says it correctly in the quote at the opening of this journal.

"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the...universe."  R. Buckminister Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969