These are a few of the books that we are either currently reading or that we pull off our bookshelf again and again. While each book is linked to Amazon, we suggest you first check with your local, independent bookstore, as most if not all of these titles should be available for order.
Check back often to see new listings, and be sure to recommend your classics to us.
Now You See It
Tags: Timely, Education
I am only a few chapters into this book and have already gained insight and renewed courage to speak up about the educational process we should be birthing and giving life to, rather than using energy to fight to keep the same system (even for good teachers) in place.
A good companion book is Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal
Tags: Timely, Education
Many of my assumptions about gaming were shattered as I read Jane's book. I have gained tremendous respect for games, especially those being developed for the greater good. McGonigal has done tremendous research and embeds this research in each chapter in ways that facilitated me coming to understand the great possibilities for many thousands, perhaps millions of us working together to solve wicked problems.
As a syntopical reading exercise, read this book with Now You See It and What Technology Wants
Tags: Perturbing
Since Out of Control by Kelly is one of my all time favorites I knew I would like this new one. While just beginning, it promises to be a great, perturbing read. I don't know yet how much of the book I will agree with, but I know I will not be the same person once I have finished the book. By the way, I am reading this on my iPhone! Yes, I thought it would be rediculous to read so long a book in my tiny little iPhone space. Not so. I read fast and keep my concentration more! -GT
Tags: Renewing, Synthesis
Brockman seeks out authors who are reshaping how we think about our minds. His contributers help us reframe the nature of being human and give us new (or very old) clues to how the mind functions. Throughout the book, we are reminded that it is not the bad apples who spoil everything. Rather it is the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Change the game and the way we see and organize, and the entire world can change.
Tags: Renewing, Synthesis
Here is another composite book by John Brockman. Cultures, like fish in water, are often invisible to us. It is difficult to know. The contributers in this book offer insights and a way to feel, absorb, and step out of time and place to come to know our human natures more directly.
Tags: Timeless
The lead in to his first chapter, The Reach of Explanations, tells the story of the book: Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, that when we grasp it -- in a decade, a century, or a millennium -- we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? John Archibald Wheeler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1986)
Tags: Delicious, timeless
I read this just before embarking on What Does Technology Want. They are great to read together, especially on iPhone! I was not disappointed in this book. I think Johnson is indeed pointing out where good ideas come from... And, I have to say, I am happy to acknowledge that DesignShops and PatchWorks are good proof of this. Environment, adjacent possibilites, fluid networks, hunches bumping into other hunches ... yes, that is the systematic discovery of new options. -GT
"There is an old Sanskrit word, lila, which means play. Richer than our word, it means divine play, the play of creation, destruction, and re-creation, the folding and the unfolding of the cosmos. Lila, free and deep, is both the delight and enjoyment of this moment, and the play of God. It also means love. Lila may be the simplest thing there is - spontaneous, childish, disarming."
And so the story begins and I follow with great pleasure... I finished the book today, reluctantly. It is one of those delicious books that does not want to be finished but savored page by page. I call this kind of book a gift to all humanity.
Free Play remains one of my most loved books. Yesterday I down loaded it to my iPhone so I could just have it near me. I can open it anywhere and find gold. Thank you Stephen for this wonderful inspiring book! - GT
tags: Resourceful
Linda Lambert and Mary E. Gardner have crafted a wonderful book about the changing nature of leadership. While highlighting the vision and characteristics that women are bringing to the table, both sexes will find value throughout the book. The authors have included many tables (what I call shift papers) indicating both subtle and dramatic changes in what matters as one steps up to take a leadership role in shaping both the present and the future. Both the authors have "teacher" in their DNA and the book offers many mentoring stories and opportunities for young women just emerging on the stage of possibility. I am included in the book under the sub-title: The Transforming Woman. Here the concept of sapiential leadership is featured. It is an honor to be included within the folds of this book.
Tags: Resourceful, Wayfinding
The more I come to learn about resilience, the more essential and guiding a quality it becomes to my design thinking. This is the first book I've read that is "about" resilience in eco and social systems. I can't imagine a better first book. -TJ
Tags: Research, Systems
Edited by Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling.
It will take me a long time to get through 500 pages of this book but it is well written for both scientific and lay readers. The authors are questing for a new theory of adaptive change. They believe previous theories which they call 1) Nature flat 2) Nature balanced 3) Nature Anarchic, and 4) Nature resilient all have some validity but each is incomplete and thus destructive to our stewardship of both human and natural ecosystems. The authors go on a heuristic search to find and document a 5th theory called Nature evolving. With this theory they are encouraging innovation opportunity for people to learn and prosper, one that incorporates responsibility to maintain and restore the diversity of nature, and that is based on a just and civil society.
From the back cover: "Resilience, timing, adaptation -- these are the three pillars upon which the emergent properties of interacting systems rest. When the systems are the economy and the environment, understanding of the relationships amonng these concepts is crucial. This volume does a better job of explaining how to manage both money and nature to ensure humanity's long-term future than any other work I know of. Read and reflect." John L Casti, Santa Fe Institute
Tags: Historical, Timely, Synthesis
Gail comments: "Timely, fun, important to my thinking about paradigm formation."
I read this book several years ago and I find myself coming back to and learning from Johnson's stories again and again.
Tags: Delicious, Community, Timeless
This is a most vital, interesting, and useful book about community design. Don't miss reading this classic. The book is basic about community in all of its complexity, beauty and simplicity... and yet so rare in reality!
Tags: Delicious, Classic, Gateway, Storytelling
This book is a classic. Kelly is a great story teller and these stories are about systems... The author leads us deep into the heart of complexity, systems, emergence and the new rules for understanding control in a complex, dynamic world.
It is available for free online as well as for purchase at Amazon.
With permission of the author, we've published chapter 4 and chapter 20 within our website. These are a couple of chapters we cite frequently in our work. You'll find links to these chapters scattered throughout our Journal pages.
This small book is a gem. It reminds us why conversations matter to us as individuals and to the communities where they happen. Most rich group processes are conversations. The author, Theodore Zeldin, is promoting a new conversation for the 21st Century. His work is passionate, playful, loving, and life giving. "... thinking is bringing ideas together, as ideas flirting with each other, learning to dance and embrace. ... Ideas are constantly swimming around in the brain, searching like sperms for the egg they can unite with to produce a new idea. The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense them, to recognize them as interesting." Conversations give place and respect to these lonely ideas. They forge community.
Tags: Historical Fiction, Scenario
"None of the happy conditions in Ecotopia are beyond our technical or resource reach of our society" claimed Ralph Nader with a quote on the jacket cover. And now, years later, the conditions are ripe and we have made many strides forward in our abilities to be Ecotopia. Perhaps, we should begin the revolution.
The Science of Synthesis explores the development of general systems theory and the individuals who gathered together around that idea to form the Society for General Systems Research. In examining the life and work of the SGSR's five founding members – Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, James Grier Miller, and Anatol Rapoport – Hammond traces the emergence of systems ideas across a broad range of disciplines in the mid-twentieth century.
"Imagine a world guided by the deeply held values that most Americans share. The Great Turning has the power to turn our country, and the world, to this more positive course." -Jim Hightower, columnist, radio host.
I am in the middle of this book. For me, it is essential reading for clues... although not a classic in the sense that I will return to it again and again. (Gail)
A fascinating, easy to read account of the design and facilitation methodology invented by Matt and Gail Taylor (of Tomorrow Makers) and the organization they founded, MG Taylor Corporation. Their system has enabled organizations of all sizes and kinds to solve complex problems and reach a level of sustained breakthrough thinking in a fraction of the time and with far greater results than are possible by other forms of strategic planning, problem solving, or group process.
Though the "state of the art" in the company's methods has progressed significantly since this book was published, the numerous interviews with Matt and Gail as well as clients, workshop participants, and knowledge workers offer a great introduction to the essence of MG Taylor's way of working.
Leaping The Abyss is available for free online at the author's website, as well as at Amazon.
tags: Organization, Leadership, Resilience
While not groundbreaking, an important book as it reinforces and reminds readers of the changing dynamics of organizations. One of the first books to touch upon the intention of Value Web communities. The book features Wikipedia, P2P, Open Source, eMule and others and lays out the principles behind this kind of organization (starfish), and compares them to the characteristics of what are generally considered more typical, centralized organizations (spiders). The central point of the metaphor in the book's title is that of spontaneous regeneration, an ability displayed by starfish but not their eight-legged friends, spiders. A short book that can be read and absorbed in a couple hours, it is a great entry point for considering the ways of organizing that a network economy demands. -TJ
Tags: Vantage Points, Design, Storytelling, Timeless
Zoom out and in... Nothing is as it seems. Enjoy this book. I have often used it with participants in a workshop or event to reveal context and vantage points.
This book, through the telling of Alya's journey from orphan through young adulthood, brilliantly captures the creativity and insight of this young girl. The author creates context and content around moments in time when the entire world view changes for her young protagonist and then Auel follows the trail revealing that when Alya moves to action and doing, new insights and possibilities spill forth. The Design, Build, Use and 3-Cat MGT Models come to mind.
This is a most interesting book to me as it maps the Native American knowing with the emerging uderstanding of complex systems and quantum physics. Peat helps us see the many similarities. To the native culture, however, there was no word for 'knowledge' ... no final resting place for the experts. Rather, this culture thought in the sense of always coming to knowing . -GT
A fabulous book of design principles applicable far beyond the fields of architecture and building. Explores design as an "age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world and their own being." This is the first of a 3 volume series that includes A Pattern Language and The Oregon Experiment. -TJ
David Bohm's writings have influenced me greatly. The idea of ideas unfolding and enfolding back on each other, always remembering and attracting a higher order. Bohm reminds of that the power of dialog, play, and imagination (as distinct from imaginary) forms how we think and how we shape our internal/external worlds.
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