Learning from the Future
Project Renaissance’s 15th Annual Conference on Creative Problem-Solving and Enhanced / Accelerated Learning
May 18-23, 2007
This was the fifteenth year that many lively and thoughtful leaders, colleagues and participants, in Project Renaissance and in related technologies and programs, have gathered for this series of extraordinary events — events which Project Renaissance hosts each year in the Washington DC area.
Really high-calibre people come together from all over the country and from countries overseas, human beings with whom it’s a delight to share space and ideas and perceptions.
Highest-quality presenters are drawn to this Conference because, as with the original Socratics and Stoics, high-quality feedback from a quality audience helps them further develop their own perceptions and understandings, in the fields which most galvanize them and are most vital to them.
Partake in unique experiences and events where you can rub elbows with some of the people you’ve read about, heard about, exchanged email with, exchanged exciting and meaningful insights with in ImageStream@yahoogroups.com and elsewhere.
Learning from the Future
Tracking the patterns of past, present and future strangification in the Garden of Memes
“He who does not learn from the lessons of the future is doomed to undergo them.”
Unfolding patterns — how can we recognize and anticipate them, to make better sense of the present and to make better sense of our future?
What does the future have to teach us that we can learn now and benefit from?
In this very special Double Festival 2007, the 15th annual conference of Project Renaissance, May 18-20, we explored this subject together. Our presenters had more questions than they or we have answers to, one of many factors which make Double Festival 2007 a very different experience from any that most of you have ever before encountered in a conference.
How does one learn from the future? Some of us have looked ahead by various means and seen mainly particular issues; but the future is, at the present moment, mutable. It is what we make it. Since from now on we will be living there subject to its conditions, we need to take an active hand in its fashioning, an informed hand. We are making the future happen, right now, but not necessarily in the way we want it to happen.
How does one learn from the future? Some of us have been looking at the way we humans have ordered our lives, individually and together, since we left the trees and/or the trees left us. Some of us have looked at the world of ideas — the patterns of meaning we have sought to impose on the seeming chaos of our sundry experiences. Some of these patterns we necessarily carry with us into the future. In the conditions of the future, what do these patterns mean for us? What will these patterns do to us?
How does one learn from the future? Dawkins: Meme: an information pattern, held in an individual’s memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual’s memory. Our very existence is comprised of trillions of memes, throughout the lives of each of us. Some of these memes are fitter to survive than are others. What is “fitness to survive,” among memes and generally? This topic in itself could be an adventure for many, many conferences….
How do we dispose of some terribly destructive and unwanted memes; how do we create and propagate memes which are more desirable, more congruent with what we consider our humanity and more congruent with the long-term survival of humankind and even of lifekind, and how do we create more desirable such memes — including a meme or structure of memes to help orient the whole process toward a higher probability and incidence of positive outcomes?
How does one learn from the future? Directly from the part of yourself which already knows the future. Our greater mind, the part of the brain which associates by sensory images, is forty times larger by volume than the conscious part of our brain where we associate in words and word-concepts. Our greater mind is an absolute seethe of sensory pattern associations and sensory-conceptual patterns/insights projected from those associations — hence the astonishing power and fidelity of en scenario explorations of the future such as will be among the featured events of this particular Double Festival. See for yourself, quite literally! (En scenario work, akin to watching a movie, can be very entertaining.)
If ever there was a need to illumine and explore these matters, is it not now?
Seldom have our likely immediate prospects seemed greater, for us as individuals or for us as a civilization and species. Even as health workers around the world have responded heroically and tirelessly to prevent imminently threatening pandemics, branches of research are close to the point where most diseases may be eliminated altogether and their effects reversed. Further, other researches are pointing toward an indefinite extension of the individual human lifespan.
In this very website is a major proposed solution for largely ending world hunger and malnutrition (“Feeding the World”). The same answer can serve as a major safeguard against world famine in the increasing likelihood of global climate change and the disruption of land-based agriculture, or of such problematic hazards as asteroid-fall or supervolcanic eruptions.
What unexpected positive goals within your own individual life might be within your reach? What long-term positive goals had you gone so long without advancing that you had more or less given up on them?
Rarely is such an array of tools assembled in one place, from diverse sources, as in this Double Festival 2007, with which to explore various of these goals and prospects and to discover workable paths toward those outcomes we prefer. Through a series of meaningful experiences and your own observations, discover far more within your reach than you may have imagined to be possible.
More questions than answers — probably that will continue to be the case, but as in lineplay in American football, at least we will have “moved the pile.” And along the way, each of us may achieve perceptions and acquire memes with which to light our own paths forward, a lantern which may also show us meaning in our past and present.
And we can do these things in the best of company. We have been singularly blessed by the quality of people — participants and presenters — who have made our previous annual Double Festivals such mutually rewarding events. The unique format of these Double Festivals, which enables everyone to be deeply involved and so better to understand, and to be deeply and meaningfully heard, attracts the best among both participants and presenters.
Our unique format enables presenters to get much new insight on the topics they are presenting and which mean so much to them. At the same time, through paired and intense small-group involvements, each participant will come to readily understand even the finer points of advanced content in the sessions. The warm mutual support characteristic of these Double Festivals will help each of us toward further growth and understanding. The formatting of these annual Double Festivals makes them in this respect a wonderful model for how all kinds of conferences should be structured.
Double Festival 2007 was a unique window of opportunity through which to understand more than just our future.
Presentations
- Win Wenger, Trips into the Future
- Najma Beresford, Appreciative Inquiry
- Joe Marasco, Solving the requirements/communication problem – “Words or Pictures, Or, Words and Pictures?”
- Michelle James, Using Spiral Dynamics in a Problem-Solving Setting/Value Memes
- Kathy Carroll, A Change Process Using Accelerated Learning and Non-Violent Communications/Neurological Levels Model
- Anthony Hyatt, Looking at your own future/Dancing with the Elderly
- Kate Jones, Hunting the Malevolent Meme
- Tijl Koenderink, Future Time-Line Problem-Solving
- Mike Hoffman, Applications of Dynamic Teaching in the Classroom
- Arasu Chellaiah, Applications of Dynamic format in University Setting
- Susan Wenger, The Better Baby
- John Fortado, The Passion test