📰 🍄🐚 Organizational Mycology – March 30, 2023

📢 Intro

We’ve had some time to reflect on all the awesome connections we made at MozFest. Below, we discuss and link to some of the highlights. Coming up in April (its almost April?! 😱),  our Oblique Thinking Hour will cover a collaborative problem solving technique. Registration links are below--we'd love to see you there! In May, we’ll try to create and test a "futures thinking" card deck all within a one hour session.

👀 Something that caught our eye

This week is a bit of a hodge-podge of links and interesting thinking from our participation at MozFest.

In our session on Biomimetic Thinking, a re-run of our Oblique Thinking Hour for a MozFest audience, we explored how our cards felt a bit disconnected from stories and our own environment for a few participants. One participant shared with us a few resources to help us better understand his indigenous world view with a book on the Mohawk Warrior Society: A handbook on sovereignty and survival. Stay tuned for more as we read through this excellent text and bring some of its wisdom into how we think about organizations and collective action. This discussion of noticing and telling stories about what is around us brought to mind Rob Walker’s excellent book The Art of Noticing and his excellent substack.

Jonah attended a session called "Exploring the Values That Will Shape AI for a Better Internet," hosted by the Movement for a Better Internet. The session made good use of break-outs and discussion of opportunities and concerns around generative AI. They’ll be releasing a report in the coming months from the contributions that took place in 6 facilitated break-out rooms.

We’re big fans of the Nap Ministry around here, and we wanted to highlight the fact that taking a break and making sure you get the rest you need is not only going to benefit your life, but it’s also an act of resistance.

In that vein, we wanted to share this retreat for single mothers that was inspired by the Nap Ministry. This is meant for any single mothers who need time--not necessarily time to create or DO anything, just a way for you to get time away and to reset. We love to see initiatives like this.

We learned about Biominga during our Biomimetic Problem Solving workshop at MozFest and thought we’d share that with you all as well. This is an online resource for prompting biomimetic practices and thinking about problems. Try their virtual wheels, and spin them to be inspired. Check out the online tool and the forthcoming card deck as well!

🤝 Engage with us

In our next Oblique Thinking Hour we'll demonstrate a collaborative problem solving technique that enables a group of any size to split into small groups, discuss shared capabilities and challenges, and feed their ideas into the larger group for discussion and synthesis. We'll be talking about general challenges and problems that anyone could relate to, but this technique can be used in any context. Come along, meet some people and have fun exploring with us!

• April 12th (1pmPST / April 13th - 8am NZT) - REGISTER HERE – See in your Timezone
• April 13th (9/10am London/Paris, 8pm NZT, 6pm AEST) - REGISTER HERE – See in your Timezone

In May, we’ll be collaboratively creating a futures card deck, similar to the deck used in our Futures Thinking OTH.