📰 🍄🐚 Organizational Mycology – May 4, 2023
Coming up next week is our Oblique Thinking Hour futures card co-creation event. Come along and help us create an open source card deck which can be used to prompt teams to consider the "future of work" from multiple perspectives. Details and registration links below.
On to the newsletter, some interesting and fun links to explore this week.
👀 Things that caught our eye
Some researchers at Tulane have a new interpretation of the Mayan calendar’s 819 day cycle as being embedded in a broader 20-year cycle, making 45-year timeframe of planetary movements make more sense. There are interesting ramifications for a deeper understanding of Mayan math and astronomy. The reductionist approach to understanding planetary movements doesn't always help us understand these broader and longer cycles. How can you look at your challenges and opportunities with longer time-cycles this week?
Inuit students created a numeric notation called Kaktovik which is a base-20 system. It’s really beautiful and worth taking a look at. It has recently been adopted by some folks in Silicon Valley because the way that the numbers work make computation easier. This TikTok has a great short explanation of the system. Where else might we create approaches that are both beautiful and unusually effective?
Elephant seals have some very interesting anti-predation strategies while they sleep. They drop like rocks, sometimes 300+ meters to the sea floor below while sleeping. This is hypothesized to be an anti-predation strategy so that they are moving below typical predator depths while asleep. How might you bring a falling-rock strategy to your work?
Engage with us
May Oblique Thinking Hour
May 10th / 11th (depending on timezone)
In this Oblique Thinking Hour we'll co-create a card deck for prompting futures thinking sessions. As a large group we'll pick a theme, brainstorm cards, and break into small groups to write the text for the cards. Then we'll come back together and play a round of futures thinking in breakout groups with the deck we just made 🤯. These cards, and this process can be used to build a unique prompting deck for other groups, and can be a great exercise for building futures thinking and group cohesion in many types of organization.
Two times are available
May 11, 2023 at 8:00 AM in Pacific/Auckland timezone (May 10th, 8pm UTC)
May 11, 2023 at 8:00 PM in Pacific/Auckland timezone (May 11th, 8am UTC)
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