October 15, 2010 A Touch of Humility Notwithstanding my desires and self-delusions to the contrary, I’m not always right. My wife, children, and co-workers can and will—with only minor prompting—attest to this all too obvious fact. For...
October 15, 2010 Reaching the Open Minds One of the things I learned from being a collaborative partner in the application of IF process to a series of independent policy explorations of contentious subject matter is that...
October 12, 2010 The White Stripes, Obstacles, Tensions, and Creativity Near the end of the rock documentary The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights, the White Stripe’s frontman, Jack White, talks about the importance of obstacles and tensions for...
October 6, 2010 How to Evaluate an IF Policy Possibility⎯Part 1 The first step, of course, is to understand the possibility: what it says and what it doesn’t. This almost inevitably means reading the description of the possibility, and the reasoning...
October 6, 2010 What’s Different About IF Policy Discussions? The Interactivity Foundation (IF) promotes the thoughtful consideration of a wide range of conceptually contrasting policy possibilities in selected areas of concern. One way that we do this is through...
September 8, 2010 If An Idea Does Not Sound Absurd, Then There’s No Hope For It “If an idea does not sound absurd, then there’s no hope for it.”—Albert Einstein I recently came across these words from Albert Einstein in the context of an interview on the...
September 5, 2010 Citizen Discussion as a Developmental Tool for IF Reports One of the ideas that has been recently been under discussion within IF is the possibility that citizen or public discussions of the approaches developed within IF sanctuary projects (that...
August 14, 2010 Development of Possibilities in “Difficult” Policy Areas Despite warnings from colleagues and apoplectic reactions from partisans of various stripes, I have been working during the last year to see if it is possible to develop general starting...
July 6, 2010 Not So Benign a Conflict As our nation celebrates Independence Day, I am reminded that much of American history is based in conflict. The crucible within which we forged our independence was a war fought...