Last month, November, I was in Tanzania. Stationed in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, I provided Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) advisory services to the Tanzanian Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (TCCIA). TCCIA has 20,000+ members. I was there as a Volunteer Advisor with the Canadian Executive Service Organization (CESO). I’ve volunteered, internationally, with […]
Alternate Dispute Resolution helps support a growing entrepreneurial culture in Tanzania
A good metaphor for why habits are so hard to change
A good metaphor is gold. Here’s one about how habits are created and why they are so hard to change. It’s from Harvard neurology professor, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, via Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. I love this metaphor. It’s brilliant. And, so winter. So Canadian. […]
Remembering the Brilliance of Ursula Franklin: The Real World of Technology
Ursula Franklin died last month, in Toronto. She was 94. Ursula Franklin was a “Canadian giant” for a whole lot of reasons; she was a world-renowned physicist, feminist, Quaker, author, pacifist, professor, Holocaust survivor, public intellectual, mother, and mentor. She was honoured as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982 and with the […]
The Existentialist Mediator
I was reading Sarah Blakewell’s At The Existentialist Cafe on the weekend. It’s an engaging window on the key proponents of modern existentialism; Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Marting Heidegger… and others. Blakewell’s book weaves biography and thought, and “takes us to the heart of a philosophy about life that also changed lives, and […]
A Care Grid Vision – Applying Principles of the Electricity Grid to Elder Care
What to do… What to do? When it comes to the elder care time bomb, we know the cost of caring for the elderly; the graph accelerates sharply as we approach the end. The chart below is for Canada. The scenario is common around a good chunk of the ‘Western’ world. These scenarios are unsustainable. […]