The Art of Change Making
Click to access The-Art-of-Change-Making.pdf
The Art of Change Making brings together the theories, approaches, tools and techniques used for understanding the complex interactions between people and organisations and how to intervene to create meaningful change.
The Divided Brain
McGilchrist argues that how we see the world depends on how we pay attention to it. We are biologically and habitually tuned into viewing the world using the left hemisphere of our brain. but the left side, whilst dominant, is also lazy, bureaucratic, logical, and coldly rational and narrowly focused. This means that the view it gives us is narrow and judgemental.
McGilchrist argues that the right hand side of the brain gives a much more balanced view of the world. It views things though a much wider lens (the gestalt whole). It uses past experience and also incorporates the perspective provided by the left and side of the brain.
The Tree of Knowledge
If we are to treat human systems as living things then a study of evolutionary biology must be at the core of what we do. How do living things emerge, adapt and survive? What is unique about them?
The Master and his Emissary
The left hemisphere is detail-oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility and generosity. This division helps explain the origins of music and language, and casts new light on the history of philosophy, as well as on some mental illnesses. In the second part of the book, he takes the reader on a journey through the history of Western culture, illustrating the tension between these two worlds as revealed in the thought and belief of thinkers and artists, from Aeschylus to Magritte. He argues that, despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with potentially disastrous consequences. This is truly a tour de force that should excite interest in a wide readership.
The Fifth Discipline
How do organisations navigate changes in their environmental conditions to adapt as the world around them evolves? Through becoming a learning organisation...
Dialogue
Like David Bohm and others, Isaacs studies how we can create generative conversations where something genuinely new emerges from the space between us.
The Insurgents
Kaplan studies the US response to dealing with insurgents and how US policy was shaped by people who followed those very principles themselves. Adaptive change and insurgency are close bedfellows.
Gentle Bridges
The dialogues involving the Dalai Lama and scholars of buddhist thought with Jeremy Hayward, Eleanor Rosch, Francisco Varela and other Western scientists are captured in the book 'Gentle Bridges'.
The Timeless Way of Building
Alexander finds a ‘pattern language’ in buildings from across locations and cultures. Wha is the pattern language for other forms of human endeavour? What is its relationship to emergence?
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
Bohm’s idea of an implicate order is phenomenally deep and the product of an outstanding physicist’s brain in consort with a deep level of personal awareness. A classic that will make you think.
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Now over 60 years old, Festinger’s work still generates subtle, non-obvious predictions about persistence and change in attitudes and beliefs.
A General Theory of Love
A General Theory of Love draws on the latest scientific research to demonstrate that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.
A Sand County Almanac
(Review from The guardian ten books that changed the world, wrote by Paul Kingsnorth)
“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,” wrote Aldo Leopold in the foreword to A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Leopold was a lifelong conservationist who lived for much of his life on a farm in the “sand counties” of Wisconsin. A lifetime of watching land across the US undergo “violent conversion” from wilderness to human use had convinced him that conservation was no longer enough: humanity needed a new ethical relationship with land and the non-human things that lived on it.
The Tipping Point
AMAZON SAY:
In this brilliant and original book, Malcolm Gladwell explains and analyses the 'tipping point', that magic moment when ideas, trends and social behaviour cross a threshold, tip and spread like wildfire. Taking a look behind the surface of many familiar occurrences in our everyday world, Gladwell explains the fascinating social dynamics that cause rapid change
Ethical Know-how-Action, Wisdom and Cognition
A short pamphlet on ethics based on Varela's lecture series in Italy, here Varela brings together a mix of Western scientific thought with Eastern spirituality. One of the best readers on this topic you’ll find.
Why Information Grows
AMAZON SAY:
What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But MIT professor César Hidalgo argues that in order to fully grasp the nature of economic growth we need to transcend the social sciences and turn to the science of information, networks and complexity. The growth of economies, he explains, is deeply connected with the growth of order - or information.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
The work that spawned ‘Nudge’ and the study of heuristics, a way of looking at the patterns in our brains and how they can lead us into advantage and disadvantage
Flow- The Psychology of Happiness
This is the key text on what it means to be in flow, how flow is created and maintained.
Frankl: Man’s search for meaning
AMAZON SAY:
A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn't) with the experience. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest - and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the concentration camp prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Frankl came to believe man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.
