Your post reminded me of an expedition I participated in nearly four years ago – 30 students, business leaders and scientists embarked on an adventure to learn first-hand about climate change and help realise practical solutions once back to ‘reality’.

An expert on ontology, Roger, facilitated our creative thinking and collaborative working. He was excellent –
he really got our group to ‘diverge’… to a point where we diverged so much that we lost track of everything and found it hard to recollect what we actually had to do!

We let go of everything… prejudices…opinions… and we were left with just our feelings and open minds!

I remember being scared at some point – Roger said it is normal. We were faced with a sea of struggles, like the waves of the Drake Passage.

Eventually we did ‘converge’ as a group – it was one of the best mental journeys of my life.

Einstein once said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

I liked the exercise you wrote regarding explaining something via text message. I wonder if the wide adoption of twitter has increased our ability to boil topics down to their most relevant bits?

When our team had our senior design capstone presentation for an engineering project, we had to sum up over 1200 man-hours of work into 15 minutes. We kept trying to compress down: 25min -> 20min -> 18min -> 17.5min -> 17min, but we could not hit the 15min mark.

What we decided to do was have everyone take the challenge of presenting each of our 24 slides in less than 15 seconds each by boiling down each slide into a “headline”.

We found ourselves hitting 14min and the presentation was much more succinct and clear than before.

Re – pre-marital sex – from a religious perspective; people can get married earlier if they want. I have always been interested in long term affects of such things, eg is there some correlation between pre-marital sex and divorce? I think there are records of some of our ancestors living upt0 100′s of years!?

Actually I believe what you are describing sounds alot to Marketing, us marketeers (currently doing a masters in such area) love to anaylze this behavior.

For example, we implemented google analytics into our website (hotel) which allows us to see when people visit our site, how much time they spent on which page of the website and more. So the pattern I am trying to describe here is how the highest number of visits occur just after the 15th of each month. We realised that during the next 5 days or so we get the most inquires. I asked myself that question over and over again and later up I came up with a theory of the cause. Apparently most of the foreigners/chinese workers get their salary around the 15th of each month.

So basically that is one of the patterns I have experienced. It is really interesting.

Nowadays we are thinking on how to implement a newsletter with sale promotions to try and get this visitors or past visitors.

Cheers from Shanghai bro!!

Somebody asked Diogenes, which wine is his favourite.

“I like best the wine drunk at the cost of others,”
answered Diogenes.

but,

does anyone really have the right to 'nudge' anyone else into making a decision?