International aid groups make the same mistakes over and over again. At TEDxYYC David Damberger uses his own engineering failure in India to call for the development sector to publicly admit, analyze, and learn from their missteps. Oh so much to learn from this sort talk from David Damberger....Organisations defend so rigorously against failure (or admitting it at least).  Its worth speculating about what our systems might be like if we admitted to being 'ordinary' rather than aiming for spectacular results ... [read more]

Kathryn Shultz is a wrongologist and in this TED talk she encourages us to learn to live with regret and the lessons it can teach us We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them.  Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.

So now there is research to confirm what many have always known - our reaction to art is irrational.  We really don't know what we're looking at and we want to believe that what we are seeing is the genuine article. Our study shows that the way we view art is not rational, that even when we cannot distinguish between two works, the knowledge that one was painted by a renowned artist makes us respond to it very differently. The fact that ... [read more]

I hereby nominate this video and this song to serve as an invocation to every professional arts conference in 2012. It's short. It's to the point. It carries an important message. And it sticks with you (boy, does it stick with you). Hat tip Andrew Taylor