What motivates people to work on behalf of the common good? In a study I’m leading for the Harwood Institute, I’ve been exploring this question with community leaders from across the country — civic entrepreneurs working to reduce homelessness, address poverty, work with inmates, clean up the environment, and generally strengthen our communities. A word that comes [...]

A Harris poll found that a full 90 percent of Americans would change their lives dramatically if they could. The survey showed that most people don’t like the way they live now, but they simply don’t know how to change. The statistic goes a long way toward explaining why advertising has become so heavily dominated [...]

I was dazzled by Ken Wilber’s book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality when it appeared in the mid-1990s. Rarely had I encountered a writer and philosopher who expressed himself with so much energy and clarity of insight on the difficult business of human consciousness. His grasp of the complexities of evolutionary theory, systems thinking, metaphysics, contemplative tradition, [...]

Some 1,000 people came together in Canberra, Australia, over the weekend for a free-spirited “ideas summit” — a gathering of experts, activists, politicians, and celebrities aimed at soliciting innovative ideas to strengthen Australia’s future. Over the course of two days, some 8,000 ideas were submitted. By the end of the weekend, the number had been narrowed [...]

Over the past six months, I’ve been talking with civic leaders from across the country about what it means to build community. The process has challenged some of my preconceptions. Community is not something you can build, they tell me. It’s a quality that has to be brought forward and actualized, in the same way a [...]

It’s been almost a half-century since the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’sThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a slim little book that introduced the word “paradigm” into common parlance and shattered our conventional way of looking at change. Fifty years on, it still represents perhaps the best thinking on how transformation happens, who drives it, why [...]

People often define genius as a set of character traits or a way of being. Books instruct us how to think like Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. But I see genius as the fulfillment of our true calling in life, as the flowering of our unique potential, whatever it happens to be. What good is [...]

Some years ago, I was asked by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change to prepare a review of the literature on how change happens and how to make it happen. As I began mapping the literature in the field, I was staggered by the sheer volume of writing on a subject we actually know very [...]

In his new book, visionary physicist Peter Russell expands on the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, suggesting that humanity has advanced to the point in its evolutionary journey where it is poised to make the “next evolutionary leap” — the critical shift from personal to global consciousness. With the latest breakthroughs in [...]