By age 12 every child on the planet can have the foundational reading, writing, and math skills to spend the next 6 years learning meta-learning skills of locating, assessing, and using all of the content available on the planet from a smart phone they would receive as a rite of passage on their 18th birthday.

Any specialized learning beyond that would be in communities of learning and practice managed and innovated by college/university and employer partnerships. Very doable in this lifetime.

One way to approach the enormously complex US health care reform: invest federal dollars into 2 years of state-focused experiments with the simple rule that no two states can experiment with exactly the same model. Then choose or fuse the best, which can be done by national vote. Guaranteed more innovation than the old model of study everything, then implement large scale.

There is a new breed of greenhouse local farmers in Connecticut who are growing grapefruits, figs, and every kind of exotic fruit, vegetable, and herb. We’re talking, Connecticut. Think of what that means for the rest of the northern zones who for years have lamented to local restaurants that rich winter Carribean and Mediterranean goods were doomed to impossible carbon footprints. Just the power of small acts inspired by amazing dreams. Bring it on.

Children will thrive when the community shares in their parenting, rather than parenting being isolated to their biological parents. What would happen if we took the view that each child is “ours” to raise, nurture, develop, and engage? How might institutions become united rather than fragmented?

Instead of crafting their own vision of the future, people have long outsourced it to magicians and shaman, religions and politicians. People who take responsibility for their own vision tend to be those who believe that people are instrinsically graced rather than flawed, and therefore hold the seeds to a beautiful future.

In most cases of coming to consensus on complex public issues like “health care,” the debate progresses to the degree that people talk as much about the process as the content. The formula for getting people stuck in any complex issue is to get quagmired in content with no attention to common design of the process.

However we define the “democratic process” with things like “health care” in the future, we need to make sure it emphasized process as much as content, process being the model we use for learning, innovation, and ultimate moving forward in millions of small experiments.

One of the secrets to the design sauce at P&G is pursuing the hybridity of design in both design process and product principles.

Hybridity is thinking in fusions - combining unlikely materials, elements, and functions. This starts with making sure the design team is diverse to start with, and particularly stacking the team with people who are accountant-sculptors and engineer-musicians.

More design opportunities in the future will require, as biomimicry does, multi-disciplinary sources for the hybrids of innovation.

Spent time on public transit lately and you get a clear sense of space sharing, certainly more than the private bubble of personal transportation. Riding together with so-called strangers reminds us of our common fates, our common earth.

All public spaces us remind us of this, as so we become more conscious of our planet every time we spend more time in public spaces. And when we actually have the narrative aesthetic to discover the amazing richness of our world, we experience the grace of connection.

How can we create more public spaces and invite more people out from their cacoons into the vast world of social wealth awaiting them there.

According to a recent travel companion Cindy who leads a thriving New England parks and recreation center, look to parks and recreation centers to be at the apex of community integration.

These centers bring together arts, sports, education, social programs, community gardens, and farmer’s markets. When well-designed, they have perhaps more potential than any other single community institution to act as prime network weavers in communities, connecting people, dreams, assets, and opportunities.

This being the case, other institutions would wisely leverage these centers to better connect with the community - institutions like schools, health care organizations, social service agencies, churches, and social clubs and networks.

There is an incredible number of people who hate work, or at best tolerate it. If many people could live without working they would.

Work in the future needs to be designed so that it’s fun, with more the character of play than burden and struggle. We need to replace old mythologies positioning work as punishment for original sins with new mythologies of work as reward for original virtues.

Work as play will take on a whole new quality and it’s such a foreign concept that most people can barely imagine what that might be. But it is this kind of imagination that needs to be applied to the question of how work - any work - can become play.  And while we’re at it, how about transforming all levels of learning as play.