So here’s a small act inspired by a combination of dreams.

As I sit at home and prepare my shopping list for the local grocery, I can go online to my local grocery’s web page and add recipes to a “Community Recipe” page, searching on recipes from others in my community. Then when I go to the store, I find throughout the store online touch screen I can use if I forgot ingredients to a recipe I’m considering shopping for, or to browse what others have done with the ingredients I see in isles and shelves. This would drive three things: shopping efficiency for shoppers, more sales for the store, and more connections within the community. How amazing is that?

At Mount Vernon University, the staff  discovered a $4000 kit that turns cooking fry oil into biodiesel fuel to power the university’s fleet of equipment and vehicles. The unit produces almost 100 gallons of fuel every 24 hours and staff are now picking up local fry oil suppliers, reducing their delivery costs to zero, so everyone wins. It only took a few months from intention to innovation for this green-dedicated institution, a great example of how easily new projects can launch and pay back. We need to think about things at these scales, far below the radar of billion dollar industries and grants, and within the reach of any community.

Although it’s not particularly known for its autos, Hungary is taking a stab at the electric vehicle market with a futuristic new solar-electric car. Founded by auto enthusiasts and backed by local investors, the Hungarian company Antro, is working on a prototype for a modular car that is capable of splitting into two separate vehicles. With solar panels on the roof, the three passenger Antro Solo can run up to 20 km per day on solar energy alone.

This report from Inhabitat unveils the prototype innovation which are small modular cars that can be easily connected into 6 passenger cars and separated again for travel efficiency, economy, and convenience. It’s a genius concept that deserves more design attention into the future.

The purpose of the business enterprise, Drucker believed, was NOT to maximize shareholder value, but to create a “plant community” in which not only a person’s economic needs but his social ones could be fulfilled. A good manager was a “community builder” and not just focused on the pursuit of profits. Drucker was one the biggest critics of obscene CEO salaries, not just because of the money, but because he feared that such salaries were “the embodiment of the ethics and values of American business and management,” and undermined the legitimacy of the business system itself.  Long before Wall Street imploded from a reckless pursuit of mortgage-backed riches Drucker criticized traders as “pigs gorging themselves at the trough”. With amazing prescience, Drucker predicted that the breakdown in the social contract between business leaders and community would result in the center of financial power shifting from Wall Street to Washington DC.

Drucker, the godfather of American management thinking, has long been one of the most respected, albeit ignored, innovators.

This is the polar opposite of economist Milton Friedman’s thesis that only individuals, not corporations, can and should be obligated to any sense of social responsibility.

It will be an incredibly different world if all governments, businesses and religious institutions embrace a core success metric of “how much community we build” in the pursuit of our mission and vision.

After doing Open Space for years, it never fails to amaze me how the power of self-organizing networks does the impossible without much complexity or elaborate planning.

Today with the New England fishing network, the group had no problem organizing into the kind of compelling questions that instantly engaged scientists, fishermen, funders, and government officials in new collaborations to do together what cannot be done in isolation, fragmentation, or competition. People love the importance and possibility of working on “getting the questions and invitations right.”

As it turns out, our sense of the future is a function of the kind of questions we approach it with. The scope of our future will always be equivalent to the scope of our questions going into it. When groups are divided and depressed about their future, it has everything to do with the questions they choose to organize their perspective on it.  When groups are aligned and inspired about their future, it has everything to do with the questions they choose to organize their perspectives on it.

In Open Space, when people are free to engage, the right people and the right questions show up, every time.

Working in New England this week designing the network within this regions incredibly complex, dynamic, and critical community of scientists, fisherman, fishing management and funding. It’s a great reminder that the strength and weakness of any network profoundly and directly shapes the destiny of that network’s survival and thrivancy.

Individual, isolated, fragmented, and competitive efforts have no power to take a network beyond its collective capacity for resilience, pragmatism, innovation, and collaboration. No matter how much we insert or withhold funding.

And it all starts with network awareness, the network’s collective awareness of its assets. Without which, nothing else is possible and all talk about success is lip-service and happy-talk that has no power to make a difference that matters. Asset awareness is what happens in conversation and it has incredible power every time.

Michael Roller polled 65 designers to determine if there were clear Myers-Briggs “personality type” patterns in designers. As it turns out, there is an even distribution of introverts and extroverts, yielding the “designer personality” as “Intuitive-Thinking-Perceiving.”  This roughly translates into someone who is more inspired by future possibilities than present problems. Not surprising.

The good news, from a neuroplasticity perspective is that anyone can rewire their personality patterns in their brain through mental and physical practice. Good news for aspiring designers.

In his NY Times Op-Ed piece, “Goodbye to All That,” former Senator Lincoln Chaffee reflects on the vicissitudes of public office on the Hill:

It’s a punishing workload even under the best of circumstances. In a typical morning, I might have shifted gears from a hearing on banking deregulation, to a floor vote on prescription drug benefits, to a committee meeting on clean air legislation, then back to the office to meet with constituents about juvenile diabetes and to take a call from the Republican National Senate Committee chiding me about my fund-raising totals. In every hearing, I wanted to show that I understood the most arcane details of the issue and had intelligent questions to ask.

It’s a puzzling commentary on how this country still romances an institutional model of “governance” in an incredibly complex society and world, using an 18th century model designed for a world that had nothing in common with this modern context.

What if we reinvented the whole process so that people who are actually expert at each discipline/issue would be the ones to collaborate on national approaches to them, rather than having decisions made by people who have to use their junior aides’ research to even attempt to grasp what they can never in depth know?

Forbes claims that my home, Cleveland, is now the most miserable city in the country on the basis of a handful of financial and physical health criteria, a city with more bank locations than grocery stories and art galleries. It is at the bottom in health of all the 88 Ohio counties, a city plastered with billboards about how we have the best sick care hospitals in the country.

This, the city where, when I am home on any given night, as I did the other night, I can walk to one of the best rated restaurants in the country, listen to a couple of hours of magnificent poetry, and then finish the night at a live blues jam.

Earlier in the day, I taught a room packed with Cleveland emerging leaders how to convene the community in the four conversations that build community and keep them from the four that destroy and prevent community. You could hear a pin drop and the enthusiasm was palpable. Just before I spoke, one of the established leaders chided the group with the injunction that if they “just read the newspaper every day,” they would, “become more interesting,” an apparently core requirement for community leadership and amazing expression of disrespect for this passionate group of emerging leaders.

The pragmatic reality is this. If people here want a future different than the recent past, it will not come from re-telling headline stories that might as well be a daily reminder: “It sucks to be us.” Every minute wasted in this media is a postponement of conversations about dreams, gifts, actions, and invitations. My dream is that more people put down newspapers and remotes, and instead discover the literally thousands of people trying to do something new here and ask them how you can help. Transformation is not hard unless you’re engaged in only conversations that make transformation near impossible.

Every year 2.5 million people die from thirst or from drinking polluted water, and The United Nations expects that by the year 2025 two-thirds of the world’s population will be suffering from water shortage. While studying Industrial Design at Germany’s Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Imke Hoehler based her final thesis on finding a resolution to this important challenge. Her DropNet fog collector offers a versatile design that literally harvests drinking water from thin air and mist. This easy to assemble design could have a significant impact on the bleak and waterless future many climate scientists believe to be inevitable.

This is a brilliant application and only one of many we’ll continue to see proliferating in the category of easy and inexpensive ways to give every human being on the planet access to healthy living.