Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 264 - June 2022

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 264 – June 2022

In a conversation that meandered off-topic (often good conversations do) with my good friend Hank Kune recently, he introduced me to the concept of longtermism.

Here is an excellent introduction to the concept by Fin Moorhouse. As Fin puts it:

‘Longtermism’ is the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.

But it is much more than this and must be one of the most fascinating topics I have encountered in a long time – maybe ever. I don’t agree with some of it, but it’s serious food for thought — if not mind blowing

1. Inner Development Goals
2. Please help support my work
3. Why Does the Gurteen Knowledge Café Work?
4. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
5. Don't quote it if you can't source it
6. Blook posts under development
7. Tweet of the month May 2022
8. Unsubscribe
9. Gurteen Knowledge Letter

I am sure you are familiar with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals but have you heard of the Inner Development Goals?

This is how they are described.

In 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals gave us a comprehensive plan for a sustainable world by 2030.

The 17 goals cover a wide range of issues that involve people with different needs, values, and convictions.

There is a vision of what needs to happen, but progress along this vision has so far been disappointing.

We lack the inner capacity to deal with our increasingly complex environment and challenges.

Fortunately, modern research shows that the inner abilities we now all need can be developed.

This was the starting point for the 'Inner Development Goals' initiative.

Credit: Inner Development Goals

The IDGs will provide an essential framework of transformative skills for sustainable development, a field-kit (in co-creation now) on how to develop these necessary skills - open source and free for all to use.

The current IDGs framework represents 5 categories and 23 skills and qualities which are especially crucial for leaders who address SDGs, but fundamentally for all of us!

It is the greatest possible accelerator to reach the Sustainable Development Goals and create a prosperous future for all humanity.

Credit: Inner Development Goals

Maybe inner change can enable outer change.

See the full framework here and read the full report Inner Development Goals: Background, method and the IDG framework here.

I have been blogging and publishing the Gurteen Knowledge Letter every month for over 20 years, and most of you have received it for five years or more.

During this time, I have also run hundreds of free Knowledge Cafés, both face-to-face and, more recently, on Zoom. Many of you will have attended at least one.

If you find my work valuable, please consider giving me a little support by donating $1 (or more) a month to become a Patron or making a small one-off contribution. Your assistance will help cover some of my website hosting expenses.

I have over 60 patrons so far who, in total, contribute just over £90 each month to my work. A big thanks to you all.

"Why Does the Gurteen Knowledge Café Work?" is a question I am often asked, and I never have a perfect explanation other than they "just do".

Marcus Conyers recently attended one of my Conversational Leadership Cafés and wrote up why he thought they worked so well. Thanks, Marcus.

If you have not come to one of my free Cafés in the past, the next one is on Wednesday 13th July: What is communityship? It's on Zoom, and it's free.

Come along and experience it - most people thoroughly enjoy my Cafés for the reasons Marcus explains in his article.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a website and YouTube channel developed by John Koenig that creates and defines made-up words - neologisms - for emotions that do not have an existing descriptive term.

Here are two of my favorites:

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Credit: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

watashiato
n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.

Credit: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I love this idea - watch his TED Talk or his beautiful videos on his Youtube Channel, such as this one on sonder.

I love quotations and have a broad selection of them stored as part of my blook. I have also programmed my blook so I can embed one or more quotes on any page.

You can subscribe to receive a daily quotation by email if you register to fully access my blook.

I post new quotes weekly but often find difficulty in identifying their source and attributing them correctly.

QuoteInvestigator and Snopes are great resources for helping me root out incorrect attributions such as this one frequently misattributed to Winston Churchill.

But I have just found a fantastic new resource called Lib Quotes. Their motto says it all :

Don't quote it if you can't source it.

Many of their verified quotations include informative footnotes and possible variant translations. You can also find plenty of helpful information about authors, such as biographies, links to their works in the public domain, and other authors to which they are related.

It's an indispensable resource.

At any one time, I tend to be working on several topics in my blook concurrently, switching between them as the mood takes me.

Some of the posts that are work in progress right now are:

• Narrative
• The Neuroscience of Conversation
• Take responsibility for the conversation
• Improving informal conversations
• Pseudoscience
• Use of Self

If you are interested you will need to register to access my blook to read them fully.

Here is my top tweet for May 2022.

The Neuroscience of Conversations: A deep dive into the fascinating world of conversations. https://buff.ly/3wCOQIh /may partly explain why people enjoy my Knowledge Cafés so much.

I tweet most days. My tweets tend to relate to material in my blook and other articles and blog posts on Conversational Leadership or Knowledge Management. You can follow me here.

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Gurteen Knowledge Letter
The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a free monthly e-mail based newsletter. Its purpose is to stimulate thought about Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management. You can find back issues here.

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David GURTEEN
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom