goal17 Podcast

For anyone that’s been watching this space, you might have noticed that I’ve been rather quiet for a while. Some of my last posts were exploring the impacts and uses of AI in consulting, collaboration and public engagement. My early experiments quickly convinced me that AI tools offered significant value in collaborative work but I didn’t see a way to keep it as a core tool in my practice with the...

A caveat up front: The Value Web has always been a community effort, and these are just my personal reflections as we reach a new part of the journey. I was proud to be a part of the Value Web when it was a scrappy, international collective of practitioners that had come together to apply their talents to tackling some of the world's most intractable problems. I was a part of the board when we cha...

Context In the midst of all that is going on in the world, Canada just had a federal election. Normally, Canadian politics isn’t something that gets the blood racing, but these are not normal times, and this was not a normal election. In the course of my work, I find I am more routinely keeping an eye on the flow of global politics, but over the last couple of years I have started to focus a lot m...

The Canadian election has had all kinds of strange accusations thrown around, including many calling Mark Carney a socialist. This is strange, indeed, given that he is an alum of Goldman Sachs. But with driverless semi trucks hitting the roads in Texas and autonomous robots building, we might want to consider some of our options. Goal17 is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and s...

There has been something bothering me for some time as I’ve watched public opinion swing wildly on some longstanding issues, but until the results for Canada’s election came in last night it has felt difficult to put my finger on it. Now, my area of specialization is in decision making, and as I have focused more and more on decision making around critical societal issues, public opinion has becom...

In the future, you will own nothing, and you will be happy. I can’t remember when I first heard this line in the lead up to Canada’s election, but before long, I kept hearing it on repeat as proof that Liberal candidate Mark Carney was part of a shadowy globalist cabal intent on bringing tyranny to Canada. After hearing it enough times, I felt the need to understand where this was even coming from...

Researchers in Artificial Intelligence often use Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting as a way of getting AI models to improve their reasoning by explicitly laying out the steps taken to answer a specific question. Not only does this focus on the reasoning process help researchers better understand how LLMs arrived at their decision, it also, as it turns out, results in better results. Like contempora...

Integrating artificial intelligence into your workflow requires you to not only evaluate where and how it can add value, but also, what ethical considerations arise with each new implementation and the policies you might need to put in place as you go. So far I have found that AI can offer a lot of value in collaborative processes, but there are a number of areas where it is easy to violate trust...

The debate in many Western democracies on what to do about TikTok hinged around a few, very real concerns. The first concern related to the danger of a foreign adversary being able to use very powerful algorithms to shape the discourse around any issue and amplify misinformation. The second concern was in having a foreign adversary gaining deep access to data profiles of so many citizens, as the a...

TL;DR - The compounding consequences and constitutional violations by DOGE should be a call to action for practitioners of multi-stakeholder work, which needs to prove it can move quickly and decisively in complex environments in order to avoid future chainsaw approaches to government reform. We seem to be in a moment where you have to work especially hard to find some cause for optimism, but in t...

I have spent the better part of my career working with individuals, organizations and groups to make better decisions. There are, of course, so many ways to make a decision, and there is also a lot of lore around decision making and, by extension, leadership. As a consultant, I found over the years that a large part of the value I could bring as an outsider was in helping a group to test and chall...

While it often seems that people are just speaking for the sake of it, I want to talk a bit about conversations that are directed towards a specific purpose, and how we can adjust our listening to support a group to come to an outcome through conversation. When we speak with others, we are (ideally) trying to create a kind of shared understanding and meaning between us, but because we are all appr...

Building on “ Why We Should Listen ”, this is the first tool for tuning your listening in an intentional way, by clearing your head of mental models that can cloud your attention. When I was studying zen meditation at Kouun-ji Temple (the “ji” actually means temple, so this is like saying “Fedex Express”, but it sounds weird without it) my teacher, Yoshitomi-san, would tell me stories about the vi...

This material is the result of a line of inquiry that started with me trying to learn the craft of graphic recording. Graphic recording involves listening to group conversations, then using visuals to model the content and connections as they emerge. Spending an inordinate amount of time in the workplace listening as a professional activity - and, in many cases, feeling as though I was the only pe...

I’ve had a few requests on where to get started to develop a practice in graphic facilitation, so I thought I would write my response here instead of firing off a few links. I still remember walking into my first MGTaylor environment and seeing a krew member scribing on the whiteboards. The first thing I noticed was that she was writing in a font . She was capturing what a group was saying, as the...

Note: I started writing this before Trump and Melania launched their own memecoins, which really raised the stakes for everything I was trying to lay out - it validates for me how important it is for people to understand what is involved, and what is at stake, in the crypto space. Policy moves slowly, tech moves quickly and finance moves in the shadows. I am always fascinated by the intersections...

During a recent training I delivered for a group focused on supporting multi-stakeholder processes, I realized that there were a few missing steps needed to get them in the right headspace to explore some of the concepts we would be going through. Everything we were going to explore would be largely useless if they didn't first accept that a lot of the decisions they would have to make were part o...

When I first started doing facilitation and design work, it was almost always in the context of a single company or organization. They needed a collaborative process because they were generally large organizations, and the only way to make sure their strategy took into consideration all the necessary complexity they were facing was to bring in all the people with direct knowledge from the far-flun...