Why a Roundtable?
A Roundtable is way for people to learn together - to co-op their individual knowledge for the good of the greater group. We live in a world that demands we not only anticipate the future, but we design solutions from our cumulative "best shot" thinking. Roundtables and workgroups can accelerate strategic learning and raise the quality and breadth of distributed cognitian.
Roundtables are comprised of thought leaders who understand the need for whole systems thinking. Contributors are skilled in many areas of expertise - technical, civic, political, business and academic. Who participates is largely determined by the conversation of the group and what collectively, the Roundtable needs to build innovative solutions to the complex challenges they envision for the future.
Roundtables are the expression of civic "willing networks." Practitioners are the willing networks passionate about what they consider to be important. They may bring expertise from their formal field of training or from practical experience, or both. The common link is they have connected the dots between what they know as fact and from experience, and what they realize as unaddressed challenges for today or in the future.
Roundtables are nodes of powerful regional and international networks. The interconnections are built on personal relationships, accelerating the transfer of knowledge to solve problems in the design of solutions. Intermediary activity can be guided by such tools as social network mapping. Results may not be measureable; the value is in the distributed knowledge of the group and the ultimate solutions they create together.
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