The frontier is conversation.

 

Friends:

I invite you to join me in an adventure that will ruffle our thinking. Our growing understanding of the brain reveals the extent to which thinking happens in conversations. What you and I believe we encounter in the world comes from the narratives and maps we inherit and generate in our conversations.

We open our eyes and are confident that we see the world. The conviction that we can see the world hides it from us.

I like to start by acknowledging what I call ‘the invisibles’: features of our conversations that we assume comprise our worlds. Consider for example money, power, energy, and capital.

We assume that as we converse about these phenomena, we are talking about tangible features of our reality. We are not. Without the narratives and maps to show the phenomena as tangible and real, they are fully invisible. Discovering where they are busy hiding things from us allows us to peer into the space they occupy and uncover paths to sometimes epic changes.

I invite you to join me in an immersive exploration of how -- in the presence of, in spite of, and with the help of the Invisibles -- new worlds are invented. With your committed engagement, we promise a mood of liberation, simple awe, and an expanded capacity to participate in inventing worlds to come.

Chauncey Bell