Fellowship Forum: Jerry Michalski on Contemplative Innovation and Design from Trust
On May 20, we continued the Garrison Institute Fellowship Forum with a conversation between Jerry Michalski and Dr. Angel Acosta, the Director of the Garrison Institute Fellowship. Michalski joined us to explore his framework Design from Trust — an innovative & contemplative-based design approach that begins with the assumption that most people are trustworthy.
If you’ve ever thought about how Wikipedia works, you’ve experienced Design from Trust. Wikipedia leaves the keys in the car: any person on the planet can edit pages in Wikipedia that the rest of us then use. Wikipedians do this because they trust that most people will try to improve Wikipedia, not destroy it. That’s worked out pretty well. It turns out that what makes Wikipedia function also applies to other domains, from education and urban planning to finance, animal training and the Internet.
Perhaps more interestingly, building the connections and trust that it takes to Design from Trust depends on finding that inner space, that inner voice, that gives you the courage to try something different. We invite you to revisit this conversation, which discusses the Design from Trust framework from a mindfulness and quietude perspective.
The Garrison Institute Fellowship Forum is a series of conversations with extraordinary leaders with expertise and experience in awareness-based contemplative wisdom, the science of interconnection, generative action, and collective healing. Each conversation will be co-facilitated by the Garrison Institute Fellows and Fellowship Director Dr. Angel Acosta.
Jerry Michalski (ma-CALL-ski) is the founder of Open Global Mind, a project to help humans make better decisions together. He is also an expert on trust. Jerry was on the front lines of the tech revolution for a dozen years as a tech-industry trends analyst during the dot-com boom, as Managing Editor of Esther Dyson’s newsletter Release 1.0. He also advised corporate advanced-technology groups on whether and where to deploy exponential technologies like machine intelligence. In the mid-90s, Jerry realized the word “consumer” was a linchpin to understanding many of today’s dilemmas. Following “consumer” led him to the concept of trust, specifically the many ways that consumer capitalism has broken trust. More optimistically, he also found groups around the world rediscovering trust to solve thorny problems. From this mix of movements and ideas, Jerry is creating Design from Trust, a process that can be applied in many different domains. DfT’s home base is Open Global Mind.