“Give Climate Change a Human Face”
The Global Humanitarian Forum, chaired by former UN president Kofi Annan, aims at being a unique platform to address key humanitarian challenges. The Forum was launched in October 2007 and aspires to build a stronger global community to better meet the needs of the poor and vulnerable.
The first annual conference of the Forum at the beginning of this week in Geneva focused on the humanitarian challenges of climate change. In the aftermath of Myanmar’s Cyclone Nargis and in view of the ongoing global food crisis, the Forum’s President Kofi Annan called together 300 leaders from all sectors of society worldwide to urgently address what he calls “the human face of climate change”: the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations are affected by ever more violent storms, drought and floods.
The Annual Meeting 2008 pooled the expertise and experience of an uncommon combination of leading people from across sectors. They worked to develop creative solutions and boost action to meet the urgent needs of those worst affected by climate change.
In solidarity with the world’s most vulnerable, the Meeting will place climate justice high on the agenda as the guiding principle in the international response to climate change and as the basis for any future global climate agreement.
BrainStore will take part in the project “Give climate change a human face” by conducting several idea finding workshops to come up with practical solutions which will help the vulnerable communities in the affected regions.
See more information on the forum on their website
Look at it with Children’s Eyes!
For everyone who works in the field of ideas and innovation, looking at the world with fresh eyes is vital. And who can provide a fresher look than kids? I strongly believe that being in contact with children is vital to the success of any venture that has to do with innovation. You do not necessarily need to have kids of your own, but you should get exposed to children regularly to see how a complete new look at the world can create new ideas.
At BrainStore, for instance, we have our own daycare called the “MiniBrains” that helps us do this. Everyone at BrainStore gets in touch with kids between one and nine years old on a pretty regular basis, and it is a lot of fun. Listening to children, their views of the world and their interpretation of the weird stuff that goes on on this planet is crucial for us. So the grown Brains spend time with the Minis, playing Lego, eating Fishfingers, discussing the universe in general.
You can learn so many things from children. And most of all, it is often hilarious. My 5 year old daughter Ella asked me at the Birthday party of my Grandfather, when a lot of black and white pictures were shown: “And since when is there color in the world?”, clearly analysing that, not always, has the world been full of color. Or my son, when explained that “this was a long long time ago, when your father was a child” stated: “Oh, during the middle ages?”.
Clearly, this is not only fun, but also very instructive for your own way you look at the world. So go out and get in touch with not only your inner child, but children in general.
Emorational: Conscious Cues? Indeed!
One of the long enduring ideas in human psychology: the moment of decision-making is not pre-determined by a single default of the brain, e.g. by a person’s character being calibrated to more of a rational or emotional nature.
Human behavior rather reflects a dynamic interaction between two distinct subsystems of the brain, as a new study by psychologist Adam Alter of Oppenheimer Lab at Princeton University fortifies. While a first affective system follows heuristic cues, a second conscious and rule-based system monitors the quality of these emotional signals. Although perceived as one single act, decision-making appears to be a two-step process.
This dualism is very well reflected within as well as over all the three major phases of the BrainStore method. For inspiration boosting we pull emotional triggers, in compression we integrate emotional yes or no sessions and systematic criteria scans. At the end of the day, decisions on ideas are taken rationally – given that our emotions play along.
