6. How might we preempt the town-gown split between theory and practice and the false thinking-doing dichotomies?

For deep thinkers, learning how to integrate theory and thinking with the practice of doing

Inviting all learning design architects, leaders, academics, researchers, mentors, muses, mavens, and practitioners to compose complex questions for generating the dialogues needed to solve our wicked problems.

Wicked problems are complex in that they have no single, simple, definitive, or final solutions, with no right-wrong answers. Wicked problems call for developing self-awareness, ontological, equanimity, ethical discernment, media literacy, empathy, and complexity skills, and many more.

We need a transformational learning revolution to provide exponential opportunities to unravel our complex entanglement of self-inflicted wicked problems.

Complex questions take us beyond reductionist language, talking, and writing about thinking and doing that focus predominantly on individual influences and not galvanized mass movements aligned for transformational change.

• How might we co-create alignment and relational power between disconnected dots, unleash Human-AI synergies, and galvanize fusion energy for transformational learning to cultivate meta-equity governance, build launching pads for the Equity Moonshot story movement, and upgrade our democracies?

Copy and paste the headline question into AI tools as a mini-experiment to make sense of its meaning and implications.

Cut and paste any other bulleted question, concept, statement, or paragraph into perplexity.ai and any other AI tool to compare and contrast outputs. Use the citations to make sense of their meaning as part of our collaborative learning journeys.

Unleash your curiosity. Ask questions about any concept and question, such as:

• How might thinking and meta-thinking inform doing, and vice versa?
• How might theory inform practice, and vice versa?
• How might we create synergies between thinking and doing and between theory and practice?

These mini-learning exercises set up the inquiry processes for understanding complexity before engaging in dialogue sessions.

Each dialogue module (1-6) provides advanced preparation to understand complex questions before participating in dialogue sessions (10-30 minutes), depending on the group size.

Updated episodically based on reflections and feedback (4/17/2024).

How might we preempt the town-gown split between theory and practice and the false thinking-doing dichotomies?

Thinkers think doers do not know what they are doing. Doers think thinkers do not know how to do about what they are thinking. This dysfunctional town-gown, reductionist split between theory and practice, calls for collaborative learning.

• How might we develop as inquiry-driven learners who proactively explore the meaning and implications of complex questions about the ontological inter-relationships of being, becoming, thinking, and doing?

This question calls for understanding the internal battle of our minds: the interactions of our neo-cortical brain of the equanimity, our limbic-amygdala brain driving our emotions, and our reptilian brain triggering the fight-flight-freeze responses.

A self-awareness about how our brain functions enables us to engage in dialogues without regressing to dysfunctional debates.

How might we co-create generative-strategic dialogues to:

• Become open-minded, truth-seeking, virtuous free-thinkers, in communion with kindred spirits, in service of all?
• Unleash the vast abundance of untapped human potential and social capital to do good for the commons, humanity, the common good, the well-being of all life, and the health of the planet?
• Unravel our meta-crisis of systemic power abuse dynamics that set up our poly-crisis: the complex entanglements of self-inflicted wicked problems in the 21st century?
• Open, inspire, and align our mindsets to co-design and build a fair-free-flourishing future to benefit all?

This learning process prepares learners to develop a broad array of capabilities, such as self-awareness, ethical discernment, emotional regulation, and critical thinking skills, to work on these noble questions.

How might we move beyond:

• Pedagogical pre-occupation with the fire hydrant of content: learning what to think and do, to?
• Process flourishing: learning how to learn, think and do, and how to think about how we learn, think, and do about addressing biases, feelings, ontology, complexity, etc,), to?
• Cultural, moral, and ethical humility: learning about the “why”, the purpose of learning, thinking, and doing, for unraveling the meta-crisis that sets up our poly-crisis?

Cultural humility is taking the one-down position in exploring and understanding different cultures. These lifelong self-reflecting and collaborative learning processes involve understanding and redressing power imbalances for developing trust-based and authentic partnerships with different cultural backgrounds.

Moral humility is an openness to understanding how our ethical discernments are lacking and being open to revising them based on feedback, reason, and different perspectives.

Ethical humility involves a self-reflective process of becoming aware of our biases in making immoral-amoral-moral discernments. This calls for an openness in re-evaluating our discernment skills to avoid the pitfalls of self-righteous fundamentalism and moral absolutism.

Cultural, moral, and ethical humility call for developing meta-cognition skills: exploring and challenging ourselves about how we think, and how we think about thinking. Without meta-cognition, we are unaware of cultural, moral, and ethical indoctrinations. We think that we know what we are, but do not know what we are doing.

Paraphrasing Aristotle, we embed our metaphors in our everyday language. We live by them without full awareness, such as the competitive win-loss metaphors of war and sports metaphors. We are largely unaware of how our metaphors govern how we think. This calls for using the diversity of metaphors to empower us to overcome our resistance to thinking about how we think.

Click on the image to review dialogue learning modules 1-10

How might we, as leaders, mentors, educators, and learners, amplify human-AI synergies to cultivate equity meta-governance, unravel our meta-crisis, and solve our poly-crisis of wicked problems?

Click on image to review dialogue learning modules 1-20.

How might we develop AI-enabled digital learning platforms and eco-systems to deliver exponential opportunities for cultivating equity meta-governance to solve our complex web of wicked problems?