VIRTUAL: Thursday, January 4, 2024 | 7:00 PM US Central Across disciplines as diverse as marketing, education, health, and management, “gamification” draws on our capacity to play to help us move ourselves and others toward a goal. Books like Burlingham and Stack’s “The Great Game of Business” and Boller and Kapp’s “Play to Learn” provide examples of how to apply this concept. With computers or consoles, balls or marbles, cards or boards, humans love games.…

VIRTUAL: Thursday, November 30, 2023 | 7:00 PM US Central IN-PERSON: Saturday, December 2, 2023 | 9:00 AM Affirmative Action and Reparations may be some of the most frightening outcomes of being honest racism and the extent to which it has been embedded in the United States from its origin.  We've built skills for feeling and thinking and hearing. In this practice session we apply those skills to discuss affirmative action and reparations. We reflect…

VIRTUAL: Thursday, October 26, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central In his 1889 biography of Charles George Gordon, William Francis Butler observed, " it is the victor who writes the history and counts the dead, and to the vanquished in such a struggle there only remains the dull memory of an unnumbered and unwritten sorrow." We know that for every happening, there are at least as many stories about that happening as their are observers, often…

VIRTUAL: Thursday, September 28, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central Before we're 2 years old, most humans develop a capacity for "object permanence," the understanding that objects in the world exist apart from us, even when we can't see them. This understanding is important for our survival. After all, the prowling tiger will still kill us, even if we don't see her coming. It's also an important dimension of functioning day to day: my keys don't…

VIRTUAL: Thursday, August 24, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central “We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say - as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: you are part of me I do not yet know.” (p. 11) These words encapsulate what Valarie Kaur means by “see no stranger.” Through personal stories, she shares her journey toward revolutionary love, a love that embraces self, others, and…

VIRTUAL: Thursday, July 27, 2023 | 7:00 PM As we turn our attention toward the reality of our world and how it became as it is, it's important that we prepare to grieve the harm that our society has done and continues to do. Mourning that loss is an important step toward healing it. One of the great paradoxes of life in the United States is that while we all experience loss, we’re largely left…

VIRTUAL: Thursday, June 22, 2023  | 7:00 PM Central Practicing what we've been learning stimulated by a topic regarded as controversial in some circles, with readings that stimulate that controversy as preparation. We've added an examination of our thinking to the exploration of how we experience, process, and express our emotion. We've learned about tools for how to practice empathy by connecting with emotions as well as how to open our minds to new ideas…

VIRTUAL: Thu, May 25, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central The "others", whoever they may be, are not evil, but often serving a different set of priorities. Learning how to describe strategies in ways that speak to others' priorities helps us move forward together. Even when we work to separate our observations from judgements we make about them, the judgements remain. We still apply a moral framework, some way of prioritizing what’s important to us. Social…

VIRTUAL: Thursday, April 27, 2023 | 7:00 PM Creating intellectual humility and reframing change as learning and growth (vs "flip-flopping" or failures of integrity). Building skill in changing our mind is an important step in creating change. Adam Grant suppoorts this skill with a description of what it means to re-think what we know, how we know it, and the skills we need to learn and integrate new information and perspectives. “What gets us into…