Long Island School of Meta-Interdisciplinary Study: Lesson One

We've posted previously about the need to create an environment where we can all learn to think in a "cross disciplinary" manner.

Meta-interdisciplinary simply means you are exhausting all possible means of determining the correct public policy by leaving no one or no possible solution or idea out of the equation.

Here is a simple exercise.

Take 100 randomly selected "things" (concepts, ideas, existing programs, physical structures what have you) and put them on index cards. Next, select five cards. Create three possible connections (collaborative activities) between all of the five cards selected.

As you get more adept at the process increase 100 to 200, five to ten, three to five and so on until your brain starts to hurt. Now we're thinking "out of the box."

If you are a software savvy, there are "randomizer" programs out there that connect to databases to achieve the same results.

It doesn't matter that some or most of the ideas won't work. That isn't the purpose of the exercise.

The purpose of the exercise is to get us to think differently.

The purpose of the exercise is to break the "cycle of stagnation" we've talked about on a number of occasions.

More in Lesson Two.