Many years ago, Buckminster Fuller*s work persuaded me that our species already has the technical know-how to create a sustainable future. The question remained, how to build our social capacity? One of my life themes became the search for alternatives to our current epistemology, the *argument as battle* metaphor described so well by George Lakoff. Karl Mannheim, in his seminal work on the sociology of knowledge, said we should rejoice whenever new perspectives lead us to question everything we thought we knew. What conditions might facilitate our doing so?

My journeys have led me through professional work in education reform (constructivism, critical pedagogy, transformative education) and personal study of various individual and social healing modalities (re-evaluation counseling, engaged buddhism, focusing, diversity work, conflict resolution) to my current work as catalyst and coach for group and organizational learning. Along the way, I*ve obtained a masters degree in Multicultural Education and another in Organization Development (Psychology), edited Tom Atlee*s The Tao of Democracy, and written the manual for Jim Rough*s Dynamic Facilitation, a way of evoking transformational dialogue on practical issues. An essay I wrote that distills and synthesizes many of these threads is available at http://www.collectivewisdominitiative.org/social_application.htm