Bucky Group 13 - Personal Planet

Just came back from a gruelling 21 hour Personal Planet workshop organised by the Bucky Group and facilitated by Mr Medard Gabel at the Singapore Management University on the 3 and 4 November 2007. I was exhausted at the end of the workshop. There was so much cramped into the two-day seminar plus lots of documents to take home to read in a CD-ROM.
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Medard Gabel is a noted author and speaker who co-founded World Game Institute with Buckminster Fuller. Medard also co-founded Osearth and is founder and CEO of BigPictureSmallWorld. In conjunction with the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Medard created the Design Science lab which is a workshop for developing strategies to address the United Nations Millenium Development Goals. For more information, click here

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What I got out from this workshop is that "Perspective is More important than Knowledge". For that Medard took us to the key statistics of the world to show how disproportionate resources are alocated in the world and how so many in developing countries are suffering.

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We went on a universal view that we are living in a world of abundance where the universe is continuously re-generating, since energy is neither created or destroyed. Then we went also on a personal view of who we are and where we would like to go to. The exercises in the workshop oscillates from the individual's perspectives to universal perspectives and vice versa. It thus led us to reflect on the Big Picture and also the individual aspirations in this Small World. A world made small as it gets more and more wired by telecommunications and air travel.

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I find that it is in this pulsation between individual and universal views that we put our plans into perspective to change the world and serve humanity much as Bucky did. Bucky is able to articulate the energy flows in the Universe and is also able to go into monumental detail of designing various life supporting inventions, like the geodesic dome.

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As the workshop moved on, the activities became more and more interactive and experiential. We all were expected to think of a global or local problem and create a business plan to change the world.

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I have envisioned a self-contained ecologically sustainable housing product, other participants dwell on education, organic products, recycling, renewable energies and products for autistic children - all to change the world and make it a better place. I think all aspiring entrepreneurs should attend this workshop to understand the individual's perspective in the world and its prevailing problems and then design enterprises to solve them. That way, there will be more creation of life supporting wealth to serve humanity.

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