On May 17, sixteen people from a variety of professional backgrounds attended Art of the Future's Introduction to Structural Dynamics workshop. Representatives from health care, higher education, financial services, management consulting, a builder of Chinese-American partnerships, an environmental NGO, the public schools and others stepped through a detailed process for getting behind the headlines of any field in order to understand the deep structure beneath the surface of current events. In a day packed with exercises, conversations and concepts, the participants used facts from a case study as a springboard to discover and live in plausible future worlds in order to select strategies to begin to implement in the present.

Appreciative Inquiry is one method Art of the Future uses to redress the consequences of living in organizational environments where fault-finding is a natural tendency. We recently delivered an Appreciative Inquiry workshop to a group of 25 very talented co-workers who want to do as good or better a job of appreciating each other as they do in being critical of one another. Social scientists have determined that we humans are hard wired to tune into what's not working rather than appreciating what is going well. Our negativity bias can make work much less life sustaining than it should be. Because it is instinctual for us to worry and carp about things, experts have concluded that five authentic appreciative statements are needed to counteract the impact of one critical or negative one.

Appreciative inquiry is frequently demonstrated through the little things in life. For example, in this organization, a member of a group took a nice set of notes at a meeting and shared them with the participants. Several people complimented her good work publicly. An old song included the line, "To say good morning and really mean it!" In many ways, appreciative inquiry is about taking the everyday, the unremarkable and putting its small quiet beauty and its truly positive meaning on display.

The Center for Medical Simulation (CMS) is a Harvard based training institution that is changing the future of medical training. By incorporating richly textured simulations into the training of clinicians and by using simulation to make all who work in health care aware of the stressful nature of the clinical environment, CMS intends to have a very dramatic impact on patient safety. Recently, the Thoracic Surgery Foundation for Research and Education (TSFRE) asked CMS to help it develop a vision for simulation in the training of thoracic surgeons. Art of the Future's Michael Sales worked closely with colleague, Jay Vogt, a skilled agent of large systems change, to develop a conference for thoracic surgeons from many parts of the world. This future-oriented program signals a new era in the training of clinicians treating chest organ injuries. Several participants considered it a mandate for change in medical practice. Michael and Jay are faculty members for CMS' Healthcare Adventures! Team building program and leadership development program, which provided the overall context for the work with TSFRE.