I bring four decades experience to group facilitation, instructional design and experiential learning to those I work with. I use a synergistic approach to link diverse parties, dissolve blocks of unhealthy competition, and enable organizations and communities to tap into tacit and entrepreneurial knowledge. In my early professional years, I taught in public and private schools. It is here, with young children, that I first thought about what I have come to call Group Genius. I was totally amazed at the creative abilities of my students and realized that they had as much to teach me about learning and teaching as I did for them. Student scores soared when I observed that there were only a few simple rules that I needed to practice rigorously. Within this discipline, freedom to excel became standard practice. What is so curious to me is how much more creative and capable young children are than what any of the schools of education suggest. Where do they get such limited ideas! I took what I learned from my interaction with young children and began applying it to the adult community and formed The Learning Exchange. The genius of this organization was that it brought all facets of the community together --- young students, CEOs, scientists, teachers, artists, educators, economists, and parents – into collaboration to design curriculum missing in school systems. Group Genius was possible with adults as well as children! And yes! Adults also could well remember and re-engage their imaginations, bringing play into their work when given the chance. My work and philosophy in education expanded to the business and government communities when I, with my husband, Matt Taylor, co-founded MG Taylor Corporation and knOwhere Inc. Together, we blended our talents and created a system of collaborative environments, work processes and tools to catalyze breakthrough and innovation in high-performance teams. This patented system is able to engage hundreds of people together to create, design and implement higher order solutions in remarkably short periods of time and reach well beyond conflict resolution and compromise. Our work has spanned from helping the World Economic Forum design environments and workshops that release the same creativity and willingness of participants to engage and play as they explore ways to improve the state of the world, to corporate giants looking for better ways to learn from each other, to the smallest of companies and communities hungry to learn and develop their collaborative skills. In all of this work, my focus has been to unleash dormant creativity and to prove the soundness and power of group genius to solve very complex problems. Now I have come full cycle with the creation of Tomorrow Makers, a non-profit corporation, developed to work with communities to help them bring about the transformations they envision. My passion is to help communities create for themselves a new curriculum based around This Place Called Home, a course for learning to thrive in both a regional and global right livelihood.
The Future is Rational Only in Hindsight. MG Taylor Axiom
http://www.fastcompany.com/user/gail-taylor-0
Fast Talk | February 03, 2008 10:38 am
