Getting to Truth, Getting to Trust: Insights from Aspen Ideas Festival 2022
Aspen Ideas has always been gracious about inviting me and giving me the freedom to experiment with and test the limits of dialogue. This time was no different, but it challenged our Dust&Co team in a completely new way. It was the first in-person conference in three years, and given the political, professional, environmental, and economic (you know the rest) challenges of the moment — the stakes felt higher.
Aspen is amazing. The location is picturesque, the programming is unmatched, and its participants are some of the most brilliant and creative individuals in the world (like these Fellows I got to meet).
I knew that hosting a series of workshops was our opportunity to build out and test drive a whole new dialogue structure. We had the opportunity to be hyper-creative, to challenge a group of impressive thinkers as they re-assimilated into the conference’s social dynamic, and to scaffold and learn about new methods of communication from it. We dove headfirst into research and planning.
It turns out, designing for this context was harder than we expected (and planning conversations is kind of our thing). Yes, Aspen was the perfect lab for our experiment, but setting isn’t everything — as I’ve said before, Lord of the Flies takes place on a beautiful tropical…
