Vision - Leads to Awards and Recognition (Boston Globe)

Reissue: A year ago, I wrote about my vision to create a retreat center and my projects at Kripalu. I just wanted to share some of the recognition given to four years of thinking, selling, planning, managing and sweat that I did there.

My Project at Kripalu was just featured in an article in the Boston Globe entitled Kripalu Center Dorm Radiates Simple Sustainability.

The project was also recently awarded an AIA Housing Design Award for 2010 and my thanks go to Peter Rose and his team at Rose + Guggenheimer (now Peter Rose + Partners).
photo courtesy of Rose + Partners


You can also read about the analysis and financial justification required to build such a beautiful green project at Metamorphosis Management Group (white paper) -and- read about how I built the team that designed and built this project employing the principles of Engagement and Respect at my blog on business solutions.

Here's the story of where it all began.

In 1993 during a workshop on Empowering Leadership, I was working along with my clients on developing a personal vision. There for the first time, I wrote about creating a retreat center. I had never heard of Kripalu at the time. But in 1996, three years later a former colleague from International Paper, Belinda Bothwick became the first outsider to be hired as Executive Director of Kripalu and I eventually received a phone call asking for help.

I took on Kripalu as project, so that I could learn about retreat centers and stayed 3 years, becoming the COO. I left Kripalu for five years and then returned to work upon strategic planning and development of both the operating educational and service businesses and the infrastructure of both the facilities and the technology. Although I resigned my full time position in April of 2008, I stayed on part-time through May of 2009 to complete the large construction projects which I have been working on for four years. Like all personal visions that are successful, they look now in reality, as I have imagined them for years.

In 2007, we began construction by moving a road and the adjacent parking lots to accommodate the Annex building. Once the road was moved and site cleared, I asked the civil engineers to have the Annex's corners staked out on the ground. The surveyors marked and placed the stakes. I walked to the stake marking the northeast corner of the building. I moved over a few feet to stand on the spot where one day there would be a beautiful enclosed walkway and above it five stories of bedrooms. When I looked out toward the Stockbridge bowl (Lake Mahkeenac) the view was wrong from what I had visualized from the building plans. The building had existed in my minds eye for years before we built it. I asked the civil engineers to check the stakes and they found out that they were off by seven feet. Only seven feet, but seven feet which blocked the view with an existing building.

The Annex building is an exceptional green building using Integrated Design methodology. It employs a radiant heating and cooling system for both the building as a whole and individually for each guest room. Day-lighting systems are designed into the building to allow the low winter sun into the building and to block the high summer sun and heat gain. The hallways of the building are "venturi tubes" and will provide passive cooling without wind. All in All, the building as built uses 45% of the energy of typical new construction of this type and can accept geo-thermal in the future.

I have posted an end of construction slide show on slideshare.com as well as my presentation on this project at the Nation Council for Science and the Environment annual conference in Washington, DC. (NCSE 2010:The New Green Economy.)

Learning Skills: Counterfeit Thinking versus Critical Thinking

Back in the mid 1990s, I contributed regularly at an annual conference on the teaching of problem-solving and thinking skills with the moniker, Problem Solving Across the Curriculum (PSAC) that was the brainchild of a friend of mine Dr. Daniel K. Apple, the President of Pacific Crest. The concept of the conference, which attracted mostly educators along with a few business executives and consultants, was that there is a common set of learning skills required to solve problems that is applicable across and independent of the specific subject matter being taught.


At the time, I was heavily engaged in corporate consulting and training. We were teaching problem-solving under the umbrella of Total Quality Management and World Class Manufacturing methods, the precursor to today's Lean and Six Sigma methods for problem solving and process improvement.

At the third PSAC Conference, I was a panelist at the plenary session on the topic of thinking skills along with Dr. Donald Bishko and Dr. Gary A. Woditsch co-author of The Thoughtful Teacher's Guide to Teaching Thinking Skills.

One of the topics we grappled with was whether or not you could in fact teach thinking skills. Dr. Woditsch contended that with few exceptions, individuals were capable of further development of their thinking skills. He countered the premise of the question by pointing out that we have “always” been teaching thinking skills as a byproduct of teaching subject matter.

Furthermore, Dr. Woditsch offered that two things that confused the issue. They were the lack of assessment around the effectiveness of the development of thinking skills -and- the ability of individual learners to develop coping strategies in place of thinking skills to produce "counterfeit" results. For example, rather than actually learning a skill, one can simply memorize a pattern and as long as the circumstances do not change significantly the pattern would yield a similar result.

My son Will was developing these coping strategies in 1st grade when it came to math. His teacher handed out worksheets where you first did the math in a “box” and then based upon the answers, colored the “box” to produce a pattern. William simply, figured out the pattern and skipped nearly all the math, as evidenced by the high percentage of incorrect answers in his work that was colored flawlessly.

There are many examples of counterfeit thinking and its limitations. Have you ever worked for someone who was promoted to being a manager because they were the best at following orders or getting tasks done? They often make dismal managers because the underlying pattern for success has changed. Even successful managers and businesses fail when the pattern of the marketplace or regulatory environment changes.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Counterfeit thinking, the attempt to follow patterns that worked in previous and similar situations, is exactly what Einstein is speaking of.

The episode of the Simpson’s where a lobbyist suggests to Mayor Quimby and the community leaders that all Springfield needs to cure its problems is a “Monorail”, mocks the counterfeit thinking so often employed by politicians in their “pork barrel” funding of projects that have zero possibility of producing the results promised but follow the pattern of similar projects done elsewhere.

To read more about Seattle's Monorail, Check out Transit Miracle or Urban Toy.


As opposed to “counterfeit” thinking, the term "critical thinking" takes thinking in a focused and diagnostic direction as it means "thinking" directed at finding and examining that which is fundamental to understanding something. Critical thinking is about finding patterns not following patterns. The leap from thinking about something -to- developing an understanding of something is the same as the difference between standing on a pool deck and looking at an object on the bottom -and- diving into the pool, swimming to the bottom and examining the object down there.

The primary tool in critical thinking is "asking questions". When you work at developing "content rich" questions about something, you must examine and inventory that which you already know or assume that you know. In working out which questions need to be asked you seek questions that when answered will further your understanding.

Counterfeit thinking will lead you to dead ends and cliff faces but critical thinking will open doors and minds.