Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work

"The more they told us, the more curious and interested we became. They were pulling together insights from fields as diverse as architecture and brain chemistry and applying them to business. They were also incorporating insights from the best business theories around. They seemed to have brought it all together in a completely unique three-day format that sounded challenging, fun, and actually generated solid work product. Could this be real?" - from the author's preface

Leaping The Abyss: Putting Group Genius To Work is the single most in-depth description and analysis of the patented DesignShop® facilitation methodology invented by the MG Taylor Corporation. Written by two authors who attended a DesignShop event in 1995, Leaping The Abyss provides a detailed step-by-step account of the three-day event, including interviews and anecdotes from participants from a diversity of industries such as healthcare, management consulting, government, military, automotive, food and beverage, education, and high-technology, as well as, a behind the scenes look at how DesignShop experiences are created and the personel who facilitate them. An extensive bibliography, dozens of web links, illustrations, tips and suggested exercises with each chapter offer the reader a great source of new ideas for facilitating the creative process within their own work place.

Christine Peterson is President of Foresight Institute, a nonprofit organization working to maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of coming technologies.

By writing, lecturing, briefing the press, and organizing conferences on powerful emerging technologies, Chris serves as an interface between technologists and the broader public, including business and policymakers. Specific areas of focus include:

Nanotechnology: Chris organizes the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, the primary conference series on this topic. She was founding editor of Foresight Update, the leading newsletter since 1987. With husband K. Eric Drexler and partner Gayle Pergamit, Chris coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (1991, Morrow), known as "the nanotechnology book to give your mom."

Open Source: Foresight supports making software more reliable and secure through Open Source development. Chris coined the term "Open Source software" to communicate these benefits to a wider user base, and now works to increase cooperation within the OSS community itself.

Hypertext and the Web: To improve societal decision-making processes on complex technological issues, Chris served as software development manager for Foresight's Open Source software project CritSuite, a free public service enabling annotation of any web text.

Group Process: Chris and co-author Gayle Pergamit wrote Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work in an effort to bring the highly effective DesignShop process for group achievement to the attention of organizations working to meet complex challenges.

Space Development: Prior to nanotechnology, Chris cut her activist teeth working to promote space development as an approach to solving environmental problems.

In her talks and essays, Chris specializes in making difficult technological concepts understandable and in lowering the stress of grappling with rapid technological change. She tries to use clear explanations, straightforward logic, analogies, and a bit of humor to help audiences and readers get comfortable with thinking about technologies radically different from those we use today.

Both within Foresight and externally, she advises individuals and companies — from start-ups to the Fortune 100 — on strategies for success in an environment of rapid technological change. To further the interest areas listed above, she provides referrals, networking, and strategy advice to individuals and organizations working in these endeavors.

Her current book project focuses on openness as a key component of success in complex self-organizing systems ranging from software to businesses to — ideally — governments and supragovernmental organizations.

Originally educated at MIT as a molecule gnurd (S.B. chemistry), Chris is now proud to be regarded as an honorary software gnurd (and slashdot addict) who influences complex organic systems through programming in the natural language called English.

Her best-known quote is "If you're looking ahead long-term, and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong. But if it doesn't look like science fiction, it's definitely wrong."