Re-thinking Life !

Modern cities in the 21st century are defined by “individual empowerment”, “social inclusion”, “economic development”. “cultural prosperity”, and “sustainable development”. The rapid urbanization around the world ( see here ), makes it imperative for cities, as they grow in population, to meet the societal, economic, and cultural needs of its citizens who are growing increasingly diverse. But  you do not have to scrutinize the Arab cities’ ecologies to know that they are conceptually and pragmatically nothing near a modern city as illustrated above. A typical Arab city, let’s say my city Tripoli in northern Lebanon, is underdeveloped, lacks social mobility, individuals are undervalued, has marginalized groups, and the city development is temporal. The marginalization or assimilation of groups in the city is only growing by the day. I have seen this in every Arab city I have visited, with the exception of a few in the GCC. A key ingredient for continuous development is life-long lea...

The World Bank has published a much needed guidebook for organizations on how to document operational experiences for organizational learning and knowledge sharing . It also discusses the significance of organizational capabilities at two levels: Enabling Environment for Knowledge Sharing and Technical Skills. The  publication asks a simple, yet important, question: Is your organization missing important lessons from its operational experiences? This step-by-step guide shows you how to systematically capture such knowledge and use it to inform decision making, support professional learning, and scale up successes. The captured lessons--knowledge assets, the central element needed for learning--are consistently formatted documents that use operational experience to answer a specific question or challenge. The guide describes how to create and use knowledge assets in five steps: (1) identify important lessons learned by participants, (2) capture those lessons with text or multimedi...