The following principles emerged from Critical Thinking’s co-creative learning and are considered essential.
Self-Managing Organisations
Conventional wisdom assumes large complex enterprises or functions cannot exist without organisational hierarchy. Frederic Laloux’s research and book, Reinventing Organizations, demonstrate that it is precisely large, complex tasks which are best suited to non-hierarchical organisation.
Laloux’s research is focused mainly on commercial organisations although the successful case studies he cites include a self-organising school in Germany.
Laloux refers to three principles which the most successful self-organising entities adopt:
These are essential principles for CoCreative Learning and are self-explantory. For a deeper understanding of these principles, we refer you to Laloux’s work referenced above.
Laloux demonstrates, with case studies, how self-organisation can work in practice to manage large, highly complex tasks such as making sense of the world.
Thinking and Evaluating Information
Fundamental principles for critical thinking and evaluating information are encapsulated in Bertrand Russell’s Liberal Decalogue:
Principles for evaluating information and critical thinking
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness