Information Management for Organizational Effectiveness
Friday, 21 Nov 2025 | Future uncertainty
Nothing really goes as we expect it to go.
Listen to Adam Grant talk about not overplanning one's future
One doesn't want to overdo it, but he makes an argument that too much focus on the end result in the early stages
can stifle the possiblity of creative solutions to the problem.
Read these articles to prepare yourself for some discussion
Paradoxes and their perceptual cousins, illusions, offer two intriguing examples of the tangled relationship
between prediction and understanding.
Both describe situations where we thought we understood something, only to be confronted with anomalies.
Understanding is less well-understood than it seems.
A five year old prediction of things that may be coming true today. How will we cope?
Whether the past few years augur a temporary lull or an abrupt reordering of working life,
economists suggest the same response for college students: Major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills.
Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts.
You don't have to read these unless you wish to ...
... but they might come up in discussion
Tolerating and even delighting in uncertainty doesn't merely help us to accept life's unpredictability;
it also readies us to learn and adapt ...
our uneasy sense of not knowing triggers a host of beneficial neural changes, including heightened attention,
bolstered working memory and sensitivity to new information.
The brain is preparing to update our knowledge of the world.
Uncertainty offers the “opportunity for life to go in different directions,”
... This is why being open to uncertainty is critical for mental well-being.
Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands.
It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 1940s
until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 contributed to the genre's decline.
The movement was an outgrowth of jazz. The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, folk, Dixieland jazz and blues blended with swing;
and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar.
The electrically amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, give the music a distinctive sound. Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop.
Western swing differs in several ways from the music played by the nationally popular horn-driven big swing bands of the same era.
In Western bands, even fully orchestrated bands, vocals, and other instruments followed the fiddle's lead.
Additionally, although popular horn bands tended to arrange and score their music, most Western bands improvised freely, either by soloists or collectively.
Prominent groups during the peak of Western swing's popularity included The Light Crust Doughboys, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys,
Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, Spade Cooley and His Orchestra and Hank Thompson And His Brazos Valley Boys.
Contemporary groups include Asleep at the Wheel and the Hot Club of Cowtown.
According to Merle Travis, "Western swing is nothing more than a group of talented country boys, unschooled in music, but playing the music they feel,
beating a solid two-four rhythm to the harmonies that buzz around their brains. When it escapes in all its musical glory, my friend, you have Western swing."
And then, there are the originals.
This was shown in movie theaters between double features or before the main feature.
