July’24 Guild Events & Experiences — Culture Month

Grey Swan Guild
9 min readJul 4, 2024

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12 Months, 12 Themes, Starting with “Culture”

Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures

First of all welcome to your summer, Northern Hemispherites (and winter, Southerners)! Also happy Canada Day, July 4th Independence Day to our American friends, and many other national holiday salutes for Algerians, Argentinians, Colombians, Belgians, Egyptians, French, Peruvians, Rwandans, Ukrainians and Venezuelans in July, and well heck, salutes to our members celebrating significant events of all stripes in their lives.

Onto the ch-, ch-, changes….

We are moving to a whole new Guild operational calendar for July’24-June’25 starting this month. With a more structured calendar, we’re cleaning up a little bit of the mess we have made for ourselves by our curious, but constant experimentation. We are moving to themed months married to the top twelve interests of our members, featuring distinct activities each month linked to your central curiosities.

Join us for July our Culture Month and throughout the year as we ramp up our 2024–2025 Guild Events and Experiences’ scheduie:

2024:

  • July — Culture Month: covering culture, society & geopolitics (see below)
  • August — Workplace Month: covering workplace, careers & talent
  • September — Futures Month: covering trends, foresights and futures
  • October — Leadership Month: covering leadership, purpose & governance
  • November — Impact Month: covering sustainability, development & impact
  • December — Humans Month covering social norms, behaviors & psychology

2025:

  • January — Marketplace Month: covering marketplace, consumers & commerce
  • February — Learning Month: covering education, skills & learning
  • March — Economy Month: covering the economy, finance and income
  • April — Sensemaking Month: covering complexity, sensemaking & systems
  • May — Innovation Month: covering collaboration,, open and crowd innovation
  • June — Technology Month: covering emerging technology & digital

We hope these thematics make sense to you, and let us know your thoughts on ideas for populating the full year calendar. Read on for Culture Month!

This Guild has Twelve Months in their Year — Here are our themes.

Events & Experiences Schedule — July’24 Culture Month

Join, engage and participate in one of 15+ events this month in The Guild

Mon, July 8th 8am ET — GSG Book Club #5A — “How Data Happens”join the review

Mon, July 8th 4pm ET — GSG Book Club #5B — ”How Data Happens” — join the review

Tues, July 9th 9am ET — New Member Onboarding Regatta refer a colleague

Tues. July 9th 12pm ET — The Quickening XII — Guild Steering Group meeting (private Guild leaders event) — ask us how to step up and join

Fri, July 12th 10pm ET- GSG Intelligence Session A — Champions, Captains, Contributors — join an Intelligence team wedge

Fri, July 12th 3pm ET- GSG Intelligence Session B — Champions, Captains, Contributors — join an Intelligence team wedge

Thurs. July 11th 12pm ET — Salon Conversation : Multidisciplinarians cover the expanse

Sun. July 14th 11am ET — AI Coffeehouse — Culture Session explore AI culture

Thurs. July 18th 9am ET — Compass+Compendium Sensemaking/Complexity Methods (restricted to seven sensemakers, option for two sessions)

Thurs. July 18th 11am ET — Compass+Compendium — Innovator Methods (restricted to seven innovators, option for two sessions)

Thurs. July 18th 1pm ET — Compass+Compendium — Futurist Methods (restricted to seven futurists, option for two sessions))

Thurs. July 18th 3pm ET — Compass+Compendiium Historian/Archivist Methods (restricted to seven historians, option for two sessions))

Tues July 23rd 9am and 7pm ET — Feature Culture Atelier: Ambition + Motivation (elevate your learning first session or second session)

Wed, July 24th — First Three Episodes of Intrepid — The Podcast air (go wider on the world)

Thurs,. July 25th 9am — Salon Conversation: Sociologists (engage on seven questions)

Thurs. July 25th 11am — Salon Conversation: Podcasters (engage on seven questions)

Thurs. July 25th 1pm — Salon Conversation: Culture Shapers (engage on seven questions)

Tues, July 30th, 12pm ET — Uncertainty Weathervane Report Publication Premiere (take advantage of the report toplines)

Wed, July 31st 12pm ET — Cygnus Sprints presents The Disruption of Consulting (discover what’s next in consulting and advisory)

Feature July’24 Events

We’re pondering some interesting provocative questions about our culture’s ambition and motivation:

  • are we losing our collective sense of ambition?
  • what motivates us professionally?
  • do we need to address part of the motivation equation?
  • are our expectations too high? too low?
  • is there a difference between passion for something and commitiment for something?
  • how is technology affecting this? enhancing this? accelerating this?
  • is this sense of ambition and motivation felt differently around the world?
  • do we need a course correction?

It’s such a good topic we are holding two feature events to incorprate all of our Guild’s time zones.

Come to our Feature Culture Atelier #64 — Ambition & Motivation — 7/23 9am ET

Come to our Feature Culture Atelier #64 — Ambition & Motivation — 7/23 7pm ET

Our fifth book club gives us Chris Higgins and Matthew Jones book “How Data Happened”. Described by The Nation as “Wiggins and Jones hope to historicize our datafied social order in order to hasten its replacement with a more humane alternative, one in which data is used in defense of people’s dignity.” Here is the brief summary.

Get the book — How Data Happened

Mon July 8th 8am ET Session #1 -GSH Book Club #5 — How Data Happened

Mon July 8th 4pm ET Session #2 -GSH Book Club #5 — How Data Happened

The Guild grows by about 2.5% every month. One of our best hours of the month in the Guild is where we onboard and wayfind some of the new members to their best places in the Guild. We learn about them, they learn about us. First impressions matter and we like to give a personal touch.

Tues July 9th 9am ET — Refer a colleague to our July Regatta …please

Intelligence is the engine room of the Guild. We are hosting two sessions next week on Wednesday July 10th at 12pm ET and 7pm ET to fill out our roster of champions, captains and contributors for our next 14 intelligence projects.

We are covering off: Uncertainty, Happiness, Resilience, AI Realities, Organization Next. Knowledge & Decision Compass. The Future of Cities. The Future of Money. Customer Zeitgeist. The Biocene. Grey Swans. The Regenerative Economy. The Bank. Real Time Uncertainty Monitor. Who’s in on the ground floor?

Do you want to join us on making better sense of the world? Join these Intelligence wedges to attend July 10th.

The conversation is the thing in our Guild. We are hosting not one, not two, not three, but four conversations in July. It’s a simple formula — 12 sparkly minds in the Guild, all from the vantage poiint of 12 different global locations, tackling seven open-ended questions relevant to their profession. Let the dialogue ensue!

Join our polymathic Multidisciplinarian Salon — Thurs July 11th 12pm ET

Join our behavioural Scoiologist Salon — Thurs July 25th 9am ET

Join our audio-friendly Podcaster Salon — Thurs July 25th 11am ET

Join our in-the-know Culture Shaper Salon — Thurs July 25th 1pm ET

We geek out on the practical sides of AI nearly every Sunday at 11AM ET. On this week, we theme it on culture-changing aspects of machine learning and generative AI.

Join our AI Coffeehouse — Sunday July 14th 11am ET

We are getting beyond the blinders and building out a wiki, visual mapping tool and recommendation engine platform all in one, iventorying over 750 of the best knowledge and decision-making approaches.

We are looking for some of the best minds in four different disciplines to inform our work. Please join us if you love to explore and optimize frameworks and methods.

Join our C&C Sensemakers Methods Sessions — Thursday, July 18th 9am ET

Join our C&C Innovators Methods Sessions — Thursday, July 18th 11am ET

Join our C&C Futurists Methods Sessions — Thursday, July 18th 1pm ET

Join our C&C Historians Methods Sessions — Thursday, July 18th 3pm ET

We wrote the Uncertainty book last year (with a 2nd edition that just got published). Now here comes the Weathervane research and intelligence report to accompany it.

Come find out the toplines from the Premiere of our Uncertainity Weathervane Report Tueaday July 30th 12pm ET

Our Guild’s venture Cygnus Sprints is hosting a frank and authentic discussion on what’s changed in the culture, the marketplace, the technosphere and executive workplace to affect the industry of advice, consulting and professional services, with experts that have had an ear to the ground to these sweeping changes.

Get the scoop on the Disruption of Consulting Wednesday July 31st 12pm ET

Guild Publication — Uncertainty, The Book — 2nd Edition Now Out

Grey Swan Guild — the Calls to Action

If you have an interest in responding to uncertainty, our pain point chasing and our particular Guild view on the world. You have a few options.

First, join our Grey Swan Guild Linkedin page Grey Swan Guild — we post daily, usually surfacing interesting observations that respond to our pain points, giving you a first view of what’s upcoming, telling you how to get involved, or recapping what cool things we have just done.

Secondly, if you want to get higher up on our radar and profile your interests, declare your intentions and potentially take on a leading or contributing role in the Guild, there is only one way to do it. Become an official member. Here’s the form.

If your enthusiasm still remains whetted, and you love going below, around and above the surface of our world’s biggest issues, become part of our standing panel of 400+ analytical and observational minds. Become a Global Sensemaker. Here’s the form.

Not satisfied with just thinking, but would rather solve these pain points too. We have designed a ventures wing to our guild called Cygnus Ventures that has embarked upon twelve different ventures to get after solutions and opportunities that tackle making better sense of the world through our well-defined pain points. Become a Cygnus Venturist. Here is the form.

Trying to find the central thread and on-ramp to participation and still have questions? Each and every month, usually in the first week of the month, we host new member onboarding Regattas, where we meet you face to face and share in why we exist, what we do, who you are, explore some interactive queries and answer every one of our queries. Join us at our next regatta in July. Here’s the link.

Join us for our regular monthly new member onboards — we call them Regattas. Our next one is July 9th.

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Grey Swan Guild

Making Sense of the World’s Biggest Challenges & Next Grey Swans — curating and creating knowledge through observation, informed futurism, and analysis🦢