Most of us office-bound information workers would be hard-pressed to describe our jobs as adventurous or risky outside our own Walter Mitty-esque fantasies. Most of the adventure we experience would be intellectual at best and the risks we encounter are thoroughly calculated such as to prevent against failure or to simply cover our rears. This is somewhat unfortunate, though, as it’s hard to replicate the incisive clarity that can result from adventurous, inherently risky activities. Nor are we called upon to stretch the imaginations as much as we might when something important like our safety and the safety of others…

Love them or loathe them, meetings are an inevitability of the business world. Often our negative feelings towards meetings are caused by a belief that they’re ineffective, frustrating, or pointless. Even those of us who have had positive and exciting meetings, we’ve all experienced those feelings at one point or another. Harvard University, in a mission not related directly to meetings, set out to aid schools in getting more value out of their test results through a project called DataWise. As you might expect, this massive project spawned thousands of meetings and a mixed bag of positive progress and static…