Portland, OR
Jerry Michalski (ma-CALL-ski) is on a quest to help humans make better decisions together. One motivation was watching too many good ideas die in bad group process; another was curating a single mind map for 23 years. But the biggest is wanting to bridge the bitter cultural divide that has brought the U.S. to such a dangerous brink. To that end, he launched Open Global Mind during lockdown and is pursuing a variety of approaches to collaborative sensemaking, from the technological to the purely social.
He is also an expert on trust, particularly questions of how trust works in institutions, like education, elections and the corporate workplace.
Independent since the last millennium (1998), Michalski has been publishing his brain online almost that long. You can browse it at www.JerrysBrain.com. He earned an MBA from the Wharton School, where he stumbled into the mind-expanding ideas of Russ Ackoff, and a BA in economics (mostly econometrics) from the University of California Irvine. He was raised in Peru and Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish and German, as well as pretty passable French.