The Potentiality

John Horn's Website for Community Builders

Corporate Exploration

Best Practices for Organizing Conferences Within Organizations

Internal conferences foster human connection and learning in hybrid work environments. They encourage team alignment with organizational goals and promote intrapreneurism. Successful conferences require careful planning, collaboration, and alignment of personal and organizational priorities. Integrating fun elements enhances learning, creating engaged and innovative teams that drive overall success.

The Community Building Potential of … Malls?!

There we were, skipping and laughing ironically through Kitchener-Waterloo’s largest mall. My grad school roommate and current awesome friend, Jim, and I were hilariously lampooning the community building potential of malls by drawing a clear counterpoint to how they are…

Five Characteristics of the New Economy

Building the next economy will take a movement. Community builders, educators, economists, urbanists, policymakers, business leaders, cooperators, activists, parents, kids, neighbours, and even a few celebrities must unite to build a better normal through societal recovery. Something that we are…

Three Bold Worklife Predictions for 2025

The year 2024 has been a wild ride for worklife, packed with game-changing technologies that are reshaping how we work and all sorts of tinkering with employee value propositions (EVP) from Google to the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan. Generative AI…

Four Ways to be Resilient When You Feel Like Crap

This past weekend was brutal for my physical health. Food poisoning and a nasty flu bug took away my bodily fluids and ability to sleep. In the grand scheme of things this was a minor setback and I was able…

Five Productivity Lessons from Espresso

I love coffee. It’s delicious, chock full of life-enhancing antioxidants and fosters connections and collaboration, too. After spending a few weeks in Italy last year, I developed a love of espresso. In addition to the concentrated caffeine boost that a…

How the Economics of Friendship Shape Work and Life

Friendship is a fundamental and universal human need. This form of social connection cultivates mutual affection, trust, interdependence, and joy. According to one of modern social science’s longest ongoing studies, the social connections of friendship enrich and even extend our…

Three Leadership Lessons from Spider-Man

Plainly put, Spider-Man leads with a unique formula of leadership of kindness, humour humility, smarts, passion, and responsibility. And here are three leadership lessons that you can take away from Spider-Man. No, this not a “new idea” and “a few people” have “already written about this” in “2010” – this being said, my lessons get to the punchline quicker and better. And the artwork (see below) that I chose to adorn this post is both adorable and (probably) concerning.

Six Lifelong Learning Lessons from The Intern Movie

Last week I published a piece on lifelong learning lessons from the perfectly fine Google recruitment video and/or raucous, adventurous workplace comedy, The Internship. This week I will focus on another perfectly fine (except for the last 20 minutes, but…

Five Ways to Connect Your Workplace

The purpose of so many organizational teams, like innovation labs, and startup ecosystems, like Silicon Valley, is to disrupt the status quo. I’ve written about why we need to disrupt our workplaces and how to do it. The thing is…