History Matters

By Maria Bezaitis, Alex Mack, and ken anderson

The EPIC Proceedings are a history of people, ideas, arguments, and conversations. While the proceedings are not an exhaustive representation of who we are, what we work on, how we think, they provide an important view into precisely these facets of the EPIC community. At the NYC conference we unveiled Intelligences. Intelligences gives EPIC people the ability to access and search across 10 years of our invaluable conference proceedings. Making this history available is such an important milestone not only for this community of people, but for any person or organization seeking to understand something about the evolution of this work over a decade and its value.

History matters not only because it links individuals to thoughts, events, and accomplishments, but because it creates accountability amongst people who identify in one way or another with that history—accountability to reference that history and ultimately to progress beyond it. While our positions as applied practitioners in a range of business and organizational settings emphasize our individual roles in specific settings, our contributions to EPIC and the EPIC proceedings remind us that we’re always standing on someone else’s shoulders and that our own work is better for that.

Thanks to everyone who contributes research, commentary, advice, and questions to EPIC and www.epicpeople.org—this is where your voice supports and builds our community.