Word-Dancing Together Towards Noble Outcomes

How can you make professional communication training at once more engaging, easier to understand, and more memorable? That question was central to a research project that ran from December 2022 to December 2023. All participants took part in a communication training programme based on an interaction model developed from recent research. This model was implemented differently across groups: some groups worked exclusively with cognitive knowledge transfer and exercises, while others combined the model with explicitly embodied movements and principles drawn from aikido. From Training to Publication The analysis of the results has since been published. This process took time, as is typical of rigorous academic research. The article went through a double-blind peer-review procedure: independent experts assessed the study anonymously, without knowing who the authors were, while the authors in turn did not know the identity of the reviewers. This procedure guarantees a critical, careful, and ...

[ ABC  is the Association for Business Communication.] This October (15–18 October 2025), I had the privilege of joining the Association for Business Communication’s annual conference in Long Beach, California. It was a vibrant gathering of scholars and practitioners dedicated to exploring how communication shapes organizations, leadership, and learning. I was fortunate to contribute in two very different formats: a 20-minute presentation and a two-hour workshop. Each offered its own rhythm, its own kind of attention, and its own possibilities for connection. The presentation, From Embodied Practice to Linguistic System,  followed a more traditional academic structure: a slideshow, clear sections, and the familiar discipline of fitting a complex argument into a tight time frame. In these twenty minutes, I first traced how experiential learning — including aikido-inspired pedagogy — deepens clarity, engagement, and retention far beyond what knowledge transfer alone can achiev...

 Aikido is a martial art that Ueshiba derived from several traditional martial arts dating back to medieval samurai times. In contrast to the traditional martial arts, aikido is considered a modern art. However, in contrast to contemporary, newly developed, anti-traditional martial arts, aikido is a traditionalist martial art that believes that the wisdom of its art is encoded within traditional forms and training exercises. “More precisely, in traditionalist martial arts, one may experiment, but only in terms of applying principles. Transgression of the principles is transgression of the wisdom encoded in the martial art” (Bowman, 2014, p. 17). Even though aikido claims a link with tradition, it does not have a straightforward origin story. In order to better understand the inception and the present manifestation of aikido, it is significant to know the evolution of martial arts from pre-medieval Japan to the 20th century. This history shows how and why aikido, as a modern martial...