Category Archives: Change

Where is imagination?

TiggerHere is Harry Potter, standing proudly as King atop his rock castle, surveying the troops who know not that they support him, the wooden horses suddenly animated, the peasants on the farm cart dressed in their sunday finery for a playday while mum sits sipping her café latte. Yummy mummies on display – themselves, the finery, their children well behaved and kept in check, the golden labrador or common mutt also dressed up in pink doggie-bow collar and designer leads. Spring sun warming their backs as it does mine, yet we must not linger too long for the breeze is cool and whips carelessly round this corner where I sit surveying the scene. It is quiet now, Harry, Princess Leia, Bob the builder, mediaeval knights and serfs suddenly and temporarily drawn to the bosom of their families, drawn by the magical force that is nothing less than deep-fried potato chips. What child can resist?

Where does our imagination go? Does it flee with the years to some distant repository from whence newborns make their withdrawal? Do the rules that creep up on us over the years drown it in their sameness? Tigger still lives in all of us – when to restrain and when to open up to the joyous intent-less playfulness? He needs to be let out, for a bored sleep through inattention slowly kills him and the grumpy old man resurfaces full of his ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’ instead of the open spaces of ‘could’ and ‘let’s try’. What have we to lose?

Let Tigger out today!

A Manifesto of Possibilities – Set your people free

For some time now I have talked to myself about writing a manifesto for the work I do. This morning’s prompt was “What do I really want or need to write about?” Perhaps the manifesto is forming already.

Empowerment A Manifesto of Possibilities – Set your people free

The answers are out there, the people need to be free. One would think that organisations are there solely for the benefit of some ethereal entity ‘the company’, but the company is there for the benefit of its many stakeholders and without the engagement of those stakeholders it can and will only survive in the short-term.

Mindless, thinking-less, managers believe that if they only set SMART stretch targets that all will be well, without really understanding the individual motivations of the people who work for them but should be working with them. Yes, money does matter in a way, but only in the societal ecosystem we have allowed to be created for ourselves; how much more inspiring is the possibility of an autonomous response to great leadership challenge. “Set your people free” applies not only in its original context but also to those within organisations. Allow them to master their science, there art, their whatever… and in the process they will develop beautiful systems capable of spectacular outputs. We only need management, especially old-style Plan/Organise/Control management, when we feel the need to control other people. Well, I ask, do you Mr Manager want to be controlled or would you rather develop your practice in pursuit of some greater good? Inspired by Bill Clinton “It’s the people stupid, not the stupid people”.

So set your people free – ask a good question, and answer is out there somewhere, let us go and find it. The search is not aided by plans and timescales but by the passionate search of somebody doing what they can, where they can, when they.

Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité

French flagNow I am no fan of bloody revolutions – their history too often leave rivers of blood, carnage  of bodies and the survivors disenfranchised only in a different way to that for which their brothers, sisters, parents, lovers and friends have been mowed down on the liberation fields.

Yet sitting in this currently drab concourse outside the Hotel De Ville, a concourse drab only because of the recent rain and unseasonal closing of the sun hardened locals both French and English, and whose magnificence will shortly blossom as the spring sun returns to warm and enlighten the creamy yellow stonework, I am reminded of the success of the French Revolution. If nothing else it forced the chefs onto the streets and kickstarted the restaurant trade so delivered of the gastronauts. But more, the power remains with both people and the politicians. The lowliest commune has its Mairie, elected in cases by only large handfuls of locals keen to ensure that their voices are heard and they get more than their fair share of the Euros coursing through the corridors of Paris. The farmers, perhaps still the peasant class and proud of it, exercise their power to close the local supermarché, the shoppers patiently waiting to be allowed into the Glass Palace this is a harbinger of mortality to the way of life lived for so long.

Liberté – not to be controlled

Fraternité – all in this together

Égalité – we are all humans

I don’t know if it is worth fighting for, is anything, but it is certainly worth having.

Leading by following

 

We were looking for a prompt, I opened the Tao and read this piece on Multitude, leading to this possible second part of my manifesto.

Leading by following Leading by following

The leader knows when to emerge from the pack. Be it wolves who, trotting along aimlessly, suddenly find a prey and must (self-) organise for attack; or perhaps the cranes croakingly winging their way like serried arrows across the southern sky needing a new leader every few minutes; or the partygoers somehow deciding when to move on and which club pub or club to go to next.

There are no rules for this, except perhaps the one “Make your suggestion and see what happens”. Often times the suggestion will be rejected or ignored, it is not you who will be set aside, just an idea and ideas are plentiful, there is a multitude in everyone’s head. We follow the will of the crowd, yes we can do also influence and guide that will. Ignore judgement as that is as someone else’s baggage and you have enough of your own without accumulating yet more from them. The time to lead is felt not thought – feeling leads (to) thinking. One minute a follower, sensing the needs of the pack, the next a leader showing the way bringing your own particular skills to the situation.

Writing for fun

Why would I want to write for fun? Well, there are a host of reasons, partly because this will become a practice field for developing my more ‘professional’ writing on my other blogs, partly just because it is fun, partly as an exercise in slowing down (I plan to write all these entries in longhand before transcribing them here)… When I was in SW France in April 2013, I was idling around Bergerac when I just happened upon a couple (Sean M Madden and Mufida Kassalias) who were touting a 2 day course in “Writing from the Heart”. It was only about 20 minutes’ away from where I was staying, so I signed up (why not?) and was enthralled with what came out of my head onto paper given some very simple prompts. It was an wonderful two days and set me off on this trail of discovery, I hope you will be happy to journey with me – I’m not seeking approval or anything but do promise to read any comments you want to make.

If you would like to have your writing instincts/ambitions prompted in a gentle supportive way, then Sean and Mufida could be for you – they are running a series of workshops in the UK. Go on, have a look…

I used to be an early adopter…

baby shouting at a laptopI used to be an early adopter – I had one of the very first personal computers in our company, I was a very early user of e-mail (before the Internet was widely heard of), I got a mobile phone before most people and using the technology of the times (I had a laptop and technology that would push my phone calls to wherever I was sitting at the time!) I was remote working before the phrase was even invented.

Now however I find it very rare that I lust after the latest piece of technology. What has happened? I suppose I could have two reasons. Firstly that it was easier to be an early adopter when my employer paid the not insignificant sums necessary to acquire early versions of technology but secondly that it seems less and less frequent that we get real ground breaking paradigm shifters in the way that the personal computer and the mobile phone were.

I have resisted getting an iPhone, for instance, because nobody has managed to show me how they help in a way that can not be done using my old technology phone and my laptop. Having just been gifted and old iPhone3 (note that old in this context means about 24 months) I am still to see what all the fuss is about. If it had a 20 megapixel camera, or a good voice recognition system then maybe I would jump.

We may however be on the verge of the next revolution. I have been using voice recognition software on my laptop for about the last 15 years and it is definitely getting better. However it is still a little clunky and a system that will recognise fractured grammar and colloquialisms as well as accents will wipe the floor and completely transform computing in all its manifestations. The possibility of asking my phone or PC to “send a note to Sally and ask her what  time the meeting about bees is on Friday night” and having the machine recognise all of that and take appropriate action (I don’t really mind if it sends a txt, a msg, an email or eve a voice message) WILL encourage me to jump. Is Siri the answer?