Visibility and co-evolution

I’ve been busy of late, home educating and house-hunting aside, continuing my work with narratives and story in organisations where there is a great need and desire to share good practice and to evidence ‘impact’.  I’ve also been writing about same for an AMED journal edition on Making the Invisible Visible, and I’ve been guest editing (curating, as I’m now thinking of it) the Summer edition of that journal, on the topic of Wisdom.

I’m just overwhelmingly pleased and even pleased by that overwhelm. How wonderful is this opportunity to be inspired by the thoughts, actions and connections catalysed by the generous thinking and exploration of others . . . I'll pass on just a couple of connections for now because they concern good reads by good folk:

My colleague Barbara Heinzen, in our book (with much missed co author Gerard Fairtlough), wrote: ‘Stories are the sharing of intricate knowledge. . . they help us to work through complex situations in ways that may be based on logic, but may also be based on experience, emotion, metaphor and allegory. . .’ (The Power of the Tale, Wiley 2002, p230).

In that book, a man called Don Michael received a grateful dedication from Barbara and Gerard. From what I know, Don was something of a provocateur. Not for the sake of it but from keen and compassionate exploration of human behavior and something of a lack of interest in towing any particular line. Barbara and Gerard spoke of him with such respect that I came to think of 'Don' as a title rather than a name. 

At the end of February, a collection of Don’s work arrived at my door. It was sent to me for review by Andrew Carey of Triarchy Press in a collation by Graham Leicester of the International Futures Forum. It’s a thought-provoking read called In Search of the Missing Elephant. Graham, I'm glad to say, is writing something for the Wisdom journal edition: if you haven’t yet read his Ten Things to Do in a Conceptual Emergency (Triarchy Press), please please do.  

These folk each have their own streams, but there’s a confluence around the links between learning, creativity and wiser outcomes.  To come back to the work I’m loving, using story for evaluation, it’s making visible the important texture of everyday life, events and connections that may otherwise be invisible through lack of noticing. If we can’t notice and share, we can’t learn, create or co-evolve wiser outcomes.  

AMED network home page http://www.amed.org.uk/

The inevitable

Scene: a (fairly new) Home School Room, February 2012

Child 1: I’ve finished

Me: Really? Oh. Well done, let me see. . . well, that’s going very nicely isn’t it C1, I can see you’ve thought of a theme. Now, this part here says ‘paragraph’ and what you’ve done is a sentence . . .

C1. <witheringly> I know. I don’t want to do a paragraph.

Me: Well, the question is partly to see how well you can continue this story with a paragraph – say three sentences or so . . .

C1. <witheringly> I know. But I don’t want to.

Me: I’d like you to please.

C1: I won’t.

Child 2: Why not C1? You would at school.

C1: This isn’t school.

C2 and Me (in chorus, oh dear): Yes it is.

C2: And Mummy’s your teacher.

C1 to me: You’re NOT the teacher.

Me: Well, I am, C1 and this is school. This really isn’t how you’d behave with your teacher or at school.

C1: I don’t care.

C2 then makes an error in her neat copy of a story she’s been writing, shouts at C1, C1 shouts back . . . how will it all end?

Well, end it did and in the afternoon we all truly did enjoy discussing a presentation on Forces (physical, rather than of personality), and drawing pictures of flying monkeys and C1 being blasted with an air cannon. All of this was based on a Royal Institution lecture we attended that was so good it remained good when selectively reprised by me some days later.

Dr Matt Pritchard, you were a star, on which we can all agree.

Royal Institution of Great Britain http://www.rigb.org

Emerging wisdom

It’s the early morning train out of town. I sit and watch the even earlier arriving into town as I leave. I cross the river, with its pink-tint buildings and pink-tint bridge. Or so I write. And it’s not true.  My imagining would like that, and parts of the sky have a tint, over the water, but the buildings are crisply almost themselves and most of the bridge is hidden beneath the train.  The true bit is that I cross the river and know I have ended and begun. That casual, liminal brightening that is river. Will you wake or will you sleep?

Where best to do the work of the imaginal, the liminal? Sleeping, awake, neither, both?  Wisdom, like science, emerges in the conversation between noticing what is and sensing what is not yet or what could be. Betty Sue Flowers, in Presence, drew attention so succinctly to something I aspire to foster through the work I do: ‘leaders of the future will need to be deeply committed to serving that which is seeking to emerge.’ I’m passionate about what’s seeking to emerge. And, now temporarily home educating my children, very curious about when the great trammeling begins. Or the great inspiring. What is seeking to emerge that we individually and collectively need to serve better?

I’m guest editing a forthcoming AMED journal at the moment. My topic is wisdom. Let’s see where we get to.  I’m sure that in the past I would have been quite happy with the title ‘editor’, especially in my previous career of publishing -- at something of a pace. Now, what I’m doing seems slower: inviting, gathering, reflecting, asking, curating. Curating, I think that might be it.  Wisdom needs curating, not editing?

Home news

Home education. January 2012. We're new at this and my house tries to accommodate. The walls grow trees and baskets of eggs, and on one egg Child2 has written, ‘Who invented metal’? Oh, what a lovely child, with a lovely question, taking charge of her education so well, so soon.  While supervised from a distance she decides to find out. On the internet. She is triumphant, finds paper and writes the answer in expansive handwriting for my adoration.


The spelling is correct, the reference included, the paper proudly presented. And I learn . . . that the inventor of metal is . . . Black Sabbath.

Thank you, answers.com. 
 

The trips to the Royal Institution and the Science Museum are planned.  But sometimes I think that first answers are best.

I’m sure I’ll be mentioning the Royal Institution again and their great lecture series for children – they’re not just the major Christmas production you may know (from whose archives I filched the probability machine in support of my topic ‘Sell your Cleverness and Buy Bewilderment’). If you visit, don’t miss seeing the game in the basement, where you can be treated to a rendition of Tom Lehrer’s ditty encompassing all the elements of the periodic table. Ten of these were discovered at the Royal Institution, and I may well have stood on the spot where the Davy lamp was invented.  Having taken the children to visit a coalmine last time I was in Yorkshire, it was a good spot to stand on.

Royal Institution of Great Britain http://www.rigb.org/

The thing of it in Stockholm

Blogging postponed for some years, gratitude for the Stockholm event of the International Coaching Psychology Conference (September 2011) got me started. Organised by Per-Olof Eriksson and colleagues at the Swedish Psychological Association, it was a great one-day event. My official part was to speak on Important but Uncertain Matters: Towards Coaching for Wisdom.  Fellow speakers were Stephen Palmer (the development of coaching psychology), Jens-Boris Larsen (accentuating hope), Reinhard Stelter (narrative practice and collaborative working), Magnus Larsson (psychodynamic approaches) and Paul O Olson (state of the art in leadership coaching). There was a lot of engaging information from the speakers and enthusiastic discussion and networking among all.

The intellectual content has stayed with me but also the general approach and fellowship and a fantastic chance to look around Stockholm: beautiful buildings, bridges and water is a hard combination to beat. And, having only recently returned from a first trip to Poland, I found myself conversing about architecture – Poland being only a shortish hop across the water, which I somehow had failed to realize.

Reinhard Stelter begged to differ with me when I had introduced Clarkson’s seven discourses as part of my talk: “when you put up there ‘physiology’, that isn’t phenomenology in my view”.  Turns out we agree on that. 

I picked up the phrase, ‘the thing of it’ from the late and rather great Ken Campell, once upon a time when I was ensconced with a collation of venturers on their way to a production of The Warp.  I’m pretty sure I’d heard it from him previously too, in a Channel 4 programme about chaos and complexity. Anyway, ‘the thing of it’.  You know there is a ‘thing of it’ which you can’t really put your finger on, and it certainly couldn’t be reduced to simple physiology, for example.  Certainly, it couldn’t be reduced at all without ceasing to be ‘the thing of it’ because it’s a holistic type of emergence that goes beyond the parts, or even the sum of them.

The conference had a thing of it, Stockholm has a thing of it, fellowship has a thing of it. Wisdom, too, has a thing of it. Ken may or may not have been referencing Kant and the noumenon that can’t be known (as opposed to the phenomenon, which is all we can know, in that way of thinking). 


Many folk who are far more learned on these topics than I am have argued for ages about this business of the known and not-known, but when it comes to developing wisdom there is one line of enquiry I’m particularly keen on and it’s this: what do we count as knowledge or information, and what are the consequences of that? What are the consequences of the ways we have, or have not, been schooled in noticing? What are the consequences of the sorts of information or enquiry we privilege over those that we don’t?

As somebody once said, all problems look like nails if all you have is a hammer.

The International Congress continues. http://www.coachingpsychologycongress.org/