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.
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