Like a Samurai’s sword

Since writing an essay on knowledge work in the construction industry, I find myself unusually alert to questions of knowledge work. Not in the narrow sense that knowledge management sees knowledge work, but in a broader sense: what, in fact, is knowledge work, how does it come about, what does one need to understand about the conditions that make it knowledge work? In fact, I think probably I’m being nudged here too, because our work on museums, libraries and archives, which will report in June. This identified two things lost to the system of work and organisation, things which need retrieving in some way. One is discipline and rigour around information and it’s handling, and the other is the fruitful downtime of the employee: those moments of wandering to the library and having the empty space to make some new, and deeper connections which put the immediate decision or piece of work into context. Or those moments, de-blackberried, uncoupled from milestones and deadlines, where someone might have a moment of new inspiration that renews the spirit and changes the lens through which the immediate task is viewed. It might be a spark of innovation, or something smaller, but no less meaningful when accumulated with other such small moments.

(A side-comment here, related, but as yet untethered and floating free, is a previous observation, in work on office space, on how the social fabric of organisations has been ripped from them with different forms of nomadic working, hotdesking, open plan, project and matrix management. New organisational systems have crushed the life out of the small repetitions of informal encounter that allow trust to ripen. (I would once have added social capital here, but I’m having trouble with the capitalist metaphors which dress knowledge management up in the language of economic value creation just to get it attention from the numbers people – surely we can be bigger of that. I don’t much like the misappropriation of the word trust either, but it’ll do for now.))

And perhaps my other impetus is that my current enquiry is into the commissioning of horizon scanning and futures (i.e. uncomfortable) research into environmental issues in a government department, and how the policymaker can be better equipped to direct, manage and assure such commissions. I’m sure this will influence where I go and what I notice for the next few months. I’ve a feeling this is quite a long intense exploration, likely to sprawl into values, craft, labour versus work, all over the place, but it might going somewhere, but for now, and to restart some kind of blogging discipline, I’m going to just list a single noticing which seem to belong under this loose working classification.

I was trying some Doris Lessing (who in a her own way I’ve quoted about the conditions for knowledge work when I wrote about her Nobel Prize winning speech and the need for the storyteller to cloak themselves in silence). Short stories, gathered in a volume called ‘The story of a non-marrying man’. The first story, ‘Out of the Fountain’ is about a diamond cutter:

‘Ephraim was a middle son, not brilliant or stupid, not good or bad. He was nothing in particular. His brothers became diamond merchants, but Ephraim was not cut out for anything immediately obvious, and so last he was apprenticed to an uncle to learn the trade of diamond cutting.

To cut a diamond perfectly is an act like a samurai’s sword thrust, or a master archers’ centred arrow. When an important diamond is shaped, a man may spend a week, or even weeks, studying it, accumulating powers of attention, memory and intuition, till he has reached that moment when he finally knows that a tap, no more, at just that point of tension in the stone will split it exactly so.’

Here’s my knowledge question for today (and in the next few days I’m going to move on to a bit of Richard Sennett, in his new thinking on craft, to Lewis Hyde’s distinction between work and labour, and to Grotowski’s description of the relationship between him and the actor, but this will do for now, from which I infer that I’m interested for now in processes of apprenticeship, of leading and following):

How many of us, in the conditions of urgent work which press hard down on us, find room to spend ‘a week, or even weeks…accumulating powers of attention, memory and intution’? Do we give ourselves permission? Are we given permission? Do we, perhaps need to start taking permission rather than wait for it to be given?

‘We notice trends before anyone else’ – Chris McCabe of the Poetry Library

There’s so much I want to write about – the structure of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, everything about Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, but above all the epilogue, cunningly inserted well before the end, in which the author blatently footnotes his sources and plagiarisms while discussing the book with the protoganist who, in some respects, knows more about what has happened to him than the author has.  It’s only a short skip to Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ which has always been one of my favourite plays, and one which determines the slowly emerging structure of my own lightly fictional work ‘Fist:  sundry items recording the breakdown and recovery of a middle-aged woman’.  Sundry items came from the shopface of an artists supply shop (now sadly defunct) I used to drive past in Highgate:  E Ploton (Sundries) Ltd.I digress.  I hope I do write about Six Characters, Lanark, Paranoid Park – they are all worth it.  

But today I want to write about poetry, and in particular the poetry library housed in London’s South Bank Centre. There are three things I want to say about poetry, to start and guide my year.  I would also like to thank Angie Dove, with whom I am ‘broken friends’ as someone once described it, for her introduction to the library.  Thanks Angie.  It was a gift I much appreciate. 

Firstly, poetry as essence.  In a recent article exalting the Poetry Library, the author, Lisa Mullen, opens with some Ogden Nash ‘Poets aren’t very useful/Because they aren;t consumeful or very produceful.’  Which goes to the heart of our current enquiry into knowledge transfer between libraries and business.  Please read ‘The Gift’ by Lewis Hyde, which says a great deal more about the collision between poetry and consume-producefulness in our society.  What is value? What’s the point?  Is the Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath in winter any less value for money, as the Corporation and the accountants would have it, because only a handful of hardy drooping ladies mostly of a certain age or beyond, with sturdy white knickers, totter there for a frozen dip?  Or is it beautiful and of value beyond compare for exactly that reason.  That we can all hold the dream of our reddened skin as we totter from the ponds on painful feet to know that we embraced, and were held by, nature for those few moments in a way that makes our souls sing, even while our bodies scream with the pain of hands crusted in cold?

Secondly, the same extolling article in Time Out (Jan 2 – 8 2008) had Chris McCabe, acting joint librarian, saying

‘One of the privileges of working here is seeing all kinds of poetry come in…we notice trends before anyone else. For instance, there has been a real swathe of political poetry since the war in Iraq – it does interest a lot of users.  And that goes against the idea that poetry is a totally quiet and reflective activity; there are lot of poets making a noise about things that are upsetting them.’

There’s one for the futurists and horizon scanners.  Stop looking to science, pay less attention to science fiction, and start watching the poets if you want to understand what’s going on and where things are heading.  Believe me when I say I’ll be making this point as we move from the MLA work into the Defra commission to help create a governance framework and guidelines for policymakers handling horizon scanning and futures research.  More poetry for Defra I say.  We’ll find musicians and poetic writers like Richard Mabey and the late great Roger Deakin, and fiction writers like Jeanette Winterson, and pithy sharp writers like Will Self, John Lanchester, John Berger, and blockbusting writers like Michael Crichton and line them all up persuade people on all sides that beauty and provocation in finding and conveying the essence of ideas has as much to recommend it as ticking the boxes of policy essentials.  

I wrote recently in a post elsewhere that metaphor is essential is opening up new channels of communication in organisational settings – not the thudding cliches of silo, blue sky and out of the box thinking and not the dangerous appropriation of a handy but superficial label (shall we windtunnel anyone), but the narratives of possibility which draw people in to conversations they never realised they needed to have. 

Which brings me to Barrack Obama and his trouncing of Hillary Clinton in Iowa.  A glorious article in the Guardian that I’ve mislaid quotes someone as saying that you win elections in poetry and govern in prose.  And there he is, making poetry just by standing there, even before he opens his mouth.  I’m a Clinton girl myself.  I think Hillary Clinton is the thinking person’s President, but Barrack Obama will win it with poetry. 

Empty space for the storyteller

I’ve been entirely inspired by Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize speech, her views on the fragmentation of the world today, the loss of books, the role of storytellers and the need for tellers to find themselves the empty space in which to find their stories:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.htmlThe piece I like best for now, but from among so many parts to chose, is about the empty space a writer has to make for themselves: 

“Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.  If this writer canno find the space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.  When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time “Have you found it?  Are you holding it fast”"

 

He was an eminent marine biologist and world expert on the taxonomy of barnacles

Alan Southward

There’s a man to have been. 50 years ploughing the same marine furrow. At work the day before he died. Deeply expert in a narrow and important field. Who would not want to be remembered as a world expert on the taxonomy of barnacles. It’s magnificent.

I liked that part of working in the Islamic world very much. The koranic education invites a very deep reading and re-reading of a small number of texts which is not intuitively an approach we value in other educations where breadth counts for more than depth. I’m not saying dismiss breadth, but I do think that without depth there can be no third dimension.

Of course this can go wrong, but there’s much to be said, koanically too, for an intense, repeated, experience which takes you to deep understanding.

Time is two modes

From Freefall, written in 1959 by William Golding, he of Lord of the Flies (I do feel that there must be an EDRM joke in that – Lord of the Files?)  

‘Time is two modes. The one is an effortless perception native to us as water to the mackerel. The other is a memory, a sense of shuffle fold and coil, of that day nearer than that because more important, of that event mirroring this, or those three set apart, exceptional and out of the straight line altogether.’

 

Sparknow, the odd little network formerly known as Spark Knowledge is ten today.  I find that entirely extraordinary.  The shuffle fold and coil of ten years.    So many things exceptional and out of the straight line altogether, but so much effortless time, water as to mackerel.  I find, as I grow a little older that I want more empty space, in which to grow reflectively, and be present in the world, and have less appetite for the urge and push of constantly pushing things and people a little further together, a little further apart, dextrous manipulations or bludgeoning and hammering to make shapes and knots and spaces which will allow some new possibilities to unfold.  And at the same time I’m willing to invite in the unexpected guest of an unlikely and impossible challenge and see where it leads.  So my appetite for the unknown and unknowable seems to grow.  There’s nothing much I want in the way of challenges, but nothing much I’d turn down.  I’m not waiting, but somehow I’m ready.   I’ve made a few decisions though.  One is to find book time.  Time to write in some clearer and more backboned way of the work we’ve done, the thoughts we’ve had, the ways we’ve developed, the philosophical musings we’ve entertained.  There must always, in my view, be time to sit existentially at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank, chain-smoking and speculating argumentatively on what is and could be.  All that nose-to-the-grindstone planning and product and delivery has it’s place of course. But without random ranting and guesswork about how the universe works, it means very little.  And that’s something else as I get older, everything, including doing nothing, must mean something.  An absence of mind, distraction from the essence of things by peripheral anxieties must make way for presence.  

Here’s my plan, in a different typeface for reasons that are beyond me.

I’m clearing a space, the biggest possible empty space, a breathing space.  And I’m going to breath it in.  I’ll only take work that holds meaning for me.  Not necessarily passionate meaning, but meaning.  I’ll look people in the eye as equals, with respect and honour and warmth and I’ll expect anyone I encounter in the context of work to do the same.   I’ll continue, as I strive to, to conduct myself with integrity, never lose my curiosity, and hold onto my instinct (which has never wavered, although has sometimes felt like a radio tuned into a faulty FM signal while pirate stations bounce their waves off Alexandra Palace) that there is a better, more soulful way to conduct work, which is not at the expense of science, or balance or rigour.   The language of narrative and metaphor bounces off the language of Facts (I want Facts, nothing but Facts, say so many in the world of work) and the space that is opened up in between in the space in which conversations can thrive and multiply.

The multiplication of conversations so that they weave an organisational fabric of a new and vivid kind is my goal I think. 

I want more mackerel time and I want more memory time.  And probably that’s all I want in life except the health and wellbeing of my nearest and dearest. 

And what of Sparknow?  Well probably plenty to be done in new narrative enquiries mostly.  And they too should be unembarrassed and straight-backed, standing tall. Humble, but not servile, although always servants to a cause, which is still to change the fabric of society in some way or another.  Not the end of the pier show, just because ‘once upon a time’ creeps in, and not some mystical voodoo.   Although there can be something profound, perhaps enchanting, about what narrative makes possible in work contexts, there’s nothing special about it really.  And I should know:

‘I made that armour myself.

Its not magic.

Its just shiny’

From the The Brothers Grimm, as one brother rides off into the forest to battle a monster, leaving the other behind. 

Will the logical Grimm brother to the beautiful maiden while Jake the storyish Grimm brother gallops off into the enchanted forest. 

 

 

 

   

 

 

‘Culture is the one thing we cannot deliberately aim at’

I see I’ve fallen silent for rather a long time. Holidays, laziness, avoidance. But most of all I’ve had in mind a blog on culture cooking and I’ve been looking for my copy of TS Eliot’s ‘Notes towards a definition of culture’ which he wrote in about 1940. I can’t find it, but googling gives me a bit of what I’m trying to look up as a starting point at least:

“For if any definite conclusions emerge from this study, one of them is surely this, that culture is the one thing we cannot deliberately aim at.”

This was brought to mind by a glorious description in Hari Kunzru’s book ‘The Impressionist’ (which starts very well and then gets a bit artsy and clever, but I’ll read his others) of a railway station in India earlyish last century:

‘The crowd on the platform at Fort Station throbs like a single body. Dirty-collared clerks, hawkers of tea and sweets, beggars, newspaper-sellers, pickpockets, raucous British Tommies all prickly heat and dirty songs, neatly dressed babus, clipped subalterns soon to be kicking the babus out of their reserved seats, displeased memsahibs leading lines of porters with trunks balanced on tehir rag-padded heads, peasant families sleeping three generations in a row using baggage for pillows,….and dining rooms – first second third and purdah, veg. and non-veg., Hindu Muslim and English all spin together….’

The scene this evokes conveys more surely than any abstract noun a kind of jostling vibrant culture. And reading it reminded me of the bit in ‘Notes towards a definition of culture’ where T S Eliot describes Englishness as cricket and strawberries, beetroot for tea and other things which now escape me.

I want to find a piece of work where the grandiose amibition of mission statement and value falls away and we work with the organisation through object, and observation and descriptions of how it is to make visible the raw fabric of the cultures (never just one) and weave together, through small stories and images, and properly condensed pithy and living description of how people want to live breathe play and work in that organisation.

People do it unofficially: they can describe with sharp and pointed insight the day to day reality of how the organisation gets work done (and often avoids getting work done), and the normally severe reality gap between those values the organisation purports to espouse and how it acts in practice. But that’s a kind of negative culture statement. The same acute witnessing could perfectly well be put to an appreciative exploration of what the organisation stands for and the cultural self-descriptions evolved from here collectively rather than imposed by the communications committee sub-committee on values.

We must stand up and fight for real words, stories and actions, imbued with the deep meaning of shared experience not the distressingly shrivelled, trivialising meaningless summary of the organisational mission statement, normally accompanied by the excruciatingly patronising values scrapbooks, tied to the threatening control of the appraisal system and to workshops through which the culture programme is ‘rolled out’ (and over people) which are either second rate and derivative or candyfloss entertainment whose impact lasts, in the coinage of Ratner, about as long as the shelf-life of a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich. (Here surely is the pithiest and most honest culture statement ever to have changed the fortunes of a man and a company.)

We must make descriptions of what organisations are and aspire which vault over the prosaic thudding half-baked controlling ambitions of mission and mission control.

We must use poetry to engage the heart, not thump on about ‘heart values’.

It’s very important to be constantly restless in wriggling free of the strait-jacket assumptions that the designers and deliverers of culture and change programmes shove us into (and that includes me as a purveyor of such so-called products and experiences).

There must be a ceaseless toiling towards the vibrance of a lived reality.

This is not going to be easy.

I said in Sparknow’s founding essay (or at least I say about it) that we want to change the fabric of society.

I still mean it.

I must go away and gird my loins for the next battle.

The triadic relationship between persons, tools and a new collectivity

There was a recent article in the Observer about how French policemen, who have taking to writing novels and poetry, drawing cartoons, and rapping in an attempt to voice their grievances.

‘This is a totally new phenomenon,’ said Frederic Ploquin, a crime correspondent and police expert. ‘Before, the only people writing books were retired senior commissioners and your average plod was just a worker or peasant. Now a new generation of police with university degrees and culture are finding ways to express themselves while still serving in the force.’

(I’d be keen to know what ‘your average plod’ was in French.)

But it doesn’t suit everyone:

‘If the cops start rapping, what’s left for us?’ said Ahmed Messaoui, a teenage aspirant hip-hop star in Paris’s 20th arrondissement. ‘If he doesn’t like being a policeman, he should leave. Otherwise he should stick to arresting people and let us do the music.’

The article was brought to mind this morning by an interview on the Today programme on radio 4 about a new exhibition just opened by the National Army Museum. Thought to be the first ‘heritage display’ of an ongoing conflict

“The interactive exhibition depicts the troops’ experiences from the start of their tour of the region in April 2006.
Personal items, including worn-thin combat shirts, “contact” calendars, mugs made from mortar bomb packaging and pieces of shrapnel kept as mementos of war wounds, form part of the display.”

Objects and small items, containing personal stories of all kinds. Not just physical objects but media objects such as assaults recorded on mobile phones and posted to YouTube. Which takes me right back to yesterday’s draft blog, never completed, which was all about objects as it happens. If I can manage it, I’ll come back round at the end to what seems to be going on with these new kinds of voices and oral histories.

Yesterday was full of gifts, and if I were feeling cleverer I’d no doubt spin off into a nice philosophical detour about gift economies. Another time.

The first gift was an email from a client, who sent me a link to this New Scientist blog on Sherry Turkle’s new book ‘Evocative Objects’. Sherry Turkle has coined, or borrowed, the phrase ‘objects-to–think-with’ and talks of the way objects can evoke and contain memories and ideas. This is not a new idea, but I’m sure it’s well handled by her – she’s a good and thoughtful writer. Plus it’s interesting to see how many posts the blog has sparked off, which gives you a clue as to how intuitively people understand and appreciate that

‘just asking yourself what they mean to you can unlock a rich stock of memories, associations and insights into your thought processes that you may not be able to get at any other way’

We’ve used objects right since the very very beginning of sparknow’s work, in fact in the pre-history of sparknow. Partly in that evoking-and-containing way – and for developing this I owe a great deal to Steph Colton, the anthropologically inclined storytelling who no longer works with me. We’ve used them, for example, at lessons learned workshops at the end of knowledge pilots, as a way of accessing some real insight and emotion. People bring objects (a conker, a postcard of a swimming pool, a packet of chewing gum) and use these to say how they feel about the pilot. The conker ‘at first I thought it was just a game, like the children’s game, then as time went on I realised that actually it was also the start of something, a seed and the conker says both’. The swimming pool. ‘I felt as though I was diving off at the deep end.’ We take polaroid pictures and make a kind of postcard display immediately to create a kind of evocative lessons learned environment through having the exhibit both of pictures and of the objects themselves. And digital pictures which allow us to make a kind of object story book which can act, for them, as an aide-memoire later and in some unobtrusive way provide a closing ritual or touchstone as a memory for the whole experience.

Or this, for fun, which led to a 5 year engagement with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation:

“A few years back Sparknow attended the Knowledge Management Europe conference in Den Haag. In among a sea of laminations, screensavers and glossy brochures about technology, we ran a couple of workshops on story1. Transforming a previously neutral space – a ceiling-free pen in an aircraft hanger-style conference centre – we strung up washing lines, pegging to them objects and assets developed through our story work. To open our session one of our associates – a traditional storyteller – performed a story we had commissioned from her a couple of years previously about our first knowledge management project. Performing in this space she filled the whole exhibition hall with sound and music. People came to find us from all over the conference.”

Our client, Manuel, found us because of the singing and the objects and gave us great backing to work in all kinds of ways with story as a knowledge instrument in SDC over the next few years. I’ve attached probably the best object story which came from that time. (It’s at the end of the pdf if you want to speed things up).

Tales from a Bedouin Tent

The other gift from yesterday was from Clive.

I whipped down to Cass to have an emergency potboiler session and pick his brains about this 7,000 words I’m supposed to be cooking up on knowledge workers (again, if only I knew what a knowledge worker is). Anyway, after updating me on his marvellous Mystery Business MBA elective, on which I’ll write another time, I asked the normal question about whether I should do a PhD. No, but he put me onto the most glorious one done by a woman called Daria Loi, who presented the entire thing, objects, in a suitcase. She had to make 5 copies, so 5 suitcases:

‘lavoretti per bimbi – Playful Triggers as keys to foster collaborative practices and workspaces where people learn, wonder and play

The thesis explored ways to foster organizational spaces where collaborative activities can be undertaken using design tools and methods. I argued that for co-design activities to emerge participants have to be linked by ‘meaningful relationships’, hence emphasising that, before embarking on co-design processes, participatory design activities require participants to feel comfortable with each other, to be able to collaborate and to communicate shared languages.

Within this context I developed a series of tools called Playful Triggers and proposed them as effective tools to elicit relationships among their users so that they can learn together how to work together before undertaking co-design activities.

Due to the participatory methods and tools proposed in the research, I explored the opportunities for a thesis to become a place for participatory practices to emerge and to be an artefact where readers can physically, emotionally, and conceptually experience ideas rather than just read about them.

The thesis was consequently articulated adopting an anomalous format that: enables readers in constructing extra layers of meaning; includes them in asynchronous dialogues with author and future readers; lets readers appreciate the tools described in the thesis by touching and playing with them besides reading about them; and expands the thesis content beyond what words can define using textual and non-textual means.

A cardboard suitcase is the main container of the PhD research – a complex system incorporating textual and non-textual content that complement and amplify each other using metaphors as converging points.’

Now this line of thinking about containers and contents, objects, play and tools, must lead past Ivan Illich and his tools for conviviality (1973):

‘To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call “convivial.” 3M (039)

After many doubts, and against the advice of friends whom I respect, I have chosen “convivial” as a technical term to designate a modern society of responsibly limited tools.’

A society in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers. Exactly so. I think that takes us rather nicely back to where we started. To our politically interrelated French rapping and poet policemen, to our serving army officers. Whose managers and chief superintendents and commanding officers are no doubt quite nervous at the loss of grip on the channels of communication. We now see the underbelly – work as it really is, our institutions and their authority as they really are. It puts me in mind of John Berger’s glorious post on Open Democracy a while back.

‘The secret of storytelling amongst the poor is the conviction that stories are told so that they may be listened to elsewhere, where somebody, or perhaps a legion of people, know better than the storyteller or the story’s protagonists, what life means. The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story however mild has to be fearless and the powerful today live nervously.’

There’s something else here about the implications for authority and leadership in a world where the voices of those lower down in the system can no longer be shut up because the new ‘tools for conviviality’, the loss of relationship of trust between the front line and the top (which means the deterrent to sharing your own story is no longer there), and the growing conviction that individuals can have their say, make organisational systems so leaky and vulnerable. Of course, in vulnerability lies the greatest strength of all. But most leaders aren’t ready to go to that place. Yet.

But before I finish I want to hang onto the idea of the container, the suitcase as it were. A suitcase, not a black box or a strong box. nothing which needs a combination. A suitcase which is easy to open, full of objects which evoke and contain memories and ideas. I need to get a bit messy and theoretical here and point out that I’m constantly trying to yoke together my two great intellectual loves when it comes to objects.

The first is the avant-garde. The notion that art, artistic performance and objects are to unsettle the status quo. But after the first wave of futurism, dada, surrealism, situationism, whatever, the wave inevitably crashes on the shore of bourgeois acceptance, the shock settles, and a new movement of disturbance starts. The the artistic ‘object’ is embedded, like a piece of grit in an oyster, in a place where it can rub things up the wrong way and get something happening.

The second is exchange-traded instruments. Here the container (the notional suitcase if you like) must be described in such a way that it contains objects (bonds, equities) which are similar enough to each other to create some kind of coherent experience which can be wrapped in a legal description which will allow the bundle to stick together and invite traders of all kinds to come and exchange transactions with each other.

I always bear this in mind when we design a piece of work. We always look for the ‘objects’ (reified, boundary objects, depending on whose terminology) which might be negotiated by individuals into becoming a collective definition of that particular community. I get confused at this point because I really that I’ve taken Jane Jacobs Guardian and Trader Systems of Survival and laid them over each other in my thinking in a way which I can’t quite pull off – and thrown in a little avant-garde disruption for good measure.

I think Ana Antonio Gill might be able to help me here. Her project ‘the value of memories’ points up very nicely the gulf between the sentimental and the financial value of a posession.

Whatever is going on here (whether community is one end of a spectrum and market at the other, both destructive at their extreme tendencies, or whether one can be laid over another in ways which hold onto their distinctively good qualities) , my instinct tells me that while I fumble to describe what it is I see when I lay out the programme for a piece of work in my mind, I’m heading in the right direction, even if I must for a short period be bundled into the woodshed and left there undisturbed while I think it through.

Peel me another ant

I’m finding the bubbling and brewing of possible threads of thinking which I need to fumble into writing quite a torment. At the risk of mixing my metaphors too greatly I’m finding the hints of ideas and piles of old scraps and scribbles bouncing around, sometimes bouncing off each other, sometimes sticking to each other to make a fuzzy kind of chain of enquiry. It always ends with more questions that’s for sure.

And somehow I notice with some alarm I’m ducking metaphor, even though I need it, because I can’t wrestle it into a place where I can see it clearly, let alone write anything down Although I’ve a nice article I’ve kept on dog-whistling politics as a way into writing about it.

And then, I’m wondering about bias in narrative enquiry and documentation, how we select memories, how we recall, what role remeniscence plays in opening up future possibility.

I’ve also got a nice little riff building which tries to link Elias Canetti’s ‘Crowds and Power’ with the recent news that Fiona Reynolds is going to take the National Trust into being an environmental activitist, and a small article in the newspaper on the same day about how sex-workers are clubbing together to give foreign sex-workers English lessons to make them a bit safer. (I once shared a childminder with Fiona, a long time ago, and I can tell Gordon Brown and whoever now runs DEFRA, I wouldn’t be in their shoes.)

And then again, I’m tormented (almost to sleeplessness) by the stupidity of having taken on a 7,000 word commission to write about knowledge intensive firms, knowledge work and knowledge workers. But I don’t even know where to begin with it. I realise after 12 years I know nothing, nothing about what knowledge work is, or knowledge workers. Do I start with the knowledge economy and move down, as it were, into the day-to-day? Do I try and make a distinction between knowledge and information. I lay awake in bed last night trying to work out which of the following were knowledge workers:
architect, structural engineer, site project manager, bricklayer, electrician, plasterer
consultant, doctor, nurse, volunteer
lawyer, compliance officer
office of fair trading policy maker, callcentre manager, call centre worker
clothes designer, shop manager, shop assistant
scientist, researcher
librarian, knowledge manager, information officer
web designer, code writer
professor, phd student, mba student, undergraduate
sushi chef, maitre d’, waiter, plongeur
or what about a health and safety officer?

Or do we all slide in and out of knowledge work? Say the scientist is really only a scientist until he works in a multi-disciplinary team and has to shape his independent contribution to be collaboratively effective without being watered down? The waiter is only a waiter when he serves table, but a knowledge worker when he knows exactly where a particular guest likes to be seated? A call centre worker is an information worker until he has to handle a difficult call from an angry customer with a long history of difficult dealings which needs unravelling and piecing back together so the right actions can be taken? A plasterer is only a plasterer when he does an odd job or works under instruction, but a knowledge worker when he works in a team who have to construct a house? Is it knowledge work for the help desk woman to say ‘have you turned it off and back on again?’ I was down the Orange shop the other day because I couldn’t hear people ringing me and they couldn’t hear me. The very helpful man undid the back of the phone, blew hard into it and reassembled it and it worked fine. Last time something was wrong he got the SIM card out, got a children’s eraser and rubbed off whatever static had built up and that worked too. Is that knowledge work? I think so. It takes a lot of knowledge to know something so simple is the answer.

I am hanging on by the merest thread here of being able to make any sense at all of the distinctions, only slightly helped by an article I read in an Irish business magazine I picked up while idling my way back from Geneva on a plane yesterday. It talks of Ireland as a knowledge economy.

‘[An] example is the change that has been going on in medical technology. Go back 20 years and we were producing disposable items – products that would be used once in a hospital and thrown away. Now we are producing cardiac stems and we are producing orthopaedic instruments. What has happened with all of those is that tehy are high-value-added products that require good engineering and technical skills. So instead of paying operatives E.25,000 to E.30,000, they are now employing engineers and technicians that earn E.40,000 to E100,000 each. That is the change to the high knowledge economy. The people employed now have to have skills. More importantly for us, they are people who innovate. They aim to improve processes and do things better and apply that knowledge.’

Would that make, say Jamie Oliver a knowledge worker (chef, TV, restaurants, social responsibility) and my local Italian delicatessen/cafe, restaurant not? Even though there’s probably been as much entreprenuership, hard work, know-how, innovation and risk taking down the road to get that off the ground?

Or is knowledge work about connecting people, brokering links. There’s a danger that, in our energy to identify, profile the jobs of, list competences for and upskill these people, whoever they are, we make it essential that they are both busy and seen to be busy, always on the go, always meeting in third spaces, wi-fired up, always updating themselves on the world, and the world on them, responding to email enquiries on their blackberries, constantly foraging for the networks which will compensate for the lack of social capital and thinking time they could build if they were allowed to sit in one place (cold desk?), put up pictures of their family and go home at five. I remember once, in a piece of work on physical knowledge spaces, somebody told me that when she really wants to think, she doesn’t stay at her own desk. Too many interruptions. She goes and hides at a hot desk.

I can’t help thinking of bee colonies. It’s the dumb old workers, the dones who get to do all the work while the queen lounges around shouting ‘peel me another ant’ while she contemplates the mystery and philosophy of the bee hive and its associated rituals and hierarchies over the millennia. I bet she gets more knowledge work done than they do.

I’m reminded of a rather excellent book by Jane Jacobs on which I’m sure I’ll write more and on which I’ve written before in the good old days of knocking out never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width papers with Clive to force us to think on different subjects. (Rather charmingly, he rang last week after a long silence to say it’s time we wrote our potboiler.) Jane Jacobs is a very interesting woman. ‘Systems of Survival’ is a very interesting book, essential, in my view to getting to some clear thinking in this muddled domain of knowledge management and knowledge sharing. In the smallest of nutshells, she writes that there are two, and only two, human systems. One is the Guardian system, conservative, looks after it’s own, fuelled by tradition, ritual and the stories which hold the present community clearly linked to the past, not comfortable with strangers, deal with each other through bonds of trust not legal contract. The other is the Trader sytem, explorers, travellers, deal-doers, contracters, they go out, encounter new worlds and people, they strike deals, make money, acquire capital of various kinds. Big businesses are Trader systems. the Public sector providers have largely been a Guardian system. To try and mix the two is to try to mix oil and water. They don’t. I’m not going to unpeel the layers here, except to say that, in my view, in our knowledge management world, we’ve not done enough to understand the implications of this. We bungle about, with our snatched bits of Einstein and Peter Drucker, our magpied scraps of theory from different philosophies of knowledge and schools of management theory, culted gurus, and make out like knowledge work sits comfortably simultaneously in both the Guardian and the Trader systems. But where does a community of practice end and a marketplace begin? Are the knowledge workers the boundary people who are uniquely competent to see both worlds and pass from one to another and back again?

I don’t know. I’m in a state of entire not-knowing. My best hunch though is to flick through the literature on the subject, so as not to get caught out by how others have seen it, but let it pass through not rest in me, and to look for my inspiration in other places. I’m going to look at people and places and businesses and things I admire and try to see the knowledge work in it and see where that takes me, rather than start with abstract notions of knowledge work and knowledge worker.

I must go and lie down now.

Taking stories to the other side

In one of the episodes of the final series of the West Wing, CJ Cragg is more and more frustrated by her inability to make a dent, leave something behind. So when someone from an NGO tries to make an appointment with her, she breaks with habit and gives him a slot in her diary.

He overwhelms her with statistics about the atrocities in Sudan. Thousands, millions, terrible things, rape, amputation, devastation. It’s all beyond her grasp, there is nothing she can imagining doing in this vastness of human failure, and he can see from her face that he is losing her attention, so he says, suddenly

‘When the babies die, the mothers carry them round in their arms because there is nowhere to put them down.’

20 words (I approximate, from memory.)

‘When the babies die, the mothers carry them round in their arms because there is nowhere to put them down.’

You can see the image of this slice through her helplessness and frustration and spring her to action, unorthorised by the President. When, at the end of the episode, he calls her to task for not having cleared things with me, it is this that she says to him. All the same, neither would have acted on those 20 words alone, although it took the 20 words to push CJ to action. The big numbers, the huge evidence of human tragedy filtered through the tiny glow of unbearable imagery.

This embrace between narrative and analysis was brought to mind for me yesterday by an article in the Guardian called ‘When the lights go out, students take off to the airport’

It tells the story, spliced with statistics, of the children in Guinea who go to study by the floodlgihts at Bgessia International Airport because they have no electricity at home. I doubt I would have read it if it had said ‘The lack of eletrictricity in Guinea is a ‘geological scandal”, although that quote comes further down in the article, when I’m ready to read it.

Some big challenges here, which must always be held close to the heart in marrying narrative and analysis in a thoughtful and authentic way, not just to pull.

The first is, how to make sure the illumination is not dramatising, but genuinely representative and informative, a way through image or metaphor, to help people find their way into a subject. In this article I really could hold the picture of the children and their education in mind and fill myself up with statistics on a subject which I had only thought about a little before.

An old article from March 2006, in something called OW weekly (whatever that is), lies filed in my ‘Small Stories’ category in my slowly emerging filing system. It is a profile, by Carole Cadwalladr of Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland. Mary has been transforming the language of aid. She says

‘If we keep this conversation in trade langauge, then it keeps it as trade. But if we can show the human-rights consequences then i’ts more powerful. It makes people very uncomfortable.’

Cadwalladr goes on to say

‘Everywhere we go, Mary has a story to tell. At the coffee farm, she tells her audeince how she grew up surrounded by farmers in ‘the poorest part of Ireland’. At the Amana hospital she points out that Ireland’s history was not so very different from that of Tanzania, a poor ex-colonial land with a tortured history. There’s a story for everyone. And this, I realise, is what Mary does…you’ve got to be able to tell people things in language they understand. And what Mary’s doing is taking stories to the other side. To US member of Congress, she too takes from the cotton fields of Mali, of babies lying in ditches, because of the US governemtns’ $4 billion of aid to US cotton farmers. To the Tanzanians she tells stories of Ireland’s rise out of pverty adn to the country’s president Kikwete, she presses home how small changes in the health-care system that we saw in action at Amana hospital can signficiantly reduce the nubmer of women who die in childbirth.’

Steve Denning, formerly of the World Bank, coined the term springboard stories a while back for these small, condensed evocations, which he sees as an essential part of the armoury of the leader, tiny sparkplugs which spring people to imagination and action. (It’s by far his best book in my view, although I find that it limits the concept of storytelling in organisations to one to do with higher order communication and leadership skills and that’s not where I’m inclined to spend my time. But his categorisations and especially the appendices are rich food for thought on structuring and placing a springboard story and should not be bypassed by anyone with an interest in the subject. I’d also like to make clear that, whatever my critique, I have the utmost respect for Steve in what he has done to transform the credibility and acceptance of narrative and story in an organisational context, not least in co-founding the Golden Fleece with Madelyn Blair and others.)

What I’ve spoken of so far is a mix, about which I’m truthfully a bit uneasy of factual journalism spiced up with strong images which will draw the reader in, and the stories that inspiring leaders select for themselves from their own autobiography, and what they witness and carry with them as travellers who cross the divide between worlds.

How are we all to make sure connection between the big context, the facts, and the small stories which bring them to life are kept honest? How are we to keep the difference between analytical reporting and storytelling positive and make sure holds its integrity. In a 5 year project working with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation we worked towards, and ended up with a guide to using story as an instrument of knowledge management in an aid setting: ‘Story Guide: building bridges using narrative techniques’ At the beginning, we showed two ways of telling of the same thing. The first had been collected through a technique for sharing personal experiences collectively that allows, through emergent self-selection, the stories resonant for the community be identified by them.

The Inspiring Pot
“Bangladesh is a really impressive place… in a positive sense. I was in a village last year working in water and sanitation. We were trying to promote the use of improved latrines, but could not produce concrete slabs and rings locally for a low cost. Somebody told me to visit the latrines of a lady in the village, so I went along and said, “Can I see your latrines?” She had made a latrine out of a clay pot with the bottom cut off. Then with a potter from the area she developed a small local production of bottomless pots, and they became the latrines. Ingenious.

A few weeks later I was in another village and saw a hand pump; it was broken, just a small piece missing. So I said to the villagers, “Why don’t you repair your pump?” And they said, “Oh, we just wait for another donor to bring a new pump.” So I said, “Why don’t you visit the lady in the village over there? She finds ways of getting things done for herself.”

Perhaps 30 personal stories of experiences in the field had been shared (in repeated rounds in smaller groups) and then people had selected the most resonant for them, bringing it down to 3 stories which held collective meaning. These were retold to the whole room, and recorded word for word (in this case, frantic typing, normally with a small Olympus or mini disc)

A while later, when we were trying to convey what the written conventions of organisational reporting do to shrivel and spoil raw materials, I rewrote this as

Lessons learned from fieldwork in Bangladesh

“In our evaluation of a project in Bangladesh we noted a wide variance in the competence of individual villages to develop sustainable and effective solutions to problems encountered, for example in replacing broken parts or developing low cost products for example new latrines. The lessons to be learned from this evaluation are that we should:

* work against over-dependence on donors;
* note and encourage entrepreneurial approaches to problems;
* identify existing and repeatable good practices;
* build and strengthen communication between villages to assist cross-fertilization of ideas at the grassroots level.”

I always meant this to be tongue in cheek: an ironic way to make an important point. And we’ve used the comparison a lot to engage people with the subject. It always works. But I’ve come to see that both ways of conveying the material work well. Jacques actual story, recorded by us, is a terrific illustration of the dependence that can develop on aid workers and the helplessness of those provided for. But the duller, less illuminating translation into report-speak also acts as a bridge, a way to summarise and abstract and create a way to compare this with other illuminations to find common patterns. It’s both/and not either/or.

Coming back to electricity and it’s lack. This has come up for me in respect of another challenge, which we noticed acutely for the first time when running a story competition for the Islamic Development Bank. The competition, ‘Voices from the Field’ invited IDBers (‘IDaBers’, those who work for this impressive development bank) to submit true stories of the impact of the Bank on its beneficiaries. How to set the judging criteria for such a competition is a long blog for a different time, and much more besides on the process of handling such a competition. We did it pretty well, building on two previous competitions. But we still noticed a new challenge in the selection of longlisted and shortlisted winning stories. It was so much easier to respond to stories of personal journeys than those of big projects. The young girl in Bangladesh, given a grant to do vocational training who ends up running her own sewing business; the young man, given a grant, who becomes a doctor and goes home to set up a health centre. These were so much easier to tell and respond to than the big electricity and road projects which have more systemic substance.

And we found ourselves giving particular credit to those who could, somehow, convey the big projects but bring them down to the personal. One winning story, as I recall, was about an electricity project, perhaps in Sudan. The teller began with a powerful evocation of the consequences of the lack of electricity – the sweat, the dark, people dying on operating tables. And then the presence of IDB as a contributor to an infrastructure project which brings electricity is conveyed via watching a news report on television. And we move back to a personal view of what it feels like afterwards.

I raise this to bring me back round to the beginning – the marriage of narrative and analysis, huge systemic systems and their human impact in a truly representative and not a dramatising way, but one which will change the perspectives and actions of the listener or reader.

But I’d like to end in a slightly different place, which is surprise. The IDB judges surprised themselves in their judging in several ways. In judging this story, one of them said that he hadn’t expected to be moved by such a story in some ways. After all, they are common experiences for most in member countries, not much out of the norm. But in fact when he was reading the stories for the first time, there was a power cut in Jeddah, and as he lay awake slick with sweat it suddenly flashed into his mind that he had forgotten what it was like always to be in the heat and the dark. So the story re-evoked for him personally, in a powerful way, the point of why he went to work. To stop such things happening.

Fiction as a place of truth

I’ve written on this before and I’m bound to write on it over and over again because it’s at the very heart of our work as narrative enquirers in an organisational context.

It comes up for me again now because of the literary festival currently going on in London which has the theme of saying the unsayable A session I missed was with Kamila Shamsie and Tahmima Anam. In an article preceding the session in the Guardian Kamila Shamsie writes of growing up in a censoring dictatorship in Pakistan, an era when the ‘absence of truth was often possible without recourse to lies.’. She writes of the thrill of the effect of Shame, by Salman Rushdie, a book about politics in Pakistan:

‘Shame was never going to attract a vast readership in Pakistan, but for me – at 10 too young to read the book – it was the first indication that fiction was a place of truth, more trustworth than the news.’

She goes on to say that fiction writers can go to places which news reporters and historians fear to tread. And all the same, the emotional truth which becomes possible through fiction is not possible without facts:

‘You need to know the contours of the world into which you are going to drop your made-up characters and their made-up lives; when people ask me which parts of my novel are based on things that really happened, I point out that I can’t make up context, only the shapes that fill it.’

Another take on the truth and fiction comes in ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ by Azar Nafisi. The subversive women’s book club she sets up reads first ‘A Thousand and One Nights’. Nafisi says:

‘I formulated certain general questions for them to consider, the most central of which was how these great works of imagination could help us in our present trapped situation as women. We were not looking for blueprints, for an easy solution, but we did hope to find a link between the open spaces the novles provided and the closed ones we were confined to. I remember reading to my girls Nabokov’s claim that ‘readers were born free and ought to remain free’.

So for Nafisi, rather in the Chinese way, the dislocation of time and space and examination of the big stories of birth, death, love, freedom, oppression, through literature creates a freedom for the reader to see their own life through the window of another experience.

But what about another challenge of the truth – it’s relative dullness. In his brilliant book ‘Stuart, a life backwards’ Alexander Masters starts, in chapter 0, with a disappointed conversation with his subject (Stuart, Shorter: thief, hostage-taker, psycho, addict, raconteur):

‘Stuart does not like the manuscript.
Through the pale Tesco stripes of his supermarket bag I can see the wedge of my papers. Two years’ worth of interviews and literary effort.
‘What’s the matter with it?’
‘It’s bollocks boring.”

And he suggests
‘Do it the other way round. Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards.’

And so that is what Masters does. Triumphantly. It is an extraordinary story. Stuart’s life backwards, and Alexander Master’s own growth and change through the challenge of grappling with both finding out this life and struggling with a way to structure and convey it. And not only that, in the background, as he learns of the bigger issues of homelessness, addiction, abuse, and the institutitions involved, an extraordinary, vibrant, informed picture grows of this whole issue of homelessness which transforms the reader’s insight. So fact, fiction, story structure, biography, autobiography all blend to convey a far greater truth than either the facts or the story on their own. An embrace of narrative and analysis.

Dave Eggers faced the same kind of issue in trying to share the story of Valentino Deng, one of the ‘lost boys’ of Sudan. In the Guardian Review of 26th May, there is a long, fascinating article called ‘It was just boys walking’ which details his struggle to wrestle the facts, gaps and partial recollections of his subject into a form which would engage the reader:

‘Valentino and I met up in Atlanta and San Franciso, spending days and weeks together, recording his story. We talked for hundreds of hours on the phone and sent thousands of emails back and forth…..I had been working on a book of oral hsitories from the lives of publics chool teachers in the US, and had studied different methods of storytelling. I assumed I would simply interview Valentino, straighten the narrative out a bit, ask some follow-up questions, and then assemlbe the book from his words. I even imagined for a while – much of our first year together – that I would simply be the editor of the book, not it’s author.’

But at the end of the first year Eggers realised that the material he had ‘did not transcend the many human rights reports and newspaer articles already avaialbel to the world. It was clunky, spare, and full of holes.’

After huge labours and an emotional rollercoaster, Eggers finally did four things to make a window through which the truth and strength of the story could be conveyed:

1. He did source research himself, going to Sudan to fill in the gaps and increase the richness of the description
2. He wrote it as fiction

This raises some interesting issues for Thomas Jones, reviewing the book in the London Review of Books. In a genuinely favourable review, he raises some pertinent questions about authorship and ownership, which I’ll write more about another time:

‘And yet, that a story so concerned with so many different forms of dispossession should itself be subject to a ‘variety of appropriation is not unproblematic, and requires a more positive justification than mere silence. Eggers, unlike many of Achak’s American friends and benefactors, does not feature as a character in What Is the What. No doubt it was important to avoid distracting readers with anything that could be mistaken for cute metafictional trickery, one of the less interesting but more remarked-on aspects of Eggers’s first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a lightly fictionalised account of bringing up his younger brother after the deaths of his parents from cancer. But in What Is the What, Eggers is conspicuous by his absence from the narrative, which leaves you wondering how his name came to such solitary prominence on the cover, how the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng came to be ‘Copyright © Dave Eggers’.’

3. He used the more recent experiences of Deng, being mugged in his own home in the US by people he didn’t know as a framing device:

‘It was at this time I knew the book needed to be not only about Valentino’s expeirences in Sudan ajd the camps, but also about the many unforeseen struggles of his life in the US.’

And finally, he underpinned the structure with an ancient creation myth known in southern Sudan, which gave the book it’s final title ‘What is the What’

And then this today from Knowledge at Wharton on Michael Crichton’s new book ‘Next’. The article is called ‘A Novel on Genetic Research: It’s ‘Fiction, Except for the Parts That Aren’t’

A few extracts to get the juices rising, my bold:

‘In Next, published in November 2006, Crichton takes up genetic engineering again, this time from the vantage point of the law.

Next weaves together several storylines in order to trace the complex and confusing interplay of scientific innovation, legal loopholes, moral limits and economic opportunity.

Together, these real and imagined stories create a troubling portrait of a teeming biotech industry marred by corporate greed, legal confusion and moral uncertainty. Crichton’s is a world in which marketing executives promote the idea of using genetically modified animals to sell their products. It’s a world in which lawyers debate whether one’s body parts might actually be the highly profitable property of someone else. And it’s a world in which no one knows how to think through the biological and ethical dilemmas posed by a science that can rearrange natural boundaries at will. What people in this world are left with, in the absence of scientific and moral clarity, is the corrupting promise of unlimited economic opportunity and a legal system that is frighteningly ill-equipped to cope with the kind of ethical puzzles genetic research raises.

Crichton’s point is that as science outpaces the understanding of lawyers, judges, and government officers, our ability to maintain a coherent legal position on it is being radically compromised. And, as the examples cited above show, he has written convincingly on this point for some time. In Next, he crafts a novel around this argument as a way of painlessly developing it (a fast-paced story is always easier to follow than a complicated analysis). This might sound like cheating. And from an analytical viewpoint it does leave something to be desired. But a novel offers Crichton something nonfiction does not: It provides him with a way to help readers use their imaginations to grasp the implications of the law as i now stands

.’

it’s evident in new kinds of scientific research, futures work and horizon scanning, this kind of blend of fact and fiction, present reality and future imagined states will become a necessary form, because only through hybrid vehicles of this kind can we have the kinds of debate and be moved to the necessary actions which we need to have as a society, a nation, and beyond national, cultural and educational boundaries. It’s worth taking a look at some of the work done by Defra (and in part commissioned from Sparknow) in their Horizon Scanning and Futures unit to explore this further.

I feel strongly that all these structural devices, the blend of fact, fiction, biography, autobiography, metaphor, myth, folktale, legend, traditional stories, the reorganising of time from liner to parallel to reversed, must all be explored by us who seek to do work using story and narrative in the context of organisations, to find ways to show people themselves and others, the worlds and systems they live and work in, the differences they can make. We must not be sucked into the pointlessness of the business case study in our attempts to render our lives, and the lives of others, truthfully. I’ll just keep on coming back, over and over again, to Clifford Geertz but Clifford Geertz plus.

‘In attempting to answer grand questions …, the anthropologist is always inclined to turn toward the concrete, the particular, the microscopic. We are the miniaturists of the social sciences, painting on Lilliputian canvases with what we take to be delicate strokes. We hope to find in the little what eludes us in the large, to stumble upon general truths while sorting through special cases.’

[From the introduction to Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia by Clifford Geertz, 1968]

In our narrative enquiry, we must hold onto our role as miniaturists and act as custodians who find ways to get people to see and hear and feel those tiny moments which hold huge difficult truths. And to do this we must play with new forms of representation to make sure what we make tears in the fabric that has been so cunning woven, which deludes us that the way organisations report on themselves, because apparently factual is truthful. It is not.

I’ve always liked, in this respect, the Buddhist notion of having a deep grasp of the past and taking a long view of the future in order to understand the now.