Knowledge transfer of unlikely kinds

I think I must be tuned in to the unlikely meeting of worlds otherwise alien to each other. In any case, here are two offers of ‘knowledge transfer events’ which I think should get the juices flowing.

First, from Saturday’s Guardian: Freerunning goes to war as marines take tips from EZ, Livewire and Sticky

“We found some of the moves were relevant for battle,” .. “For them it is about artistic expression. For example, they will run along a wall keeping a low profile because it looks good, but we need to do the same thing in urban combat to stay safe.”

The other example that struck me over the weekend has an altogether darker underbelly. I was watching a programme about wreckers presented by Bella Bathurst who has also written a book on it. The original wreckers, who stripped wrecked ships for a living in dangerous circumstances, often leaving survivors to drown, are in fact the same families in many cases as those who are committed to the life boat cause. Same skills, different motives.

I write this, in fact, as I’m listening, in the background, to a virtual lecture by Clive Holtham about the role of artists sketch books in reflective management practice, which is another crossover moment. And then there are the blurring of boundaries between high and low culture with the popular classical raves going on for a few years now in Berlin clubs.

So all kind of knowledge is crossing all kinds of gaps, and in it’s transfer is generating new energy, commitment and ideas. This is, to me, true knowledge transfer of an unpedestrian kind. Hard to see, but inspirational when one gets a glimpse of it.

Brothels in Bangladesh – a direct consequence of climate change

As I come to the shift of gear, the dreamy limbo of writing up the museums work we’ve been doing for the past few months and starting to clear a space to think about the work on horizon scanning and futures which hoves into few and will take up most of my thinking and unthinking space from February to July, I’m quite alert to tiny fragments which pack a punch. I’m finding a surprising amount in our mla database which seems to connect directly to the hsf thinking in ways that are almost frightening. For example I wrote recently about poetry as a kind of horizon scanner – the poetry library gets a surprising frontline view of what matters to people.Then in the Guardian this week I was startled by an article on the rise in prostitution in Bangladesh:

“The brothel opened 20 years ago, making it the newest and largest of the 14 recognised brothels in the country. It is set on the meeting point of two vast rivers, the Jamuna and the Ganges (known locally as the Padma), which makes this a very busy place to catch a ferry. Trucks carrying rice, jute, sugar cane and fish from the west and south-west of the country queue here for two or three days at a time to cross the river for the drive to the capital, Dhaka. In Bangladesh on a BBC World Service boat to look at the impact of climate change, I was surprised to find that an unexpected consequence of rising water levels is the growth in demand for prostitution. River erosion has meant the closure of some ferry berths, so men wait even longer to cross the river. And, while they wait, many of them pass the time in the company of Daulatdia’s women.”

We spent some time this week at a workshop imagining scenarios for mla relationship with business (banish mla as concept, replace it with a sense of extended learning places and resources essential to the rounded worker, then ‘backcast’ from that to the present day to see how one would achieve that symbiosis over, say, 20 years).

Anyway, my question for a couple of days has been, take a scenario (not good or bad, hopeful or unhopeful, just a confluence of circumstance) and imagine backwards from that circumstance how would would have forseen it in some way.So I’m interested in the idea of taking brothels (one can deconstruct brothel of course in quite a feminist way – poor endentured women with no prospects, men with too much time on their hands and not much inclination to do cultured things) in Bangladesh (low-lying land, under-resourced in flood management, having to react rather than act, most likely to be one of the frontiers where we witness the consequences of climate change, etc).But working back from brothels, Bangladesh, flooding, too few ferries, downtime. How might one, 10 years ago have forseen this thing? What kinds of horizon scanning might one have done in, say 1997? What kinds of different policies for prostitution and flood transportation might a reasonably accurate prognosis have led to?I think it might be interesting for our hsf governance work to come at it sideways, and find some unlikely events, from history and the present, and consider what a well-scanned intelligence process might have thrown up by way of a different policy path.What’s so interesting here is how little we prize the insights that people can bring from their daily witnessing. I’m witnessing a great deal of unlikely stuff because of where I sit. But I’m not a scanner or a futurist, and there’s no-one whose sleeve I can tug about most of it. I do it because it interests me and puts a bit of pep into my daily work. Think of all those scanners out there. If, instead of simply using people’s excess computing power to calculate space things,we used their witnessing power to help us see further, think of the changes that could bring about.

It happens a bit of course. Say the RSPB and birdwatching. There’s a model of participatory scanning that it’s worth looking more closely at, and I know Natural England so some interesting scanning using Cognitive Edge techniques. And it’s all trendy to talk about the wisdom of crowds. But I’m not talking about exactly any of that here. I think I’m talking about something a bit different that I’m trying to find and describe better.I’m off to read the Guardian and let it settle for a bit while I think about what it is I want to say next.

But before I do, a tiny, gorgeous little thing from my second visit to Louise Bougeois, accompanied by sketches of skyscapers as people – perhaps three of them standing together:

“One man was telling a story, it was a very good story, and it made him happy, but he told it so fast that nobody understood it.”

Yup, that happens a lot.

Offsetting the digital sales experience with stories

Oblique narrative pathways seem more than ever necessary to us as we want something more than a hard sell.   Take this Toast podcast which is a special Christmas project of book and podcasts intending, I suppose, to distinguish Toast from other online retailers. We want something which has been touched by human hand, or voice, and these kinds of slightly offbeat digital narrative projects help to put a face, a voice, a personal stitching hand, a sense of richness to the encounter which offsets the inhuman and functional aspects of the experience.

This is part of a bigger story called in a recent magazine article ‘The birth of nu-craft’. Writing about two exhibitions (one just past, called ‘Hot Craft’, and one just started at the V&A called ‘Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft’Fleur Britten writes about how craft has moved from being a ‘nesting pastime’ to an expression of creativity. Craft nights are springing up everwhere, including in unlikely places like working men’s clubs (a subject worthy of another blog sometime). The boundaries between craft, art and design are being blurred. We want the trace of the potters hand on the pot, both as potter seeking meaning in work expression, and as purchaser, seeking meaning in what we surround ourselves with. One of the interviewees in the article, Kate Westerholt (who co-curated Proud) sees is as akin to the Arts and Crafts movement, with people tiring of industrialisation and craving individuality.I don’t think it’s just that. I think there’s more too it, but it is a sign of an important trend.

I’ve been writing elsewhere about negative space, and, by inference, about the necessary slowness involved in the ambiguity of making your own meaning.This struck me too the other night when I was watching Pan’s Labyrinth, quite a chilling mix of fact and fantasy set in the Spanish Civil War. As with all Guillermo Del Toro’s films, there’s a great big allegory in there. What’s great and big about this one is that like ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ the fusion of both fantasy and fact make for a whole new personal narrative journey. And you have to park your analytical mind because the meanings are not, as my friend Markie would term it, isomorphic. The surrender to ambiguity and random resonance during the experience is what makes it meaningful.

This all seems to me to be part of a bigger search for personal meaning. Which Doris Lessing was also saying in her Nobel Prize Speech at the weekend. We need storytellers and writers don’t come out of houses without books in them, she says. But beware: 

“The inanities of the internet have seduced a generation, and we live in a fragmenting culture where people read nothing and know nothing of the world, the new Nobel laureate novelist Doris Lessing warned yesterday…. “We never thought to ask how will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging.” I’m off to read and write real fantasy now

Mind the Gap: knowledge work and the UK construction industry

I’m close to the final thing, or the first thing, depending.
Here’s the synopsis. This feels like a beginning to me in some way I’m not yet able to describe. Rather like the article ‘One continuous accident mounting on top of another’
in which Francis Bacon describes his creative process, if that’s not too pretentious of me.

Q: It often happens, does it, this transformation of the image in the course of working?

It does, but now I always hope it will arrive more positively. Now I feel that I want to do very, very specific objects, though made out of something, which is completely irrational from the point of view of being an illustration. I want to do very specific things like portraits, and they will be portraits of the people, but, when you come to analyse them, you just won’t know – or it would be very hard to see how the image is made up at all. And this is why in a way it is very wearing, because it is really a complete accident. For instance, the other day I painted a head of somebody, and what made the sockets of the eyes, the nose, the mouth were, when you analysed them, just forms which had nothing to do with eyes, nose or mouth; but the paint moving from one contour into another made a likeness of this person I was trying to paint. I stopped; I thought for a moment I’d got something much nearer to what I want. Then the next day I tried to take it further and tried to make it more poignant, more near, and I lost the image completely.
Because this image is a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction. It will go right out from abstraction, but will really have nothing to do with it. It’s an attempt to bring the figurative thing up on to the nervous system more violently and more poignantly.

Well, of course it’s pretentious, but better than not going right out on a limb.

The moreoreless finished article (or opening chapter?) ended up around 9,000 words plus footnotes on knowledge work in the UK construction industry which seems to have turned in some way into a founding essay for Sparknow’s next ten years. Here are the synopsis, and Sparknow’s founding essay. If you’d like a copy of the whole paper and are willing to comment on it, please email me.

I’ve also promised to go back through and assemble the various works on knowledge and space, and on slowness, which Clive Holtham and I wrote over the years, and make them available here.

Next year when I’ve more breathing space, I’m inclined to play with a wiki which starts to thread the whole thing together into a position on knowledge work and workplace design for knowledge work.

‘MIND THE GAP’: A View of Knowledge Work in the UK Construction Industry
Overview
This paper explores the following questions:
1. What is knowledge work?
2. Who is a knowledge worker?
3. What are the characteristics of a high knowledge economy and a firm in it?
4. What kinds of knowledge issues are there in the UK construction industry?
5. What kind of knowledge- and collaboration-intensive processes work?
6. What kinds of encouragement do people need to engage in knowledge work?
It makes six main points:
1. Everybody is a knowledge worker. The construction industry as a living knowledge system challenges the view that knowledge work is done in the head.
2. The dominant metaphors of knowledge work hinder. A move towards metaphors of ecology, culture and environment and away from metaphors of capture, capitalisation and resources would help.
3. Knowledge lies in the gaps in between – between participants in a project, in the time between the generation of an idea, the execution of a project and its subsequent management, between disciplines. Knowledge is activated only in context in a particular moment. Only information can be codified.
4. Information infrastructure, economic incentives, innovation systems, and education and learning – the four pillars of the knowledge economy – are a useful lens through which to assess the state of knowledge in construction.
5. The UK construction industry, by its nature has a lot of ‘gaps in between’. It’s knowledge-rich, but not yet very able in managing the gaps to generate competitive advantage.
6. Tools and techniques might be under any label, of which knowledge is only one, but are subordinate to an intent to create values and a culture which encourages effective knowledge behaviours at all levels.

Sparknow Founding Essay: Designing Spaces for Knowledge

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.

‘You’ve got a whole repertoire of silences, don’t you?’

‘You’ve got a pissed-off one, and a resentful one, an I-hate-you-so-much-I’m-pretending-to-be-deaf one, and a worse one which is I-hate-you-so-much-I’m-pretending-to-be-foreign-and-I-don’t-understand-anything-you’re-saying. Your silences are the most eloquent thing about you. I can read them the way an eskimo reads snow.’

From ‘Memory of Water & Five Kinds of Silence’ by Shelagh Stevenson.

We don’t like silence in organisations. Apart from Quaker business meetings, I can’t imagine that most businesses would begin with a few moments silence to orient people. We plough on, with agenda, timetables, interruption, challenge. I’ve never before made a real list of silences and in fact was going to blog on something else triggered by this play but it’s too important to pass up now I’ve happened on it. Lets try and make a list of organisational silences.

1. There’s the management-speaking-at-you-which-silences-you silence
2. There’s the deafening-silence-of-lack-of-feedback
3. There’s the worker-silenced-and-the-management-doesn’t-even-notice silence
4. There’s the silence-about-what’s-really-going-on-masked-by-a-plethora-of-apparently-informative-memos silence
5. There’s the I-sent-you-an-email-asking-for-your-commentary-and-you-didn’t-reply silence
6. There’s the silence-of-avoidance-and-survival – if I keep quiet she won’t ask me to do such and such
7. There’s the silence-of-one-unwilling-to-blow-the-whistle-on-bad-practice-because-he-will-be-shot-as-the-messenger

I’m going to spend the day adding to this list. I doubt any of them would be positive. In fact I wonder whether most of them boil down to an unlistening leadership (and lets not confuse listening with consultation), a neglectful management, poorly handled requests for help or the silence of a workforce bleak with cynicism after the last round of consultation where their opinions were asked and appeared to count for nothing.

In story and narrative terms, silence and pause are essential to the rhythm and unfolding of the story. Silences are moments of recognition, high emotion and drama, or pause – shifts from one state to another. In conversations, silences are attention, acknowledgement, contemplation of what is being said. In some cultures, it’s appropriate to hold a silence, to allow what the other has said to sink in. So by squeezing out silence or using silence as a means of avoidance or disapproval, organisations do themselves no favours.

In one piece of work, we were investigating the relationship between functional services and the emotional context wrapped round them. Would people respond differently to a poor service if it were handled with empathy, or would that cut no ice? We worked with members of a callcentre, whose normal function was to pursue people who had not fulfilled contracts of various kinds. Their training was to use silence to nudge the recipient of the call into a flush of discomfort – not aggressively, just careful polite silences to get people to feel more obliged to cough up their side of the bargain. In working with us they found it quite a challenge to shift to a warm silence, an invitation, a leaning back to create a space between the caller and the recipient in which the conversation would grow. They were too used to leaning in, getting a bit close and face to face, pushing the other to lean back onto the back foot.

In the story work we’ve done, we’ve found silence essential, but also quite difficult to manage. One technique in workshops is to encourage people, at the end of a telling, to sit in silence, and perhaps wave their fingers and hands above their heads instead of clapping. Clapping cuts off the story and the pause it needs to sink in.

When we use pinboards, we often find it useful to mix rounds of call-out, small group work etc with silent rounds of card writing. These perform several functions
1. those with quiet voices or unpopular views are not drowned out – they get a chance to write what they want and this becomes part of collection of views which are ordered by the participants themselves
2. it’s important to make room for the second wave, the unrehearsed thoughts and memories where real nuggets of insight are to be found. There’s a great tendency only to give room to the rehearsed and ready, and miss sight of the fact that the unrehearsed, more private messy stuff behind it is the thing one needs to be giving room to.

I experienced the power of silence in great force once, in a workshop run for the London International Festival of Theatre by Peter Reder. A group of business people and young musicians met at the Union Chapel in Islington. Each of us brought 5 items and started by sitting in circles, telling the person next door what these items signified. Then we were asked to gather in one big group and, in silence, lay out objects, one of us at a time, in a way which we privately thought them to be associated. We created characters – a bloke with snazzy dark glasses, a mobile phone, a packet of fags, a bottle of vodka, who you could almost see sitting at a bar in a speakeasy. A young woman with a shell necklace, swaying in a grass skirt under a palm tree on a desert island somewhere.

And then Peter asked us to move the objects from where they were and create different groupings, again all in silence. We catalogued them – all the mobile phones together, all the car keys. And then we did a third round, I can’t remember what. And then we did speak about how we’d come to do this together and why we’d made the choices we had. There’d been almost a dreamy limbo, a sense of moving through water, not air, or a dance, as we’d collaborated in silence to make these groupings.

So its less about silence than about shifts in pace – a move from the relentless timetabling of organisations, deluded into thinking they and their meetings and projects are trains, and can run on time. Room for slowness, tempo shifts, rhythms of work (something Clive Holtham and I used to write about a lot under the working title of Slow Knowledge).

Yesterday I was reading a lovely little book – ‘Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Soicety’ a note of conversations held between Daniel Barenboim, the Jewish musician, and Edward W Said, the Palestinian author. At one point in it, Barenboim talks of the mistakes musicians make about tempo:

‘You know, tempo is always related to content, and many musicians make, to my mind, the fatal mistake of first deciding on a tempo. They take a metronome, sometimes given by the composer, which is inevitably too fast because when the composer writes the metronome marktins, he doesn’t have the weight of sound. He only has the imagination in his brain.

…Anyway, this has led, at least, many musicians simply to take the decision of the tempo as a first decision and, then, see what content you put into it. And you cannot do that. It’s exactly the other way. IT’s the content htat really determines the tempo.’

He does go on to say that there is a certain necessary speed as well if the music (say the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh) is not to dissipate – things lose the chance to succeed when the tempo becomes too slow.

But my point is this: what leader of an organisation do you know who is willing to eschew ‘quick wins’ and to stand up to auditors, board members and investors in establishing the right tempo for different projects, plans and kinds of work? What workers are willing to slow things down or speed them up because the internal rhythm of the work demands it, not the external demands of the organisational planning cycle?

An unpronounceable Chzech man, whose name I must recall but which has remarkably few vowels for its length, wrote well on this. He called the best kind of time ‘flow’ – the moment when you are alive in time and lose track of time – in the making of a sculpture, or writing a good passage, or performing, or attending a performance which holds you entranced. Why not make ‘flow’ the aspiration of the organisation at all levels?

It’s the same with all units of time. From a ten minute telephone call (something you could Dennet-wise call an organisational meme) to a one hour meeting to a monthly team meeting to a Board meeting or the annual reporting cycle. They all take time, and much of it is redundant time dressed up in busy-ness, noise and action. If we had the courage to tug at time, slow things down, speed them up, change the beat, use time in the variety of ways it offers, not in the monolithic way we’ve been convinced of – well, then, time (and it’s wise use) would generate tremendous energy, not the pall of inertia which so often hangs of the processes and production cycles of the system.

Two dimensions is not enough.

“At 400ft they see a big black man and they cross the road to avoid me,” he explains. “At 200ft they cross back because they realise that I’m a professional basketball player and they want a closer look.” But recently, he says, they have come a bit closer and then crossed again. “At 50ft they recognise me as the gay bloke who just came out and then they cross back across the road again.”

This from an article in the Guardian about John Amaechi, a British Sportsman who became a big star in American basketball. The article is called ‘I’m not just that big gay bloke’

The power of this tiny extract in putting you into his experience and being able to witness (lets be truthful) yourself from the outside, is quite shocking.

I was reminded of the article posted recently on opendemocracy called ‘Mulitiplicity not long division’. I’m going to quote from the beginning and then make a couple of observations.

‘I heard a hilarious story from a big burly London taxi-driver. To please his younger daughter, he had got up very early one morning and drove all the way to Cardiff to buy her an expensive rare-breed dog. “It cost me an arm and a leg and it looks like a toy sheep. Now, of course, at the end of my shift, my wife is at work and the girls are at dancing class, I have to walk the dog. I don’t know why, the missus bought this pale pink lead with gold studs. So I’m walking along when I spot a mate driving his cab and I try and stuff the dog in my pocket because I don’t want him thinking I’m gay.”

Here I bridled a little. But this was a nice guy. Although he was one of the lads, he adored his family and clearly would do anything for them, he was able to laugh at himself and he entertained me. None of my gay friends would be seen dead walking that dog either. The wider point is that the cabbie defined himself too narrowly, drawing on the stereotypical view that you can’t share characteristics with a group you don’t belong to.
…
The world seems to be ruled by this kind of binary thinking. From the technology we use to terrorism, it’s the one / nought principle, the on / off switch, the yes / no question, the in / out classification or for / against challenge – which, by limiting individual identity, imagination and allegiance, creates and exacerbates social division. Those in power use it deliberately for their own advantage. The binary logic of politicised group identity means that belonging to one group equals conflict with another. As Diane Enns puts it in a new paper from the Berghof Peace Centre, we inhabit “a world in which identities are endlessly generated in binary pairs, pitted against each other.”

Now I find two things interesting here. The first is that she used a personal anecdote to punch her way into a complex subject. The anecdote (Geertzwise) is a window into a big pattern. And I’ll come back to that. But you could imagine both this and the short extract about John Amaechi being pretty good conversation starters, things which slow you down a bit, interrupt your thinking, make you see a subject in 3d, not 2d.

(A detour here. I recently went on a sculpture course, having hardly done anything with my hands in my life except type and cook. Our teacher pointed out that sculpture differs from painting in that it exists in time. Or to be successful it exists in time. You can’t just see it from one vantage point. You, the viewer, need to travel through space and time to appreciate and question it. If you can, you should touch it too. Taste the knowledge. Although that’s not where I got the name of the blog from. Another time.)

I’ll come back to the 2d 3d part. But I’d like to travel via Jim Lord’s book ‘What kind of world do you want, which I referenced once before.’ I find it a puzzling and slightly flimsy book, so I’m intrigued that I’ve referenced it twice now and thought about it quite a bit. Informed by Appreciative Inquiry, it makes well the point that complex thinking arises more readily from concrete example. p. 129

‘Here’s a simple example from the way staff at the University of Michigan prepared for a $3billion campaign. In the middle of a flip chart, we wrote the name of a gentleman who had made one of the largest commitments to the university. Then the small group offered factors and conditions that they believed had influenced that person’s decision to invest. They included even something as seemingly small as a casual comment made by the receptionist.

As we began to discover the lively interplay between all parts of the system, we created our own theory of contribution, a theory distinctive to the university’s history, culture and community,a nd to the particular individual. Sucha specific, complex, nuanced understanding stands in sharp contrast to the more usual view that contributions result from simple, generic cause-and-effect mechanism….’

So viewing things from the specific is much more likely to yield a 3d picture. It’s a banal truth of course. But why are we, in an organisational context, largely to unable to take this truth on board and use it to do work for us? I’d suggest it’s because it suits us to hide behind the binary in may of our systems and organisations. It’s safer that way. You can stay disengaged, stay in your head, not engage your heart.

This takes me to Amarya Sen and his fairly recent book ‘Identity and Violence.’ In an essay derived from the book in Slate magazine, he says

‘A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for example, a mathematician who happens to be a Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic identity would be to hide more than it reveals. Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say, MIT or Princeton invokes an “algorithm” to solve a difficult computational problem, he or she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term algorithm is derived (the term “algebra” comes from the title of his Arabic mathematical treatise “Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah”). To concentrate only on Al-Khwarizmi’s Islamic identity over his identity as a mathematician would be extremely misleading, and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly, to give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.’

This in turn leads me to Christoph Maier’s work on diversity, which I first came across at a knowledge management thing at the ILO a couple of years back. I’ve been prompted by this line of enquiry to get back in touch with Christoph, because I’ve a hunch there’s a great deal in this 3d thing which we need to push into organisational conversations of all kinds. I’ll write more on that when we’ve corresponded. Meanwhile, here’s an abstract I found online about his kaleidoscope approach:

‘The author proposes a fresh perspective on diversity. The individual ceases to be simply a member of a certain nation, ethnicity, race or gender group, and becomes a multi-faceted, unique kaleidoscope – a treasure for any workgroup. Setting out from this perspective, a conceptual framework for leading diversity – the ‘leading-diversity dice’ – is developed. This framework focuses on personal behaviour and the interactions of workgroup members. It defines leading diversity as a rational, emotional and spiritual process that centres on a shared humaneness and the African concept of ‘isithunzi’.

As I recall, any person at any moment can be driven by many facets of their present and historic situations and their future aspirations. This means that the kaleidoscope of which they are made up shakes and shifts all the time. To reduce any individual to black, white, Muslim, Christian, rich, poor dehumanises and corrodes the social fabric.

I can’t quite grasp at the reasons behind the segue to my final fragment, although they must be there somewhere. But this reminds me of what Anthony Gormley says in the introduction to the booklet accompanying his current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, ‘Blind Light’

‘You could say that there are two very discrete and almost oppositional places where a sculpture belongs. One is physical: in a landscape or a room, and the other is in the imagination of the viewer, in his/her experience and memory. They are equally important and in many sense the work is there waiting – almost like a trap – for the life of the viewer to come and fill it, or inhabit it. And then once ‘capture’ the art – or its arising – inhabits him or her.’

Why do I think this is connected? I’m really not sure. Perhaps it’s something about the role of the viewer, interviewer, reader, audience, and all the back history and kaleidoscope they bring with them into any situation which means each experience is unique in both it’s simplicity and its complexity. Probably too, it takes me back to the theme, the need for 3d thinking, but in fact not just thinking. 3d experiencing with all the senses if we are to make sense of ‘the systemic swirl of forces and conditions inside and around [a] person and those closest to him.’
(Jim Lord again)

In this case in fact, certainly with Allotment II which consists of reinforced concrete 300 life-size units dervied from the dimensions of local inhabitatns of Malmo aged 1.5 – 80 years, it really is a concrete experience, not a tired metaphor. For once.

Metaphors next, I’ve a feeling. Better gird my loins.

‘Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’

From ‘His sense of exile’ by William Blake. The whole poem goes thus:

‘I am like an atom, a nothing left in darkness,
And yet I am an identitiy.

They told me that I had five senses to close me up,
And the enclosed my infinite brain into a narrow
circle,
And sunk my heart into the Abyss…
Till all from FLie I was obliterated and erased.

Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things
thro’ narraow chinks of his cavern.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing
would appear to man as it is, infinite.’

At the recent conference in Wrexham on Excellence in Narrative Practice
there was considerable reflection on the role of the narrative interviewer and their relationship with the interviewee. And then on what to do with the transcription and analysis of materials. This is a huge area and not an easy one. In different work on oral histories with the founding brothers of the Islamic Development Bank, lessons learned and governance of futures and horizon scanning research at Defra, enquiry into merger culture, and into the customer experience at HMRC, we’ve grappled in many different ways with the casting of the interviewer and with the analysis of resulting materials. I’ll write more on this as a subject over time, but simply wanted to record today a metaphor for the role of the enquirer/witness that struck me in one talk. The researcher described herself as feeling like an amateur archaeologist in sifting through the materials. For many old fragments of artefacts, you need to have some idea of the overall shape of what you are looking for to stand any chance of recognising it among the rubble. And all the same, you must keep an open mind and a keen eye to discern things and possibilities you may not have had in mind. So you need to be both open and closed minded in reviewing the assembled materials.

This reminds me of the end 17th point in Quaker Advices and Queries:

‘Think it possible that you may be mistaken.’

If you know exactly what you are going to do, what is the point of doing it?

So Picasso.

It comes up over and over again. Handing yourself over to the not-knowing and to full immersion in attention to the present, trusting your instinct will find the deep knowledge you need in any instant.

I’m told Declan Donnellan has written of this in actors. In Shakespeare’s time in fact the actor did not know. The actor had a gift, given by god, and was the channel for divine inspiration. Now that the actor must stand on his own two feet, without the flow of the divine through his performance, he tends to concentrate too hard, feel it’s all down to perspiration with a soupcon of genius (or vice versa depending on the ego quotient I suppose). But good acting is not about concentrating too hard, its about paying attention and then letting things happen.

My friend Chris Heimann once ran a workshop for our little network. First he asked us all to imagine a thing on a shelf in our houses, then take the imaginary objects of the shelf, examine and caress it, then describe it to others. We all had beautiful vases, mirrors, picture, photos, nothing out of place in Designer’s Guild. Then he asked us to imagine a dusty old cupboard under the stairs in the cellar, a shelf, hidden behind an old frayed velvet curtain which had on it objects we knew nothing of, left by the previous owner. We had to, in the dark, put our hand through the curtain, fumble on the shelf for an unknown object and try, unseen, to work out what it was. These objects were slimy, mouldy, spongy things which revolted us. They were what was there when we took the borders of control off our imaginations. Those are the things we need to be willing to find if we are to express the whole of our messy experience, not just the tidy stuff that can go on show for visitors.

My singing teacher, Howard Millner, says pretty much the same in a different way. For him its the wave, the wave of the life force that can knock you off your feet. We don’t sing, we are sung through. All we need to do is learn how to get out of the way, make an empty space through which the force flows. This is where our attention needs to be directed. To making and loving the uncertainty of a narratively whole empty space which allows expression of who we really are to take shape beyond our control.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathon Haidt uses the metaphor of a rider on an elephant:

‘Modern theories about rational choice and information processing don’t adequately explain weakness of the will. The older metaphors about contolling animals work beautifully. The image that I came up with for msuyelf, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hand, and by pulling one way or another I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elpehant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.’

The mahoot is not the man in charge. The elephant is the elephant in charge, or most likely charging.

And somehow from elephants to Matisse. This from an article in the Guardian on 12th May about the unknowing and anxiety with which he approached his back sculptures:

“Henriette III was completed in 1929 at a point when it seemed to Matisse that his painting had reached a dead end. He made the last and most uncompromising of the Backs the same year, manipulating a vast mass of wet clay alone all through a sweltering Paris summer, knowing, or at any rate suspecting, that nobody but himself would ever see the finished work. It was as if he needed to touch base before veering blindly in a new direction without knowing where he was heading, or what he might find if he got there. Back IV was the last work he completed before setting sail for Tahiti on a voyage of discovery that would eventually lead to the great cut-and-painted paper compositions of his last decade. “I learned the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical from the shoreline and the coco palms,” he said afterwards.

…

Matisse’s sculptures seem now so sure of themselves, so full of energy and poise, so taut, even sleek in their confidence and clarity, that it is not easy to re-see them as they first presented themselves to their creator, groping his way forward by his own account in a fog of anxiety, rising often to panic.’

Veering blindly in a new direction without knowing where he was going. Just as we do on our elephants. Just as Chris got us to do as we fumbled behind the curtain in the cupboard under the stairs to find we knew not what. Which could take me back to where I started with Anne Carson’s ‘from the sleep side’.