I was at a gig the other evening in which the Kennedys & Edwina Hayes were playing. In introducing one of the songs, Maura Kennedy explained how he had a first degree in history, and Masters in folk music. The learning about ‘folk’ had come from inside – mainly through playing with other great musicians (Nanci Griffiths was the haunting…
Listening to a group of conference goers talk about a workshop on tango strategy – they said several things about communications and resistance the importance of resistance in the ‘hold’ that makes it possible to dance with a partner without resistance there can be no communication between the partners – at least not of intent you open yourself as a…
Some time ago I heard Rupert Goold talk about Decade, his collection of 19 playlets about the decade following 9/11. He remarked how striking it was to him that people could remember what they were doing when they heard about 9/11, and how much they wanted to tell that to others. He used the phrase, ‘…the need to narrate themselves…
I find that working intimately with innovation almost always involves being in – or on the verge of – ’emergent’ settings; and there are particular qualities to this experience. What it feels like to be in an emergent setting tells you something about emergence; and emergence tells you something about what it is like to be in a complex context,…
The ‘boundaryless’ organisation (Hirshhorn and Gilmore 1992) can stimulate large group phenomena such as feelings of loss of identity, a lack of coherence and connectedness[i] – yet also might provide a setting in which there can be a proliferation of connectedness through which some kind of coherence emerges. As Patricia Shaw[ii] discusses: ‘…we are not relating to one person at…
We tend to externalise communications – see it as the ‘inside’ communicating with the ‘outside’. and make big assumptions about the scope of what we mean by communications – from ‘broadcast’ to ‘dialogue’ – without much consideration of the degree of inter-penetration of one another. After all ‘language creates its own reality’, as well a communicating what might be the…
Partnerships are a way of promoting a kind of dissonance, especially for partners for whom conflict is muffled, baffled and starved of opportunity. Ruth Duek discusses dialogue in impossible situations, in her examination of ‘antagonism’ rather than ‘agonism’ in Israeli:Palestian negotiations. One of the things she says is: ‘In the conflict between narcissism versus object love lies the danger of empathising…
I think there is evidence that partnerships – I am sure not exclusively, but pretty consistently – achieve something of strategic significance (the what) because of the way they work (their processes, or the ‘how’). And there are many instances of ‘how’ – we have mentioned ‘visioning’, as a prominent one – but I would like to consider how they…
Slingshot