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…
Clare Huffington, Kim James and David Armstrong in their paper, ‘What is the Emotional Cost of Distributed Leadership’[i] discuss the relationship between emotions and the distribution of leadership. They sketch out what to me appears to be a ‘system of systems’ in which context (or environment) is crucial. They propose: ‘… to accept distributed leadership involves bringing into view the…
In his ISPSO paper, in New York (1987) Harold Bridger[i] includes a diagrammatic illustration of some of the main institutional characteristics of an open system with its organisational components and interconnections. The diagrammatic model indicates that such an institution is both “purpose-orientated” and “learning and self-reviewing”. This is a pretty accurate description of what many partnerships are like and feel like…
Iain McGilchrist makes claims about ‘attention’ and how it ‘shapes’ reality – that it changes what kind of things comes into being for us, and in that way it changes the world – it is itself constantly involved in intimate innovation. And in relation to knowledge, perception and what we think is reality (and remember that Bion linked the experience of ‘maternal reverie’ to be…
Iain McGilchrist in his The Master and His Emissary links together neuroscience and brain functioning with the qualities of ‘attention’. I am not going to try and do justice to his arguments, here, but it seems to me clear that he is describing – from a very different point of view – aspects of what we are exploring. He describes the…
Leadership vitality is experienced in the inter-subjective dynamics of very small events, lasting seconds. ‘The scale is small’ but this is where we live; the scale if small, but this is where we lead, where we are led, where we follow – the relationship between leadership and scale is prone to ‘bigness’. It is often a term of approval for…
Slingshot