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…
In July 2012, Paul Omerod spoke at the RSA on network effects. He described this as positive linking – but not because the effects of networks are all positive. His contention is that – especially in economics – we tend to be subject to (but over look) network effects. Better attention to this trend could lead to a revolution in our…
Roman Krznaric is a cultural thinker and writer on the art of living. He is a founding faculty member of The School of Life in London, which offers instruction and inspiration on the important questions of everyday life, and advises organisations including Oxfam and the United Nations on using empathy and conversation to create social change. He has developed the concept of outrospection – the…
When thinking about roles at work, maybe it is worth thinking about fantasy. Indeed, the idea of ‘what role do you play’ implies something about imaginary drama – about the play- within-the play. At a conference in Elsinore in Denmark, I attended a socio drama workshop. The session was led by Ron Weiner. He described us to each other as ‘each…
In the Skilled Facilitator Field Book, there is a discussion of a ‘unilateral control model’ which describes a default position in the process of learning – where a growing sense of being outside one’s ‘comfort zone’ leads to defaulting to a set of strategies which are sub-optimal (in creating the conditions for learning) but optimal in maintaining control of a…
Over the past few years, we have been involved in innovation projects where a wide range of players have been learning about how to change things in their local context, and then periodically joining together with one another in a learning community, to amplify and exchange learning. In the setting of this learning system-of-systems, one of the things on which…
Some describe working with partners as being like ‘dancing with a gorilla’ – and many / most would say that they are in partnership to change others to be more like themselves (rather than the idealised, both change to be differently different to one another, if you will). It could ironically also be the case that those that are active…
Part of the way in which partnerships intervene in the ecology of our public service systems is as a check on fragmented conceptions of need and how to respond to it. In a paper presented at ISPSO in 1986, in New York, Jim Krantz and Tom Gilmore describe: ‘… the current distinction between leadership and management (which) often results in…
In ‘Working Below the Surface’ (Karnac Publishers), Clare Huffington, discusses what women leaders can tell us. She suggests that: ‘Traditional ideas of role, primary task of the leadership, authority and power derived from these seem less useful when ‘organisation’ appears to be a provisional concept. Many organisations, especially public sector organisations, seem to be in a state of deconstruction and…
In some ways, partnerships are ‘bridging’ institutions, providing different ways of being in relation to different people. Ben Okri (in his Astonishing the Gods) describes a traveller on a journey who meets a guide. This guide speaks of change as a bridge, visualises it as something constructed by the traveller; seeing change as a bridge that is visible in front…
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