It is not innovation that matters, it is agreement. And we might need innovation to reach agreement.
Here [UPDATE: Broken]
1. Presenting conditions [still negative unfortunately]
2. What we do
3. What we might benefit
UPDATE: Somewhere else I found a good heuristic on writing copy.
It’s time for positive psychology to lay out its wares clearly?
One CommentThe eminent social scientist Karl Weick once said that social problems are often defined in ways that prevent us doing anything about them.
I have been watching the Zimbabwean elections closely. As facts emerge, I have been listing them on a “secondary” blog.
The situation in Zimbabwe is as dire any conflict in history. Can we move here? Can we move there? It seems the ultimate Catch 22. Whatever we do may create more damage.
I believe however that much of our hopelessness comes from our own representation of what is happening. Could we not, instead, look at difficult objective conditions that require resolution?
Today, people are starting close in, as the poet David Whyte would say.
Today, we are going to do something positive. Today we are going to say thank you. Today we are going to say we are with you. Today we are going to send emails to the President of Zambia who is the current chairman of SADC. Today, we are going to take 3 minutes to write a short, brief, courteous email saying,
Dear President Mwanawasa,
I write to thank you and the leaders of SADC sincerely for convening the extraordinary meeting concerning Zimbabwe and to extend my support and goodwill for a resolution that is satisfactory to all the people of Zimbabwe and her neighbours.
Sincerely,
I am patching in a long excerpt of a post from Sokwanele that gives the email addresses of SADC. Zimbabwe for a positive future.
TAKE ACTION
Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has called an emergency meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to discuss the Zimbabwean presidential poll delay. This is the first move by Zimbabwe’s regional neighbours to intervene since the elections on 29th March 2008. President Mwanawasa is the current Chairman of the 14-nation South African Development Community. This is what he said yesterday:
I wish to take this opportunity to commend the people of Zimbabwe for the calm and peaceful manner in which the elections were conducted.
Similarly, I appeal to them to maintain the same spirit of calmness which they exhibited during the elections as they await the results of the presidential elections.
However, given developments immediately following the elections, I have decided, as Chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to call an extraordinary summit on Saturday 12th April, 2008 to discuss ways and means of assisting the people of Zimbabwe with the current impasse as well as adopt a co-ordinated approach to the situation in that country.
Both President Morgan Tsvangirai and opposition leader Robert Mugabe will be attending the emergency meeting.
Support our democratically elected leader and take action.
What YOU can do
You can voice your feelings and SHOUT OUT for FREEDOM. Communicate with key SADC people attending the meeting.
Tell them that Zimbabweans have the right to live in a democratic, free and peaceful country. Tell them your personal experiences and why you want change. Make them understand what it is like to be in Zimbabwe today. Tell them we voted for change, we got change, and we want change now. Speak the TRUTH.
HOW you can do it
Email, fax or phone using the details provided below. Keep your messages real and honest but also short and to the point. Remember: thousands of us will be doing this so they will have a lot to read. Let’s make sure they can read and hear it all!
Be polite at all times. People don’t pay attention to angry messages (look at us: Mugabe has been angry with the people for many years now and we just ignored him and voted him out anyway). Anger does not work.
1. Call or fax or email the Zambian State House with a message for President Levy Mwanawasa:
2. Call or fax a message to President Thabo Mbeki – President of South Africa
3. Call or email Lieutenant Colonel Tanki Mothae – Director of Politics, Defence and Security Affairs at SADC
4. Copy all your emails to this general SADC email address:
5. If you want to attach images to your emails, you can download copies of the photographs at the top of this mailing from the Sokwanele flickr account here:
6. Forward this email to everyone you know and ask them to take action too.
7. Be positive, stay strong, and never forget that we have won.
Design thinking is all the rage. I like it too. Instead of thinking about what is “right” or “wrong”, we think about how we will use something and when and where we will use it.
Designers though, aren’t that keen on design!
Die Zeit interview with French designer Philippe Starke
This was my conclusion. There won’t be any designers. The designer of the future will be the personal coach, the fitness trainer, the nutritionis! That’s all!
What do you think?
Related articles
Oh! I do like this expression. How do we solve large problems or answer large questions? Break the question into as many small questions as we can.
And if we are group or a family, do the same thing. Brainstorm the question and ask everyone to contribute, “two or three (neither more or less) specific things” about how they will be affected by the big question.
Bang on time – this will be useful this weekend!
UPDATE: Bang on time again. This is an important hack to add to a manager’s quiver. 2 or 3 specific things (neither more or less) about how they will be affected by the big question!!
Leave a CommentAbout 5 years out of college, you will begin to take responsibility for work that you simply do not understand. Imagine ~ you are running a project and the accountants are totting up your numbers and running off terms like cashflow and depreciation that you are not really sure of.
The IT boffins prattle away about bandwith and JSON.
Anyway you get the idea. People can baffle you with rock science and you wonder sometimes whether they are just having you on!
You want to know
1. Explain!
2. Show me!
3. What’s next?
4. When will we finish?
5. What is my role here?
Elephants shall never forget me! (Explain, Show, Next, Finish, My Role)
I took out Goodbye Mr Chips from my local library thinking it would be nice to relax for a couple of hours with this gentle, slightly sentimental, very inspirational movie. For non-Brits, this is a classic pygmalion, teacher story with romance thrown in. Think To Sir With Love, History Boys and Freedom Writers. I think when Yanks write pygmalion stories they are typically about basketball coaches. Britain has teacher stories.
Goodbye Mr Chips is a double-pygmalion story. Mr Chipping is an awkward “Latin master” in a “public school”. If you are non-Brit, read exclusive private school (or prep school in Americanese – a prep school here preps you to go to public school which takes you to the army academy or university).
Mr Chipping has two mentors. A charming relaxed fellow teacher and his wife. They are the catalysts in allowing Mr Chipping, or Chips as he comes to be called, to incorporate the softer side of his nature in his teaching style, reform the rugged-masculine-bullying culture of the school, and to encourage boy-after-boy, and their sons after them, to blend the feminine sides of their nature with the masculine demands of their school and obligations to country.
I thought I was borrowing the musical version with Peter O’Toole from the library. When I got home, I discovered I a new version with Martin Clunes, the star of the TV show, Doc Martin. He makes a marvellous Mr Chips with the mixture of clumsiness and kindness that we also see in Doc Martin. (He doesn’t sing btw, and nor do we hear the boys singing which we did in the earlier version).
The story seems slightly different too – but so be it. After this long back story, this is the quote I wanted to give you.
“I found that when I stopped judging myself harshly, the world became kinder to me. Remember I told you once, go out, and look around the world. Do that now. Only this time, let the world look at you. And the difference, I assure you, the world will like what it sees.”
This is the concept which takes positive psychology far beyond positive thinking. It has echoes of the pygmalion effect, popularized in the musical My Fair Lady in which a flower girl becomes a lady. It includes the Galatea effect, ably researched by Dov Eden, who also researches the pygmalion effect in work settings. Basically, the Pygmalion effect is the effect of other people’s expectations on us. So a teacher creates clever pupils by expecting more of them. A teacher creates dull pupils by expecting failure and subtly communicating doubts and restricting the resources and time we need to learn. The Galatea effect works the other way around. It is the effect of our own self-perception. It is not that seeing is believing. But that, believing is seeing.
George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion 100 years ago. 150 years ago Goethe wrote:
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
– Goethe
The idea that we shape the future is so new to us in the west. The idea that the universe comes to us sounds a little new age.
Of course, we cannot do anything. We don’t want to do anything.
But there are some things, we want to do. And if we can imagine those things, if we believe in them deeply without effort, if they make sense, if they seem right in themselves, if we believe in them enough to take the first hesitant step,
if we believe in them enough to take the first hesitant step,then the universe conspires to help us.
This is tautological, of course. It will work because it is right and it is right because it works.
is well explained in this Times on line article.
UPDATE: The TimesOnline ran a series on various leadership styles modeled it seems on the Blake Mouton grid. It illustrates the style with British iconic figures and explains the advantages and disadvantages of each style and how to work with such a leader.
Leave a CommentSo goes the nursery rhyme, and for most psychologists, any understanding of a person in his or own terms.
We are trained, for our sins, to be analytical. I trained other people to be analytical. And I would still defend our training. But after we have finished being trained, we have to learn to put Humpty together again. How does all the information we have collected about someone, amount to a person with a hopes and dreams, with a history and with a future, and with fears and determination.
The first is the idea of a sense of self, that, through whatever means, begins to take shape quite early.
Well, maybe you weren’t born with it, but you probably started exploring images of who you are, quite early in your life. And the question is, what images can you remember that you were drawn to?
I will give you an example. At about 10 years old, I saw an American movie about a basketball team who put some magic bouncy stuff on their shoes. I had never seen a basketball game in real life, we played netball, but I was fascinated. Five years later (a long time when you are a kid), our school announced that we were going to drop netball and play basketball. I immediately, and I mean immediately, within thirty seconds, asked my mother if I could play in the team (with all the expense that implied). She happily agreed, as I was well known for not being able to catch a ball, and hey presto, I was captain of the Under 15’s within weeks. How I loved that game and it took me from clutz to school hero.
We all have creative images, though some we aren’t going to blog about, and it is worthwhile thinking about them, because however bizarre they are, they are important to us.
The second key idea, which David Whyte makes again and again, but rather obliquely, is that these images are essentially social. They talk to our relationship with the world and the relationship we want with the world.
Now I am not much of an exhibitionist, and I was rather shy as a youngster, but I think I was drawn to two things in the basketball movie: the shared excitement of the crowd and the nippiness of the game. And those are the roles I played. The fast break specialist and the ‘man-to-man’ marker. These are results-oriented ‘closing roles’, bringing home the bacon so to speak, and roles which the crowds understand and set them alight. For someone lousy at sport, this was gratifying. It was something I could do in a sports-mad school that helped me learn about how crowds become excited and why we enjoy it so much.
We weave our story from a young age. We see movies quite by chance, and are taken by some and not by others. Opportunities arise, and we respond to some and not to others. And we move on, giving up pursuits of our childhood and adopting others. It is always our story though, woven partly from chance encounters and partly through choice. We learn as we go, working out what’s next, from the story we are telling to the world and ourselves.
We are happier as workmates and colleagues when our story is heard and when our current circumstances are woven in to what went before and what will come soon after. There is no right or wrong. Simply the unself-conscious bringing of who we have been, to whom we are with, and the celebration of the richness of our imagination in the past, with the shy pleasure of the growing imaginative awareness of a gentle birth into the future.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Leave a CommentSynergy is not a word I like but do we have a better word for describing productive interaction between people? Alex from alwaysnewmistakes writes on how essential synergy is to doing well. Yeah. What a great post contrasting Venice in the time of Vivaldi with Silicon Valley of today. True, true, true.
And Alex makes the further point that it is not enough to be close to abundance. One must take part. My favorite author David Whyte puts it like this:
“I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you.”
Some months ago, I also picked some criteria for the conditions for synergy from an academic paper by David A Lane (I’ve lost the url, unfortunately.)
a. We must have a reason to interact (e.g., you make cheese and I like to eat cheese)
b. Our roles must be complementary (e.g, you sell and I buy)
c. We must interact often enough for a system to emerge (e.g., I must buy from you to keep you in business and you must have cheese to sell to me)
d. We must have permission to find solutions and opportunities to act.
David A Lane talks in terms of worrying less about the outcome and more about the quality of the interaction. Indeed, I can go to my local deli and if they don’t have what I want, trust to them to produce something that meets my needs. I once lived in a country where there was a flour shortage. When the local bakery opened at 7am, I would go in and ask what is for breakfast? And eat what ever they produced! Generative: they were in the bakery business and I was hungry. We could work out the rest imaginatively! That is synergistic whereas going into a well stocked supermarket, isn’t really.
Synergy – I think it is an essential idea!
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