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A collection of updates, noticings and undirected musings on the subjects of knowledge, business, satisfaction and what happens next.
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A few weeks ago we ran an event in the library of the Charlotte Street Hotel (a very nice London venue) wherein we asked a few “Critical Friends” to respond to our thoughts on an emerging idea we are calling Resiliance and on which Sabine and Victoria have previously blogged. The drivers behind the idea were the realisation that firstly, in their haste to inject new blood and ideas at the expense of older staff organisations are increasingly losing the…
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Ernest Hemingway. For a $10 bet to write the shortest short story. He won.
We were discussing this in the car yesterday on the way to lunch in Marseilles. And it reminded me of a Guardian article where writers were asked to come up with 6 word stories. And the BBC did something similar on the Today programme Apparently this fits into a genre of literature called ‘flash fiction’ – stories of 1000 words or less.
I like…
About 18 months ago I put down a deposit on an apartment at a to be constructed site on the lovely island of Cyprus. Its attractions were two fold: adjacent to the 14th hole of the to be constructed (there is a common theme here) PGA designed and built golf course and only 10 mimutes from the airport though not on the flight path. The investment’s economic viability was predicated on the golf course being constructed and even though licences…
A timber framed house in Lavenham Suffolk, googled from flickr
I’ve been thinking, in the toolkit, about how to write about purposeful metaphor. I’ve a great fear of offering the dreamy, irritating kind, or of not being able to get through the sludge of imprisoning metaphors, analogies and assumptions in which organisations unwittingly bind themselves. It seems to me that in the kind of rigorous imagineering that foresight work encourages, a well placed, sturdy metaphor can do a lot of real work. Like the epidemiological lens through which researchers into…
One of the important things about coming back after being away is that small things spring out in new ways. As a London resident it is easy to stop noticing the blue plaques. But today the Alfred Hitchcock one on the street where I live looked different, because I have been living for a while in a place that has no blue plaques indicating to passers-by name, life-span and main activity of a building’s past resident. It looked different because…
“If they would cry you would also cry in front of a child, but slowly slowly you resist it but if you resist it you will be having something in…For yourself, that problems that you have been listening to all day, it really remains in your brain” Picture of psycho-social support project googled from USAid
A gorgeous gift in my email this morning from Steph Colton, whose presence I sorely miss as we are moving towards what feels like real breakthroughs on several fronts. She sent me Developments 40, A special World Bank Report on whether the 2015 Millennium goals are being reached. I’ve attached it here. Page 19- 20 talks of testimony gathered by Panos
These life stories were gathered by the Panos network and patners using a painstaking method of interviewing which emphasises…
Yesterday we met in the Library of the Charlotte Street Hotel for a couple of hours of thinking time with critical friends. We wanted to try and progress and challenge our thinking on how organisations leverage their cultural assets. How can heritage & history work better to inform present and future directions? How can relationships with archives and museums go beyond the Christmas party or the odd team-building exercise and be part of the fabric of innovation and business development?...
Googled from information aesthetics “sophisticated information visualization showing the overlap between 161 different diseases by studying epidemiological data from 1.5 million patients”
I’ve mentioned before the book Natural Security. I’m finding much to return to in it while we develop the Defra work, and as I’ve 30 minutes or so while the wiki is down for running repairs I thought I’d write a little about Chapter 17 ‘The Infectiousness of terrorist ideology’by Kevin D. Lafferty, Katherine F. Smith, and Elizabeth M. P. Madin. This looks at how drawing analogies with epidemiology could help those seeking to combat terrorism. I paraphrase a little…
Yesterday I was talking about a pitch and we were all enthusing about postcards and their role in engaging people. We’ve a nice old paper on that in the archive. I’ve always liked it’s name: ‘Slow Knowledge: uses of the postcard in re-forming organisational time, place & meaning’.
In the conversation I was reminded of something I meant to blog last week on the rise in sending postcards reported by the Royal Mail:
There are certain things about postcards that people like…
Yes, indeed.
We subscribe to supply2gov (source, Patrick Towell, formerly of Simulacra), and I’m the lucky one to get the daily information on smallish government contracts out to tender. Sometimes I skip it – we have so little time that tendering to strangers feels like an impossible uphill struggle, even when we really want the work. I once did a pqq (Pre Qualifying Questionnaire) for the National Audit Office though and we got quite seriously bounced in one way (it’s very…
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