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Image via WikipediaI am looking for my mouse
Clay Shirky at Web2.0 Expo tells the story of a 4 year old who gets bored looking at a DVD and crawls around the back of the screen: “I am looking for my mouse”. This is the story of child brought into a technological age where we expect to participate in whatever we do. “Looking for the mouse” is the mark of a generation who expects to take initiative.
Who moved my cheese?
Just ten years’ ago, we were delighted by another story, an allegory, Who moved my cheese? This story is about a generation who does not expect to take initiative. Indeed, it resists taking the initiative. It wants to ‘put the clock back’.
We spend a lot of time crying, “we want the cheese to come back.” Or, words to that effect. We celebrate the past rather than the emerging future.
The positive message of this allegory is that once we can move beyond fear, we are free to move on, and find fresher, more interesting, more enjoyable cheese.
My advice is “follow that mouse!”
I live a double life as I have said before. In my one life, I work with Zimbabweans who are frozen in terror about the changes going on in their country. Their fears are real, and justified. So too, is their desire to go back to a time when cheese was there for the taking. Their liberation will ultimately come when they stop protesting the unfairness of it all and start to explore their future.
In my other life, I work with HR professionals who are also frozen in terror. In the case of HR, there is a little cheese left, but not much. The world has moved on to work patterns where there are new demands and new generation who says “I am looking for the mouse”?
For Zimbabweans and HR professionals, I am looking for my mouse has a sadder meaning The mice have already detected the dwindling cheese supply and have left.
My advice is “follow that mouse”!
Both Scott McCarthur and Jon Ingham have been blogging on 2.0 recently. The big question in discussions about 2.0 is always whether or not 2.0 marks a fundamental shift in the structure of society.
Here is a video of Clay Shirky speaking at the Web 2.0 expo recently with a compelling story about why 2.0 is here to stay: “I am looking for the mouse”!
This video was originally shared on blip.tv by Web2Expo with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.
1 Flow
I love flow. I know some people who think it is great to be in flow, or in the zone, for half-an-hour a day. I am a flow junkie. I go for all 24 hours counting a good sleep as good flow.
2 Crossing the Rubicon
But there is something I love more.
That is the rush when you have a crystal clear idea that you know will work and that is, in that instant, so obvious.
What is the name for that?
I know Peter Gollwitzer, the psychologist calls it “crossing the rubicon” - moving from wish to intent.
3 Corporate anthropology
This corporate anthropologist, who studies the use of mobile phones, must also get a daily dose traveling around the world studying the way phones are used.
My questions to you?
Why don’t we study this sensation, whatever-it-is-called, a lot more than we do?
Why don’t we study people at work they way this guy studies phones?
Why aren’t we interested in why and when work is blissful fun?
Why are aren’t we interested in making jobs as enjoyable as Nokia tries to make its phones?
I could do that all do long and never get tired of it!! Could you? Do you?
Image via Wikipedia
The 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:
- Tel: +260 1 266147 or 262094
- Fax: +260 1 266092
- Send an email to Mr John Musukuma, Special Assistant to the President for Press and Public Relations: johnmu@nkwazi.gov.zm
- Use the contact form on the Zambian State House website here to send an email:
http://www.statehouse.gov.zm/index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=3 - Bonus email: we’re not sure if this is a direct contact for President Mwanawasa, but just in case it is, copy all the emails you send to: differmu@nkwazi.gov.zm
2. Call or fax a message to President Thabo Mbeki - President of South Africa
- Tel: +27 (0)12 300 5200 and +27 (0)21 464 2100
- Fax: +27 (0)12 323 8246 and +27 (0)21 462 2838
- Send an email to Mr Mukoni Ratshitanga Thabo Mbeki’s Presidential Spokesperson: mukoni@po.gov.za
3. Call or email Lieutenant Colonel Tanki Mothae - Director of Politics, Defence and Security Affairs at SADC
- Tel: +267 361 1001 or +267 397 2848
- E-mail: tmothae@sadc.int
4. Copy all your emails to this general SADC email address:
- Email: registry@sadc.int
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.
Die Zeit interview with French designer Philippe Starke
P.S.: There won’t be any designers. The designer of the future will be the personal coach, the fitness trainer, the nutritionist. That’s all.
Advice from an ‘old hand’ to a ‘new teacher’ whose class got the better of him : in Goodbye Mr Chips, which I watched over the weekened.
“You have some hours before prep starts. Go out. Out there under the sky. Look around. What is the saying? Distance lends enchantment to the view. Go out. Come back refreshed.”
Paulo Coelho offers the same advice. Don’t spend the day looking down. Look to the horizon.
David Whyte has the same advice. Sometimes the answer depends upon a walk around the lake.
Whenever life is bad, look to the horizon. Close your eyes and listen to the furthest sounds that you can hear.
And if you can, do it when you awake. Do it in short 1 minute break. Do it commuting on the way home.
Is that why you pay so much for a house or office with a view?
I managed Newtonian physics OK, the stuff you do in high school, but I gave it up before I got to quantum mechanics. I rather suspect that is the same for most psychologists. Around us, our understanding of the world is changing and I wonder whether psychology is keeping up.
Neil Turok, of Cambridge University, won a TED prize this week for his work in mathematical physics and his parallel work setting up the Africa Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town. Neil was born in South Africa and grew up in exile (is that fair) in East Africa and the UK. So I am motivated to ‘have a go’ and see how much I understand of what he has to say and how it relates to us.
The beginning
Most of us have heard of the big bang. But the problem with the big bang is, what happened before the big bang. Where did the big bang come from?
No beginning
The new theory is that big bangs happen cyclically. They come and go like growth and contraction in an economy. And the big bang is the good part, the part were we expand and be different.
Big bangs are preceded by big crunches, the part signally the end of a phase of contraction in the universe.
Our beginning
So how does this affect us? Is a big crunch imminent? Not as far as I know. As I understand it, we are living in phase when things will go on much as we know them, at least in the grand order of things.
But we may think differently perhaps about our own lives.
A cyclical view of the world considers it quite normal to have good stages in life and bad. To have seasons which are not associated simply with good when you are young and bad when your are old. Bad necessarily precedes good and is therefore one and the same thing. If you want to know how new that idea is in the west, try writing it down in your own words and citing movies and books that illustrate the idea.
A cyclical view of the world suggests that there are many possible futures. We know that. But in psychology we have been trained to predict, in a Newtonian way. If we have these conditions at this time, that is NOW, then this will happen in a few minutes, in an hour, or NEXT. We’ve predicated a whole industry on making these predictions, and possibly a second on promising the world we make them a lot better than we do.
That we have many possible futures means that from HERE and NOW, there are many different routes that we can follow to many different places. Yes, says the classically trained psychologist, but to which one and which one is ‘best’.
To exploit the new model, we don’t ask that question. We ask what are the routes we can follow. Lets just write down the possible routes. Let’s just do that task of showing all the possible ways forward.
and it is a free dowload.
Why is this significant to you and me? We’ll have fun with it for a start. You can take an interactive tour of the universe and create your own tour.
The pre-launch at TED also promises to change our view of the universe. Literally, of course. Psychologically too. I’ll be interested in your reactions when it comes out.
“Belonging” is the theme of our age. “The House of Belonging” from David Whyte. “calling you into the family of things” Mary Oliver.
Belonging is a hard concept to grasp. Michael Bauwens has drawn this picture showing different understandings of belonging: me as part of a family, me as in let-me-be!, me as let-me-be(come), and me as going part of the way on the journey with you. Co-creation. I came across Barbara Sliter’s blog, Co-creatorship, in the last week or so too.
In my own evolving grasp of the concept, I am thinking in THREE steps:
ONE, can I begin the day with curiosity? Which birds are singing? Who is already up-and-about? What will the day bring that is totally unexpected and surprising? No”to do” list for me! Just an early morning welcome to the unknown as it is evolving around me.
TWO, can I begin the day with sureness? That my interest in the world will help shape it into a better place, alongside the interest of everyone else. The birds, the cat, the neighbor whose petrol mower is already going and shattering the peace, the motorway 20 miles away, the cup of coffee beckoning, the blogosphere which should be ignored this Saturday . . . That my interest is valued and creates safety for others.
THREE, can I be wholehearted? Can I approach everything I do today with energy, enthusiasm and warmth? Can my wholeheartedness for some or even most of my tasks (it is Saturday!) bring me pleasure and create more energy, enthusiasm, warmth for others, people and tasks?
At the end of the day, can I look back on a day when we have been surprised at what we have accomplished together? Not the race that we have won or the people we have vanquished.
Can I be surprised at what we discovered together, and how we continue to surprise each other? Do we go forward to another day, not dizzy with excitement but astounded, that we have found hidden depths in ourselves with all our failings and limitations? The hidden depths of ourselves and others. And do they feel it too? Not necessarily with bear hugs and noisy applause. Just gentle appreciation of how much their hopes and dreams, their wholeheartedness, brought warmth and enjoyment to the day for me.
Don’t blog in a vacuum - comment on other people’s blogs
Any “coldie” as I have heard people from the 1.0 or cold-war era called, will hesitate to take part in online discussions, and is amazed that “post-coldies” do, and quite happily. Do! Do take part!
I have just discovered Barbara Sliter’s site Creatorship and I discovered it in inimitable 2.0 style. I went to the Chief Happiness Officer blog. Alex was doing something with snow (pardon me I’m from Africa); Steve Roesler was guesting; Galba Bright joined the discussion of one of Steve’s posts; he had a look at one of my blog’s and said you will enjoy . . . You are right. Thank you. I do.
Thanks Galba, Steve, Alex and not least, Barbara. If you are interested in leadership, personal development and real-world applications of complexity theory, you should have Creatorship on your feed reader.
The promise of the 21st century
I know a lot of people my age who are rather gloomy about the way the world is going. Change is certainly in the air. Whether we see it as good or bad, depends on the meaning we perceive and more so, on our intuitions about how we will be connected in the new order of things.
That is why I love Barbara Sliter’s site. She has the gift of pointing to a horizon that welcomes everyone, young and old, experienced and inexperienced, from your country and mine.
One excerpt:
“we’re ready for more: more meaning, more challenge, better environments, interesting work, balance in life. We’re ready to be co-creators”
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again”.
So 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.
There are two key ideas.
The first is the idea of a sense of self, that, through whatever means, begins to take shape quite early.
“Hold to your own truth, at the center of the image, you were born with”. (David Whyte, p. 349, River Flow).
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.
Understanding this story, delighting in this story, cherishing this story, is the privilege of the existential coach. 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!
The first time I encountered this idea, around 25 years ago now, I found it an assault to my classical training as a psychologist. Over time though, I have come to understand that the question of whether leaders are born or made is the wrong question. The right question is a sociological and anthropological question: what role does “leadership” play in organizing society and what are the different ways we use the concept?
At an organizational level, I have become convinced that leadership resides in the followers. There are times when someone is in the right place at the right time and it all comes together.
The process begins with the people talking to each other in a bounded space, such as an organization. These people talking together look for a leader, not to tell them what to do, but to represent who and what they want as a kind of shorthand to themselves and to the world.
The day a leader stops being representative of their collective wishes, either because s/he has stopped listening or because s/he no longer is what they want, then the relationship all falls apart and force needs to be used to maintain the position of “leadership”.
I suppose another sociological/anthropological question is the circumstances in which we allow leaders to run away with power and to use force against us.
It has long been agreed in the democratic English speaking world that the essence of good government is replacing leaders in an orderly way. I wish we could see the same as the standard in business organizations. The use of force against employees is a sign that something has gone wrong. Alarm bells should go off. And HR should be on the scene in a flash trying to understand why the leader believes so little in his or her people that s/he feels the need to bully them.
Young managers often don’t trust their subordinates. A skill that is rarely talked about is the skill of believing in one’s people and seeing their strengths.
I would love to collaborate with someone on this. It could make a great 2.0 app.
A link trail on designing organizations around possibilities rather than constraints from Wayne Hall at Idea Festival.
Quotations from Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management.
“My guess is that the most bruising skirmishes in the new millennium won’t be fought
along the battle lines that separate one competitor, ecosystem or economic bloc from
another. Rather, they will be fought along the lines that separate those who seek to
defend the prerogatives, power and prestige of their bureaucratic caste from those who
hope to build less structured, less tightly managed organizations that elicit and merit
the very best that human beings have to give.”
“Not surprisingly, most managers believe you can’t manage without managers. This is
the mother of all management orthodoxies
I think much of the value of gratitude and forgiveness is in ability to live in the present: to be clear what is happening now, to listen to the “voices” or essential nature of what is happening, to list our choices for action, to take action. When we ruminate, we are anywhere but here.
aaron(at)todayisthatday(dot)com describes the ho’oponopono that treats self and other and past, present and future holistically - a central idea in quantum physics and in many indigenous cultures such as Hawaii (what is the adjective) and their relatives the Maori of New Zealand.
Here is the challenge. Can we can accept responsibility for bad weather? In our hands, that question smacks of superstition. Of course, we did not make the weather. Of course, we cannot change the weather. Of course, we may have predicted it better. And of course, it is so silly to complain about the weather. What we can do is note the weather, understand the weather, review what we want from the day, list our choices, and act.
There are times, though, when hardship is severe. Acting during a tsunami under the influence of adrenalin is probably easier than coping with loss and devastation afterwards. Maybe then to grieve, and to grieve fully, is the correct action.
I always felt so silly in New Zealand teaching western ideas of management and leadership. My apologies for the curriculum were always met with knowing nods from Maori and Pacific Island students. The concept of mana, schizophrenically adopted by New Zealanders of recent arrivals but not included in the management curriculum, includes status and influence as a bundled idea, leadership and followership in one. You have mana as teacher and you acquire mana from being a good teacher. So if something is going wrong in the classroom, one does not get emotional. One acts in appropriate ways to restore the dignity of the classroom for all concerned. That’s all.
I wonder the philosophical origins of our need to separate self from society and the present from the past and the future.
I suspect that the most interesting concept in positive psychology, if you are a psychologist, is the relationship between the past, the present, and the future.
Our training is based predominantly on on linear models. We are trained to think that if we are X today, we will be Y tomorrow. Most of our tuition concentrated on teaching us to define and measure X’s and Y’s and it took for granted that today and tomorrow are independent.
Positive psychology is based on recursive models. The past does not predict the future; it is part of the future. Mathematically, we predict the value of X in the future, rather than the value of Y in the future.
David Whyte’s Midlife and the Great Unknown begins by addressing the relationship between future, present and past. To feel well, to feel vital, to feel alive, we need to be active, to be acting our future in the context of the present. In other words, always to be doing now what we want for the future, without the future being a separate place.
I particularly like David Whyte’s idea that we are all unique - well of course we know that, but do we act that way? Do we look at all our relationships with people, with events, with places and even with things and see a unique story that is unfolding and interesting in itself?
Related is the concept of mindfulness - to be fully present in events, not to experience their beauty or their ghastliness (ghastliness is real) but to experience be present.
It is a hard concept for we psychologists!
David Whyte takes about finding the frontiers of your life: the place where you face the unknown in an expansive way. I like the correspondence with Paulo Coehlo’s horizon.
The logic of entrepreneurship. Is this a term to watch?
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