Now I normally never drink this essentially British drink. , Americano (I regard my home expresso machine as more important than the Aga) or various types of chinese tea, or Rooibos are my normal fare. However there is something about working with tools that engenders a need, that and Radio 4 on the portable radio. I rewired two houses and installed central heating in one, all to tea and Radio 4 not to mention more bookshelves, cupboards and kitchen furniture than I care to think about over four houses. Its a ritual, and sharing tea breaks with the Thatcher just adds to that sense of comfort.
Its not the only link of a particular tea to a particular context, I wrote my thesis to Green Tea and Wagner; my O and A levels were fueled by Vimto, Most articles end up with a late night marathon fueled by Penderyn. For a Rugby match there is no substitute for the greatest beer of all time, Brains Dark. Late night or for all round thirst quenching ability a quart of 1% milk. For reading in the garden in summer, Pimms with lots of fruit. Then of course for all plane journeys at whatever time of day if the flight is for two hours of more, a Gin and Tonic is unsurpassed.
Note - before and after pictures below, with the full sequence available here; the most important aspect is missing, that needs a post in its own right, its the story of my father's workbench now installed.
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To Oxford today for a series of meetings. Firstly more work on the use of SenseMaker® as a new way to incorporate larger volumes of people in scenario planning and also moving that planning from a linear staccato process to a continuous one linking strategy with operations. I also started to see ways in which we could create a Delphi method variant which does not close off so many options. I had the afternoon free before an evening meeting/briefing on impact measurement and knowledge management in the health Service. So I indulged myself with an extended (and expensive) visit to Blackwells to pick up some interesting books on aesthetics. Lunch was in the Kings Arms pictured below. Back in the 70s I used to come to Oxford to meet with Herbert McCabe OP in Blackfriars (pictured), then it would be off to the Kings Arms to meet up with Terry Eagleton and Giles (another Dominican who gave evidence for the defense in the Oz trial) who were all working with Slant at the time. Herbert was an inspiration and had a profound influence on many people who wanted to think radically about the world and our role in it. A Thomist scholar of repute who was also a marxist, a priest and a considerable wit, Herbert was one of those larger than life characters who you meet from time to time and who make a lasting intellectual impression.
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I say in the corner of the Kings Arms skimming through the new books and reflecting on how things had changed in the last thirty years. I was also thinking about how different those conversations would have been if we had been aware of the complexity and cognitive science discoveries which were around the corner. A lot of the debates we had then about social process would have been transformed by concepts of coevolution and emergence. One of these days if I get the time and space (and live long enough) I want to go back and look at how we can rethink political engagement using complexity theory as an informing concept rather than the tweedledum and tweedledee of market mechanisms of labour theory of value.
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I've had a stressful week with several work projects, compounded by issues for/with spouse, children and Her Majesty's Inspector of Taxes which have taken me away from the blog. I'm pleased to say that those problems which could be solved have been solved and those problems which cannot are at least stable. At the same time the thatcher arrived. For those who don't know our house is a thatched cottage which sounds romantic but is also expensive to maintain. We've lived here for over twenty years now and have had to redo the ridge once, but we are now at the point when you have to re-thatch. You can see why if you look at the picture to the left which is three feet to the left of the fresh new thatch in the picture to the right.
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Now you have to book thatchers a year in advance at least, if you want a good one. The difference between a good and bad thatcher can be ten years life for your roof. It's also a real pleasure to watch them at work. It's one of the fe remaining craft skills with ancient tools and materials. There is a real rhythm to the thatchers work as the bundles of wheat/reed mix are stacked and thumped into position and tied back with straw and secured with hand cut willow pegs. Conversations over coffee and tea with thatchers are also interesting. I've known a few over the years and they are generally reflective and narrative rich. Yesterday we talked about carpentry and thatching, the pleasure of working with materials. Today it was all about rugby (he was a fly half I was a number 7) both in the past and the present. Tomorrow I am off to Oxford University, but there will be as much wisdom on the scaffolding outside my house.
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I watched Rabbit Proof Fence with the children tonight (well at 18 & 21 children no longer). It is one of those films that everyone needs to watch. The story of the abduction of "half breed" children from their families in order to breed them back to pure white over three generations (see picture). The abductions continued until 1972 which shocked Huw & Eleanor. It was the year I went up to university and while I was more that aware of the situation in South Africa (I was an active member of the Anti-Aparthite movement) my generation had no idea of what was happening to the indigenous population of Australia. From the late seventies I started to be aware of the scale of the issue, initially around land rights in the Northern Territories when I was with the WSCF, at that time a radical organisation. What I never understood, and still don't is why it didn't get the same level of attention.
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To Middlesex University today for a startup meeting on the use of SenseMaker® to understand student experience. The idea is to capture micro-narratives from students before they join about their expectations. Then through the first year to allow not only research and reporting how their experience of education, but also to create fast feed back loops so that minor problems can be handled before they become major, and opportunities are seized and used as soon as they become visible. The other big idea here is to allow students access to the raw narrative. its much easier to solve problems if you have access to the stories of other people like you and how they handle them. Todays session with a group of students and staff confirmed something I have long known, namely that people don't talk about problems and solutions in different categories and at different times. Rather they jumble them up, often coming up with the solution as they talk about the problem. The capture system will reflect this messy coherence. It is going to be an interesting project which will start in a few weeks time before the new term and will report back as it develops and as I am allowed!
Washington DC today, and an all day session with Global Giving who have been running a project with SenseMaker® for the development sector. The project involved gathering several thousand self-signified micro-narratives in Africa, often in areas with no access to technology. the inventiveness with which they tackled the problems is outstanding. Today was the first review of the results and planning for the next phase which should move to continuous capturing and potentially impact measurement. We have some very exciting discussions around the potential for empowerment in knowledge flow and project creation that could be enabled as we develop practice here.
For the last two days I have taken advantage of too longish drives (Montreal to Ottawa on Tuesday, then Ottawa too Oshawa today) to pick up on a couple of historical sites related to the war of 1812 and its consequences. That meant Fort Lennox on Tuesday and Fort Henry today. Unfortunately time didn't allow me to take the scenic door on the Quebec side of the river to Ottawa or the Loyalist Parkway today. I've been reading up on the war of 1812 over the last couple of years and aspects of it are both fascinating and depressing. The needless provocations, the total betrayal of Native Americans by the British in the Treaty of Ghent, French Canadian loyalty to the Crown and the whole catalogue of accidents that affected the outcome. Its also one of the great What Ifs of history; what would have happened by Wellington had taken the Peninsular War Army to the Americas? As it was the escape of Napoleon prevented that particular event.
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As an added bonus at Fort Henry I arrived in time to see an hour long parade in which various battlefield drills were enacted with great seriousness by students in residence for the summer. The thin red line reenacted above, the famous anti-cavalry square (see below) and a whole range of drillings including a full firing of the cannon really brought things to life (or possibly death). Its one of the upsides of a life of travel, you do get to see things. I'm also pleased with my new Nikon camera. I left the SLR at home as a result of certain people tidying things up, but I used that as an excuse to get a small digital that can stay permanently in the bag, and is easier to carry around. I've been pleasantly surprised with the quality of the pictures, especially in poor light conditions. More photos, including the complete cannon firing sequence on the Flickr stream.
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Yesterday was my final one at the Academy as I need to get down to Ottawa tomorrow before moving onto Oshawa and Washington. I finally return to the UK at the weekend. I started the day with a session on ethics in management and moved onto exaptation and knowledge management by way of a failed attempt to get in on another Mintzburg session and a bit of tourism around two Cathedrals (see photostream for results). The session on ethics was interesting as there was some attempt to involve philosophy. That said, creating a triangle between Aristotle, Kant and Mill and claiming that as a full representation indicates that there is some way to go. More on ethics and exaptation later, they require more substantive posts and need more time than I have today after a long drive.
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The knowledge management session worried me. There was one interesting paper describing the way in which statistics and narratives had been used (and abused) in an Australian Government report on how older people gain/retain employment. It showed how non-experts were forced into recounting their stories in giving evidence, but were not permitted to present statistical evidence, in effect made subjects not participants. Their stories were then taken up and distorted in subsequent discussions, but the official language of the final report was all stats. For me it pointed up the way in which anecdotal knowledge is often restricted to folk knowledge, or the raw discourse of the subjects of research or political action. In contrast the language of power is the language of statistics and that is reserved for the elite who also interpret the narrative to satisfy their needs for authenticity. Our work which links numbers to anecdotal material has the potential to allow the research subject to regain power of interpretation, and thus distribute the power of evidence based reasoning.
I promised a more substantive post about our Friday session at the AoM on new forms of research, and I want to do it by summarising aspects of Max Boisot's final presentation, which did an excellent point of putting everything in context. He neatly summed up the three types of inference in this picture.
Before he reached that point Max had built a highly coherent narrative around the idea of dots and linkages. I've shown the whole sequence on the right. Dots here are events, and the way we join things up is by narrative. We make sense of the world by explaining connections between things, the patterns that form from the dots and the linkages. Its simplified here of course with only four dots, as the dots increase the number of possible linkages increase. With four dots there are six linkages and sixty four possible patterns, if we go up to 10 dots then there are 45 links and 35,184,370,000,000 patterns. But we will come back to volume issue later.
Now with SenseMaker® we argue that we can reduce that uncertainty by volume of material and self-signification of that material, i.e. we can make abduction less tentative, but you don't have to accept that argument to get the basic point. The statistical tools currently used in business are inadequate to the levels of uncertainty and complexity that we face.