Dave said to introduce myself, so here are some things to know about me.
- Once, flying through San Francisco, I set off the metal detector 3 times and was accosted by security. It got dicey because repeated pat-downs failed to find the threat. Secretly, a bag of green tea in my shirt pocket was lined with foil. That’s how dangerous I am. I can bring a global transportation network to a standstill with single-serve packet of green tea.
- Dave pulled me into the Cynefin Centre during its last year at IBM. There was a famous accreditation program at the 17th-century Parrot Inn in the tiny village of Forest Green. (Apparently, part of the test was not telling me where the village was.) Not understanding a lot of the sessions, I watched the rabbits rearrange themselves on the grass for better foraging. Between the sessions, I noticed the participants rearranging themselves on the lawn in exactly the same patterns for better cell-phone reception.
- For the past 3 years, I’ve mostly been working in Thailand, helping government agencies articulate their economic development strategies in terms of organizational learning and intellectual capital, smuggling complexity theory into the projects whenever I can. The coup was not my fault.
- Dave’s fireplace is also not my fault. On a cold day during a 1999 vacation, he invited us to visit their cottage in Wiltshire. We enjoyed pheasant stew and a lot of excellent wine, whereafter I interviewed him for KM magazine. I had my back to a wall that I would have sworn had a small fireplace, and I reported that to give the article a little atmosphere. Apparently the warm sensation was only indigestion but now Snowden claims I owe him for his remodel, saying the new hearth was just to make me look honest.
- I am fascinated by ants and the sophistication of their complex adaptive social behaviors. So I feel guilty every year when they overrun the house and yard and I have to take steps. This year, as I pulled up the old bait traps, I was surprised to find they had cleaned out the poison and started using the plastic housing as their egg chamber. That’s how smart I am, compared to an ant.
- I like what Dave said about “brings a wealth of connections,” because that’s meaningful to me in two ways. I’ve had the privilege to hang with a lot of really interesting people from Halifax to Havana. But I also love to connect disparate ideas together and see what they look like. I'll try to deliver some interesting connections over the next 10 days.
- Oh yeah: I have a degree from a notorious party school, which bagged 5 Nobel Prizes in 7 years. For a long time I said 5 in 6 years. That’s how bad at math I am.
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