Touring with the band
8 March 2010While watching this excellent trio of talented Quebecois musicians known as Genticorum I was musing the nature of collaboration. Each of these musicians is no doubt talented in his own right, yet together they can do so much more. I saw this time and again over the last few days watching various bands perform. I…
Perfectionism
16 February 2010Dan Pink has a post on perfectionism, that adds another dimension to thoughts I’ve been riffing with Johnnie Moore and David Robinson around what we’re calling The Tyranny of Excellence. One of the principles of improv is to ‘be average’ – to give yourself permission to stop worrying what others think, do what you do,…
Messy
8 February 2010Forms, flow charts, matrices, systems diagrams, models – all are designed to help us make sense of this complex, messy world we live in. We assume that messy can be ordered, that wild can be tamed, that we can predict cause and effect. Sometimes we can. If machines are involved, usually. When humans are involved,…
More on breaking patterns
19 January 2010So consider the role of training other facilitators, or indeed, training others in our own profession, whatever that might be. Is that not also about patterns, if not breaking them, at least exploring new ones? How do I (the one delivering the training) make sure I’m not just reinforcing my patterns? BTW, I believe breaking…
Letting go of The Hero
15 January 2010While Johnnie Moore was here this week, we’ve been riffing this idea of ‘putting down your clever, and picking up your ordinary’. I’ve also written about it here and here and here. It’s also known as ‘be average’ and emerges from improv theatre. I know I have more work to do on this because I…
Something to say
2 January 2010That feeling of ‘not good enough’ is just SO hard to shake. There’s a handful of draft blogs, unfinished and unpublished. And don’t even start me on books! Ideas pop into my head and just as quickly I discard them. Where does this self-editing begin, I wonder? I know I’m not alone. And I know…
Possibility
22 December 2009Maybe it’s the time of the year – long days, warm evenings, sitting about with a bottle of wine, chatting with good friends. End of the year, beginning of a new one. Is it any wonder that ideas abound? That anything seems possible? I was listening to Sir Ken Robinson on the radio today. He…
Where’s Viv?
20 November 2009This post is prompted by the question posed recently: “Has Viv dropped off the planet?” Well, no… not really. I’ve been on holidays – that’s vacation in America-speak, so that accounts for me being quieter than usual in the blogosphere and elsewhere. I like being unavailable, off-line – although my partner would definitely disagree, saying…
Ways of knowing
27 September 2009Way back, when I did my Masters, I took a subject called Ways of Knowing. I think. Maybe I made that up. I DO remember lots of talk about knowing. I DO know it’s been of interest to me ever since. Scientific, evidence-based knowing is one way of knowing. There are others. I’m most interested…