Jennifer Rice has been talking about our meetings in Malmo. Modesty (the False brand of it) prevents me from quoting the very flattering things she says (but do take a look for yourself). But I’d like to dwell on this observation she made:
In our conversations it became clear that we see the world from two quite different perspectives: Johnnie’s approach is quite fluid, flexible and evolving whereas I look for boundaries and structure. Two quite complementary viewpoints
As one who delights in paradox, I’ve enjoyed trying to work this out. It came as a bit of a surprise to find that Jennifer thinks we have two quite different perspectives; if you look through our many blog conversations there’s a lot of common ground.
One of my dogmas is the importance of context. I can be quite a structural thinker myself but when someone else is doing structure, I tend to want to play against it. With Jennifer, this seems to lead to a good double act. That’s largely because she’s such a positive-minded person… and also because a bit of testing sometimes creates more effective structures. So both structure and freedom can work together. And we both like a bit of Zen.
