Random Acts of Madness

Seth asks about a Random Act of Madness. I reflect on one of my own and talk about metaphorically poking spiders in jam jars.
Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

Seth asks

Numanuma

I just got this in my email.

I have no explanation.

It’s fascinating. If there’s a point I don’t get it. You decide.

Link: Numanuma.

I followed the link, was puzzled and then started laughing.

I guess I just enjoy absurdity. It reminds me of leaning out of an office window a few years ago and shouting to a traffic warden. The warden was sticking a parking ticket on someone’s car (not mine or anyone’s I knew). I just yelled “It’s not my car!”. It made me laugh. It just did.

Small boys like to put spiders in jam jars and poke them with sticks. It’s not very nice, but as a metaphor, don’t we all occasionally want to poke the spider in the jamjar, just to see what happens? To introduce randomness into our lives.

Share Post

More Posts

Rambling thoughts on models

I went down to Surrey on Friday for long walk and pub lunch with Neil Perkin. We’d originally planned to run a workshop about agile

Planning as drowning

Antonio Dias offers a fascinating description of what goes wrong when drowning: What separates a swimmer from someone drowning is the way a swimmer acknowledges

Leadership as holding uncertainty

Viv picks out some nice ideas from Phelim McDermott on the subject of leadership. “We love the security of the illusion that someone is in

Concreting Complexity

I’ve been thinking about the urge to scale things lately – see here and here. I understand the concern with being able to effect big

The absurd

In moving house, I radically downsized my collection of books which I can highly recommend. I used to think I’d one day find a reason

Rewriting history…

Thanks to my Improvisation friend Kelsey Flynn I rambled into a letter cited in Margaret Cho’s Blog (go to Letter #1): Lately it seems like

Who says fun is dangerous?

I wanted to share this email doing the rounds this morning… AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE After every flight Qantas pilots fill out a form called a gripe

Yes, and…

A quick ramble on the nature of paradox, inspired by a blog on the value of both fear of the new and curiosity

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Not being a company

Harold Jarche has been reviewing his blog from 2004. That’s a fun thing to do I think. He found this apposite then – and it resonates well for me now.

Johnnie Moore

A second helping of Gonzo

Chris Locke posts a second instalment of Gonzo Marketing. More great stuff. My favourite bit: In marketing just as in government, professionalism tends to hew unimaginatively to its own timid

Johnnie Moore

QR codes

It never occurred to me that QR codes could be useful in meetings. But then Stu Field got me thinking about it. He’s been experimenting with using them to make