The Ceausescu Moment

I know I've posted this video before, but I've been thinking of it a lot lately. Watching our MPs in the wake of the expenses scandal has been like watching a minor version of Ceausescu moments.

We complete each other

I wanted to say a little more about Matthew May's work on creative elegance. Matt's eloquent challenge is this:

Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that’s wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things?

He makes the point that by letting others complete our ideas, we create far more engagement. That's such an important lesson in a world that often seems to favour brittle certainties. A couple of years back, I wrote about Elen Langer's experiment where she rewrote a text book to deliberately introduce uncertainty and conditionality in its precepts... and discovered that this created much greater application of the material by students.

This is why I have become more and more wary of keynote presentations, which so often seem to serve up tired certainties instead of provoking fresh thinking and insights - by both speaker and audience. As Langer points out, when become familiar with a routine, we often become insensitive to the subtle factors that really influence its success. The curse of the expert.

Elegance

I really enjoyed Matthew May's Change This manifesto, Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking. So I was immediately drawn to his latest, Creative Elegance, The Power of Incomplete Ideas. I highly recommend it as a pleasant sort of whack to the side of the head. (For a bigger whack, you can buy the book, out now)

It's about how you create more engagement by leaving things out, letting your audience fill in some blanks. For instance,

the great renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci invented a technique called sfumato—literally “in the manner of smoke”—that he loosely defned as “without having distinct edges and lines.” With sfumato, lines are left a little vague, and forms are slightly blurred to merge with one another. This is what allowed da Vinci to achieve such life-like effects in his masterworks. The mystery of the Mona Lisa is somewhat less mysterious, for example, once you see that the corners of her eyes and mouth—the two features responsible for human expression—are deliberately indistinct. She seems to be alive because her attitude is so open to interpretation.

I was also struck by this Lao-tzu poem Matt cites at the end:

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub,
It is the centre hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel,
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room,
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there,
Usefulness from what is not there.

This leaves me thinking about how we get fixated by the measurable and risk not seeing the true value in what isn't measured. I get easily frustrated by people who anxiously fixate on the "deliverables" of meetings and seem to miss an awful lot of the subtle stuff that's going on.

Going Leroy

This video really makes me laugh.

The humour might be lost on non-players of Warcraft, I don't know. It shows a group of players on a raid. One of them, Leroy Jenkins, takes a snack break while the rest strategise about how to deal with the next encounter. Listening to their weary tones, you might find it hard to believe that playing this game is supposed to be fun.

Anyhow, while they try to agree the finer points (calculating their survival chances to two decimal places), Leroy returns. Oblivious to their plans he charges right on in, yelling out his name "Leeeroy Jenkins". The result is chaos, a wipe.

I can't fully explain what makes this so funny, but I'm sure we've all been on both sides of the divide - planning too much on the one hand, or leaping in without thought on the other.

Leroy is a cult hero in Warcraft, and I think in the end we'd rather side with the passionate over the bureaucratic. And at least he had chicken.

Another day of noticing

Kay Scorah and I enjoyed our first Day of Noticing workshop in Dublin in March. We had some very positive feedback from our first set of participants. So now we're taking bookings for London on June 15th.

Here's a bit of the blurb:

We think far too many of these sorts of workshops set out tantalising shopping lists of outcomes – but as a result deny the most important factor of all: what can happen spontaneously when a group of people get together to share learning and experience.

We will encourage you to achieve a new level of attention and noticing. We’ve come to believe that developing this kind of awareness is central to our own practice when working with individuals and groups. Attention to yourself and others, to your immediate environment, to your inner voice, to what others are saying and doing. We will share tools and games that we have ourselves found useful, and that we have used with thousands of groups over decades of experience.

We're holding it at Wallacespace St Pancras and places are £150 for the day, inc VAT - with some earlybird tickets at £95 if you book by May 25th.