Thinking images This blog made me think: What is the shape of thought?. It kicks off with this provocative quote:"Words and language, whether written or spoken, do not seem to play any part in my thought processes. The psychological entities that serve...

Self-organisation, traffic lights and empathy Recommended viewing for contemplating the power of self-organisation and the hidden costs of top-down control. The best line in the commentary was this: "Road capacity might be limited but empathy is boundless." (If you can't see the embedded videos, click...

Connections... Viv emailed me this article from Businessweek: The importance of connecting with colleagues. If you can forgive the slightly office politics tone, there's some interesting nuggets here. For instance, there was research looking at the effect of students' locations in...

On being wrong It's become a kind of truism these days that we all need to get more forgiving about making mistakes. Perhaps what needs more attention is noticing that we may have made them. I've often thought about starting a meeting showing...

The hitchhiker's guide to better meetings The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one my favourite books. Andrew Rixon's Hitchhiker's Guide to Better Meetings is a delightful riff on it. I especially loved his point about the number 42. In the book, the machine deep thought...

Programming a conference Dan Saffer offers some thoughts on how to program a conference. Some good ideas. I liked what he said about themes:Unless your conference is extremely targeted and you are planning to work with the speakers to shape their talks, don't...

Hold a meeting I posted this cartoon about six years ago*. It's one of those throwaway posts that I notice still gets picked up by others. I often sense that meetings which are apparently being organised to deal with a problem become, unwittingly,...

What is anger doing for us? Rob Paterson talks about his work with KETC hosting conversations on the subject of immigration: Why are so many people so angry? Often, he writes, the stated reasons are about loss of jobs and crime...But I wonder is that really...

Facilitating with Confidence - London 2010 I'm going to be helping to run a facilitation training this autumn in London, based on the programme developed my friend Viv McWaters in Australia -Facilitating with Confidence. Viv will be hosting this autumn workshop with me and our colleague...

Getting Agile Neil Perkin and I have put together a new workshop for Friday September 17th. We're calling it Getting Agile. We'll explore the idea and practice of agility. It will combine serious content with seriously playful experience of agile using improv...

The danger of safety Stephen Adshead has a nice guest post here: Rationalise like Ford or empathise like Toyota?. He looks at risk management and what happens when rational thinking runs up against us pesky humans. For example, and referencing Gladwell:You would expect that...

Facilitation Camp I've just signed up for Facilitation Camp, London on 20/21 August. Two days of Open Space, very low cost, what's not to like?...

Going a bit deeper Allan Kaplan has written up his experience of a five-day facilitation for development professionals: Emerging out of Goethe: Conversation as a Form of Social Inquiry (pdf). He describes their struggle to beyond conventional thinking in their discussions, and the challenge...

Nuff said Hugh's latest daily cartoon: ...

Closing the field on innovation Here's another report on the recent research on the limits of brainstorming (previously blogged here): How Group Dynamics May Be Killing Innovation. The underlying research suggests conventional brainstorms are less productive, in both quality and quantity, than a hybrid approach...