It’s an old saw with me, but Dave Snowdon puts it very nicely and succinctly: Numbers are good, but they are never the whole picture. Its easy to focus on them, they give the comfort of apparent objectivity and used to support human judgement they have high utility. The problem is when they replace judgement rather than supporting it. Of course in the ordered aspects of any enterprise statistics and numbers can do a lot of the work for you, but in a complex situation they can be dangerous. Applied to ordered aspects (boundary conditions, probes and the like) they …
All the best stuff I have learned about mentoring has been in the context of traditional culture, whether with indigenous Elders from Canada or in the traditional Irish music community. Traditional Irish music is played and kept alive in a structure called a “sessiun.” There is a repertoire of thousands of tunes, but most musicians who have played for a while will have a hundred or more in common, and that can easily make for a long evening of playing together. Sessiuns are hosted by the most experienced musicians (traditionally a Fir a Ti, or Ban a Ti; the man …
Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power. We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars. Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world. We might hate the implications of a fossil fuel economy, but everything we do is firmly embedded within it. We might despise colonization, but we know that we are alos guilty of it in many small ways, The reason challenges like that are difficult to resolve is that we …
Working with groups is not easy. This is Ian McGeechan, manager of the British and Irish Lions before a dead rubber test. My friend Kathy Jourdain was quoted yesterday as saying “our power comes from our vulnerability.” This video reminds me of how that feels some days.
A little reflection today about social change and Occupy coming out of a conversation yesterday. When I was a young man we talk about “movements” like we were on the go. From whatever place we were in we will move to another. And we marked this action with marches and demos, dancing and action. The feeling of action was powerful and palpable. Once in a while we occupied a place and sat there for a while. But in general we were all about the movement. We made ourselves different from those we were working against and we moved. Occupy did …