Tag: history

Wilfred Bion’s DAZED AND CONFUSED

Mechanical Dolphin

There’s been a feeling lately of things coming full circle for me.

There’s been a period in which the links between the scenario work I do today and the art of moviemaking, which obsessed me as a kid, became very evident – you can see some of this in my recent writing on Decision to Leave, Burden of Dreams, and The Limey.

And I found myself training as a group facilitator at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, a specialist mental health organization in the UK.

This is a journey I probably should have seen coming ever since a colleague, Steffen Krüger, sat down with me after a scenario planning workshop which had left Post-It notes strewn across a number of whiteboards, and showed me the strangely resonant cover of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s book Experiences in Groups.

Read more →

Fast, deep, and uncertain: the currents of thought and feeling

Mechanical Dolphin

“Big whorls have little whorls which feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls and so on to viscosity“

Lewis Fry Richardson

These lines appear in Sarah Dry‘s tremendous book Waters of the World, a work of history which explores how scientists, researchers, and passionate amateurs gradually pieced together an understanding of our global climate system. The story spans continents and generations; some of its characters collaborate or compete, while others work alone, unaware of the wider context in which their endeavours might be received. Some don’t even live to see the difference that their research will make to the world. There are false starts and dead ends. Politics, from the sweep of colonialism to the pettiness of institutional squabbles, plays its part; and for all that this is a tale of systematic observation and theorisation, it’s no less deeply human for that. As one of Dry’s scientists, Joanne Simpson, put it:

“I think I am generally perceived as a pretty cool character. Nothing could be farther from the truth. To understand how a woman, or a man, for that matter, creates original work in any field, it is necessary to penetrate the emotional masks, and my masks have intentionally been hard to penetrate.”

Dry’s book, and particularly its chapter on “Fast Water”, exploring the currents of the ocean’s depths, makes me think of the ways that emotions can swirl around us and within us when we address difficult issues, alone or together.

Vailulu’u vents, from the NOAA Photo Library CC BY-2.0
Read more →

Preservation for All: Whose Future?

Mechanical Dolphin

“We need to meet this inflection point with a more expansive imagination of what conservation work could be…The tools of the conservator can remind us of the fundamental human need for creativity, most especially under difficult or dehumanising conditions.”

In this short video for America’s National Gallery of Art, Sanchita Balachandran of The Johns Hopkins University speaks about “preservation for all” and strategising under TUNA conditions of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity.

The Time of the Surprise: Strategy for the Wooden World

Mechanical Dolphin

I spoke this week at the Inclusive 2040 event hosted in Plymouth, England, to explore the future of sustainable, equitable growth in that city.

Alongside speakers including Stephen Evans of the Learning and Work Institute, Fiona Tuck of Metro Dynamics, Alexis Bowater OBE, and Tim Sydenham, I presented an interactive session on strategic foresight, drawing on an adapted version of the IMAJINE scenarios.

Britain’s so-called “Ocean City” has been a strategically important naval site for centuries, thanks to its shipyards and dockyards. In exploring the future for the city, we also wanted to acknowledge its long history. Who we have been in the past shapes who we are today, and the potential for who we might need to become tomorrow.

In Plymouth’s naval heyday, the time of the Napoleonic wars, each ship was its own “wooden world”, a microcosm moving through the ocean. The image of a man o’war sailing into battle evokes a particular notion of strategy: directing one’s own organization like a vessel through changing waters, assessing the conditions of the weather and the sea, weighing one’s limited resources, managing the morale of one’s crew, and making judicious choices in combat and competition with other, rival ships.

Dominic Serres (1722-1793) – Return of a Fleet into Plymouth Harbour

At times, leading an organization can feel like steering one of the ships pictured in Dominic Serres’ Return of a Fleet into Plymouth Harbour: even in a familiar setting, all is not certain. Some hazards are evident and well-charted; others may lie below the waterline; others still may vary with the conditions of the sea and the sky. Each figure in Serres’ painting, whether on the land or aboard a vessel large or small, will have a different perspective on the waters which the fleet is seeking to successfully navigate.

Such multiple perspectives can prove useful in helping us to understand the three elements which Geoffrey Vickers identified as fundamental to wise decision-making in his book The Art of Judgment:

What is going on? What does it mean for us? And what can we do about it?

Yet our world is different from that of centuries past. The connections and complexities which define it have evolved considerably, as has the speed and quality of communication. Strategizing today involves much more than guiding a single ship, squadron, or fleet in competition against hostile powers.

As Trudi Lang and Richard Whittington write in Harvard Business Review, we must adopt a broad view of strategy, rather than leaders’ traditional approach of “taking the long view and focusing on where they’re going”:

Thinking narrowly, in terms of traditional sectors, industries, or geographies, can limit or blindside an organization. A better approach is to think in terms of systems. Doing so sensitizes leaders to broad changes of context and allows them to bring actors together from many sectors, which in turn enables the creation of new value.

Read more →

Tales of the times to come: the humanities and scenario planning

Mechanical Dolphin

“What do the humanities have to offer strategists, policymakers, and decision-takers in the age of the algorithm? As machine intelligence and computational power increase, as we gather ever more data from ever more sources, do the humanities still offer a valuable perspective on times yet to come?”

Over at the website of the Irish Humanities Alliance, Marie Mahon and I have a piece on what our training in the humanities has brought to our work on the IMAJINE project for the future of European regional inequality.

Incoming Storm – Galway, Ireland – August 11, 2008, Wikimedia Commons

Exploring Photography with Wendy Catling, Dr. Natasha Barrett, and Jonathan Bart

Mechanical Dolphin

Last month, I invited three photographers to discuss how their medium is used for art, research, and storytelling in families, communities, and institutions.

Joining me for the conversation were Australian artist Wendy Catling, Research Librarian Dr. Natasha Barrett of the Alexander Turnbull Library (National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa), and British filmmaker Jonathan Bart.

Do photographs offer a collection of scattered moments or an unbroken connection to the past? From first pictures taken through “memories of memories”, stories of migration and famiy secrets, questions of colonialism, agency, and power, my three guests talk candidly about their personal, professional, and artistic relationships to this unique and powerful medium.

You can listen to the discussion on Soundcloud or YouTube.

Would you like to find out more about my guests?

Wendy Catling’s work appears at her own website and the site for her most recent project Nightshade, discussed in the podcast. (She is currently fundraising for the Nightshade photobook).

Read more about Dr. Natasha Barrett’s research at the University of Leicester website, and you can also find Natasha on Twitter.

Jonathan Bart’s work appears at his own website. You can also find Jonathan on Instagram, Behance, Vimeo, and Flickr.

Taboo Futures, Fate, and Destiny – Conversation with Steffen Krueger

Mechanical Dolphin

In 2019-2020, I worked with researchers from the University of Oslo on a set of scenarios for the future of Norwegian schools. You can see the full scenario set, “Schools and/or Screens”, here.

Niamh ni Broin and Steffen Kruger of the University of Oslo convened the project and recruited me to help a group of key stakeholders develop the scenarios. Today Steffen, a psychoanalytic researcher and senior lecturer in the university’s Department of Media and Communication, joins me to talk about the project, taboo futures, pop culture, and questions of fate and destiny in foresight work.

Read more →

The Important Thing Is Elsewhere

Mechanical Dolphin

The Family Tree

Before all this, I went to my grandfather’s house in Spain. I’d never really liked it. It wasn’t the house he’d lived in as I grew up, which was just down the road from the new place. That had been the house of memories, the place where my grandmother had died before I was born.

He bought the new place when it was time to find a smaller, more manageable property, as he entered his eighties and I my twenties. I worked with him on both houses, helping him to do up the old one and improve the new. I painted walls white and coated tiles with red rubber sealant; mixed cement and ferried endless wheelbarrows of it to wherever he was working that day. He chided me for my cement mixing technique, for the way I handled a paintbrush or a pickaxe, the way I clambered up and down ladders and scaffolding, fetching tools and materials. It was the happiest time.

He died, digging over the garden of the new property with a rotorvator, when I was 23. He’d have been glad to go that way; he’d always talked of “falling off his perch” rather than a dreaded slow decline, and even when we were working together on the new place, he’d still pull stunts like climbing into the tree he was pruning, clinging to the branch above him while standing on the one below, which he was sawing off, jumping up and down to speed the process.

Read more →

Marvellous Finale

Mechanical Dolphin

It’s the final edition of Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical today – the newsletter I’ve used to capture stories and secret histories from Australasia and beyond over the last two years.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We started out by walking the coasts near Lisbon back in January 2016 and we finish the journey more or less where we began, exploring the history of one of Portugal’s most illustrious artistic families.

In the intervening years, highlights included:

And that’s not even including the drug counsellors, the Nazi hunting comedians, the dancer turned paramedic, the time travelling arts worker, or the Argentinian sisters running a horror-themed cake shop out on the tropic of Capricorn…

…or the pastry.

Check out the complete Marvellous, Electrical on Google Maps.

It’s the Tyrell Corporation Comedy Hour!

Mechanical Dolphin

On Friday, 20th October, I was the guest storyteller at Brisbane improv troupe Big Fork Theatre’s “Cool Story Bro“.

At “Cool Story Bro,” the guest storyteller shares tales from their past, based on audience prompts, which then become fuel for improv sketches by the troupe. It’s an interesting format with roots in the work of the Upright Citizens Brigade, which has been home to the likes of Amy Poehler, Donald Glover, and Aziz Ansari.

You can watch Tina Fey doing this kind of storytelling here:

I’m no Tina Fey, but I did my best. My stories came from the audience call-outs “cats”, “whales” (or “Wales”), and “first kiss”. As always with these things, it was entirely terrifying & nerve-wracking right up until the moment you stepped on stage and just had to do it.

I’ve been getting all excited about memories lately – how they blur the bounds between fact and fiction, how they might be shared or transplanted between us. And I like challenging myself to get out of my comfort zone.

I found stories from my life and told them messily and honestly, with plenty of detail for the improv troupe to riff off. In turn, they made skits about talking meteorites, a school for nervous possums, and TV cookery shows. It was fun to see your experiences reworked into something that preserved only the vibe; details warped and reworked into new contexts, themes you hadn’t spotted in your own tale coming to the fore.

Read more →