Owning our mistakes
We tend to treat making a mistake as something to avoid at all costs. It’s fairly common to plan, rehearse, polish, and play it safe because we want to get things right. And while that shows care and attention, there’s also a quiet cost: the more control we seek, the more we grip ourselves, and […]
Creative Apprenticeship
Fifteen years ago I had the good fortune of attending an event where Dave Hall from The Ideas Centre spoke about Thinking Money Down the Drain: his approach to growing critical and creative thinking in organisations. I loved the energy and humour he brought to the topic, and the challenge he brought to the kind […]
Intentional improvisation
We all improvise every day. None of us goes through life with a script telling us what to do, and we don’t want one either. We like to connect with others, share ideas, take a few risks, learn and make decisions as we go. It’s a rational response to the predicament of life. The map […]
Networked meetings
I recently ran some training for a group at the University of Suffolk on creative facilitation. I love sharing facilitation as a practice and a performance, and the conversations with the group got me thinking about the ways my own practice is changing. Here are a something I shared at the training that feel like it […]
Desire lines of play
We’ve all seen those images of desire lines made by feet across urban landscapes to take us from point A to B with the least effort. BUT…this weekend I spotted a desire line that was created by the desire to PLAY. Wandering near Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol I came across The Slidey Rock. This […]
Bring a brick
When you truly surprise yourself, the ripples can last a long time. In an improvisation class with Jules Munns some years ago he asked what skills or challenges we wanted to work on. I said that I kept hanging back, judging things, editing myself and that I wanted to follow my impulses and get more […]
We’re using mute all wrong
Would you ask participants in a face-to-face meeting to put duct tape over their mouths when they are not speaking? Of course not. So why have we made ‘default mute’ the norm in online meetings? When I facilitate virtual sessions I ask people to only use mute if there’s a distracting noise in the background. […]
The Headless Way
Who are you? What are you? These are some of the deepest questions we can ask. I came across some novel ways of answering these questions while listening to some ‘pointing out’ experiments by Richard Laing from The Headless Way. These experiments offer some intriguing, visual ways of discovering that awareness is our experience. Or […]
Up Mole!
I wrote this in a season of life when it felt hard to engage in the world. At the time, I had a studio at an arts space called Old Jet in the Suffolk countryside, and I picked up a copy of The Wind in The Willows in the kitchen which inspired this poem. Like […]
