Hi everyone,
this last week the best post I put up on this site was the fab interview with Sabine Clarke. Read it here.
Coming up this week there are posts on “organisational decay”, taskforces as catnip for liberals, a 1984 Canadian documentary and a 1970 “what’s going ON?” memo from within the Nixon Whitehouse.
I’d like to say thanks to Sam and Richard for their proof-reading and their thoughts. If YOU want to help proofread future posts, get in touch. If you want to write a post, get in touch.
Lastly, with permission, I am quoting someone’s friendly critique of the site/the project. (fwiw, I agree with it, and will try to act on it. What do other people think?)
OK this seems like a good place for me to present an overarching criticism and a challenge. I know we will disagree about this, but after reading all these entries I developed a sense of something missing..
So what I would like to propose is related to the overall purpose of this project. It already provides great stuff in terms of orientation for people within a history of endless loops, lessons not learned and so on, but what about trying to go one step further…
If you have any ideas for how things should and could be done differently, from today, and if you see any possibility at all that people reading these entries might be receptive to them, (having just read learned something about all the ways we have been doing things wrong), then would this not be a good place to share them?
Suppose that every entry you attempted to link to other articles you have written in a section at the end of the entry called “what we do now”, or “so what can we do differently”, or “how we can apply this lesson”… A section like that wouldn’t need to be unique for each entry, you would just think, “ok, if that is the lesson we get from looking at this historical event, then how do I normally suggest we avoid this, or account for this in our actions? What pro-active suggestions do I have for the movement and for orgs?” Then you would just link to the relevant articles where you lay that out, using those links in a repetitive way as necessary, since likely there are fewer solutions than the occurrences of failure…
Obviously, this would then change the scope of the project a bit. You would be focussing not just on our “yesterdays” but on our present, but I think something like this might be necessary. Not only does it seem like a practical step, but it might also increase readership. People might generally be more willing to engage with their failures if they don’t see them as unavoidable, pre-destined things and if they don’t have a sense that there are alternatives or fixes of any kind. They will bury their heads deeper
I should clarify, obviously the “what I think we learn from this” section already goes some way to providing what I think is missing, I just think it doesn’t go far enough. Rather than just providing lessons about how to think about certain things, we need more thinking about how to actually apply those lessons. That’s sort of what I am getting at here.