November 2023
#MonthNotes
Hi, welcome to my MonthNotes — reflective notes looking back over the past month, loosely based on a set of questions which help me reflect.
1. What was difficult?
- Saying no to a piece of work
2. What did you fail with?
- I told myself that I would prioritise by eating my frog first thing in the day. In fact, I said this about two frogs. But I continued to put them off.
3. What did you experiment with?
For the first time I used this organisation to try help recruit new trustees for Cambridge Curisity & Imagination (CCI). (At a time when the charity’s services are needed more than ever, we’re looking for two trustees, with experience in healthcare and in marketing — for more info, see here.) My intial experience is positive.
4. What inspired you?
- Watching the pitches from the teams in our hackathon: genuinely exciting, and amazing what they produced in just a week. Fun too.
5. What made you proud?
- Elsevier continues to be standout in terms of LGBTIQ+ workplace inclusion. Workplace Pride released its 2023 Global Benchmark results, a comprehensive international assessment, and Elsevier is again one of the handful of organisations that achieved top-level scores, consistently surpassing 90%.
- Research on the impact of Artscaping — the innovative practice of exploring and creating in nature developed by Cambridge Curiosity & Imagination, the arts and wellbeing charity whose board of trustees I chair — was selected as one of the ‘impact stories’ shared by the Faculty of Education and Society at UCL (University College London), in order to inspire people.
6. What made you sad?
- I’m always sad when a colleague who I’ve enjoyed working with leaves.
7. What did you do that helped someone?
- I did some testing for Henry Shukman’s new app
8. What words did you learn?
- Tetralemma is a model that can help someone move past binary ‘either/or’ thinking and increase the number of options they perceive in decision making (the prefix ‘tetra’ means ‘four’; eg contrast with a ‘dilemma,’ in which there are two options). It is sometimes used as a tool in coaching (HT Hazel)
- ‘Yielbongura’, in Dagara, means ‘that thing that knowledge can’t eat’ and is often reduced in translation to ‘mystery’:
“Mystery is the proper limit of our intelligence. Mystery is the place where we can finger the ragged edges of what we know and begin to make peace with what we will not know. It is the nature of mystery that the more we know about it the more mysterious it becomes.” Stephen Jenkinson (* p 218)
- I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the difference between emotion (a term I thought I understood), affect and valence (two new terms for me): “Affect is your basic sense of feeling, ranging from unpleasant to pleasant (called valence), and from idle to activated (called arousal). Emotion is a much more complex mental construction.”[*] More for me to read and ponder here.
- John Cutler distinguishes between product operations and product enablement: “operations provides the structure, platforms, and systems that enablement leverages to equip and empower teams. And enablement provides the training, resources, guidance, and support necessary for teams to effectively utilize and benefit from these operational frameworks and tools.”[*]
- Toki Pona is the world’s smallest language, with approximately just 120 words (in comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary contains over a million)
- There are different ways to understand time:
Most of us most of the time think about time as quantitative, something that you can measure (eg in minutes). But this is only way of thinking about time (the Greeks called it ‘Chronos,’ from which we get ‘chronological’). Time is also qualitative (the Greeks called this ‘Kairos’ — HT Hazel, again). You can feel it when something happens at the opportune time: the special moment when a particular thing is most opportune and happens at just the right moment:
“For everything there is a season: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8
(For more on kairos and chronus, see here and here.)
9. What else did you learn?
- Danya Shults has shared a rich set of resources linked to coaching (including articles, videos, poems, questions, exercises), which I will come back to and explore more
- Succession planning for non-profits:
As chair of the charity Cambridge Curisity & Imagination, I joined a super useful workshop (run by B&G partners) about how to plan well for the succession of a founder/CEO/Executive Director — a key management and governance challenge — and future proof the organisation. Great to hear best practices and tips, and learn from others.
10. What did you get reminded of?
- 1 Thing, by Amerie
- Performance = potential — interference [*]
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” Friedrich Nietzsche
11. What books did you read?
12. What poems touched you?
- ‘The Rainstick’, by Seamus Heaney
- The bell and the blackbird, by David Whyte
- Your prayer, by David Whyte
- House, by Neil Gaiman
- ‘Wait without hope’, by TS ELiott (HT Susan David) — it’s an extract from ‘East Coker’ in Four Quartets
Also, not poems, but I was touched by the music playlist that Ryuichi Sakamoto prepared for his own funeral and by the message George Alagiah asked be read out at his memorial service:*
“If you haven’t already told the people you love that you love them, tell them;
If you haven’t already told them how vulnerable you sometimes feel, tell them;
If you want to tell them that you’d like to be with them until the front hall stairs feel like Everest, tell them.
You never know what is coming around the corner.
And if, lucky you, there is nothing around the corner, then at least you got your defence in first.”
[Note: there is always something around the corner.]
13. What was fun?
- 10-pin bowling
- Watching Men In Black 3 (!)
- Watching fireworks
- Going to the theatre to see a new production of Agatha Cristie’s novel And then there were none
- A leaving party in the woods to celebrate Neil, who has been the ‘office manager’ for Cambridge Curisity & Imagination for nearly 20 years (‘even though the charity doesn’t have an office,’ as he always enjoyed saying) — cake, cards, sparkles, bubbles, rooks, stories, a limerik, a poem, a crown, a thrown, a cape, and lots of smiles & laughter.
- Trying to explain a hard idea using only the 1000 most common words. It’s not easy. Give it a go here.
- Dancing on a Monday morning
14. What did you enjoy?
- Catching up with Hazel Carter — we worked together on a project in Parliament a decade ago, and she also gave me some great coaching. We were talking ahead of Hazel interviewing me for her podcast.
- Seeing friends
- Seeing my dad
And what Susan Cain, following C.S. Lewis,[*] calls “stabs of joy”:[*]
“those little moments of perfection within the mundane. The way my first sip of coffee tastes in the morning when it’s just the right temperature, the funny little way my daughter will say something, the tiniest sliver of a moon, receiving a random text from a loved one, an unexpectedly meaningful conversation with someone” Grayson [*]
- My daughter asleep on our bed
- A pair of jays at the end of our road
- Leaves shimmering in the breeze on autumns trees
- The moon rising
“the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.” C.S. Lewis [*]
“When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what’s that?”
“The Golden wind reveals itself.” Blue Cliff records, case 27
15. What are you looking forward to in December?
- Going to the Loft party in London
- Sharing my career story
- Christmas
