Personal Blogs

There's a warning on this activity, that the techniques may draw up uncomfortable events from your past.

This also highlights a major problem with such techniques:they can throw up the unexpected.

I like to think I have ample experience 'working with dreams' ; I have used them to develop story-lines and ideas, even to some degree for personal cognisance so it felt like an obvious one to give a try.

Context is vital, picking the right activity or game for the people you are working with.

How well do you know them?

It also makes me realise that I'd like to be in a working environment with the kind of colleagues and friends where I could employ such techniques.

I feel like a big fail; there are two activities suggested for problem solving, or creativity, innovation and change: keeping a dream diary and this, which offers ways to explore a dream's meanings and to re-enter and work with this environment created by your subconscious.

There's plenty troubling me at the moment but I find repeatedly that holding onto a dream is like chasing autumn leaves in a stiff breeze.

Take this morning; just a few moments awake I recall I had been dreaming and that it had been a 'good one': vivid but apparently not memorable enough. I tried all the tips in the book to recover or return to the dream: you have to place yourself exactly as you were as you had the dream. I still can't get it; I feel like MacBeth clutching at the dagger; it is always just out of reach.

By way of example I have a snippet of a dream from a few days ago: returning to the campsite after some kind of trip or activity in the woods I find my tent has gone: everything has been removed, as if I had never been there. The plot is bare. Why should I be thinking this as I return to work after a two week break?

The 'activity' is then to work with and develop your feelings about this moment, been to re-enter the dream, not simply to see what happens next but to change or influence the outcome. This then MAY offer a solution or at least an understanding of your feelings so that you can deal with them.

How to work with a dream or metaphorical image:

• Entering the dream
• Studying the dream
• Becoming the images
• Integrating the viewpoints
• Reworking the dream

Appreciating, reflecting, looking forward and emerging

P.S. I just returned to work and couldn't have entered a more friendly environment, my desk as I'd left it.

P.P.S. I realise why I am 'losing' my dreams: stress. I'm waking up with a jolt, some unpleasant thought in the back of my mind.

Steve Jobs was hugely influenced by Zen Buddhism; this I understand would play to the importance of intuition. Intuition alone is not enough; this for Jobs was also the product of intense effort to get his head around an issue; he immersed himself in it until, to paraphrase the historian E.H.Carr he could 'hear it speak'.

20 LIFE LESSONS FROM STEVE JOBS

http://mashable.com/2011/12/18/steve-jobs-20-life-lessons/

REFERENCE

Glouberman, D. (1989) Life Choices and Life Changes Through Imagework, London, Unwin, pp. 232-6

Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. Little Brown.

As if I haven't got enough going on the ASA sent my results to date for the 10 part ASA Level III coach certificate. I have taken and passed 9 out of 10. All I have to do is submit a piece of Sports Psychology and I'm just about done. So a few degrees, an MA and a Level III Swimming Coach.

'All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time'.

Steve Jobs quoted in Isaacson (2011:545)

He also favours highly personalised online earning with loads of vide keeping class for debate and discussion. Surely the class to some degree is redundant too given the increasing quality of the online experience?

REFERENCE

Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. Little Brown

If enough people wish to discuss Steve Jobs I'll set up a group for OU folk over in LinkedIn?

Steve Jobs launching the iPod Nano

I can see that whilst the gift of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is my gift of 2011 (on the last chapter), that I need it as a eBook.

I resisted making notes as I read 'because it's the holidays' yet now I am finding it repeatedly a nuisance to have missed a point or quote that under others circumstances I would have dutifully taken copious notes throughout. So here's one I couldn't afford to miss: From stand in CEO when Steve Jobs was ill in 2009 (but reflecting a Steve Jobs ethos)

'We are constantly focussing on innovation. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution'.

'We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allows us to innovate in a way that others cannot'.

'We have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change'.

This is the kind of organisation I would like to work for. This is the kind of thinking needed for those studying B882 'Creativity Innovation and Change' and for H807 'Innovations in E-Learning'.

REFERENCE

Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs.

 

 

"There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random disucussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas". Steve Jobs after Walter Isaacson (2011:431) on the design of the Pixar building.

I'll be quoting from the Steve jobs biography often as I apply what I have learnt to B822 'Creativity, Innovation and Change', and share what he did for the world with the Apple, with Pixar, with iTunes and the iPad.

Had he got involved in education I have an idea of how he would have approached something.

Steve Jobs was the idea and for behind releasing on iTunes a box-set of EVERYTHING Bob Dylan had ever recorded; this in the Digital Age is the way forward. Even if I cannot read everything on a subject, I want it aggregated for me nontheless. I want every article or book reference in a book such as this biography, with links to every interview too.

REFERENCE

Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. Little, Brown.

Happy 2012 folks!

They are worse than a crutch, they are a smoke screen of obfuscation, lack of nerve and even of understanding. All anyone needs to do is to get up and talk.

Steve Jobs banned PowerPoint. There's plenty of software I'd ban in favour of a napkin or the back of an envelope.

REFERENCE Isaacson, W (2011) Steve Jobs. Little John

Or is each one an apple?

The 'Techniques Library' is a collection of some 150 activities or games that elicit from a person, or group (as small or as large as you like) answers to business problems, or at least ideas (potentially innovative or off-the-wall). Forty or so of these hold some appeal so I am picking my way through them; missing is the the meal, two or more people gathered for what I might describe as a 'continental' dining experience i.e. where you indulge for a couple of hours, mixing socialising with work, finding the middle ground.

Two observations:

1) As soon as you do one of the 'techniques' your starting point shifts

2) Whatever you do next comes a) with the outcomes of that activity and b) with the experience of the strengths and weaknesses of what you did.

I am reminded of the concept of 'Hilbert Space' that I became familiar with in 2000 when working for one of the most creative web agencies of the era (BAFTA, Cannes, IVCA top awards). Hilbert Space imagines a vortex full of holes; you exist in this space wearing a blindfold and holding a bag of marbles; to progress you role a marble forward, when it roles down a hole you listen out for the shin king noise, shuffle off in that direction, pause, then role another marble: this is how you find your direction, it is progression that is iterative and not in a straight line.

What about dinner?

Why has this been left out? The Business lunch is not about feeding your face at the office's expense, it is in part the experience of the meal, its pleasures and challenges, but also about the conversation and how the longer meal is conducive to so many of the things these exercises set out to achieve: shared points of view, listening, sharing, disagreeing in a non-combatitive manner and potentially leaving the table with some ideas sketched-out on a napkin (or the table-cloth). Other bonds are created, insights too on a person's tastes (literally).

Our problem in the UK (I have lived and worked in France) is that 'we eat to live, whereas the French live to eat'. We had luncheon vouchers to use and went out every day for a proper meal, we might take a work problem with us, we might not (I know setting where no business talk was permitted before the coffee). The dining room table became a meeting room.

I need to get back into this. There was a dream that was 'project based' but I lost the plot despite my best efforts to 'retrieve' it. The trick is to drift into consciousness and if necessary shift around in bed so you are in the psition in which you had the dream: none of this worked even though i had the opening scenario my son in a football game played with a tennis ball that kept being kicked out of field. Then a Regional Manager I know made an appearance and we reconvene in a commercial kitchen. Now I draw a blank. In theory I may be able return to this moment tonight, in practice I may prepare better. Something needs to disturb your sleep without shocking you into consciousness. You can't make notes if it risks waking others either. As someone who can draw I have never found drawing a dream works, they are either too complex or shift, more importantly it is how you FEEL about the place, people and events that explains the dreams purpose.

18 years ago our lives became wedded.

I find these resolutions from the 'well known' in Propect Magazine predictably trite?

What's yours?

Some I fail within hours, like giving up coffee! Others become a way of life, such as keeping a diary.

P.S. one seems to be made as a matter of course, every year I can wish for another year of happy marriage and family life.

 

Reading the Steve Jobs biography, without taking notes (a sin, but it is the holidays), while also studying B822 'Creativity, Innovation and Change' I am increasingly inclined to ditch all techniques in favour of 'being yourself'. This is how Steve Jobs lived; he was himself, often without compromise, therefore difficult, particular and obsessive.

Some advertising creative types are laughable because of the way they go about things yet the simple act of behaving differently over an extended period of time is bound to create in that plastic mind a slightly different mind set. All it takes for an ad to stand out is for it to be different; to be effective it has to have relevance and resonance.

Having taken no notes at all on Steve Jobs I'll be obliged to read it again, notepad or iPad by my side.

If you thought there were rules or ways of doing things then this will throw your mind. Most of us can't be Steve Jobs, to realise his dreams someone has to put the ideas into action.

Had Steve Jobs done a Myers Briggs Type inventory what would he have been?

A prompt to thinking.

'I keep six honest, serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

 

Kipling (1902)

 

As aide memories back of an envelope, think out loud, journalism, PR ... but somewaht limiting to the facts, so you need t oexpand.

 

REFERENCE

 

Kipling, R. (1902) 'The Elephant's Child', in Just So Stories

 

 

Not as an athlete, nor as a coach, but as a volunteer or 'Gamesmaker' working on the Press Office at the water- polo venue (once played, still coach and ref http://www.london2012.com/water-polo-arena This'll require some training in February then a commitment from the end of July to the 12th August. All I need now is somewhere to stay in London (free travel within the 6 zones). What is water-polo? Rugby in water ... but more violent! There are two refs to keep order.