Johnnie Moore opens a recent post on brainstorming with the caveat, “(Long slightly rambling post ahead)”. And, yes, the post that follows is both quite long and quite rambling and herein lies its strength. Although the focus of the piece is on brainstorming and some of Johnnie’s reservations about the process, the rambling nature of piece opens up spaces to to explore a whole range of crucial issues about how we can work productively and creatively together and the obstacles we place in the way of doing so.
I would urge you to go to this post, read it carefully and then join in the discussion that I hope will follow. There is much to be mined here.
The part I want to focus on here is where he talks about the importance of “noticing”. Paying attention is one of the central tenets of purposive drift. Those who have been following my ramblings will have noticed that a point I keep on returning to is the way that many of the plans and processes we adopt get in the way of us noticing what is actually going on. Or as Johnnie put it in an earlier post, “pay more attention to what is happening and less to your notion of what should be happening”.
In his brainstorming post, Johnnie suggest that, “… instead of having innovation programmes, we might try noticing programmes”. My sense is that the successful adoption of a “noticing programme” could be the biggest step that any one could take to transform an organisation in a positive way. What do you think?