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A British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, was once asked what was the most important thing in politics, “Events, dear boy, events”, he replied. Over the years I have come to believe that the same is true of life in general. We can make all the plans we like, but it is how we respond to events that becomes key.
My event of the moment is called Bell’s Palsy. Before we flew to Chile I had anticipated a mix of holiday in the sun, some time spent getting a feel of whether I would actually like to live and work here and some time to think through some more ideas about purposive drift. Instead, the day before we were due to fly I found the right hand side of my face paralysed – just like a visit to the dentist, only I hadn’t been to the dentist.
Perhaps foolishly, I decided to fly anyway.
And so I find myself having a very different time in Chile from that I had anticipated. The focus of my concerns has shifted to coming to terms with having Bell’s Palsy and how best to deal with it.
Bell’s Palsy is a curious condition. It is diagnosed by exclusion – in other words nobody knows its cause – though the key suspect is a viral infection. Its most obvious symptom is paralysis of one side of the face, because an important nerve is damaged or impaired. Essentially there is no treatment other than rest.
Most of the medical information focuses on the paralysis of the face and the need to take care of the eye on the affected side because it doesn’t close properly and because of that can become infected. What seems to be less mentioned is how appallingly ill you can feel – well at least this is how it has affected me.
So my best days have been spent sleeping and dozing, with occasional trips to the balcony of our apartment to look out at the waves rolling in from the Pacific and breaking on the rocks of our bay and watching the little dramas and stories of life on the sea front.
Since New Year’s Eve I have felt dramatically better, the sense of continually fatigue seems, for the moment, to have lifted and I have more movement in the right hand side of my face. But, while I am enjoying this sense of improvement, I am not counting on it continuing without set back – my experience so far is that while a general trend of getting better can seen, its progress is very up and down, two steps forward, one step back.
So are there any lessons to be learnt from this experience. Probably not, other than the one I began with, the need to account of and deal with – “Events, dear boy, events.”

I like the sound of 2008. It looks like being an interesting year. For me, it is likely to be a time of a number endings and, I hope, some new beginnings. This, I expect, may be echoed more widely. So for all of you who some times wander here, my best wishes and may the coming year offer you new opportunities to move from places where you don’t want be and towards the places where you do.

Regular readers will have noticed gaps of various lengths between entries here. Some times this is because I have nothing to say or to point to. Some times it is because I have too much to say and haven’t articulated my thoughts enough to put down anything but a deranged ramble. Very occasionally it will be because my computer or internet connection isn’t working. And, finally, there are the odd occasions when I am away from easy internet access.
As I write this I am anticipating a large gap through much of December and the the first half of January. During this time I hope to be enjoying a summer in Chile and working on some ideas to extend the the idea of purposive drift. So any of the reasons for not posting may apply.
In the meantime there may be a few posts over the next week and then probably silence.
So to all of you who take the time to dip in here, have a good winter/summer break and let’s look forward to the coming year, which, if we can successfully navigate the alarms and scares it looks certain to bring, promises to be very interesting.

Perhaps someone could whisper in the ears of some of the apparatchiks and wunderkids, who are now innocently leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, that there are other ways of doing things. Listen quietly to this from Max Perutz, who, as well as being a distinguished scientist in his own right, ran a research lab, which nurtured a number of other Nobel Prize winners (possibly a measure of success?):
“The laboratory owes much of its success to the enlightened policies of the Medical Research Council, especially to Harold Himsworth, its secretary from 1949 to 1968, whose foresight and courage led him to support our early work for many lean years when we had little to show for it yet, and when there was only the faintest hope of it ever benefiting medicine.

Himsworth’s staff did not burden us with bureaucratic rules and futile floods of paper, but saw it as their prime responsibility to help us carry out our research. I reported directly to Himsworth, rather than a Committee; he negotiated the annual grant to the Medical Research Council with the Treasury directly, rather than being allotted the Council’s slice of the overall science budget by a ministerial committee, and he had the authority to take decisions within the broad lines of policy laid down by the Council. This system ensured smooth and efficient running, but Thatcherism has now destroyed much of it. Under her all-pervasive rule and in the name of “accountability”, bureaucracy has multiplied and directors are burdened with mountains of paperwork that leaves them less time to devote themselves to scientific work, the talent for which (and not for filling in forms) earned them their positions in the first place.”
P.S The link to “Max Perutz” is to a set of video interviews that are a sheer delight.

My friend, Michael Renouf, read my short entry, “Improv Wisdom”, at the end of March and then bought the book by Patricia Ryan Madison. A few days later, following her advice, “Be average” he began a project to post one drawing a day on his new blog. Here we are a few months on and he has well over two hundred drawings up on his site.
Patricia Ryan Madison’s book is well worth a read and packs a lot of useful advice into a short volume. For those of you who would like to supplement her punchy practical guide to effective action in the world with a more academic justification of the crucial role of improvisation in organisations and human life, take a look at the late Claudio Ciborra’s paper, “Notes on improvisation and time in organizations” – it may change the way you look at the world.

Another gem of an article from Simon Caulkin and a great quote from Russell Ackoff. Here’s a short taster:
“Targets, claim their defenders, are simple, they provide focus, and they work. Yes, they do. Unfortunately, these are also their fatal flaws. The simplicity is a delusion. As Russ Ackoff put it: ‘The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers with simple problems are those with simple minds. Problems that arise in organisations are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a simple part.'”

Some of you may have read my ramblings about purposive drift that you can access through the sidebar. A few more of you may have read my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”, published on Changethis. But there is still a lot more I need to explore.
I touched on one aspect of this in something I posted in February, “Cultivating Kairos”. Kairos is a Greek word for “the right time” or “the appropriate time” – a qualitative sense of time as opposed to the more mechanical, relentless clock time, Kronos.
I discovered another Greek word Metis – “cunning intelligence”, the quality displayed by Ulysses – the other day. And again, like my discovery of Kairos, I have a strong sense that this concept is also going to be important in developing the ideas around purposive drift.
Curious, isn’t that that the ideas people were using a couple of thousand years ago seem so relevant to the world we face today.
(As a totally irrelevant, but perhaps amusing aside, I happen to be writing this with my favourite word-processor Ulysses.)

“… After studying twenty firms that were facing crises, Dunbar and Goldberg (1978) concluded that the chief executives in these troubled firms generally surrounded themselves with yes-sayers who voiced no criticisms. Worse yet, the yes-sayers deliberately filtered out warnings from middle managers who saw correctly that their firms were out of touch with market realities; many of these middle managers resigned while others were fired for disloyalty.
Top managers’ perceptual errors and self-deceptions are especially potent because top managers can block the actions proposed by their subordinates. Yet, top managers are also especially prone to perceive events erroneously and to resist changes: Their promotions and high statuses persuade them that they have more expertise than other people. Their expertise tends to be our-of-date because their personal experiences with clients, customers, technologies, and low-level personnel lie in the past…”
William H. Starbuck, “How Organizations Channel Creativity”
(Dunbar, R. L. M., and Goldberg, W. H. (1978). “Crisis development and strategic response in European corporations.” Journal of Business Administration, 9(2): 139-149)
N.B William H. Starbuck’s fascinating online autobiography is worth a post on its own. Is this yet another example of purposive drift?

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”
Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear” XXVI

“We’re approaching a transition point in computing that most people don’t understand. It isn’t just the Internet or search or access to movies and music that matter, but all of those presented in a technological context that Just Plain Works. The importance of all our digital stuff along with our fear of losing it will shift us more and more toward central backup and storage. And once you have your life sitting on some company’s server, are you going to move it on a whim? No, and that means there will be a LOT of money to be made providing these services. Storage and automated backup and probably some form of netboot with a fresh OS image every time is the future of computing whether we’re talking about desktops or notebooks or mobile phones.”
Robert X. Cringely