Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us.

Frank Warren from Post Secret tells the story of over 500,000 secrets submitted….and he reminds us of the value of secrets, of keeping them, of sharing them and of the truths they contain.

The professor’s popular talks have detailed his experiments teaching with Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs—and they present a general critique of the chalk-and-talk lecture as outmoded. To get a sense of his teaching style, check out a video he made about one of his anthropology courses. In it, some 200 students designed their own imaginary cultures and ran a world-history simulation by sending updates via Twitter and a voice-to-text application called Jott.

Wesch has spent some time in the classrooms of other teachers observing how they make connections with students.

As Mr. Wesch began to rethink his teaching, he visited Mr. Sorensen’s class and was impressed by how the low-tech professor connected with students: “He’s a lecturer. He’s not breaking them up into small groups or having them make videos. That’s my thing, right? But he’s totally in tune with where they are and the struggle it takes to understand physics concepts. He is right there by their side, walking them through the forest of physics.”

I believe this to be true of any work relationship – the human connection between people – whether that is teacher/student, manager/worker etc and the quality of that relationship is what create the conditions for learning.  If the respect and interest (and wonder as detailed in this article) doesn’t exist then the conditions for learning cannot exist either.  All this is a way of reinforcing my view that we spend too little time attending to the human elements of organising and too much trying to get technology to do the job for us.  It’s heartening to see someone like Wesch re-evaluate his teaching stance while not abandoning his interest in technology all together.

Composing a mission statement isn’t as easy as it sounds. Should a mission describe what a museum is doing, or what it should be doing? Is it about tangible goals to which institutions are held accountable, or Platonic ideals to which they merely aspire? Should a museum’s mission offer an inventory of assets and activities, or will it work best as a crystallisation of core principles? How will it reflect a museum’s take on cultural progress, audience demographics, funding sources and technological opportunity?

Short or long, however, what lurks behind the carefully scripted sentences is a swirling cauldron of organisational politics.

All that aside there are other issues pertaining to mission statements.  My research into disappointment has generated some interesting insights into the relationship between disappointment and idealisation.  The more we create ideals, missions, visions and values that are aspirational rather than attainable the more we guarantee disappointment.  I’m all for ‘blue sky’ thinking but I’m also all for realistic and achievable plans that can be delivered and realised.  That’s not to say that all mission statements are guaranteed to generate disappointment it simply means that any strategic planning process must build in a ‘reality testing’ phase.  Keeping it real can’t eliminate disappointment but it can help us examine the relationship between fantasy and reality and in turn, create plans that can be realised and delivered.

CAMPBELL, D. 2000. The Socially Constructed Organization, London, Karnac Books.

FINEMAN, S. 2000. Emotion in Organizations, London, Sage Publications.

FINEMAN, S. 2003. Understanding Emotion at Work, London, Sage Publications.

GABRIEL, Y. 1999. Organizations in Depth, London, Sage Publications.

HOCHSCHILD, A. R. 1983. The Managed Heart, Berkley, University of California Press.

1. The social construction of ‘art’as something holy, a notion which is contradictory to the notion of commerce and monetary exchange. He writes: “Although the arts earn approximately half of their income in the market, the arts can only maintain their sacred status when people associate the arts with the values of the gift sphere rather than the market sphere.”
2. While artists do care about money, they tend to care more (than other professionals) about rewards such as personal satisfaction, recognition, and status. He says that most artists have been socialized to this preference and that it is ‘hardly a virtue’. As a manifestation of these preferences, he says that (for example) most artists will work their day jobs only long enough to earn sufficient income to go back to creating artistic work.
3. Given that artists tend to exchange money for rewards such as personal satisfaction, direct subsidies do not lead to higher incomes for artists. Instead, they may simply provide incentives to more people to become artists, thereby increasing competition, and making it more difficult for any to make a living. As Abbing writes, “Subsidization increases the number of poor artists per hundred thousand inhabitants and thus increases poverty.”

And it perhaps goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) subsidies (grants, gifts, or other forms of support) may not only lead to an  increase in the number of people who want to be artists but also the number people who want to form arts organizations.

As the year draws to a close I want to take the opportunity to thank you for continuing to read the blog.  I’ll be taking a short break and hope to return in the new year.  In the meantime, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and very best wishes for the new year.

I heard the two men talking about a third old man who had recently died. One of them said, “I was visiting him at his home. He started to tell me an amazing story about something that had happened to him when he was young. But it was a long story. Night came, and we decided that I should come back the next day to hear the rest. But when I arrived, he was dead.”

The man fell silent. I decided not to leave that bench until I heard how the other man would respond to what he’d heard. I had an instinctive feeling that it would prove to be important.

Finally he, too, spoke.

“That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.”

Lovely piece from Henning Mankell in the New York Times about the art of listening

So if I am right that we are storytelling creatures, and as long as we permit ourselves to be quiet for a while now and then, the eternal narrative will continue.

Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

Who knows? Maybe someone is out there, willing to listen …