Phil Lewis from Corporate Punk certainly gave a few pause for thought moments with his talk on culture and being a deliberately developmental organisation at our Inset Day this morning. The question about culture and how to foster the type of culture which allows creativity to blossom is one he has been thinking about for the past 20 years and so it was a great opportunity to hear some of his findings.
Two of the ones which really struck a chord were "Grey Matter" and "Yes the problem is you...". To explain, grey matter is the messy space between passive acceptance of what is happening in an organisation and nuclear explosion in opposition to what is happening. This is the space where real change can happen and the space wherein we need to be working. I worry that I, as with many others, too often find ourselves in the passive acceptance state where we don't want (or feel we can) challenge things. Reasons for this are sure to be varied but for me it comes back to a conversation I had with a colleague earlier in the week about not wanting to upset or hurt people and so always taking the role of mediator or facilitator. If real creativity is to be unleashed and real change to follow then I do think that I and others need to step out of the comfort zone of acceptance and find our voices to challenge the way and the why of things. This leads to the "yes the problem is you...". I totally understood what Phil was saying about the narrative we tell ourselves about our days and all the experiences we have. The tidying up of inconvenient parts of the story so that they fit within our own narrative and our own version of events is something I know I do but I see time and again either with students or colleagues or friends when we try to rationalise what happened. We re-write the story to suit our already preconceived version of what was really going on. Phil spoke about a time when he used to go home from work and in the process of rewriting that day's narrative he would ask "Is it me or has the world gone mad?". The answer he says is that "yes the problem is you". It is quite liberating to actually have that answer because now that the problem is me then it is within my power to change it. To do which I must step into the grey zone...
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AuthorRosie Smyth is a teacher in School 21, East London. ArchivesCategories |