Sparknow blog

I’ve just subscribed to Resurgence magazine. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this as it’s slightly too new age for me (evidenced by the fact that I went into one of those witchy crystal, Tibetan prayer bowl, tarot shops to look for it before going online).

In any case, in the first issue I read (a special on the transformative powers of music) I found an article called ‘Burning Ice’ – also the name of one of its projects – on Cape Farewell, a pioneering project launched in 2001 by an artist called David Buckland. What a very very nice example of multidiscplinary (Defra word) working

bq. Cape Farewell has brought together our leading artists, writers, scientists, educators and media for a series of expeditions into...

As a child, one of my favourite books was The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright. She wrote it in 1941 and it’s a glorious tale of 4 children who, bored, decide to pool their pocket money and take it in turns for each of them to have a decent Saturday adventure financed.

I’m not suggesting we pool our pocket money but I do miss the first 7 years of Spark when we have an office and events, 25 of them in fact (and I must say, in passing that I much applaud Philippa Thompson, sadly not part of the network any more, in her numbering which started at E001). Some of my favourites are:

• Installations. of which the most ambitious was the construction of...

A tiny scrap from Daniel Martin, by John Fowles, which a friend of mine adores and persuaded me to read over the summer. (Frustrating because I’ve put the book down somewhere so can’t quote directly from it for now.) I was over- and under-whelmed by it in about equal measure, but the man sure could write. Even in the self-indulgence of rosy nostalgia in the middle sections, every page had some perfect turn of phrase that invited a sharp in-breath of admiration at the just-soness of what he’s said.

The one I’ve been carrying with me and wondering where to put down describes Ben the gardeners grumbling tolerance of the demands on him to grow more exotic vegetables. He tends and waits and considers his failures with...

A moment of extraordinary pride last night – so proud in fact that my trembling hand and mind failed to remember I had a camera in my handbag so I have no pictures.

Peter Jones, a John Lewis Store in Sloane Square hosted the launch of the reports and next stages from our work for MLA London and the LDA on their Knowledge Transfer Programme. In the partners room on the 7th floor.

There was much warmth and merriment and a glowing sense from the client that we’ve provided an experience, written documents and a freshness in our narrative enquiry that helps set London’s conversations between the MLA sector and business on a new path.

For me there’s a homecoming...

This is how the photographs of Tim Walker are described on the Design Museum’s website: “London based photographer Tim Walker has established himself at the cutting edge of fashion photography. His images capture a sublime moment in time, evoking a sense of epic drama and beauty. Stunning sets and lavish locations juxtapose the everyday with the absurd and the fabulous, to create captivating, original photographs. Tim’s evocative images are full of textured nuance and intriguing detail. His innovative photography is amongst the most imaginative and exuberant being produced today”.

I bring this up because last week I attended an alumni event hosted by PA Consulting at the Design Museum where we were guests in an in-between space; the Thames and all its riverside lights out the window...

Sometimes you just get lucky when you aren’t really looking.

I have a kind of bush tuckering principle when I’m out and about. So on buses and tubes and walking and in waiting rooms I rarely whip out my phone or laptop, bury myself in a book, and almost never tune into my ipod. I snack on what’s on offer as I go. This normally means I get a lot of London Lites and Metros, the Appointments Section (normally of the FT or the Telegraph), a lot of G2’s, the odd specialist magazine. I get conversations, two way, one end of a loud telephone conversation on the top of the bus, posters on the tube, the tinny whistle of someone else’s ipod.

I like the odd...

I was once in transit in Frankfurt airport with a colleague who looked around in wonder and said

‘funny people the Germans’

So, having spent 5 weeks mainly working in France (in an odd kind of two worlds – rural France sometimes, burrowing about in a wiki-toolkit at others), I offer a handful of observations about differences that struck me.

• Milk products. Rubbish milk, but metres of milk-derived products like yoghurt, butter, fromage frais, even in our little Shoppi (Tesco Metro relocated to rural France).

• Parking. The English draconian trapping of parking control in evidence nowhere. The laissez faire about parking restrictions is very relaxing and really makes the point that parking should not be a secret...

A few weeks ago we ran an event in the library of the Charlotte Street Hotel (a very nice London venue) wherein we asked a few “Critical Friends” to respond to our thoughts on an emerging idea we are calling Resiliance and on which Sabine and Victoria have previously blogged. The drivers behind the idea were the realisation that firstly, in their haste to inject new blood and ideas at the expense of older staff organisations are increasingly losing the embedded memory that is such a core part of an organisation’s make up. Secondly, that the younger people coming into organisations have a very different career portfolio mentality that senior staff find hard to come to terms with. Finally, though organisations spend significant amounts on cultural “stuff” (Cultural...

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Ernest Hemingway.

For a $10 bet to write the shortest short story.

He won.

We were discussing this in the car yesterday on the way to lunch in Marseilles. And it reminded me of a Guardian article where writers were asked to come up with 6 word stories. And the BBC did something similar on the Today programme

Apparently this fits into a genre of literature called ‘flash fiction’ – stories of 1000 words or less.

I like it as a development of ideas around postcards, somehow mashed up with springboard stories, and as a move away from the structuring of springboard stories. Writing world suggests the following.

• Throw yourself in and...

About 18 months ago I put down a deposit on an apartment at a to be constructed site on the lovely island of Cyprus. Its attractions were two fold: adjacent to the 14th hole of the to be constructed (there is a common theme here) PGA designed and built golf course and only 10 mimutes from the airport though not on the flight path. The investment’s economic viability was predicated on the golf course being constructed and even though licences were supposedly issued by the government and money spent on industry experts to oversee the construction and design there was little activity apparant on site when I visited it in April 2007.

Fast forward three months and still little discernable progress either off or on the...

I’ve been thinking, in the toolkit, about how to write about purposeful metaphor. I’ve a great fear of offering the dreamy, irritating kind, or of not being able to get through the sludge of imprisoning metaphors, analogies and assumptions in which organisations unwittingly bind themselves. It seems to me that in the kind of rigorous imagineering that foresight work encourages, a well placed, sturdy metaphor can do a lot of real work. Like the epidemiological lens through which researchers into fundamentalist terrorism peered as a way of reframing their enquiries. That seems to me to be highly practical.

What about biological discovery? Jonathon Miller, in his marvellous book The Body in Question writes, in the chapter on the heart, of the essential role of metaphor in...

One of the important things about coming back after being away is that small things spring out in new ways. As a London resident it is easy to stop noticing the blue plaques. But today the Alfred Hitchcock one on the street where I live looked different, because I have been living for a while in a place that has no blue plaques indicating to passers-by name, life-span and main activity of a building’s past resident. It looked different because I noticed it again for the first time in a while and reflected on this marvellous urban ritual of recording residences, of the homage the city can make to some of its people.

The blue plaque has chance encounter written all over it, unless of course one...

A gorgeous gift in my email this morning from Steph Colton, whose presence I sorely miss as we are moving towards what feels like real breakthroughs on several fronts. She sent me Developments 40, A special World Bank Report on whether the 2015 Millennium goals are being reached. I’ve attached it here. Page 19- 20 talks of testimony gathered by Panos

These life stories were gathered by the Panos network and patners using a painstaking method of interviewing which emphasises patient listening and openended questions.The result was that those journalists are now more inclined to highlight the problems faced by the people they met and others like them. These interviews were gathered using a method known as ‘oral testimony’, which sets out to record the fine...

Yesterday we met in the Library of the Charlotte Street Hotel for a couple of hours of thinking time with critical friends. We wanted to try and progress and challenge our thinking on how organisations leverage their cultural assets. How can heritage & history work better to inform present and future directions? How can relationships with archives and museums go beyond the Christmas party or the odd team-building exercise and be part of the fabric of innovation and business development? What role can libraries and librarians play in deepening and broadening the resources and rigour of the organisation? Ellen Collins, Francesca Valli and John Spencer joined us for a broad ranging conversation which boiled down to three things:

• Many organisations are becoming hollow, brittle and battle-weary....

I’ve mentioned before the book Natural Security. I’m finding much to return to in it while we develop the Defra work, and as I’ve 30 minutes or so while the wiki is down for running repairs I thought I’d write a little about Chapter 17 ’The Infectiousness of terrorist ideology’by Kevin D. Lafferty, Katherine F. Smith, and Elizabeth M. P. Madin. This looks at how drawing analogies with epidemiology could help those seeking to combat terrorism. I paraphrase a little below, some of the main points.

1. Epidemiologists have rigorous standards of enquiry and analysis to understand the where infectious agents come from, their dynamics and how they propogate. Origins, geography, social contours of an outbreak? This approach to mapping and understanding a pathogen could,...

Yesterday I was talking about a pitch and we were all enthusing about postcards and their role in engaging people. We’ve a nice old paper on that in the archive. I’ve always liked it’s name: ‘Slow Knowledge: uses of the postcard in

re-forming organisational time, place & meaning’.

In the conversation I was reminded of something I meant to blog last week on the rise in sending postcards reported by the Royal Mail:

There are certain things about postcards that people like using. They are a physical connection with the recipient, unlike a text or e-mail.

I wonder how many secret trends of this kind there are. Postcards on the rise. Paperless office as much a myth as ever it was...

Yes, indeed.

We subscribe to supply2gov (source, Patrick Towell, formerly of Simulacra), and I’m the lucky one to get the daily information on smallish government contracts out to tender. Sometimes I skip it – we have so little time that tendering to strangers feels like an impossible uphill struggle, even when we really want the work. I once did a pqq (Pre Qualifying Questionnaire) for the National Audit Office though and we got quite seriously bounced in one way (it’s very hard to answer health & safety and staff turnover questions when you have no office and no staff, as such). But it did lead a very nice lady to ring up and invite us in and give us a chance to air ourselves in a...

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren’t.

Thus ‘Next’ by Michael Crichton on the fly page (do you call them that?)

The other holiday reading included The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Persepolis and Cocaine Nights

You can detect a theme here I imagine – the constant need for story and analytical/political context to co-exist in the search for larger than life human actions and reactions. I know I bang on about Geertz:

In attempting to answer grand questions …, the anthropologist is always inclined to turn toward

the concrete, the particular, the microscopic. We are the miniaturists of the social sciences, painting on Lilliputian canvases with what we take to be delicate strokes. We hope to find in...

I’ve all sorts of other blogs brimming up (holiday reading, what really makes a springboard story, story spines, using Twyla Tharp’s box idea, how Mont Blanc uses art at the heart of brand values alignment) but I must start with Black Watch which I saw at the Barbican last night.

Synopsis An unauthorised biography of the legendary Scottish regiment. Celebrated for its bravery and clan loyalties, the Black Watch has been in the vanguard of countless British military expeditions from Waterloo and the Somme to Kosovo. Its last great challenge before enforced amalgamation was relieving American forces at Camp Dogwood in Iraq during 2004. The National Theatre of Scotland presents this timely and vital theatrical investigation based on interviews with former soldiers of the...

It’s a hard knock life ain’t it? This is where Fifi and I have been forced to stroll to for our coffee breaks this week. On the wander back, we stumbled over a very unlikely exhibition of modern art in the (beautiful) home of the chair of the Alde & Ore Association which exists to

preserve for the Public benefit the Alde, Ore and Butley Creek rivers and their banks from Shingle Street to their tidal limits and such of the land adjoining them or upstream as may be considered to affect them, together with the features of beauty and or historic public interest in that area

It seems fortuitous beyond anything reasonable (knowledge management mystics would bang on here about serendipity...