healthy debate

I was in the audience for a really interesting debate at the University. The time was short, and hence we didn't get to great depth, but some reflections:

I asked, how should we at Coventry University be equipping our students for the complex health care environment?

Partnership development at all levels - we all need to be making connections with practice.
Brief interventions are what's required: by all professionals acting across boundaries.
Focus on delivery and on innovation.

Becca made the excellent point about preparing health professionals for uncertainty.

An example was given, by one of the nurses in the audience, of nurses from respiratory medicine at UHCW doing smoking prevention in the community, having bid competitively for the contract.

emotional labour indeed

Two years on.

I now find myself esconced in a large bureaucracy. A middle england University. Doing emotional labour, hard labour.

And part of that is making choices. Trying to behave collegiately and being forced into individual decisions, with colleagues resisting cooption to process.

I make the choices. I take the consequences. That's how it works.

Alternatively I take no responsibility, I make no choices, I merely observe and comment on the inevitability of compromise, the inexorable journey to mediocrity and failure.

Not my usual course, so I guess that's why I can feel so conflicted.

emotional labour

One of the results of the many fruitful conversations I had with my soulmate, Paul, in Montreal a few weeks ago was a realisation that making choices is emotional labour. The energy investment in making choices, and taking responsibility or accepting risk is significant. If it is a real choice, that is ( and not a decision dictated by the bureaucracy, or the certainty provided by authority).

True choice makes us anxious. Some of us even design our lives in ways to avoid freedom of choice, because it is threatening to our security.

So, it strikes me that this is a form of emotional labour that is not at all recognised in thinking about organizations.

provocations

i need some space to gather statements that i will use as provocations. i just posted one to twitter: utopian aspirations about democracy and community are doomed to fail until we address the central issue of men and their sexuality.

more?
classic leadership is a male homosexual fantasy
organizations are primary sites for domination and submission
management fetishizes men
we are all buggered by leadership
men have to learn to submit
management has to learn to submit
suits do not produce efficiency
profit is not sexual fulfilment
we need to talk about our misbehaviour in organizations


i will write into these.

space

now that space is beginning to appear in my head, and in my life, there are green shoots of possibility showing. i'm making links between management innovation (see MLab) web 2.0 and my personal life and the thesis. it's possible i could have something important to say, and i do begin to wonder if there are channels available.

although there is innovation in practice and thinking, there is a lack of a critical voice, and a lack of acknowledgement that old-paradigm thinking will inevitable try to co-opt innovative methods. as ever, we run the risk of a naïve essentialism in attitude; which inevitably leads to the polly-anna or utopian (self-)destruction of our hopes. i haven't expressed this well, so i will return to this. it's something about the inevitable, hubristic destructive core of optimistic utopian thinking.

what i must do is write. write and communicate. everything else is subsidiary. money must be earned, but is subsidiary to the need to communicate what i see, what i prophesy.

Hm, not sure about this lack of capital letters, though, LOL.

pressures

I thought it might be a useful exercise to list here the pressures that I am experiencing which take me away from good space, from clear thoughtful space which may lead to creativity.

The first is, of course, paradoxical in that it's my desire to know, my desire to vision the future that gets in the way of knowing, or allowing the future to blossom from the present. Thus I fret, or I fantasize about my next steps, developing images of myself (they're usually negative, by the way).

Next, I suddenly find all manner of things interesting, from twitter, to prayer, to cooking and baking. Note here that by prayer, I mean the form of prayer rather than the essence. So I occupy time with seeming to pray: the quality of that prayer time is poor.

Finally, for now at least, and perhaps most interestingly, there is an amazing pattern of inactivity. Yes, doing nothing to stop myself doing nothing. How does this work? Well, essentially one discovers a few tasks that could be done (note, could). Then one lists the tasks, and allocates target completion dates. Yes, these are SMART objectives. Then the trick is to avoid doing them, thus becoming anxious and feeling guilty about not achieving things. Finally, then I am in an anxious space, worrying about my lack of productivity about things I didn't even have to do! I become increasingly unproductive, but rather neatly I fill the space with guilt and anxiety so that I don't have the space, the peace and the quiet which inactivity should lead to. I am thus busy doing nothing, preventing myself from being nothing. Isn't that neat?

unknowing

One of the clearest values with which I concluded my thesis was that of the wisdom of uncertainty, or more poetically, the Keatsian concept of negative capability. I was proposing that our addiction to certainty, under modernity, was limiting our potential, overstructuring our organizations and perpetuating hierarchy, while more grossly leading to domination and oppression, indeed abuse, within organizing.

Our intolerance of our anxiety leads us to surrender our authority to those who have the confidence, chutzpah, or those whom we think are born to lead.

But here I am, two weeks after sending my thesis to the University, in a space of complete unknowing, not feeling very wise at all. I am trying to be comtortable in my anxiety, but it's hard work.

Today I am going to do some gardening, some meditation with nature, and tomorrow I will lay out thoughts, experiences, and aspirations and we'll see where that takes me.