Having thought about this idea of phronesis  for a while it didn't come as a surprise to learn that the three 'R's' - usually taken to mean reading, writing and 'rithmatic - were originally conceived as

Reading and writing
Reckoning and figuring
Wrighting and wroughting

... where the third 'R' refers to the knowledge of action, of making and undertaking, of phronetic knowledge.

... and brings to mind, again, the distinction between competence and capability, a foundation of skills and competencies which are not ends in...

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Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Laurie Anderson
 

In 1994 we stayed for a couple of nights with our friend Klaus Maier, Director of Theater von Menschen für Menschen in Nürnberg.

Not a terribly gloomy place - I think Ella had ice cream - parks, gardens, leafy walks, lakes with ducks and, quite suddenly, Monumental Monolithic Masonry, The Zeppelin Field. Staggering!

The word zeppelin is very evocative, at least to me. It's quite possible still to imagine a great airship nuzzling gigantically to the ground before us,...

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"In 1931, the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn't be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms ... of that mathematical branch itself. You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules and axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical systems of any...

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 A working hypothesis: every coach needs a coach. Like every shrink needs a shrink. Something about keeping yourself honest, setting up a sounding board for reflection on the practice, shrugging off the Mantle of the Expert (something I learned from the legendary Dorothy Heathcote a hundred years ago, back in the Drama Days) to look at oneself in the role.

My coach - a dear (critical) friend and colleague, Ron Adie, founder of Responsive Management Australia, a long established expert in professional development...

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We are social animals

We are hard wired for stories

We use stories to sing the world: Body as Land, Land as Story 

Discourses arrive after the singing, as both agents and actors

We make category errors all the time, not the least in distinguishing the singing from the sung.

Cultures are self organising systems, ways of being in the world 

Cultures produce artefacts and creative technologies which are perceived to have social-political and economic value. Nothing has intrinsic value.

We are simultaneously cultural producers and consumers, the authors and readers of our own lives

We concentrate the outcomes and behaviours of cultural...

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A side project, and a source of considerable joy - Universal Placebos. The idea came originally from a class I was teaching at QUT. The discussion was on branding, and moved our thinking to the value of untraded intangibles. Pet Rocks. Cans of L.A. Air - things with no intrinsic value but (potentially) considerably actual and commercial worth.

My immediate interest in placebos, or more precisely, the so-called Placebo Effect, is in the realm of health and wellbeing, and our family has had recent experience with it. Ella was born with cerebral...

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Edgeware's Build Your Business program is an alternative to business education for new entrepreneurs, and for entrepreneurs who want to re-imagine or grow their businesses. Each time it runs, it changes, because the needs of participants and the dynamics of the group make changes necessary. Edgeware aims to provide more than just a course, because there is no single pathway to success in business. Each participant comes to Edgeware with a different mix of expectations, ideals, capabilities and needs.

So Edgeware aims to provide practical skills and competencies, but also the kinds of...

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 "... The fundamental mission of a business (is) not profit, but value creation. It sees profit as a vital consequence of value creation - a means rather than an end, a result as opposed to a purpose."

Frederick F. Reichheld, Director Emeritus, Bain & Company, "The Loyalty Effect"

You know you have a business when there is a Value Proposition: 'what is it I have to offer which has a value so compelling (in the eyes of a potential customer) that s/he is willing to exchange something of value...

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I can think of four things to say about generosity.

It's a quality of behaviour which requires very little in the way of resources but which has enormous power to influence and change things, beginning with yourself.

Firstly, generosity is an accessible behaviour. A generous act can be as small and simple as giving someone ten dedicated, alert minutes of your individied attention. The generosity of a thought or an act is not scaleable; its source is the intention to give. 

Secondly, in order to think and act with generosity you have to...

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I've noticed that I'll often use optical illusions or some kind of perceptual trick in my presentations, to indicate not only how easy it is to trick the eye or the brain, but that the way see the world is the way the world becomes.  It's like everything that's going on around us can be imagined as 360° - a whole world of perception, conception, experience, emotion, input, colour and ... everything. And it's not stretching the idea too far to propose that we're only ever aware of a slice of this.    Let's...

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I think a coach does four things:

1. Mentoring - a coach should have the capacity to empathise, and to relate the coaching experience to his or her own mind-set, world view and direct experience of analogous situations and contexts.

2. Facilitation of learning - a coach should have the capacity to transfer knowledge, either tacitly or explicitly, in a way which is beneficial to the client.

3. Problem solving - a coach should be able to deploy a variety of problem-solving processes so that the client can methodically work through the parameters of a problem to evolve...

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I'm fascinated by the emerging field of 'experimental philosophy', where it seems that philosophers are stepping away from their armchairs and using research methods from psychology to tackle philosophical questions.

Like intentionality.

This is interesting enough in itself, but just recently I've been pondering some of the ideas I heard expressed and saw practiced in workshops here with my friend and colleague Paul Natorp, from the Kaos Pilots. Paul's gigs were mainly about 'creative leadership', the kind of leadership that is appropriate to innovation and...

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 I was invited to convene a session at the Brisbane Ideas Festival in March 2009, a panel on the topic of Creative Entrepreneurs: The Artists of Commerce. I selected a group of Edgies from a variety of businesses and a variety of demographics, reinforcing the concept that creative entrepreneurship is a matter of psychographics, not demographics, as in Ian Plowman's proposition that Edgies are essentially 'weird', and that Edgeware is a platform for 'validating weirdness'. More on the video itself, also accessible through Youtube (and thanks to Edgie Sarah Moran for this).

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Coach as Cartographer

May 20, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 

Everyone is coaching or being coached; there are life coaches, career coaches, personal coaches, fitness coaches, executive coaches, coaches for getting out of bed in the morning and coaches for getting to sleep at night. Why do we need coaches so much and so often?

Could it be that the old, well-worn and predictable pathways - any path to anywhere and every path to everywhere - are dsiappearing, the maps no longer even remotely relating to the territory? Are coaches our conceptual cartographers?

I'm not a great fan of mind mapping, but I find the...

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6 Word Memoirs

July 12, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 

Smith Magazine invites us to summarise our lives in six words - 'Six Word Memoirs'. I thought, 'Easy! I have the Edgeware motto, near enough to six words: make money, have fun, change the world. I could lose the article before "world" and that's the six.'

Then I looked at the phrase as a 'memoir' and it didn't feel right. It struck me that a motto, or a guiding statement of principle, or a goal, or a home truth, has to chunk things up to get to a seamless, clear whole. Life...

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Business Ethics

July 12, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

Business ethics is an important field for Edgeware because it’s in the ‘change the world’ bit of our DNA.

You don’t ‘adopt’ ethical practices; you can’t operate without ethics, even if you couldn’t name them and you don’t have a code. We make moral judgements all the time and they’re the basis of our actions a lot of the time whether we recognise it or not. The question is: are these good ethics or not so good ethics, is this action which is good or action which is not so good? And this ‘good’ concept, that’s...

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Speaking at the Hive

July 17, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 I was asked to give a short talk at a Brisbane networking function called The Hive on 30 June 09, on the topic of 'entrepreneurship'. The talk was filmed, and video is now on Youtube, but to save the bother of looking it up, here's the talk, in three sections.