Replying to LO30178 --
Dear LO,
Michael Bremmer writes,
>I find helping people create pictures of the situation is extremely
>valuable. A picture is indeed worth a 1000 words. (so much for this
>treatise)
>These are not artistic (talented) Andrew C. type pictures. They are simple
>diagrams.
>Make a Value Stream Map (Womack - Learning to Think or Jones - Learning to
>See) What happens outside the company, organization, or department to get
>things started. Go from suppliers to customers for the service or products
>being delivered. I like to blend a strong time element into these
>pictures.
Would you like to see a place where Andrew C type pictures meets simple
diagrams authored by those concerned most directly with the issues outline
and to hand. I am happy to say thay are 'dia-grams' because that is I
suppose like 'dial-logues', but archetype is more fitting. I have created
a PowerPoint recently and have made it available to Rick for the archive.
It is in PP and only appreciated in XP format or version.
[Host's Note: The PowerPoint file is at
http://www.learning-org.com/docs/LO30193AboriginalPresencings.ppt
.. Rick]
The text is already in the archive here somewhere, about two years ago. I
was interested in the connections between a people (aboriginals) who could
almost 'see' and 'feel' and 'walk' their surroundings ( field effects )
and LO, 'dialogue', ecology, well-- you know me ;-)...The artists of the
two works were a CEO and a transport director ;-)...in the workshop there
were no guidelines, so the 'connections' in the case of one with
aboriginal artworks (which is exampled in the compilation) are just there,
simply ;-)noticed by me some time later ;-) though the/my own research
into aboriginal images and only then retro-relating it to his image -
which incidentally he gave me permission for a consultancy to use as a
graphics motif for it's brochures. And the other is very like a
Kabbalaist amulet design. Which I came upon an example of in a catalogue
to a show in Chicago. Again the CEO who made it was working
straightforwardly, fast, no brief from me. What one could call automatism
- an offshoot of the surrealist school...
I have been hanging out in the world of Demming to Senge and everything
in-between, AI, LO, EI, KM version I and KM Version II and many
peripherals from those disciplines, complexity, Time, ...the list is wide
;-) mouthed ;-) and the use that is made of any connection between one of
mankind's oldest, surest, highest, easiest, most natural processes (image
making) is rarer than hens teeth.
If I were, say, offering a seminar at Green College, Oxford next year with
the subject line, My Seven Years Living and Learning with the
Organizational Development Community (aka 'you lot') I would have to say
that OL and LO and all the others 'disciplines' have a very limited and
'self limiting' view of a/ what fine art is in the 21st C and b/ what fine
art could accomplish for people in organizations in the 21st C.
(I could go through to Z - but I used up a lota space up in my last
offering;-)
I think it is about time we were, all, felt, big enough, brave enough to
speak our minds about this incapacitating fear that is pervasive. I smell
it on the local stage, on the national stage and the global stage, I smell
it in small organization, medium sized ones and large ones.
A few months ago I sent an image to LO of a child, an albino boy starving
in Africa. I enquired and he was 'lost'. His image was lost in the ether.
That is possibly powerful symbolism for an African. I decided in the end
not to resend it for the archive, just as I asked Rick for the image of
the yellow church to be removed from the archive. My sensibility, such as
it is, told me I was wrong to have offered his image in the first place,
and second there was not enough caritas living here to do with the light
in him, in your retina, to do what Hannah Arandt said is possible, to
raise flame from dust.
I have no idea how many images I have shared privately that I have created
over the last few years, Mike. I do know that nearly every single one no
longer exists, in whatever original form it took.
You'll all be familiar with the way that Jesus spoke with Peter when he was
handing him the keys to the Church on earth. (I am not a theologian so your
input might be valuable if you have a christian education) ... what...I
learned...over ...time... was that Jesus... was at
each.......interval.....creating a space, .....a doubt...... a
distance......with-in Peter....so that Peter would have to go ...re-find
himself ...and the Creator out of that dust of creationing.
I am always reminded when I confront the blankness of the page or the
canvas that the greatest art is first, not there, then, it is there and
then, it is not there again.
"Dear Ilya Prigogine, tell us about the value of art in relation;-) to
science...."
" - Strangely enough this (aspect of) creativity is undervalued in science.
We all realise that of Shakespeare, Beethoven, or van Gogh had died soon
after birth, no one else would have achieved what they did. Is this also true
for scientists?...."
Art is a miracle of time. A miracle without end.
Love,
Andrew
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