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Somewhere in the city..? 16 April 2012

Posted by agsteele in : Personal , comments closed

There are many great success stories around, but those works very rarely reflect the bride of Jesus Christ. Sometimes she seems to be as elusive as her Lord. Rarely do you see her beautiful and whole, gathering somewhere in the city. Rarely will you ever gather in a place where you will sense the deep work of Christ in the corporate body of people. Being with a people who have been made one … and whose oneness – tested by the long trek of time – is found in nothing, absolutely nothing, but Christ. Such a people is rare, exotically rare. Rare because that glorious work which the Father did in the Son was so rare.

from Gene Edwards, The Inward Journey

 

Best Practice or Good Work? 12 April 2012

Posted by agsteele in : Training , comments closed

In January I was taken with a blog post from Gurprriet Siingh challenging the current fascination with the idea of best practice. Siingh observed that what might be good practice for me may not be best for you.

This week I’ve been reading a number of papers from the 1980s and was impressed by the way in which a number of them seem to address a world not dissimilar to the one we are facing right now – pressure on budgets driving calls for greater productivity and so forth seemed to at the top of the agenda for writers in 1983-1985.

I was struck, therefore, by a comment from Anant Neghandi (1983) writing in the Asia Pacific Journal of Management

There is no ‘best’ way of doing things. The principle of equifinality applies to the functioning of social as well as business organisations. Managers may achieve given objectives through various methods.

This comment from nearly thirty years ago challenges the notion that there is a single ‘best practice.’ If Neghandi was correct there is rarely an approach to our practice which we can describe as being in some way, uniquely, the best.

To do so implies that other approaches are to some extent less than the best. If it is true that we may achieve what is needed by various means then perhaps there are lots of good practices to be noticed, made sense of, applied and become Good Work.

Negandhi, A. R. (1983). Management in the Third World. Asia Pacific Journal of Mangement, 1 (1), 15-25.

 

So what makes me qualified? 28 March 2012

Posted by agsteele in : Training , comments closed

The British public and media have been gripped by a crisis of trust in its media and journalism in particular. This crisis has led to the closure of one of the nation’s oldest and largest circulation newspapers, has brought senior journalists and editors before a judicial enquiry, and to the closure of the newspaper industry’s complaints body declaring itself to be unable to regulate news gathering.

by now this news is not new. But for a trainer who spends part of his time training budding journalists in Africa and beyond and who has a particular interest in media ethics this crisis also raises so profound questions.

Perhaps more than any other I find myself pondering why I, and those who tread the same path, think we are qualified to train media ethiics when we come from and represent a system which is continuing to reveal itself as ethically bankrupt. Our media systems are ethically discredited.

Of course there are justifications.

If journalists are not encouraged and helped to develop their own ethical frameworks how can we expect anyone to even be slightly successful?
If we don’t help anyone from a professional context to make sense and meaning from the situations and dilemmas they face, how can we expect appropriate responses?
If we don’t provide the tools to reflect upon our practice as professionals then we can only expect un-reflexive responses to the challenges.

When it comes to media ethics, I don’t teach the ethical path that should be followed. But I can encourage the development of skills which will help the practitioner to think and act ethically.

 

Thin places for introverts 6 March 2012

Posted by agsteele in : Training , comments closed

If you’re like me you’ll be subscribed to all manner of Email lists, RSS feeds and so forth which disgorge megabytes of stuff into my inbox most days. I long since developed a quick scan process to avoid spending too much time reading things which aren’t that relevant. Despite this somewhat haphazard approach I still manage to locate those snippets of information that are pure gold.

Such was the case today.

Olivia Mitchell’s monthly Speaking About Presenting newsletter often has helpful stuff and this week I was drawn to a short note she included a link to a presentation at this year’s TED event. Olivia is, like me and many trainers I know, a self-confessed introvert. That’s not a bad thing, just a recognition that interaction with large numbers of people is stressful and draining. That we need time to recover after being in those public places. As Cain notes ‘Introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they’re in quieter, more low-key environments.’

Susan CainSo I was keen to watch the TED presentation by Susan Cain who makes a passionate call for extroverts to embrace the introverts around us and for we introverts to unpack out bags and reveal the hidden resources and value we bring.

I was gripped by Cain’s gentle exposition of the value of the introvert. ‘Solitude matters, and for some people it is the air that they breathe.’

In the middle of her talk Cain refers to the place of solitude in much religious expression. “We’ve know for centuries the transcendent power of solitude…” And then came the killer claim: “No wilderness, no revelation.”

I found myself musing… is this a claim that we need the liminal experience of solitude in order to discover new stuff (sic)?

As a member of the Northumbria Community I am familiar with the solitude embraced by the religious of the middle ages – whether on an island off the coasts of England and Scotland or away in the deserts of North Africa, men and women of faith have embraced these thin places “where the veil between this world and the Other world is thin, the Other world is more near”1.

I don’t know if Susan Cain was making spiritual claims. I suspect not and neither do I. At least not just now. But I do know that my experiences in community and as a trainer support the claim that revelation comes from the experience of solitude. For me it provides one of those triggers that is now called a paradigm shift. Not always, but occasionally time away is what allows me new insight into what I’m working on.

So whatever our faith tradition, or even no faith, there may be real value in going to the wilderness just once in awhile.

1http://www.thinplaces.net

 

Happy 80th birthday – BBC World Service 29 February 2012

Posted by agsteele in : Personal,Training , comments closed

Today marks the 80th birthday of the BBC World Service. It is an institution that has been part of almost all my working life.

In 1978 Bush House became my place of work and the source of many crazy stories that still get told to enliven the ends of dinner parties and the like. They were fun days with the emphasis very much on Eastern Europe.  The days of the Bulgarian, Romanian and Hungarian services. The days when there were still programmes for Portugal, France and Spain. The days of interval signal, or bongs as we used to call them sounding out the morse code V ona timpani.  he days when recordings were shipped to transmitter sites so they could be broadcast in better quality without the interference of being relayed from London. The days when a colleague from the Bulgarian service, Georgi Markov, was murdered by poisoning.

Later we found ourselves living in South America and a key piece of every expatriate’s kit was a shortwave radio. We avidly listened to any programme that gave us a sense of what life was like in Thatcher’s Britain. These were also the days of the Falklands war and with correspondents we counted ships and planes in and out with the World Service.

Returning to UK that shortwave radio still traveled with me as I spent life visiting partner agencies to share in training. Even now, hardly a month passes without the Word Service being part of my listening life.

Of course, rarely do I need a shortwave radio. Many African cities have an FM station or medium wave signal. The internet provides easy access even on my mobile phone. Somewhere along the way that shortwave radio ended up gathering dust on a bedside table.

Yet wherever I travel, the BBC is still held in great regard. I may have worked at Bush House (soon to cease being home to the World Service) 35 years ago, but when new contacts hear of that now distant association the caché is still present.

Through its lives, the World Service has had to reinvent itself more than once. Empire Service, war reporting, cold war service, a shift towards the near East and now… No doubt it will need to be reinvented again.

But my guess is that many itinerant trainers like me will continue to rely on news from London.

. . . _