A few years ago I read an inspirational book by Michael Gelb called “How to think like Leonardo da Vinci“. It’s an amazing book to prompt different thinking and increase your powers of creativity. The book came to mind last week as I was thinking through some ideas in the day job. I want to … Read more
In the NHS in England we have had several years worth of initiatives which are designed to encourage innovation. For a monolithic entity that spends £110 billion a year and has 1.3 million staff, the rhetoric around the NHS began before the global economic crash with some approaches which were aimed at encouraging modernisation and … Read more
I wrote about Reflective Practise on this website a couple of years ago. My thinking has moved forward since then – you could say, the result of reflective practise itself! Here’s what I wrote back then: What do I mean by ‘Reflective Practise’? This is the regular habit of asking yourself questions about how you … Read more
I love reading. I’ve always got a few books on the go at once. I also like variety, so I do read books from a wide range of genres. Years ago I set up a simple set of lists to keep track of my reading: Books Read – I keep a list of the books … Read more
Yesterday I was reading through some study notes I made back in 1998. I wrote with great excitement about the fact that I was going to be able to access the internet from home, not just in the office. It was a big deal. And now, 15 years later, the internet is on the TV, … Read more
Last week I worked with the team I lead on the values that underpin our work. A couple of years ago we commissioned an Impact Report. The team who led the work (Nick Fayers and Sue Roberts) interviewed our key stakeholders and produced some underlying metrics to assess the impact of our work. From the … Read more
I can point to a specific time at which my poetry writing shifted from early nonsense to something that I was proud of. I was working as a Community Artist at the time and the workshops we were delivering were inspiring my work into new areas. I was also experimenting with making small hand-made booklets. … Read more
In the next few weeks my working patterns will change significantly. I am seeing this as an amazing opportunity to free up time to write more. This blog has been really quiet for the last few months as a lot of my energy has gone into getting into the space for this to happen. There … Read more
This is just a really quick comment on the idea of team working and encouraging discussions in a way that resembles flash mobbing. What do I mean by that? Well, in the last few years I have become increasingly impressed with techniques for facilitation that rely on the wisdom within the room and push the … Read more
I wrote in earlier posts about the work we did last year as a team to develop a Creative Learning Academy approach. This included reading a book a month, a set of workshops and other activities. This helped to inform the developments in the Releasing Potential Programme which we are now running for R&D Managers … Read more