… a good way to keep feeling young is to keep feeling humble, to keep learning. The people who think they know everything get old before their time.

As he so often does, Hugh nails it with this cartoon.

Michele Martin:

So we approach professional transitions from a place of wanting to know what we should DO and tend to constantly search for the RIGHT ACTION to take us toward our goals. We may pay some lip service to the emotions that go with these transitions, but we don’t tend to spend a lot of time on the emotional aspect because to be “professional” is to have control of our emotions, especially any emotions that threaten to become “messy”.

An interesting read on holding space for change. This has been my experience working on change within organisations. The emphasis is placed on action and dealing with change from a situational point of view rather than a people-oriented view (both are needed). Rarely is time spent on understanding the emotional impacts of change. Often there is little or no awareness of, and compassion for, liminal experiences.

Noam Chomsky on Being Truly Educated

Noam Chomsky on being truly educated:

Via Open Culture.

Seth Godin:

And, person by person, trait by trait, we build a broken organization because we believe that function trumps cooperation, inspiration and care.

Until it doesn’t, and then, all we’ve got left is a mess.

Amazing organizations are all about people. We need to be unashamedly humanistic in our approach to organisational life.

Celebrated anthropologist, philosopher, and systems theorist Gregory Bateson: There is a story which I have used before and shall use again: A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private large computer. He asked it (no doubt in his best Fortran), ‘Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?’ The machine then set to work to analyse its own computational hab…  
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How Empathy Can Change the World

Cultural thinker and writer Roman Krznaric, argues that empathy is a powerful tool for transforming and improving societies on a mass scale.

Cynthia Kurtz:

I’ve been waiting a long time to write this essay. I thought of it four or five years ago when I was writing a series of posts about natural storytelling. I never wrote the essay because other projects got in the way, but it has been at the back of my mind all this time. I’m excited to finally bring these thoughts to you.

It was well worth the wait. There are so many gems in this essay that looks deeply into The Neverending Story and what it has to say about storytelling. It’s quite a long read, but well worth the effort. A must-read for anyone who works with stories.

The whole area of why people do what they do, and what you can do to support them changing that, is an absolute passion of mine. It intrigues me, fascinates me and is such a complex area, I know it will keep my massively curious mind, engaged for the rest of my life.

My friend and colleague Kevin Bishop, has launched a new venture and started a blog. If you’re interested in enterprise change management, or change in general, this is well worth following.

Alex Swarbrick, writing for Changeboard:

Maybe there’s something inherent in OD which doesn’t help. Many of us like things that can be neatly labelled, wrapped up and put in a box; things that can be boiled down to a single concept, deconstructed and reduced to a single principle. OD is exactly the opposite. It’s about the bigger picture; it’s about the complexity of systems and the messiness of human interactions that make up organisational life.

A useful exploration of what organisational development is. As OD practitioners, it’s important that we help others understand what it is and why it’s important—and not get in the way of that.

Serversaurus, a Melbourne-based green cloud computing company, has purchased the customers and infrastructure of Brisbane based cloud hosting company Tract.com.

This is exciting news for my friends Marty and Nick. They’re good guys and deserve every success. I’ve hosted my own website and online infrastructure with them since 2005.