Weeknote 681: bricks

Things I have learned this week:

Lego Serious Play. I spent a good few hours this week on Amale’s LSP for Coaching course with a wonderful group of other coaches and facilitators. I have to say I’ve been a bit sniffy about LSP until now, partly because the book I bought about it was so boring, and partly because the term “serious” put me off. Why do things need to be serious to be useful? (Having said that, I was probably falling into the trap of conflating serious with sombre).

Anyway, 6 hours with Amale talking through the techniques and having the chance to use them opened up a whole world of thinking for me. There are lots of parallels with the things I’ve been doing with the meerkat cards, but some other nice things about the approach that are different.

It’s not the answer to everything (nothing is) but a useful new technique to have in the toolbox. Amale has a few spaces on her next course if this piques your interest…
WB-40 reached 300 Episodes this week. The show has changed more in the last 5 months than its entire previous history. This is a very good thing.
I’m continuing to work out my role. I’ve realised (partly through a mini-coaching session on the LSP course) that I’ve been conflicted between adding value as a practitioner and adding value as a team facilitator. I’m better off sticking to one for now, and it’s probably the latter.
I’ve also been thinking about the role of a Generalist working in an organisation that self-defines as experts. Is Generalism an expertise? Probably.

It’s also made me wonder if maybe Generalism is more conducive to a regular sense of imposter and Specialism. There again, this might just be a sense of the grass always being greener…
Thank God this dreadful government is falling apart and about to leave us. The mess that whoever comes in next has to pick up is dreadful, though.
I will enjoy the schadenfreude of what appears to be setting itself up for the worst-run election campaign in history, though. I know that’s neither big nor clever, but there we go.
Another trap I found myself and my thinking in this week was the “I wouldn’t start from here” trap. People are where they are. You can’t teleport them or an organisation to somewhere else. You have to plot a course from here, not there.
At what point is the BBC’s Chris Mason going to realise that it looks better when you shave your head?