The paths of my upbringing - Day 5

Day 5 (5th December 2018)

5 Olympic rings - they symbolise the five continents of the world. It was
designed in 1913 and the Olympic flag was first hoisted in 1920 at the
Antwerp Games in Belgium. The 6 colours (the 6th being the white background)
are the colours used in competitors flags at the time of design.

I loved this post when it was first published in January 2015 - so I am sending a huge "High Five" to its author, Keith Gulliver. It is always good to be reminded of your roots and how they have helped to make you the person that you are, as well as providing a foundation from which to appreciate where you are now headed. Over the next couple of days I will spend much time pondering our futures, as I am speaking at and chairing sessions at the Academic Research Conference, which this year is being hosted by Nottingham University. It is an excellent conference, run in conjunction with the CIPD, and I know that I will return to work full of thoughts and insights. 

I first made Keith's acquaintance via Twitter (his handle is @KeithGulliver) and through his piece in the 2014 Book of Blogs - This Time It's Personnel. He wrote a great chapter about wearable technology and its impact on HR. Perhaps his choice of subject matter was not surprising, given that at that time he worked for a leading technology firm. Keith has moved on and he is now a Policy Consultant for West Sussex County Council and he does great work supporting local schools. Keith is an avid follower of Pompey (Portsmouth Football Club) and writes a regular football blog (Being Blue Through and Through) and also a less active one on cricket (Memories of Bowerchalke Cricket Club). He is also a frequent commentator on HR.

******************************************************************

A Rural Beginning

I grew up in a small village outside of Salisbury, an idyllic picturesque place in what is known as the Chalke Valley. 

Above Bowerchalke, Chalke Valley

There was a school, a shop, a post office, two public houses, a church, a chapel, a village hall, vast acres of farm land and a river that slowly wound its way from source springs and on to the sea. 

Footbridge over the River Ebble

In the Summer the villagers played and watched cricket and in the Winter it was football. Victories and defeats were celebrated with opponents in equal measure at the main village pub. Everyone knew everyone.

Village cricket match seen from Marleycombe Hill

Although the population was small the village itself was spread out over a relatively large area, houses clustered around a number of different farms between the flood plain and the chalk downs. The church was separated from most of the village, history told us that was due to the Black Death forcing villagers to abandon their homes and move. 

Death strangling a black death plague victim
c1370 manuscript

A story for another day perhaps.

Carefree Days

For me and my friends the village was our adventure playground. In the Summer months we would spend many a carefree hour exploring: searching farm buildings; looking for old bottles in forgotten rubbish dumps; climbing trees; traipsing along the banks of the river, fishing for trout; building camps; lighting fires; and apple scrumping. 

Young Schoolboys Playing with a Toy Boat
Alfred Bathurst Binning

With hindsight it wasn't always the safest of playgrounds! Sometimes we felt the wrath of an angry farmer when we trampled in places we shouldn't have. As we explored we looked after each other and guess what? We survived. 

1970s photo of boys playing in a tree house

We survived and we learned together through our experiences.   

Instinctively we knew all the different footpaths, bridleways and ancient farm tracks just as our parents and grandparents had before us.

Ox Drove ancient track, Chalke Valley

Expanding Horizons

Sometimes my Dad, the local plumber, would allow me to join him in his work van on a trip high in to the downs overlooking the village, a place I would never normally venture to. Perhaps it was to fix a remote cow trough, check on a farm pump house, measure water levels in one of the farm's reservoirs or record rainfall in his little notebook.

Often Dad would park up the van and we would stop for a cup of tea (and probably share a piece of homemade jam sponge cake!). He'd load his pipe with Erinmore Mixture and light up. We would sit in silence and admire the glorious views across the village and of paths to Salisbury and unknown places beyond as far as the eye could see. We didn't need words, the view said everything. 

Grazing Cattle on Marleycombe Hill - photo by Ken Leslie
Highly commended in Landscape Photographer of the Year 2012

These were paths that most of my friends and I would eventually take, never to return. 

Salisbury Fair

Every year in October the fair came to the city of Salisbury and set itself up in the marketplace at the centre of town. 

Salisbury Fair, 1978

It's an event I was often reminded of whenever I complained to my Mum or Dad about some perceived injustice (most probably to do with being told to go to bed early and having to miss Match Of The Day!), "It's not fair!" I would whine to which came the stock reply: "Fair is not until October!".

I'm sure that for the hardened fair attraction owners it was just another week, in another city. One more stop on a continuous trek around the country. 

But this was one of the highlights of the year to small, wide-eyed children like me. Something special. A small piece of glamour in an otherwise dour world where black and white TV was still very much the norm.   

Salisbury Fair - granted by Royal Charter to Bishop of Salisbury
by Henry III, in 1227, to be held on 3rd Monday in October

It was loud and it was brash. All bright flashing lights, noisy diesel engines, candy floss the size of clouds, sad looking goldfish, pumping, pulsating rock and wheezy organ music.  

For a few hours each year the fair sucked you in to its exciting, mesmerising world: stalls with enticing but cheap-looking prizes; rides that made you scream, your tummy churn and your legs go all wobbly.

And then it was gone, over for another year. Packed up overnight and trundling on to the next town.

The Penny Falls

One of my favourite stalls at the fair was The Penny Falls. A series of steps that slowly moved in and out, covered in coins. Some of the coins overlapped, some tantalisingly teetered on the edge of a step ready to fall, others were stuck in limbo, unlikely to ever move. 

The idea behind The Penny Falls was a very simple one: roll a coin down a small metal shoot in to the machine and try to dislodge some of the coins from the top step to create a cascade. 

It was all about the timing. If you were lucky your coin led to a chain reaction, other coins slowly spilled over from one step to another until you were rewarded with those that dropped in to a small metal opening at the bottom of the machine.              

British Pre-decimal coinage

Invariably, the meagre winnings were used to start the process all over again. A few fleeting moments of fun until the coins stubbornly refused to cascade anymore.

Paths and Organisations

  

We're obsessed with having paths in our organisations for people to follow. 

There seems to be something comforting and reassuring about a path. We desire a sense of direction especially when it's not always 100% clear where we're heading. 

We develop strategies to get us from a current to a future state. We build plans. We talk about roadmaps and being on a journey.

Our organisations often have rigid, formal hierarchies. 

We put our people on to development programmes, some are grandly titled 'fast tracks'. 

Our people go through what is sometimes referred to as an employee life-cycle: from on-boarding to exit.

We have career paths and build personal portfolios of artifacts based on our experiences. We used to refer to career ladders but now we refer to career matrices.

We encourage our people to consider carefully their digital footprint and build their personal, social networks.

Visualisation of an email network, using Gephi

We like the certainty of a path. Paths give us direction, set us on a course from A to B to Z and sometimes back to A. 

We look back and we look forward. We have choices, make decisions and we take turns and forks. 

Complex flights of birds captured on film by Dennis Hlynsky

We're surrounded by many different paths both physical and virtual. Some we know well, others less so. Paths lead to experiences that generate memories and metaphors.

Ultimately, paths are all about people: those who make them and those who take them.

Reputedly the earliest recorded human/hominid footprints
dated 3.7 million years imprints made in volcanic ash
National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C

The People's Path

Have you ever noticed footpaths that were designed to take people along a specific, elongated route to get to their destination, but which over time just get ignored as people create shorter alternatives? 

You often see them in parks and in edge-of-town super markets and shopping centres. Ugly gaps, muddy, The People's Path, the turf or bark chippings long gone.   

It only takes one person to dare and make the first move before others follow suit, perhaps not wanting to miss out on something, anything. They're not always sure. 

I guess it's a natural human tendency to find the shorter route, to follow well-worn paths, even if it might mean scrambling past a thorny bush or tripping over a low wooden barrier. Time is at a premium. Sometimes it's just down to ignorance and laziness. Sometimes it's just poorly thought out design.   

Over time, as the gap gets wider the 'dangers' diminish.

What amuses me is when the path designers 'give in' and formalise The People's Path, perhaps acknowledging in some way that they got it wrong.

Final Thoughts

With our desire to create ever better ways to develop and manage people's talent have we inadvertently created too many paths and too much complexity?

Of course we can make our lives as complicated or as simple as we like - that decision is down to us.

But let's avoid stifling people in our organisations. I believe people will be at their best when they are allowed to take time and have the freedom to: 

• Explore and have adventures.
• Try out new things and make mistakes.
• Be themselves and really get to know others.
• Help each other to find the way that works best for them.
• Make decisions for themselves.
• Ask for help without fear of embarrassment.
• Pause, think, reflect and learn.
• Enjoy life as themselves.
• Pass on their experiences and memories.

I guess those beliefs were formed along the paths of my upbringing.

Comet Tails and Dust Trails

Day 28 (Monday 28th December 2015)

28 domino tiles make up a standard set. The earliest mention of dominoes
is from the Song dynasty in China. Dominoes were first played in Europe in the 18th century,
it is presumed that the game was brought to Italy by returning Christian missionaries.
The word "domino' is derived from a spotted hood traditionally worn during the Venetian carnival.

For many of us around the world, today is a Bank Holiday to compensate for Boxing day falling on a Saturday. Even if you have not a day off work, I hope that you are enjoying a peaceful period before the start of the New Year and find some calm in which to read today's wonderful blog.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce a new voice to the Advent Series, Siobhan Sheridan, the HR Director of the leading UK charity NSPCC (founded in 1884 and originally called the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children). Siobhan commenced her career in a customer-facing role in retail banking and soon found herself responsible for training others. She transferred into HR via Learning & Development. She has an impressive track record, moving from Financial Services into the Public sector, where she was HR Director for Defra and the Department for Work and Pensions, before becoming a recognised leader within the Not For Profit arena. She has a strong moral core and a great sense of humour. Siobhan is active on social media. You can follow her on Twitter, her handle is @SiobhanHRSheri.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Comet tails and dust trails... 

'Will you write me a post?' 

'Comet tails and dust trails is the theme' she said... I was struck by the beautiful melody of the title, my instant slightly magical desire to grab the tail and take a ride across the night sky and perhaps more importantly, by the fact that I know nothing about either comets or their tails.

Somewhere in the far recesses of my memory I recalled that comets often appeared in ancient stories as 'harbingers of doom' or as 'portents of great events.'  Inspired by recent conversations about traditional stories with Geoff Mead and Sue Hollingsworth, I set off in search of where this view of such a beautiful phenomenon might have started in storytelling terms. 

Fairly soon after I began to forage, I was intrigued to stumble across not just any story, but what is claimed to be the world's oldest work of literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh. I won't trouble you here with the telling of the whole tale itself. It is, as you would expect, quite long.

Gilgamesh and the Star of Anu that falls on him

In summary this famous poem, which apparently dates back to 2100 BC, tells the story of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, and Enkidu, a man created by the gods to stop Gilgamesh from oppressing the people of Uruk. My interest was piqued not only by the poem itself, which I had never heard of, but also by the story around it. 

First discovered in 1853 it caused a bit of a stir due to containing a number of similarities to The Bible, including a Garden, a Man being created from the soil and of a Great Flood. Dating of the oldest fragments originally concluded that it was older than the assumed dating of Genesis at that time. This lead to a great deal of debate about who borrowed what from who and when.

In 1998 a new discovery revealed the first four lines of the poem. At that stage almost 20 percent of the epic was still missing and a further 25 percent of it was so fragmentary that it could be only partially understood. Translations of the poem though were remarkably consistent and had remained so for about 150 years. 

Just this year however, researchers discovered a new tablet which added 20 previously unknown lines. Not a great deal of additional content when one considers the overall length of the poem but they appear to have a relatively significant effect on the story overall.

Tablet discovered in Sulaymaniah Museum in 2015 resulting in a correction in the
order of chapters and completion of some blanks in the Epic of Gilgamesh

The new section added more detailed descriptions of the 'Forest for the Gods' which completely changed the interpretation of what the Forest was like. They reveal the inner thoughts of the protagonists and describe their guilt at some of their actions, previously unknown emotions. They redefine one of the characters as less of a monster and more of a King and finally reveal that two of the key characters had in fact been childhood friends. The story is now different from that which existed before. 

Gilgamesh and his childhood friend Endiku, by modern artist Neil Dalrymple

Stories are everywhere in our lives. We use them to help us to make sense of many things; of ourselves, others, our work, the world and much, much more. We use them at their best to share wisdom, connect communities, inspire teams and to delight our children. Humans have been doing so for many thousands of years. As Ursula Le Guin said 'There have been great societies that did not use the wheel but their have been no societies that did not tell stories' 

And yet they are of course, stories... 

Becoming aware of a new story can change our perspective of an older one. Our brains have the amazing capacity to create complete stories from incomplete fragments without us even knowing that we've done so. Two people having the same experience can create entirely different stories about it. Before long we can start to feel that the stories we have created are in some way 'right.' Stories have the ability to keep us stuck in an old groove, not realising that we are in some way imprisoned by our own fertile imagination. 

And yet, the addition of a few words, the consideration of a motivation we hadn't realised existed, the discovery of a fact we don't know about or the opening of our minds to a different kind of ending, can quickly change everything. And suddenly what we thought we knew isn't quite so clear anymore.

So whilst the stories that we hold dear, about ourselves, our organisations  and the world, deserve to be held dear and honoured. Its helpful perhaps to also be able to be open to holding them lightly, seeing them change or reinterpreting them in order to allow ourselves and others around us to grow and move forward.

Stories are a truly wonderful creative force in the world, offering  a delightful opportunity to look at the world, our organisations and ourselves in new ways.  As Geoff Mead writes in his book 'Coming Home to Story' 

'The magic of storytelling is an essential and timely contribution to the re-enchantment of our disenchanted world'

Christmas Story Telling, A Winter's Tale, 1862
by Sir John Everett Millais

I hope that your Christmas creates the kinds of stories that you will want to tell for many years to come and that you all have a thoroughly magical and enchanted season of goodwill. 

I'm off to grab a hold of the tail of that comet and see where it might take me...

The Paths Of My Upbringing - Day 37

Day 37 (6th January 2015)

37 - the number of War Elephants the Carthaginian general Hannibal began with on 
his long march across the Pyrenees, in 218BC, to attack Rome;
(only 1 survived the final leg of the trip over the Alps.)
Photo of War Elephant armour in the Armouries, Leeds, UK
NB this is for an Indian Elephant, Hannibal used African Elephants - much harder to train

Today's post is by Keith Gulliver, whom I first got to know via Twitter (his handle is @KeithGulliver) and through his piece in the 2014 Book of Blogs - This Time It's Personnel. He wrote a great chapter about wearable technology and its impact on HR. Perhaps his choice of subject matter was not surprising, given that he works for IBM in Talent and Workforce Planning. Keith is an avid follower of Pompey (Portsmouth Football Club) and writes a regular football blog (Being Blue Through and Through) and also a less active one on cricket (Memories of Bowerchalke Cricket Club). He is also a frequent commentator on HR.

******************************************************************

A Rural Beginning

I grew up in a small village outside of Salisbury, an idyllic picturesque place in what is known as the Chalke Valley. 

Above Bowerchalke, Chalke Valley

There was a school, a shop, a post office, two public houses, a church, a chapel, a village hall, vast acres of farm land and a river that slowly wound its way from source springs and on to the sea. 

Footbridge over the River Ebble

In the Summer the villagers played and watched cricket and in the Winter it was football. Victories and defeats were celebrated with opponents in equal measure at the main village pub. Everyone knew everyone.

Village cricket match seen from Marleycombe Hill

Although the population was small the village itself was spread out over a relatively large area, houses clustered around a number of different farms between the flood plain and the chalk downs. The church was separated from most of the village, history told us that was due to the Black Death forcing villagers to abandon their homes and move. 

Death strangling a black death plague victim
c1370 manuscript

A story for another day perhaps.

Carefree Days

For me and my friends the village was our adventure playground. In the Summer months we would spend many a carefree hour exploring: searching farm buildings; looking for old bottles in forgotten rubbish dumps; climbing trees; traipsing along the banks of the river, fishing for trout; building camps; lighting fires; and apple scrumping. 

Young Schoolboys Playing with a Toy Boat
Alfred Bathurst Binning

With hindsight it wasn't always the safest of playgrounds! Sometimes we felt the wrath of an angry farmer when we trampled in places we shouldn't have. As we explored we looked after each other and guess what? We survived. 

1970s photo of boys playing in a tree house

We survived and we learned together through our experiences.   

Instinctively we knew all the different footpaths, bridleways and ancient farm tracks just as our parents and grandparents had before us.

Ox Drove ancient track, Chalke Valley

Expanding Horizons

Sometimes my Dad, the local plumber, would allow me to join him in his work van on a trip high in to the downs overlooking the village, a place I would never normally venture to. Perhaps it was to fix a remote cow trough, check on a farm pump house, measure water levels in one of the farm's reservoirs or record rainfall in his little notebook.

Often Dad would park up the van and we would stop for a cup of tea (and probably share a piece of homemade jam sponge cake!). He'd load his pipe with Erinmore Mixture and light up. We would sit in silence and admire the glorious views across the village and of paths to Salisbury and unknown places beyond as far as the eye could see. We didn't need words, the view said everything. 

Grazing Cattle on Marleycombe Hill - photo by Ken Leslie
Highly commended in Landscape Photographer of the Year 2012

These were paths that most of my friends and I would eventually take, never to return. 

Salisbury Fair

Every year in October the fair came to the city of Salisbury and set itself up in the marketplace at the centre of town. 

Salisbury Fair, 1978

It's an event I was often reminded of whenever I complained to my Mum or Dad about some perceived injustice (most probably to do with being told to go to bed early and having to miss Match Of The Day!), "It's not fair!" I would whine to which came the stock reply: "Fair is not until October!".

I'm sure that for the hardened fair attraction owners it was just another week, in another city. One more stop on a continuous trek around the country. 

But this was one of the highlights of the year to small, wide-eyed children like me. Something special. A small piece of glamour in an otherwise dour world where black and white TV was still very much the norm.   

Salisbury Fair - granted by Royal Charter to Bishop of Salisbury
by Henry III, in 1227, to be held on 3rd Monday in October

It was loud and it was brash. All bright flashing lights, noisy diesel engines, candy floss the size of clouds, sad looking goldfish, pumping, pulsating rock and wheezy organ music.  

For a few hours each year the fair sucked you in to its exciting, mesmerising world: stalls with enticing but cheap-looking prizes; rides that made you scream, your tummy churn and your legs go all wobbly.

And then it was gone, over for another year. Packed up overnight and trundling on to the next town.

The Penny Falls

One of my favourite stalls at the fair was The Penny Falls. A series of steps that slowly moved in and out, covered in coins. Some of the coins overlapped, some tantalisingly teetered on the edge of a step ready to fall, others were stuck in limbo, unlikely to ever move. 

The idea behind The Penny Falls was a very simple one: roll a coin down a small metal shoot in to the machine and try to dislodge some of the coins from the top step to create a cascade. 

It was all about the timing. If you were lucky your coin led to a chain reaction, other coins slowly spilled over from one step to another until you were rewarded with those that dropped in to a small metal opening at the bottom of the machine.              

British Pre-decimal coinage

Invariably, the meagre winnings were used to start the process all over again. A few fleeting moments of fun until the coins stubbornly refused to cascade anymore.

Paths and Organisations

  

We're obsessed with having paths in our organisations for people to follow. 

There seems to be something comforting and reassuring about a path. We desire a sense of direction especially when it's not always 100% clear where we're heading. 

We develop strategies to get us from a current to a future state. We build plans. We talk about roadmaps and being on a journey.

Our organisations often have rigid, formal hierarchies. 

We put our people on to development programmes, some are grandly titled 'fast tracks'. 

Our people go through what is sometimes referred to as an employee life-cycle: from on-boarding to exit.

We have career paths and build personal portfolios of artifacts based on our experiences. We used to refer to career ladders but now we refer to career matrices.

We encourage our people to consider carefully their digital footprint and build their personal, social networks.

Visualisation of an email network, using Gephi

We like the certainty of a path. Paths give us direction, set us on a course from A to B to Z and sometimes back to A. 

We look back and we look forward. We have choices, make decisions and we take turns and forks. 

Complex flights of birds captured on film by Dennis Hlynsky

We're surrounded by many different paths both physical and virtual. Some we know well, others less so. Paths lead to experiences that generate memories and metaphors.

Ultimately, paths are all about people: those who make them and those who take them.

Reputedly the earliest recorded human/hominid footprints
dated 3.7 million years imprints made in volcanic ash
National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C

The People's Path

Have you ever noticed footpaths that were designed to take people along a specific, elongated route to get to their destination, but which over time just get ignored as people create shorter alternatives? 

You often see them in parks and in edge-of-town super markets and shopping centres. Ugly gaps, muddy, The People's Path, the turf or bark chippings long gone.   

It only takes one person to dare and make the first move before others follow suit, perhaps not wanting to miss out on something, anything. They're not always sure. 

I guess it's a natural human tendency to find the shorter route, to follow well-worn paths, even if it might mean scrambling past a thorny bush or tripping over a low wooden barrier. Time is at a premium. Sometimes it's just down to ignorance and laziness. Sometimes it's just poorly thought out design.   

Over time, as the gap gets wider the 'dangers' diminish.

What amuses me is when the path designers 'give in' and formalise The People's Path, perhaps acknowledging in some way that they got it wrong.

Final Thoughts

With our desire to create ever better ways to develop and manage people's talent have we inadvertently created too many paths and too much complexity?

Of course we can make our lives as complicated or as simple as we like - that decision is down to us.

But let's avoid stifling people in our organisations. I believe people will be at their best when they are allowed to take time and have the freedom to: 

• Explore and have adventures.
• Try out new things and make mistakes.
• Be themselves and really get to know others.
• Help each other to find the way that works best for them.
• Make decisions for themselves.
• Ask for help without fear of embarrassment.
• Pause, think, reflect and learn.
• Enjoy life as themselves.
• Pass on their experiences and memories.

I guess those beliefs were formed along the paths of my upbringing.