Month: February 2010

Silverdale – Half Term

Last week we spent a wonderful week chilling in Silverdale – it’s not far, but it’s a different world.

Silverdale and Morecombe BayIt was great to spend time with friends away from the normal day to day rush. We did some walking, we did some eating, we even drank some coffee and played board games. There’s something very special about playing a silly board game in a lounge with a roaring fire and laughing uncontrollably at something that isn’t really that funny.

The weather was amazing – on Tuesday we were walking in the snow up to Easdale Tarn; on Wednesday we sat out on the balcony eating lunch in the sunshine.

As a follow-up to my last post; this holiday underlined the start of a new era with Jonathan driving himself there a few days after we left.

We stayed at Wolf House Cottages, it’s right next to an art gallery and a coffee shop, what more could you ask for:

http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?set_id=72157623488637620

Created with flickr slideshow.

Blessings #146 – New Era

This week a new era has started in the Chastney household – Jonathan has passed his driving test.

Levens SnowThings are never going to be the same again.

At the start of the week he couldn’t drive and that meant that his options for going places were restricted to places his parents would take him, or public transport.

At the end of the week he has a new freedom – he can drive himself places.

One era has ended and a new one has started. There is no going back to the old era it’s finished.

I know many people who look on change as a scary thing. Each new era brings a new set of concerns and worries. Sometimes those worries are just the fear of the unknown. We can look at situation and imagine the worst-case-scenario. Our brains go wild and conjure up all sorts of terrible outcomes.

A new era is really a sign that we are alive.

Only dead things never change – things that are alive are always changing.

Watching the children move through different era is a sign that they are growing and moving towards adulthood. That’s a wonderful thing. Without it they would remain children forever and that wouldn’t be normal or healthy.

Moving from one era to another era gives us the opportunity to reminisce about the journey that we’ve been on. Much like the experience you get when your mountain climbing, and you stop to look around you, reminiscing lets you realise how far you have come. We can spend so much of our life with our head down looking at the next step, making sure that we don’t trip and fall over. We need times when we stop, look up, and realise that things around us have changed.

We’ve built up experiences in one era and now it’s time to naturally move into the next. Rather than fighting it we should look forward to it and celebrate it.

“Hooray, I’m alive, I’ve moved into something new, something I haven’t experienced before”.

I’ve never had to hand over a set of car keys before and watch a car leave the drive with my son in it on his own. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for me to get comfortable with that experience, but I know that I will.

I’m not sure how long it will take us to work out the practicality of having three drivers and two cars, but we will.

I’m not sure how long it will be before Jonathan realises how much a car costs to run, but he will.

It’s a new era and it doesn’t quite fit yet, but it will.

And no sooner will this one fit than we will be entering into a new one.

Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business

One of the most popular blogs on this site is the one on Rich Pictures. I think that pictures are fabulous, so I really liked Dan Roam’s article on ChangeThis called Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business.

Tower Bridge - Freshly PaintedIn this article Dan tells a simple story about getting directions in Moscow and the four different ways in which he could have been given the directions.

  • The Narrative
  • The Checklist
  • The Map
  • The Landmark Sketch

and Dan describes each one of them:

All four of these sets of directions are correct. Following any one of them should in theory get us to the Gagarin Museum in the same amount of time. But here’s my question: I’d like you to look over the four options again, really think about it for a moment, and then ask yourself this: if we actually were in Moscow, which option would you prefer?

The powerful communication methods are the map and the landmark sketch – without a doubt. We all know it’s true, so why do we use so many words in business?

I believe that for practical, business-oriented problem solving—when you and your team need to address something right in front of you right now, the visual options—the map and the landmark sketch are without question the way to go. The fact that we so rarely see these kinds of pictures used in business is why I write my books.

Over the last two days I’ve filled sheet after sheet of flipchart paper with diagrams. We’ve been talking through a solution with a customer, a solution that takes thousands of words to document. The documents don’t communicate, they just document. I had presentation slides and charts, but I knew that they wouldn’t communicate either. Simple blocks and lines on a chart with a commentary – that’s what communicated.

There’s something very powerful about a conversation held over a piece of paper, and I think it’s something intrinsic in who we are, but something that we suppress as adults. My reason for saying this is the difference that I see in the way that children react to paper table-cloths and the reaction of adults. What do children do with paper table-cloths? They write and draw on them, they get creative. What do adults do? They protect them, even though we know that paper table-cloth is going straight in the bin as soon as we have left. Why is that? One of the reasons, I think, is that the children’s  need to be creative is fresh and unimpaired, as adults we’ve come to suppress it so much that we don’t even think about it.

If you haven’t come across ChangeThis before then you really are missing out on a treat. I really like their manifesto.

My Tools: WordPress for BlackBerry

It’s not often that I write blog posts while I’m mobile. If I’m going to write anything I’ll normally twitter. But there are times when a thought comes to me that is more than a tweet and is worth writing there and then rather than waiting until I am home.
It’s not always a good thing to be too immediate about things, but there is a time and place for it. It’s at those times that I turn to WordPress for Blackberry, and to prove the point I’m using it right now.
If I got more comments I’d probably also use it for keeping up to speed with the stream.
We have only just started the mobile revolution even. We’ve been working at it for some time now. In years to come we will do things while we are mobile that we can only imagine today. The devices that we have today are going to change radically as the computing power, storage and connectivity capabilities accelerate.
Writing a few words into a simple app might not be that radical, but it’s a signpost of the things that are to come.