I recently enjoyed immersing myself in ideas for two days solid at the National People & Organisation Development Summit organised by Andrew & Tammie Greatrex of Global Leaders Network. I vowed publicly to summarise the sessions I attended but of course work got in the way, so I have chunked the task down to summarise a speaker every few days.

Day 1 session one – Goran Carstedt, former head of Volvo and IKEA and Society for Organisational Learning (SOL) steward. I enjoyed the session and the slight let down was that he had to start late and shorten his session, so he cut out most of his stories and talked instead about the underlying principles that he had learned as a leader. Even though I loved the principles, I see the value of stories in the ones he did tell.

Goran started by talking about the benefit of sharing ideas (see my blog entry from 10 Jan!) where we each end up with more and that the ‘new logic’ is not what we own (scarcity has value) but what we share (plentitude has value). This confirms the value of spending time to learn technology like blogging, that allows me to connect with a larger audience and reinforces my commitment to sharing ideas.
He spoke of setting up SOL fractals around the world and I liked the idea of learning fractals – each a smaller image of the whole. This is one of my passions at the moment – how to encourage learning communities in organisations.

I especially liked: that we ‘create’ human energy by inviting people to contribute to something meaningful, purposeful and learningful – something worthy – not by requiring obedience to rules and regulations and profit. This is becoming a bigger theme in contracting with clients – we want to work with clients who want to share their returns with their employees and other stakeholders. Thus, I loved the distinction that “Profit and Not-for-Profit are two ends of the continuum and in the middle is Not-only-for-Profit“. Creating a new mental category opens up lots of opportunities for organisations that have been constricted until now and it is another demonstration that we cannot think and imagine new ways of doing and being until we have the language to support it.

Three more ideas I particularly liked:

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(sung to the tune of Cat Stevens’ “The first cut is the Deepest” )

Sharon here. It’s Monday and I have promised half a dozen people that I’d send out a first blog for comments, but two weeks have gone by and I haven’t written a word. What is going on? I think I am suffering from performance anxiety – a nasty condition in both organisational and personal life! I’ve gotten self-conscious at the thought of having an audience and want to make my performance perfect before I go ‘live’.

So, to get into action, I delved into the web literature on performance anxiety as well as revisiting material that Paul and I facilitate on dealing with procrastination. Hence, the blog is finally up and running.

So, welcome to our new, blog A Passion for Ideas, whose purpose is to discuss new and interesting ideas in the world of organizational learning, change and development, including ideas for leading and managing people and teams more effectively. Paul and I are looking forward to writing about some of our personal and organisational experiences and hearing your stories too. Read on for more ideas on dealing with procrastination and performance anxiety.

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