“Arresting moments” or “reminders”.

Image by Jackie Kever via Flickr

“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.“ – Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)

This is the first of a number of emails I intend to write to record my exploration of the notion of social poetics, a topic I introduced last week. The first of the “methods” I mentioned was the concept of ”arresting moments“. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Shotter and Katz suggest that there are, ”hidden in plain view“, moments in the flow of our conversational relating which ”remind“ us of things that we have long since taken for granted. The trick is to notice them.

I’ll try to illustrate what I think they mean with a personal story.

Last week I had a conversation with Theodore Taptiklis, founder of the Storymaker Research Institute and author of the book Unmanaging: Opening Up the Organization to its Own Unspoken Knowledge. We discussed various bits of work we are each doing with public sector clients and generally engaged in a ”flowing“ conversation about our work and our practices. Towards the end of our conversation Theodore suggested that I and another colleague we both know are ”self-taught“ in relation to our practice. Out of the ”flow“ of the conversation we had this really struck me and seems to have triggered what I can only describe as a cascade of memories, associations and thoughts.

As I write these I am sure it will sound more organised and intentional than it actually was/is and more finalised than it feels at the moment. To try to convey something of the disjointedness I will describe things in bold. Where I think I am editorialising or interpreting, rather than attempting to capture the experience, I will use italics.

I was ”struck“, but the idea of being self taught didn’t grate – it just wasn’t a description I would have used about myself. After all I have benefitted from a good deal of formal education.

Up until recently I think I would have grabbed hold of this and tried to, metaphorically, wrestle it to the ground. I would also have been very concerned to try to find out what Theodore ”really“ meant. This time I was more interested in my own response and have a sense of being content to let my response happen and see where it led/leads.

For a good deal of my working life, I have ended up in situations or roles in which a way to operate and the practices that would work needed to be ”improvised“. It seems to me it has often been the case that I have worked intuitively and then ”made sense“, in a more theoretical way of how and why certain things worked, retrospectively.

At one point in our conversation Theodore talked about some work he had done with social workers trying to ”capture“ their professional knowledge. He offered the view that for him what they brought and applied to their work was their experience of life. Life, of course, including their work. This also ”struck“ me, although more slowly, and probably only as a result of sitting with the idea of being self-taught.

My high school Ancient History teacher insisted that we start from an examination of the sources, the earliest evidence, and only later introduced the interpretation applied by various historians in textbooks.

My early exposure to the work of Garth Boomer, who wrote a little book called Negotiating the Curriculum, is also significant. Unfortunately I never got to meet Garth, but I was heavily influenced by the ideas in the book and began experimenting with approaches that I would now describe as ”dialogical“.

I don’t think I had ever really considered how influential these two experiences have been in the way I have worked and the practices I have adopted and continue to try to refine. The idea that we can really only begin where we are and with what we know and the idea of somehow going back to the source have really been quite powerful for me. It is also possible that much of my recent reading and conversation with people like Theodore have re-ignited these influences.

I read a lot – but often castigate myself because I don’t finish things, or I feel like I’ve got the gist, put it away and then maybe come back to it later when something triggers a need or re-kindles my interest.

I have a much stronger sense of my reading not as a form of study but as an ongoing conversation with a community of people who had/have something to say that I want to hear. Even as I’m writing this I am struck by how powerful, but how unnoticed, the idea that one only reads for a purpose, has been for me. It hasn’t stopped me from following my nose all over the place but it has been a background theme I think that has coloured my perception of the value of what I am doing.

Hopefully this is enough for you to get the flavour or impression of what I experienced.

Three things seem worth mentioning now that I have taken the step of trying to write this down:

1. It seems that sometimes my learned tendency to want to theorise things can get in the way of noticing the experience of my own shifts of thinking and the connections and reconnections I am making.
2. Almost everything I’ve recorded here had its genesis as an imagined conversation – perhaps with Theodore, or John Shotter and certainly with you. Nothing began the instant I sat down to write.
3. But, of course, the very act of writing, although it has corralled it a bit, hasn’t stopped the ongoing flow of thought. In fact it has ”set it off“ again.

So … in the spirit of conversation, I would be really interested to hear your response to this or for you to share a story about an arresting moment that occurs for you in the next few weeks. I’ll leave you with a quote from John Kennedy.

”When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.“
John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963), Amherst College, Honoring Robert Frost