Retreat

I spent (most of) the morning at Mountain Acres Lodge. Actually, I spent the first hour and a half driving around George’s Valley, which is directly across the ridge from Decker Valley, which is where Mountain Acres Lodge is, but let’s ignore that. As a result, I managed to miss Kevin’s talk in which he apparently answered a question I asked him in the last IT Leader’s Brown Bag lunch. If nothing else, at least I can provide fodder for further conversation.

Anyway, this was session 19 in the Brown Bag series and it was graciously hosted by AIS. Thank you very much!

As always, the event was wonderful. The conversation insightful and stimulating, and I already have ideas about how I can use what we talked about. Many light bulb moments today.

I think there is a core of people who really get it, who have integrated these themes not just into their daily lives, but into the way they think. Like learning a foreign language, it is the difference between being able to translate into the language you know and being able to think in the foreign language so that no translation is necessary. We are beginning to speak the language. Half a dozen people sat in a circle with me in our discussion group and had a single conversation. Ideas starting in one voice and flowing to the next. Being picked up by another and carried on by the rest. Without hesitation. Not rote repetition, but new answers to new questions — pertinent questions.

On a side note, I saw something in some meetings yesterday, as well. For a long time, I’ve been wondering how to influence the glacial pace of change in our organization. It has been extremely frustrating for me. I guess I was in a bit of a mood and I had a moment like Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network, where he says, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” That wasn’t what I said, but it was how I felt. The funny thing is, like in Network, the reaction was to hear the same thing from just about everyone around the table. It wasn’t just me any more. The people that I thought were the glacier had changed my mind. I was looking at it wrong. Not a glacier, but an iceberg. And the iceberg was breaking up before my eyes.

Things are changing. Now in visible ways.

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