stories & organizations

Here’s an extract from a research series with Clive Holtham of Cass Business School which explores slowness at work.

The ubiquity of digital representation of the organisation can lead to a situation where knowledge workers are skilled in perceiving the organisation through digital lens, but lack sufficient skills in the perceiving the physical actuality of the organisation.

We have been exploring educational approaches, which can address this increasing area of risk, and improve the skills of managers in perception of the physical world. One of the most promising areas appears to be the dérive (Holtham and Owens, 2007), a term originally coined by Guy Debord (1958) and fellow Situationists, but which conceptually has more extensive historical predecessors. It is defined by Debord:

“One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psycho-geographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.” (Debord, 1958)

A dérive is a group-based slow “wandering” through typically an urban area, with an emphasis on close observation and recording of the physical actuality of that area (Jenks and Neves, 2001). It also emphasises the conversation and dialogue between the members of the group (Lee & Ingold, 2006; Pink, 2008). Although Parkins (2004) has some reservations about Debord’s thinking on slowness, we report on extensive experiences with slow dérives in a variety of professional educational contexts, in both teacher and manager education programs.

After accidentally initiating dérives, these have subsequently been self-consciously constructed as a means of enabling our trainees and students to learn with their peers through drift. In concrete terms this means that as academics working in two different fields we allocate periods of time to meet and learn together through a playful form of St Augustines (354-430 AD)  “solvitur ambulando”, learning through walking about. To date we have dérived together in and in between; London, Chester, Nottingham, York, Uttoxeter, Liverpool and Nuneaton.

We then individually use the documentation and theorization of this process to model these approaches to learning for our students together with the use of another time-honoured learning affordance, the reflective sketchbook (Holtham, Owens and Bogdanov 2008). We also provide a city-scape for the students to experiment in. For the MBA students this is the City of London, for the PGCE Trainees it has included; Venice, Florence, Prague, Amsterdam, and Barcelona. Time, place and space are created for a form of informal, critical learning not customarily valued in the self-pressurising technicist state of Initial Teacher education in England and Wales (Hill, 2007).

“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” (Debord, 1958).

Following Debord’s suggestion that the ‘most fruitful numerical arrangement’ to dérive is ‘several small groups of two or three people’ (ibid), the PGCE trainees organise themselves in this way. In addition three of four whole group sessions are scheduled into the week to allow for intercultural and interdisciplinary encounters that deriving does not allow for. For example, a two hour workshop in a school in which forty drama and art PGCE ‘s work together with 40 senior school pupils whose first language is obviously not English and a practical session with an applied theatre professional looking at the ways in which  drama operates in their cultural context.

Debord suggests that whilst the average duration of a dérive is one day it often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments. The PGCE trainees are encouraged to view the dérive rather than the organised sessions as being core to the week and so select which of these they might attend. The emphasis is on educating reflective practitioners rather than training technicians which places this approach firmly in the learner-centred  as opposed to teacher-centred camp in the on-going debates about teacher quality and teacher education in many parts of the world (Zeichner and Ndimande, 2008).

Holtham, C, Ward, V & Owens, A | Slow Work – designing space & learning, presented at the EGOS conference, Lisbon, July 2010

Add that to Sparknow’s attachment to curating experiences as you have a clue to awakening organizational imaginations. I was reminded of this when listening to David Hockney talk about new ways of seeing on Radio Three. Hockney can curate by translating, through his own art, into painting and things (sometimes via technology). I’m hamfisted and lucky that the smartphone gives me a way to record image, text and sound in ways that I can assemble to recollect and to see where the assembly takes me. 

Here’s my favourite Christmas hipstamatic snap, taken just before Christmas when I was, as my partner would say, dondering from the London Library to the 91 bus stop via Piccadilly. I love the company Leonardo now keeps:

And then, my other favourite from the run up to Christmas was a delightful romantic review of Sparknow’s new strategic position document (‘shift’) with Chris and Sabine on the 5th floor of Waterstone’s (soon to be catastropically deapostraphied) by accidental candle light because the bulb in the light over us had blown: