Wednesday, 21 November 2007

Malcolm Davies Says

I was talking to Malcolm Davies today & he happened to make the comment: "Honesty without sensitivity is cruelty."

I liked it so recorded it here for posterity.

Tuesday, 20 November 2007

Links to the Past

In a previous Blog entry I mentioned I was getting our old bore working again so we did not have to rely on town water which is becoming scarce. The photo below shows a micro-jet I adapted for use with the bore. It has a 1mm hole in the centre so works with a very low water flow.
The photo below shows the micro-jet in action. The spray is produces is so fine is is barely visible. It's in use here to water where new grass seed has been planted over an area we (my son Jason & I) re-contoured last weekend.

The re-contouring was necessary as, last storm, a large amount of leaves, sticks, etc. were washed onto the patio of our "barn". We have now re-contoured the ground the "barn" (in which my office is located) so storm water runoff will flow away from the patio. The scoop below was used for the contouring. It once belonged to my grandfather. That makes it over 100years old! It would have been made in the late 1800's. Its original use was to build dams by towing it behind a draft horse. We towed it behind our tractor.


Talk about links to the past! Two days ago, I found a Brazilian cherry tree, loaded with fruit. I've picked quite a few. They have an interesting taste - both sweet and sour at the same time. As a child I well remember eating fruit off the Brazilian cherry tree in my grandfather's back yard. We didn't plant this one, so it must have grown from birds dropping a seed. Does anyone have any recipes for making anything out of Brazilian cherries?


While taking the photo of the Brazilian cherry I noticed some wild verbena in flower:

And, I mentioned last week our frangipani trees are in flower:


That's all for now.

Applying Energy Field Theory - Notes

I received an email today from George Meija with the thought for the day: "The most important things in life are not things." I was reminded me of some notes, I wrote some time ago, on energy field theory and its applicable in our daily lives. So I decided to put these notes in my Blog.



Notes:

Although we know a great deal about the way fields affect the world as we perceive it, the truth is no one really knows what a field is. The closest we can come to describing what they are is to say that they are spatial structures in the fabric of space itself. (Talbot cited Wheatley 1994, p. 46)

Newton’s world of cause and effect required great effort (forces) to make things happen. Since the emergence of the quantum world, we see that it is possible to accomplish this through manipulating non-material structures – i.e. fields – which are the basic substance of the universe. (Wheatley 1994, p. 48)

One explanation of the way fields work is to consider fish in an ocean. As the water moves in synchronism with the swell, the fish all appear to move together from side to side or up and down as though connected by some invisible connector. We know that it is the water of the ocean, however, fields in space behave the same way, we cannot see them and they (unlike the water of the ocean) have no material substance, however, they link all material objects in space. “Physical reality is not only material. Fields are considered real, but they are not material” (Wheatley 1994 p. 50).

The laws of motion, in field language, are rules for flows in the ‘cosmic ocean’. The rules for transformation are telling us what reactions occur among the components in this ocean (Wilczek & Devine cited Wheatley 1994, p.51).












The Newtonian Science
Organisation
The Quantum Science
Organisation

"An organisation is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and
feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions
looking for issues to which there might be an answer, and decision makers
looking for work." (Cohen March & Olsen cited Wheatley 1994, p. 54)

Organisational order is generated through fields. These fields are conceptual controls – it is the ideas of a business that are controlling, not some manager with authority. One of the most powerful fields is shared meaning or the unconscious common ground within an organisation.



In the field view of organisations, clarity about values or vision is important, but it’s only half the task. Creating the field through the dissemination of those ideas is essential. The field must reach all corners of the organisation, involve everyone, and be available everywhere…we need to imagine ourselves as broadcasters, tall radio beacons of information, pulsating out messages everywhere…we must fill all the spaces with the messages we care about. If we do that, fields develop – and with them, their wondrous capacity to bring energy into form. (Wheatley 1994, pp. 55-56)

Reference List

Wheatley, M 1994, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about organization from an orderly universe, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco.

Tosey, P. & Smith, P. 1999, ‘Assessing the learning organization: part 2 – exploring practical
assessment processes’, The Learning Organization: An International Journal, Vol
6, No 3, pp.107-115.

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

Outside my office

This massive (8in across) toadstool was under a tree outside my office this morning...

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

Beautiful day at Park Ridge

I've just finished cleaning our pool. What a beautiful day it is here. The frangipanis are just coming into bloom too.




There's a really bad drought here at present with severe water restrictions, so my younger son, Jason, and I have spent the past few weeks getting a bore we've had for years, but which hasn't bee working for the past 10, working again. We added a small pump near the house and connected it via pipes to the bore (30 metres away from the house).
I was taking a photo of the trench I just filled in between the bore and the house. It came out with an interesting effect with the light on the camera lens.


The bore is 30m (100ft) below ground level and the water is crystal clear as you can see from the pool photo. The spin off with using bore water in the pool is that we will now be swimming in mineral water - sounds healthy!






Sunday, 11 November 2007

New Blogs

I'm in the process of setting up new blogs - each to cater for separate activities of the minessence group - i.e. AVI (A Values Inventory) development & support, MissionControl (infrastructure website which supports the AVI), Minessence eZine, etc,

Saturday, 10 November 2007

Think Tank Meeting

Just finished a great virtual meeting with members of our Think Tank - meeting notes are at http://www.minessence.net/ThinkTank/ContentList.aspx?ContentTypeId=1

Chaordic Organisational Design

I published Minessence eZine #31 today. The topic was Chaordic Organisational Design. We are using this process ourselves to create the Minessence Foundation and our Think tank.

New Blogger

Maintaining my own blog software was too time consuming, so I've now moved over to using the software supported by google.