Supercharging your leadership forums

Supercharging your leadership forums.

Just recently I was meeting with a senior leader in Organizational Development in a very successful American led global organization.  He was telling me how they had introduced Director forums for the 75 directors in his region, who were the vital engine room of their business. They were well attended, and they were led and organized by the directors themselves and he was keen to explore how they could get more value from these events given employment costs of tying up 70 plus leaders for a couple of hours as well as the opportunity cost for the business.

I shared with him some of our top advice based on over 40 years of helping organizations make their leadership meetings and conferences and town hall meetings more impactful and value creating.

  1. From Topics to Current Challenges

The senior leader shared how the directors chose the topics and agenda items for the next forum.  I suggested he changed the language and instead of discussing possible topics, he asked the working group of directors, what were the top collective challenges that this group could collectively impact.

  1. Focus on challenges that can be only dealt with by this group of people.

We then explored what were the challenges that this collection of middle leaders were best placed to address, rather than waiting for senior leaders to decide, or dealing with them in their separate silos. Most of these were challenges concerning horizontal partnering and learning across the business.  Barry Oshry points out that the top leaders need to focus on the external and the future, while the middle leaders take responsibility for joining up and integrating the organization.  We teach how this middle cadre of leaders are key to creating a team of teams that is more than the sum of its parts (Hawkins and Carr forthcoming).

  1. Facilitate real time strategizing

A good leadership forum should engage all the brains and creativity in the room, and the best way to do this is to focus on real collective challenges for the organization that require new collaborative thinking.  Senior leadership need to articulate why these challenges are important for the future of the organization and ask for help from everybody in finding a new original response.

  1. From breakouts as discussions groups to task groups with well-defined outcomes.

It can be useful to split a large leadership forum into small working groups, but it is important that each group is not just given a topic to explore but is commissioned with a clear outcome that they are asked to bring back to the main plenary.

  1. Ensure all breakout groups have a well briefed facilitator

Each workgroup needs an appointed facilitator with clear process guidelines.  Their job is to:

  1. Reiterate the outcome the group need to achieve
  2. Get everyone’s voice into the room within the first 3-4 minutes
  3. Use techniques like brainstorming, collective build, people stepping into the shoes of different stakeholder groups, etc., to maximize creative thinking
  4. Manage time
  5. Return the group to core focus if they get stuck or wander off track.
  6. Ensure the group comes to a collective output which is summarized.

If necessary, they could delegate one or more of these roles.

  1. Ban reporting back from breakouts on their conversation

For many years I sat through large leadership gatherings where each small group would have one member feedback to the main plenary, and it became increasingly boring.  I called it ‘death by serial feedback! I changed the process, which now included all members standing and jointly presenting their output, in a way that was starting a new live engagement and dialogue with all the other small groups.  This included being clear about what they were asking other participants to commit to, in order to take this proposal into action.  This inter-group dialogue needs skillful facilitating to ensure the groups are co-creating better thinking and more energized commitment that the small groups did by themselves.

  1. End with commitments not vague intentions.

Agreement to a good idea is made with the cognitive brain, but real change is always embodied. If the change does not start in the room, it is very unlikely to happen when people are back at work, bombarded with e-mails, meetings and demands, and falling back into their past engrooved habits.

What does this look like in practice.

At a recent annual gathering of the top 120 leaders of a large global organization, we redesigned the format.  We said there would be no platform, podium or presentations! Instead, the large room was set up with 12 tables of ten leaders. Each table was facilitated by one member of the top team who has been given brief training and guidance on how to facilitate their table team. Each table was selected to have a maximum diversity of countries and roles.  In the middle of the circles of tables, was a large theatre in the round, for real-time interchange between groups and the whole gathering.

The 3 day gathering started with the song ‘Surfing USA’ (we were hosted in Huntingdon Beach California!).  The music got louder and louder till everyone had taken their seats, and then suddenly stopped and the room went dark.  Onto the screen came two important clients saying what they appreciated about the work of this organization, but also what they were going to need different from the organization over the next three years. This signaled that the conference was not going to be inward looking, but instead, starting ‘outside-in’ and ‘future-back’.

Many of the attendees were anxious as they had not been given the usual timetable agenda for the three days.  So, we followed the client presentations by telling them the agenda was:

Day One: discovering how the organization could double the beneficial value they created in the world, within the next three years.

Day Two: to collectively workout the roadmap to achieve the 2027 vision and outcome.

Day Three: to start the transformation process live in the room and create clear joint commitments across the organization before everyone returned to their own countries and functions.

Despite much pre-skepticism of how this would work, the event was extremely engaging and high energy from start to finish.  Transformation happened in the room, at personal, inter-personal, inter team and function levels.  It also created a lasting legacy of new ways of doing events both internally and externally.

 

If you are going to bring your best brains and key leaders together either virtually or in person, start by working out what the cost is to your organization, and how you are going to get a measurable high return on that investment. Once you have been through that exercise, I hope the above guidance and examples helps you design how to make this happen.

If you want to know more and explore this further, we help many organizations around the world; plan, design, and facilitate their major leadership and engagement events.

Contact us at www.renewalassociates.co.uk.

This material will also appear in our next book “Coaching the Team of Teams” by Peter Hawkins and Catherine Carr.  Kogan Page 2025

 

Peter Hawkins September 2024

———–

Renewal Associates with Coaching.com are leading the next global virtual training in Systemic Team Coaching® Certificate (Practitioner ), 9th October 2024

Renewal Associates are also hosting the next in person Systemic Team Coaching ® Certificate (Practitioner) in Toronto in November 2024.

Along with Dr Catherine Carr, Peter Hawkins  is completing a new book called ‘Coaching the Team of Teams’ based on global research around the world.  This will be published in spring 2025 by Kogan Page.

———–


Beyond Psychological Safety to Collective Psychological and Relational Maturity

Revisioning Psychological Safety: An Introduction

Kahn (1990: pp708) defined Psychological Safety as: “being able to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career.”
Since then, Professor Amy Edmondson (1999,2012,2013) has done important pioneering work to develop the concept of Psychological Safety and its importance in creating the right culture. Many times, Amy Edmondson has made it clear that psychological safety has to be combined with accountability and with our individual and collective responsibility to speak up, make our unique contribution to the team, and take leadership. To grow and develop we all need feedback, challenge and healthy conflict as well as experiences that, at the time, will take us out of our ‘comfort zone’ and feel risky.

We have also built on the important work of Dr Timothy Clark, who in 2020, outlined four stages of Psychological Safety: 

  1. Inclusion safety 
  2. Learner safety 
  3. Contributor safety 
  4. Challenger safety 

We recognise these development phases, but now believe that every stage needs the right mix of support and risk, care and challenge.  

Gradually, psychological safety has become popularised and generalised and has been understood by many to be a fixed state that every team must have. It has become too easy for team members not to take responsibility or speak up, by blaming others or the team or organization, for not making them psychologically safe. 

Like many terms in the lexicon of leadership and organizational development, the term ‘psychological safety’ began by usefully in pointing to an area that had not been attended to, but over time has in places become a generalised cliché, an unhelpful ideology and an artificial goal. (see Hawkins 2023: “Beyond High Performing Teams”) 

Psychological safety is neither a thing nor a goal.  There is no leadership act without psychological risk, for to speak up, and to state your truth and unique perspective, will mean that others will disagree with you, may criticize you, tell you that you are wrong.  

 Collective Psychological and Relational Maturity 

At Renewal Associates we now believe that we need to change from focussing on psychological safety in leadership teams to helping teams explore collective relational and psychological maturity.  If a team is experienced by the majority of its members as unsafe, the level of contribution and risk taking diminishes and the collective team fails to mature. However, if a team is experienced as too cosy and comfortable, then the amount of challenge and creative conflict diminishes and the team becomes a mutual admiration society, often projecting all negativity on to the external wider environment.  Once again, the team fails to mature. Real psychological and relational maturity come when support and challenge are not polar opposites, but a team has a culture of openness where support and challenge are mutually intertwined, and flow in all directions 

From our work with senior teams around the world and across many different sectors, we have discovered that the key factors that help teams to collectively psychologically mature are: 

  1. Encouraging full engagement from all team members,  
  2. Promoting active listening and the building on each other’s comments, 
  3. Developing the collective skill of generative dialogue and creative conflict, where different perspectives and proposals are welcomed and worked through, 
  4. Ensuring that the conflict does not become personally antagonistic, and work to find ways of drawing together the opposing views into a higher order alignment, 
  5. Having regular feedback, not just vertically from the team leader to team members, but also horizontal peer feedback between the members. 

Here are the 15 Steps we have discovered that teams go through from being dysfunctional to collectively psychologically and relationally mature, but not necessarily in the same order. Sometimes teams leap a couple of steps and sometimes go back and address earlier steps.  Even when all steps are accomplished, they need to be constantly maintained or the team when under pressure will slide back to less mature levels. 

The Fifteen Steps 

  1. Team members gossip and complain about the team and other team members outside of the meeting but avoid addressing issues in the meetings. 
  2. Team members are fearful of speaking up and contributing to team meetings. 
  3. Team meetings are ‘hub and spoke’ with conversations happening between the team leader and different team members. 
  4.  The meeting is dominated by a few powerful people that are actively engaged. 
  5.  All team members contribute to team meetings, but some much more than others. 
  6. Difficult issues are referred to obliquely in meetings rather than specifically and directly. 
  7.  Everyone receives 360 feedback from all team members. 
  8.  Feedback is given regularly and directly to all team members. 
  9. The team has a clear collective purpose which everyone recognises can only be achieved through collaboration.  
  10.  The team regularly reviews its dynamics and functioning and commits to new behaviours, protocols and processes 
  11.  The Team ensure that every team member contributes in the first 5-10 minutes of the meeting and welcomes every contribution. 
  12. Team members actively build on each other’s contributions. 
  13. The team regularly addresses collective challenges where no individual has the answer, but the team has ‘generative dialogue’ which generates new thinking between them, which no one had thought of prior to coming together. 
  14. There is healthy creative conflict in the team, which does not become personally antagonistic and in which the team collectively addresses how to connect the wider conflicting stakeholder needs.   
  15.  All team members and the team as a whole, is continually learning and developing, through a healthy mixture of supportive challenge and challenging support, in service of the team’s wider stakeholders. 

Conclusion 

It is important that in team and organizational development and coaching, we stop seeing psychological safety as ‘a goal to be arrived at’, but as one step on the maturational journey in developing the psychological and relational maturity that is needed to be a high value creating team, which I have defined as ‘a team that continually co-creates beneficial value with and for all it stakeholders’. (Hawkins 2021) 

Peter Hawkins  August 2024 

 

Bibliography 

Clark, T.R. (2020) 4 Stages of Psychological Safety New York: Berrett-Koehler Publishers 

Edmondson, A (1999) Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44 (2) 

Edmondson, A (2012) Teaming, 1st edition, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 

Edmondson, A. C. (2013) The Three Pillars of a Teaming Culture. https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-three-pillars-of-a-teaming-culture.  Accessed August 13th 2021 

Gawanda, A (2010) The Checklist Manifesto, Profile Books, London 

Hawkins, P. (2005) Wise Fool’s Guide to Leadership: Short spiritual stories for organisational and personal Transformation. London: O Books  

Hawkins, P. (2020) Beyond the High Performing Team Blog:  www:renewalassociates.co.uk.    

Hawkins, P. (2021). Leadership team coaching: developing collective transformational leadership. 4th edition. London: Kogan Page. 

Kahn, William A. (1990-12-01). “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work”. Academy of Management Journal. 33 (4): 692–724.  

———–

Renewal Associates with Coaching.com are leading the next global virtual training in Systemic Team Coaching® Certificate (Practitioner ), 9th October 2024

Renewal Associates are also hosting the next in person Systemic Team Coaching ® Certificate (Practitioner) in Toronto in November 2024.

There is also free Practitioner Workshops on Systemic Team Coaching® on 9th September 2024 at 4:30pmUK/11:30amET, 10th September 2024 at 10:00amUK/5.00am ET, 10th September 3:30pmUK/10.30am ET. (registration details tba)

Along with Dr Catherine Carr, Peter Hawkins  is completing a new book called ‘Coaching the Team of Teams’ based on global research around the world.  This will be published in spring 2025 by Kogan Page.

———–


Exciting News! Systemic Team Coaching Website Launch

 

 

🚀 Exciting News! 🚀

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new Systemic Team Coaching website, a hub that brings together all the fantastic work we are doing around the world, both in person and virtually 🌍✨

In partnership with Renewal Associates, the AoEC, and Coaching.com, we are committed to ensuring that everyone has access to learning how to work with this ground-breaking approach to coaching. The website offers a variety of programs and certifications designed to help coaches, leaders, and HR professionals develop their abilities to work with teams systemically.

🔍 Explore the innovative programs and certifications available at systemicteamcoaching.com and discover how you can take your coaching to the next level. This approach focuses on viewing the team as a whole, considering its systemic context and stakeholders, and applying models like the Five Disciplines.

Join us in transforming the way teams work together and achieve success. Let’s make a significant impact together! 💪🌟



Love your work more in 2024

My first Sufi spiritual teacher always said – “You can always love more.”  By this he meant more in terms of depth and breadth.

What would you need to do, to love your work more in 2024?  For too long we have talked about work -life balance in ways that portray work as a burden we then have to recover from.  In contrast I aim to leave each week of work more energised, alive and creative than when the week began.

So, what have I discovered enables this to happen?

  1. Discover the deeper purpose in your work. Work out who and what your work serves, for whom your work creates value and benefit. Love what you do and love those who benefit from it.
  2. Being in love with learning. Every person and team I coach and every person I train and/or supervise, I see as my next teacher. I have made a commitment that if I ever teach a course or workshop and do not: a) learn something new; b) teach something new; and c) upgrade the program, it will be the last time I teach that course.
  3. Teach what you are learning. I believe that we do not learn by being taught, only when we turn what we have read or heard into our own enacted practice. Also, that we learn most by teaching what we are learning to others, as then we need to be clear in understanding the learning and have to embody it.
  4. Always be curious. Be fascinated by everyone you meet; they all have an interesting story to tell.  Also be curious about new places, their history and culture; new subjects and ways of working different to yours.
  5. Surround yourself with great colleagues and partners. When I was in my mid-twenties and running a therapeutic community, I realised that my boss could not supervise my work, so I formed a peer supervision group and recruited people from many different organizations. My learning and love of the work quickly multiplied. Create a group of great colleagues, compatriots with a shared purpose.  Help those already in your team, by discovering their passion and helping them to develop it more fully at work.
  6. Treat every difficult person and situation that you encounter as a ‘generous lesson life has sent you.” Our most difficult clients, colleagues, bosses or teams are potentially best teachers, so rather than getting frustrated by them, ask yourself what they need you to learn.
  7. Work from source rather than from effort. Each summer I run advanced retreats at Barrow Castle near Bath UK and we explore how to work from source and renewable energy, rather than ego effort and energy that is not renewable. This entails letting go of believing it is you doing the work, and having to perform and get it right, and realise you are always working in partnership and just a channel for the work happening.
  8. Create teams that are synergistic and are more than the sum of their parts. Teams that enjoy being together, but even more love what they are collectively and collaboratively achieving together for the benefit of those they serve. Teams that have a collective purpose, remembering it is the purpose that creates the team, not the team members who create the purpose.

 I invite you to think of three easy ways you could love your work more in 2024.

I will be starting the year by teaching a Systemic Team Coaching 3-day training in Houston USA 22-24th January 2024, assisted by Steliana van de Rijt-Economu and meeting up with as many of our North American alumni who can join us on the evening of the 23rd January. I will love learning from each new trainee and how our alumni are taking the work into new worlds.  If you would love to learn with me visit https://www.renewalassociates.co.uk/stc/stc-certificate-houston/



Leading by Nature – Giles Hutchins

Leading by Nature by Giles Hutchins

Foreword – Peter Hawkins

I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with Giles since his first book The Nature of Business was published in 2012.  I remember so well reading it with excitement and resonance, so pleased to see a fellow author addressing the big questions of our time.  Questions such as:

  • How can organizations function the way nature operates?
  • How can we learn through biomimicry, not just ways of making our products more natural, but also the whole way we organize and collaborate as humans?

Here was a truly radical thinker and writer, taking us back to our roots in the ‘more-than-human’ world of the earth we live, not on, but from.  Again, in his latest and now fifth book Giles is both inspirational and radical.  Inspirational in showing what leaders and organizations need to do to be future fit for what the planet now requires, and radical in the true sense of taking us back to the roots of life.

read the full forward here/…



Partnerships are not created by partners: from bartering to partnering

Too many people think in terms of trade-offs that if you do something which is good for you, then it must be bad for someone else. That’s not right and it comes from old thinking about the way the world works…We have to snap out of that old thinking and move to a new model.

Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever

Many partnerships, from marriages to business mergers and from professional partnership organisations to public service organisations partnering to provide joint ‘leadership of a place’ start with good intent but descend into ‘trade-offs’ and transactional bartering of what each partner needs from the other.  In this short blog I explore how all forms of partnership need a purpose greater than the parts as well as processes for regularly renewing the synergy of the partnership.

Whether in business or in marriages, founding partners often think they are the ones who have created the partnership, but for the partnership to begin and be successful, a third vital element beyond the partners is even more important in its formation.

This third element is a collective purpose. It is the answer to the questions:

  • “What can we do together through collaboration that we cannot achieve by working in parallel?”
  • “Who and what does our partnership serve?”

Despite the growth of partnerships in all sectors of the economy, there has been very limited research on how to create effective partnerships that realize potential synergies and little development in how to effectively coach partnerships. Increasingly my colleagues and I have been applying the ‘five-disciplines’ model (Hawkins; 2011, 2014, 2017) to coaching partnerships both in how they form and develop as well as how they resolve conflict.

Commissioning

Many partnerships fail to adequately define the core mission that the partnership is there to serve or to create.  Ismail (2014) redefines the mission as the partnership’s ‘Massive Transformational Purpose’ – the endeavour that creates great beneficial impact for all the partnership’s stakeholders at the same time as transforming the partners and their ways of relating to others.  This creates the galvanising force and collective buy-in that gives a partnership its momentum.  It also needs to be a strong enough motivator to keep the partners fully engaged and committed, even when an avalanche of urgent issues tempts them away or when the dynamics of the partnership become tough.   The commission or collective purpose of a partnership does not usually come from further up the hierarchy but from a massive challenge in the wider eco-system that requires multi-organizational collaboration.

The collective purpose that is formed by a partnership in response to this challenge needs to be one that:

  • Is only achieved by working together and not by partners working separately or in parallel.
  • All partners recognise and define in an aligned way.
  • All partners are committed to and will prioritise over ‘business as usual’ items within their own organization.

Clarifying

Too often partnerships (including marriages) start in a contractual way with each partner saying what they want from the partnership.  This creates a negotiated transaction between the parties.  For a partnership to be transformational the partners need to develop their ‘future-back’ and ‘outside-in’ strategy – addressing questions such as:

  • Who and what does our partnership serve?
  • What can we achieve together that we cannot achieve apart?
  • What massive transformational purpose can we pursue together?
  • How will we know the partnership is successful?
  • What criteria will we use to evaluate our collective success?

Too many partnerships start their thinking from inputs into outputs. Instead they need to try working backwards along the continuum from ‘value-creation’ to outcomes by agreeing the necessary outputs they need to collectively deliver and the inputs or resources which are required to achieve this.

A partnership needs to clarify how this strategy can be developed into agreed strategic objectives with action plans and measurable targets, and clear roles and responsibilities

Co-creating

Inter-group dynamics are not only critical internally within organizations but also between multiple organizations that constitute partnerships. Increasingly organizations have a wide and diverse number of often quite complex partnerships with other organizations. One large drinks company I worked with was using competitors as bottlers in one part of the world, distributors in another and as a joint venture partner in a third area. Elsewhere they competed fiercely for market share. This required a sophisticated and mature way of managing partnerships.

In the public sector where independent services are expected to deliver more at higher quality but with less finance and resources, they are finding they need to work closely in partnership with other agencies to create savings, remove duplication of effort and create synergies in delivery of service.

There has also been a growing recognition of the importance of public sector organizations working together to deliver ‘leadership of place’. The UK’s public sector focussed Leadership Centre writes:

A sustained period of constrained public finances means we need to look beyond any single organization’s resources for solving problems. And the nature of the major challenges we face means they cannot be met by one agency alone. Our focus has rightly shifted away from organizational structures towards people and places, so across the public sector we need to learn to work together in different ways. And we need to do it fast and wide. (www.leadershipcentre.org.uk)

A partnership needs to develop effective ways of co-creating in which meetings do not become dominated by bureaucratic governance but generatively create new forms of response that their individual partner organizations could not have arrived at by themselves.

Connecting

Successful partnerships always focus on who they are there to serve rather than just on each other.  A coach needs to help a partnership to keep focused on this.

A partnership needs to be connecting with all its stakeholders in a way that represents all the constituent members, not just their own organization.  Effective partnerships I have coached have moved beyond ‘representative’ members going back to their ‘constituencies’ to brief ‘their people’ and consult.  They have developed joint statements from all members and new forms of engagement which entail joint cross-organizational presentations, communication and engagement events to the various organizations and the wider stakeholders.

Core learning

Finally, a partnership needs to have regular reviews, attending to its own core learning and performance improvement.  Many of the approaches for carrying out board reviews can be adapted to coaching the core learning of a partnership.  Other embedded core learning methods can also be built into partnership meetings, such as ‘time-outs’, process checks, process consultancy.

What is important however, is that the core learning is not just for a partnership’s internal representational members, but must be generated in dynamic co-creation between all its constituent member organizations, as well as all the customers/clients and other stakeholders for whom it is there to create value for.

A few years back I was privileged to be the celebrant for a couple who wanted to have a spiritual wedding that would speak to the many different beliefs of their community.  They came on retreat to design their unique ceremony.  I posed them two questions to explore before we were ready to co-design the ceremony:

“Who and what does your relationship serve?”

“What is the truth your relationship needs to express to your wider community?”

These questions took them into a rich collaborative inquiry, by the end of the week they and their relationship were ready to co-create a truly moving wedding ceremony.

These two questions are core to all partnerships – whether marriages, joint ventures, mergers or joint leadership of place.  As my wife and I reach our fortieth wedding anniversary, I realise that we need to ask ourselves these questions not only at the beginning of our partnership but at regular intervals to redefine and determine the changing purpose of the partnership and the ever changing needs of those our relationship serves.

 

Professor Peter Hawkins

This article is based on some of my new writing in the third edition of Leadership Team Coaching:  Developing Collective Transformational Leadership which will be published by Kogan Page in July 2017 (already on Amazon for pre-order)



In the world of Hyper-change and Hyper-connectivity we cannot afford to evolve human consciousness one person at a time?

“The most important task today is, perhaps to learn to think in a new way.”
(Gregory Bateson (1972:462)

We live in a time when our collective human actions are putting the very existence of our species at threat, but also a time when we have the potential to destroy most of the living world of this planet along with our own species. Tim Smit the founder of the Eden Project for sustaining biosphere diversity opened a speech to the UK Institute of Directors with the line: “The next thirty years are possibly the most exciting time to be alive in the whole of human history. For in that time we will either discover if we deserve the title Homo Sapiens, or we will all fry.” (Smit 2019).

Reg Revans the founder of “Action Learning” (Revans 1982) often used the powerful formula L= E.C. (Learning must equal or be greater than the rate of the environmental change) as a way of awakening those who would listen to the Darwinian law of organisational survival. It is only through learning in relation to the contexts we find ourselves in that individual, teams, organisations or species co-evolve, flourish and survive. Bateson (1972), a contemporary of Revans, would also point out to those that would listen the problems we have created by choosing the wrong unit of survival.

In accordance with the general climate of thinking in mid nineteenth century England, Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution, in which the unit of survival was either the family line or species or sub-species or something of that sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.

Continue reading “In the world of Hyper-change and Hyper-connectivity we cannot afford to evolve human consciousness one person at a time?”



Why Have a Web-Site at a time of digital overload?

Five years ago, we sold Bath Consultancy Group and I launched Renewal Associates as an independent business specialising in developing Systemic Team Coaching, in a way that brings the best of Organisational Development and  Coaching together in a rich blended offering.  I decided that the new business would have no web-site, brochures or business cards, indeed no marketing at all, except what books and articles I published.  The only work we would do would come from word of mouth and personal recommendation.  This has been very successful with more work arriving that we could cope with.  So why launch a web-site now? The world does not need more stuff, but it does need more connection that links thinking from different communities and different professional disciplines. Continue reading “Why Have a Web-Site at a time of digital overload?”