Yes, despite appearances, I really am progressing the writing at last. Essentially, what little reading I am still doing is simply proving to be confirmation and reinforcement, so lots of drafts, mental and physical, have already taken their shape.
I wrote-up the Iain McGilchrist / Oxford trip, but haven’t done so for the John Seddon / Mike Jackson Hull lecture nor for the British Library visits. So this is just a round-up.
John Seddon – gave this year’s annual Mike Jackson lecture at Hull Uni / Centre for Systems Studies (CSS) last Thursday, 10th April. In his 70’s with many decades of war stories under his belt as management consultant to leaders in commercial industry as well as assorted ministerial civil servants – health, prisons, etc. Pretty liberal with his opinions of named public people & politicians and their (very costly and ineffective) mistaken approaches to systems management systems. For him, his systems were all complicated but not complex, in the sense that he limited his interest to those management systems (procedures and tools) designed – made complicated – by humans, for a well defined purpose that could be seen as closed from any wider human or ecosystem complexities. Fair enough. Even then most of his stories were of the “you get what you manage” variety. Systems designed to serve the needs of – fix the problems of – individual “customers” but which invariably ended-up managing the efficiencies of quantifiable compliance within the system itself, ultimately dominated by handling all the failure cases, especially via support and referral call-centres. The experts should be answering the phones, not hidden away behind inexpert triaging processes. So not rocket science, but boy could he talk, for a full 75 minutes before Mike Jackson as host could pause for 10 minutes of dialogue to close. (Dave Snowden also there, making copious notes. My focus is unashamedly the complex, the wider societal context of open systems, and his Cynefin approach is about assessing whether you are dealing with Simple / Complicated / Complex / Chaotic regimes to start with, and choosing methods & actions accordingly. I wasn’t really therefore the audience for Seddon’s focus on the Complicated.)
I mentioned in the footnotes to my recent Iain McGilchrist post, my own history with the British Library. I did have reading-room membership back in the days of my London-weekly-commute-working, but the BL had a massive cyber-attack back in 2023 from which they are only partially recovered. User records lost as well as losing the capability of ordering books via their electronic cataloguing. Like the US Library of Congress, in principle they have at least one copy of, every version of, everything ever published. For a book like McGilchrist’s “Against Criticism” there is only one Faber & Faber 1982 hardback edition and, whilst they had two copies catalogued, one in London and one in Boston Spa / Thorpe Arch nr Wetherby. However, the one in Yorkshire appeared to be lost, so as well as re-registering in person, I had to make a second trip yesterday to see the London copy nearer home.
It proved to be worth it. Even though in 4 hours I could only selectively skim read and make notes and selected image copies, it was both fascinating in content and a wonderfully written read. [I’ll will of course, say more.] Two things arose.
Firstly, I was reminded that Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria” is a recurring reference in so much of my reading. The archetypal source of the romantics, both British and German, that it’s been on my must-read list for some time. As I was in the Library and logged-in to their cataloguing I searched in order to request it for the reading room. Well, unlike McGilchrist, there are many, many published editions and versions of Coleridge, so just doing that selection is a piece of research in its own right. Long story short, using Amazon as well as the BL, I’ve ended-up with a Kindle copy of the 1817 edition. There were plenty of later used versions out there at reasonable prices too, unlike the sole $2000 dollar used copy of McGilchrist, and there are quite a few modern editions. Coleridge is well referenced by others, so I really need only a reference version myself – so with Kindle I get the added bonus of searchability of other people’s quotes. Job done.
Secondly, Jean Boulton – is embedded in my memory for some reason, despite checking mail and social-media records showing that I’ve only known of her for a matter of months? Some LinkedIn exchanges with Dave Snowden over the last year or two and a debate with Mike Jackson (I missed) back in February this year (hat tip to Ben Taylor again). Anyway I bought a copy of her (2024) “Dao of Complexity” – “sense-making in turbulent times” – like every man and his dog these days – a veritable meme of memes. Can’t comment yet on the quality of her writing or arguments, but it is chock-full of so much of my own content and 21st C sources … no Pirsig and no Snowden, but lots of Maturana, Mazzucato, Temelkuran, McGilchrist, Rovelli and Whitehead … and Pragmatism and Mary Parker-Follett(!) We obviously have a lot in common. [More later.]
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