Simon and Henrietta Cozens

I haven't posted much this past month because, well, it's been insane here. I'm taking three modules at college, and two of those are compressed into six weeks rather than the usual twelve, so I'm essentially taking five. Ouch.

But they're good. I'm learning a lot. The most exciting module for me is on organizational culture and change, and we're picking up a lot of vocabulary to give voice and expression to some of our experiences with organisations in the past, and to diagnose some situations we see right now.

We're also learning particularly about bringing about change in "dynamic" situations - moving away from the rigid, modernist "seven steps to change" models (which all seem to be produced by "management gurus" who earn thousands on the lecture circuit) that assume you can control all the inputs and determine correctly all the outputs. Instead, we want to work out how to bring change when people don't always react the way you want them to, when situations change rapidly beneath you, and when your initial plan might not actually be absolute divinely-ordained right answer. I've often thought that a lot of this applies to leading and managing open source projects, and when time permits I'd like to write some more about that.

It's often been quite big-picture stuff and especially with four-hour sessions I seem to come away thinking "I can't quite pick out exactly what I learnt in that session, but it was good." I need to go over my notes a few times, and see what shakes out - I expect that's where a lot of the value will be for me, as well as doing the assignments which will enable me to bring these tools to bear on my mission organisation and think deeply about how to bring about change there.

The leadership module has been good too, although a bit slow going and on the whole covering ground I've covered before at ANCC, albeit in a bit more detail. One really useful component of it has been reading Ruth Hailey Barton's book Strengthening The Soul Of Your Leadership together as a book club. It's one of those books I wish I could send a copy of to all the Christian leaders I know; it's led me to a lot of personal realisations about how and why I do things and the motivations that drive me. The sections of the book on shadow personalities that come out under pressure, and the work we've been doing on toxic leadership have left me with quite a sense of fear about my own propensity to act in unsavoury ways, together with an awe of leaders who do manage to hold it all together under pressure without acting up.

Apart from that, I've been trying to finish a programming project that I honestly thought would be done in the holidays, the Kirin ISP control panel. And then there's family, and evil viruses which knocked me out of action for most of last week.

And that is why I've not been writing very much recently.