Tripping blithely over the yawning inaction of recent times, let me attempt to slide back into rhythm with relatively less effort, by simply capturing some bits of observation lying about in my notes from the last few years:
Winks: Struck by the glaring departure from the exemplary compliance culture of the Swiss, implied by the little gap in the railing of a tram stop that opens straight onto a road with no zebra crossing – e.g. the coop stop in Bottmingen near our old place (‘2021 update: a zebra crossing is there now). It is evidently a sympathetic provision to enable the commuter making a dash for it, and seems like a wink of the municipal authorities, in acknowledgment of the feather-edged human frailties that no amount of sharp regimentation can banish.
Vigorous Nodding: Is it just me that feels the impulse to nod a little more vigorously when an interlocutor says something slightly off-key or risque’, as if to make the person feel more comfortable with the risk they’re taking and save them embarrassment? I guess it is the same instinct which makes it so hard for me to watch stand-up comedians, as my compulsive empathy creates a sense of unbearable fear for their jokes flopping with the audience.
Petites Madeleines: Proust made them famous as the storage medium for the richness of his sensory experiences from childhood. My petites madeleines were 80’s songs…even catching a random strain of one in a shop electrifies a web of not only direct memories, but of the backlit emotions and feelings of the time when I first heard it.
Roger Ackroyd Effect: This one occurred to me as we piloted a case study on using a new leadership development model for conducting a performance management review with direct reports (some years ago). To probe lateral thinking of the participants, it would be interesting to ask them what they have to say about the writer of the case. The reference, of course, is to Agatha Christie’s famous mystery – the first Christie novel I read (in summer ’88 I think), whose denouement was so far out that I must have read half a dozen of her other books within a few weeks.
Sick of Semiotics: Gestalt must be cool and spiritual, but there comes a point where it might be taken too far. “You leaned your head about 20 degrees to the left as you said that – could this mean that you were channeling the Northwest energy of sensing from the whole?”. Now nobody actually said those words, but I’ve been in conversations that came close.
Keep your Mindmaps to yourself thank you: Though a devotee of mind-mapping myself, I find it irritating when someone has the bright idea of using it to present their thoughts and expect me to follow along as they take me through a tour of their personal mental circuitry. It smacks of being either lazy, pretentious or self centered…do me the courtesy of processing your brain dump into a digestible format please. Mind maps are okay when being co-developed – they lend themselves well to capturing thoughts, but fail miserably at communicating ideas.
Sliced up: I’m troubled by the rise in the phenomenon of knowledge being shredded into convenient bits in the age of e-books, blogs, RSS feeds, wikis etc. Previously only anthologies of famous quotations did this kind of mining and mixing. This miniaturization is part of our zeitgeist – kills context, debilitates expertise, washes away nuance, and makes it so easy for charlatans to fake it.
Notes to Self 
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