Archive for Blogging
… wanting your life back
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Perhaps Tony Hayward (soon-to-be-former Group CEO at BP) had a valid point when he lamented the loss of his private life. Anybody who has been involved in a real crisis management role knows that it tends to absorb a lot of your time – most crises don’t stop for evenings and weekends.
My current BAU “Crisis Management” role is certainly absorbing my time to write. In fact it tends to absorb the available intellectual energy to apply to such activity as much as it eats the time to read and write.
Again that is an expected feature of any crisis response. Hopefully we all have that aspect included in our plans and strategies.
The weekly effort applied to this engagement is probably 20+% higher than my previous average working week. In resilience thinking we are often trying to find the way to ‘bounce forward’ from a disruption – the up side for my current situation is that I bill by the hour.
With my limited free-time/energy I have been able to keep up with the reading and conversations required by the Working Group to establish a set of Resilience Awards here in Australia, plus the initial effort to get engaged in the BCI’s ‘Discipline Mapping’ working group – more on both those initiatives in other posts.
As a result I find myself with >50 unread articles in my Google Reader, many feeds that deserve more time marked as read and an increasing number of blog posts on other sites that I was initially motivated to comment on. Plus an increasing sense of frustration at not having the energy or inspiration to write.
It takes a concerted effort to get started with a blog, but when you find your voice (which I guess comes from the motivation and passion) then it is amazing how it becomes a part of what we do and how we perceive ourselves.
I am constantly amazed and inspired by the output, and quality, of commentators such as Chris Brogan (on Social Media) and John Glenn (in our own professional space) – not sure how these guys keep it up.
Just wanted to let people know that I am still here and getting back into the blog habit.
Is anybody still reading and subscribed?
If you haven’t already – click the RSS Subscription link (top right) – that way you don’t have to keep coming back to check for new posts.
… World Conference on Disaster Management
Posted by: | CommentsThe past week I have been on holiday, making my way to Toronto for the Conference.
The sessions here kicked off Sunday afternoon with a workshop – was looking forward to this as an opportunity to meet John Bircham from New Zealand. I have read a lot of his writing on the net, and he has some very interesting insights – the workshop lived up to expectations.
Looking at risks that will never appear on a risk register or a dashboard. An interesting review of systemic risk and how these are invisible to our existing Risk Management processes.
It was fascinating at the Speakers Reception to look around the room and see the various people whose material I have been reading over the years, and here they are on the same faculty. Includes John Vargo from ResOrgs at Uni Canterbury, Geary Sikich, Peter Power and Nathaniel Forbes.
It was also an opportunity to meet up with another person I have been communicating with over the net – Alex Fullick from StoneRoads. Alex is a particular inspiration as he has completed to self-published books and is starting on his third.
You may wonder why there are no hypertext links in this post. Well I have also been catching up on my reading of Nicholas Carr. As part of his thesis about the internet making us dumb, is the distraction and loss of clarity when hypertext links abound in the body of our work. As a result I have linked the relevant pieces at the bottom of the post.
More over the next couple of days from the Conference.
What is your view on this issues of hypertext links in the body of a post? Are they a positive, or do they distract you from the reading and comprehension of the article?
John Bircham – Bircham-Global
Alex Fullick – StoneRoads
