A /now page, for sharing what I’m currently focusing on.
Updated 15th July 2024.
At an event I attended recently, David Robinson of The Relationships Project posed the question, what are we doing next week, in the coming year, and what’s our direction for the next 5 years? So for me:
- This week – continue developing facilitation skills training for people doing co-production in public services (not training facilitators, but distilling the values and skills that you might need if you work in a public service and have to gather people together to do meaningful engagement, citizen involvement, and/or co-production).
- This coming year – expand my facilitation practice into explicit team dynamics and conflict transformation areas (beyond the business as usual stuff, I want to do more untangling of the weeds under the surface when things aren’t quite so straightforward). I’m putting this intention out into the Universe, and inviting the possibilities!
- The next 5 years – I don’t know what shape this is going to take yet, but I want to look into grief work in organisational change (whenever there is a change, even a positive one, we have to let go of something to make space for the new; I believe we need to attend to this process of letting go and grieving).
I also have a permanent and ongoing fascination with how we can measure relationships and culture change (in an ethical and affirming way, obvs). I collect my occasional thoughts on the blog under the “Measurement” tag.
On my reading shelf – about dying and grief (both on a personal and collective level):
- Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief (Cindy Milstein)
- The Grieving Brain (Mary-Frances O’Connor)
- Option B (Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant)
- You Are Not Alone (Cariad Lloyd)
- Modern Loss (Rebecca Soffer & Gabrielle Birkner)
- Ashes To Admin (Evie King)
- The Silly Thing (Esther Ramsay-Jones)
- Being Mortal (Atul Gawande)
- Stiff (Mary Roach)
- Grave (Allison C. Meier)
- On Death and Dying (Elizabeth Kubler-Ross)
- Necessary Losses (Judith Viorst)
- Living your Dying (Stanley Keleman)
- The Smell of Rain on Dust (Martin Prechtel)
- Geometry of Grief (Michael Frame)
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow (Francis Weller)
- With the End in Mind (Kathryn Mannix)
- Tending Grief (Camille Sapara Barton)
I have long been interested in end-of-life doula training. I may well explore this more concretely in the coming years. In the meantime I’m very open to conversations about all of the above!