Monthly Archives: October 2025

The death of ideas

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Walking the dog a while back I was taken with the amazing seed heads around and make me think about the scripture “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24). It caught me not just as a verse of hope, but as a pattern that runs deep in how ideas grow.
Since Wallas, described a four-stage model of creativity in his 1926 book The Art of Thought, when we talk about ideas, there are stages that repeat. I particularly like Shannon Hopkins idea of “junk the brain” get all the ideas out fast and furiously to make space for some real out of the box thinking.

One pattern could read along the lines of First is the spark, that flash when the idea is born. Second comes the shaping, when we test and sketch, throw things out to see what sticks, gathering others to work it up. But I think the third stage is stranger, harder and looks suspiciously like death, either in terms of Shannon’s junking all the other ideas or as the third stage of ideation, when the idea no longer belongs to you. When you stop clutching it tightly as your possession and allow it to be buried, entrusted to soil that something new grows. The grain of wheat image is not about efficiency or productivity, it’s about release. It suggests that if we refuse to let go either of the initial ideas or if we insulate and protect our bright spark from change, criticism, or collaboration, it remains alone in its own sterility.

But when we release it, even bury it, something else happens. It may disintegrate in its original form, but in that decomposition potential multiplies. Fruit emerges. The community reshapes it, God breathes on it, and what was once “mine” becomes “ours.” What was a single thought or series dies and seeds a space where movements emerge that belongs to something bigger than we imagined.
In organisational innovation, this feels risky. It is tempting to hold to control structures, to keep ownership, to patent and protect. But ideation as faith practice teaches a different rhythm: hold lightly and let the seed fall. Trust the soil of community and Spirit. The third stage is less about control more about surrender.

I wonder if this is why so many pioneering ideas falter, they never move beyond the hand of the founder. We tend to want the harvest without the letting-go. Yet John’s image is uncompromising: the fruit only comes after the seed dies to its own form.
So perhaps the invitation today is simple but costly. What idea are you still clutching in your hand, afraid to plant? What seed needs releasing into the ground of community, risking loss in order to multiply life? Ideation is not complete until we dare to embrace the third stage, trusting death as the doorway to a new future.

Applied Alchemy

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There’s a contrast between a conversation that helps us see differently and one that helps us do differently. Mentoring and coaching both matter deeply in leadership, but they pull on different threads of the learning tapestry. Traditionally mentoring listens for the larger story, the forming of vocation over time, while coaching sharpens focus toward a defined horizon, an outcome, or a stretch goal. One is relational, developmental, and long-range; the other is structured, performance-centred, and time-bound. However more recent research shows that the two are more linked and building on this we are launching Applied Alchemy.
Eg see “Two sides of the same coin”? Coaching and mentoring and the agentic role of context. Stokes, Fatien Diochon, and Otter  Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA)

Mentoring: The Long Arc of Formation

Historically mentoring tends to unfold slowly, rooted in shared experience. A mentor doesn’t so much “fix” a problem as accompany someone through it, offering wisdom from lived practice. This kind of learning isn’t evaluative, and it resists short-term measurement. It’s formation more than feedback. For church leaders and changemakers, mentoring often nurtures a deeper sense of vocation and alignment: learning to live the questions rather than reach for premature answers.

Coaching: The Mirror of Practice

Coaching, by contrast, often begins with a question like “What needs to change?” and ends with a measurable outcome. The method is deliberate: structured reflection, focused feedback, and immediate application into behaviour. It’s for those moments when leadership feels like standing at the edge of action when clarity and accountability can make the difference between good intentions and tangible progress. Organisations that integrate coaching report gains not just in performance, but in the confidence of those they support.

Applied Alchemy: Content, Application and Accountability

Whist it is often said a good coach can does not need to know the sector someone’s working in to help, the research is clear: learning only changes culture when it’s transferred, when new thinking embeds in practice, so like in most situations context is key. Studies in leadership development show that those who hold themselves accountable for applying new learning are significantly more likely to sustain behavioural change. A 2025 goal-oriented leadership study found that leaders who engaged in reflective, app-based follow-up after training improved in self-reported leadership skills and learning transfer, especially when they tracked and shared how they applied lessons in real work contexts. Güntner, A. V., Heimann, A. L., Kleinmann, M., & Ingold, P. V. (2024). The combined effect of a goal-oriented leadership app and leaders’ mindset in optimising training transfer. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 34(2), 175–187. So if an app helped how much more might a real person? 

Similarly, work on organisational transfer shows that accountability partners and deliberate action planning radically increase the translation of learning into results. Without such follow-up, training dissipates into aspiration rather than action, and real change becomes unachievable. Leadership transformation becomes real when it is woven with everyday practice, when leaders are seen not just as learners, but as stewards of learning in motion. See https://culturepartners.com/insights/leadership-development-building-tomorrows-leaders-for-organizational-success/

So Applied Alchemy seeks to close the gap between Context, Content, Application and Accountably as a specialist service for leaders in the faith. So much has changed in the last decade or so, both organisationally, culturally, and missiologically and it is the leaders who are applied it their learning in their toolkit that making the most headway. We will draw on this content and develop deliberate avenues for application and accountability. In a theological sense being accountable for the learning of the last few decades and beyond is to keep covenant with our own becoming, to recognise and act as if what G-d has revealed and others have discovered matters. It’s a form of stewardship: nurturing the insights entrusted to us until they take root in practice, community, and system.

For leaders today, real change isn’t born in the seminar room; it’s in the moment when learning is owned, enacted, and held in view by others and the communities we are walking alongside. Mentoring helps us remember who we are becoming. Coaching helps us practice who we intend to be.

Applied Alchemy weaves together content, context, mentoring and coaching converting insight into embodiment. Check out https://alchemyedge.substack.com/about for more information on the free and subscription levels.

You can join Applied Alchemy in the way that work for you. The free posts will still land here and in substack but I think people will really like the DIP – A monthly Applied Alchemy Leadership, Systems and Change programme that examines the free content with relevant theory with practical application leadership ideas. It also includes Applied Alchemy Questions prompts, Postures and Practices to adopt, and an Accountability Checklist for you to embed in your situation and at your own pace.

First ones will go live in November and you can subscribe for free here or  via https://alchemyedge.substack.com/subscribe?params=%5Bobject%20Object%5D

 

 

The changing face of trickster in systems change

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Sunday Papers turned 21 last month and so I thought I would look back through some of the themes that have emerged over the years and the 950 or so blogposts. The figure of the trickster has been a restless but pretty constant companion, sometimes provocateur, sometimes guide, sometimes the shadow in the corner when certainty threatens to harden. Journeying back through the archive, I notice how my use of “trickster” has itself been tricky: adapting, morphing, much as the trickster does, to the movements and moods of the times and the evolving questions of church, systems, and cultural renewal. Gathering these together we can see her different guises and learn a few lessons along the way. 

Trickster as Disruption: Stirring the Comfortable

In the early days, trickster arrived in my writing as disturbance. Rooted in the stories of Hyde and the many mythic mischief makers, trickster embodied the kind of holy mischief needed to unsettle our ecclesial complacency. I wrote about the discomfort, border-walking, question-posing, edge-dwelling that trickster brings to stagnant communities. Trickster was the strange guest, misunderstood and sometimes unwelcome, who moved the conversation from comfort to confrontation (which probably also reflects my life stage at the time).

There is a necessary place for this sort of energy in organisations and systems facing calcification, when the status quo is defended with greater force than the call of the gospel or the pulse of life. In this stage, trickster is a mirror to stuckness and a living question mark for institutional “wisdom.” Trickster’s value here is not so much in having answers, but in disrupting, and simply tearing open space for something unexpected to begin.

Trickster as Emergence: The Playful Edge of Creativity

As time went on, my engagement with emergence deepened. Trickster moved from being merely an irritant to something generative, a figure not only to challenge boundaries, but to create new ones, or dissolve them long enough for new forms to emerge. The conversations about “emergent church” and “grace spaces” that led to Here Be Dragons revealed the need to dwell not just at the border, but also in the middle, where the boundaries blur and creation teems.

Here, trickster’s play becomes vital. The themes shifted: less about simply sabotaging structure, more about risking improvisation, learning from ambiguity, and allowing the uncomfortable laughter that comes when certainty recedes. Surprisingly, trickster’s lessons in play, parody, and improvisation offered a source of hope and resilience, essential for organisations learning to let go of the need for control and to make space for emergence.

Trickster as Companion: Deep Listening and Systemic Renewal

In more recent years, a subtler, deeper trickster has come to the fore. No longer relegated only to the borders or eruptions of crisis, this trickster appears as a companion in the slow, ongoing renewals of system and spirit. I found myself drawing on trickster stories not just for their disruptive potential, but as a wisdom tradition for co-creative leadership, deep listening, and navigating unpredictable terrain.

Now, trickster is invoked to remind leaders and communities that true transformation happens in liminal space, between the old and not-yet, in stories shared, questions asked, and boundaries re-imagined. The work is less about subversion for its own sake and more about fostering an adaptive, generative ecology where fresh forms of church and meaning can be discovered. Trickster joins the circle as both risk and companion: an invitation to stay open, responsive, and alive to the wild grace of emergence.

Using Trickster in Organisational Change: Practical Insights

Looking back, I see that the trickster’s role shifts with the system’s need:

• When a community is stuck or stagnant, trickster shakes the ground, challenging, exposing, disrupting.

• In seasons of uncertainty or growth, trickster invites play, risk, and improvisational imagination needed for the new to emerge.

• As change matures and practice deepens, trickster becomes a reminder to listen to what emerges with humility, to hold structures lightly, and to let stories and edges lead the way toward renewal.

In organisational and systemic change, then, trickster is not a one-off tool but a shape-shifter morphing between clown, sage, and the voice that asks the question no one else dares name. The journey through these stages is itself trickster-like a reminder that creative transformation is rarely linear, often surprising, and always a bit mischievous. So I think we let trickster take us further, rooting practice in tricksteresque space where the grace of emergence calls leaders and communities not just to survive disruption, but to welcome it as the soil in which new worlds may be planted. And in this, perhaps, the trickster makes our world anew, again and again.

 

As part of Alchemy At The Edge I’m thinking of developing three webinars based on these three trickster stages. If you are interested in this please leave me a comment or email me richard@alchemyedge.co.uk 

(The image was my leaving present from the wonderful Emma Richardson.) 

Momentum You Can See and Feel

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In the second episode of Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams The Ultimate Test, down in Newton Heath, Manchester, there’s a key moment. The rebuilding of the clubhouse has slowed; they had lost the lease document and Freddie talks about how nothing had changed since the last visit. Despite this they still get a bunch of young people to show up and start playing. (I’m yet to see if the slow clubhouse progress impacts the wider project). On the Bottle estate, the young people a to move quickly, They want to play proper games with the hard ball, not just knockabouts. They crave the test, the experience of doing the real thing.
It’s a reminder that change often hangs on two surprisingly simple tools: visibility and momentum.

John Kotter, one of the most over quoted figures in change theory, makes much of “short term wins”. His point isn’t just about morale boosting milestones; it’s about the need for evidence. Communities, like individuals, need to see difference made real. A patched fence, a working clubhouse, or that first hard?ball match. Sightlines anchor belief. Without them, the best written vision documents drift into abstraction.
Although I’m yet to watch the rest of the series I suspect in Newton Heath, the clubhouse will be more than bricks and mortar it’s will be a symbol. The slow progress at that site will test patience, while the practice showed possibility but how will the quick and slow play out? (UPDATE just watched the next episode and they had to move to a new venue which I guess kind of proves my point)

At the Northern Mission Centre, we found a parallel when we designed our Speed Incubator. We built it on the principle that pressing the accelerator early helps overcome inertia. Speed matters. Think of it like cycling: harder to push off from standstill, easier once you’re rolling.
In community development, momentum is not about racing ahead irresponsibly. It’s about creating experiences of movement, moments where participants feel the breeze of progress. People learn with their bodies as well as their minds. That first product launched, that story told at a community meal, that visible experiment tried in public, these generate a sense of speed you can feel.
Visible + Experiential = Trust. Bring visibility and speed together, and you start to rebuild trust in the possibility of change. That’s what Freddie Flintoff stumbled into on the Bottle estate. The young people didn’t simply hear him talk about cricket or watch a clubhouse crawl towards completion. They stepped into a match where the sound and sting of the hard ball told them: this is real.
Likewise, our Speed Incubator showed that the feel of “something happening” matters as much as strategy. Prototypes and pilots, no matter how rough, are worth more than perfect plans delayed. The eye sees, the body feels, and the imagination follows.
Lessons for Local Change
For those working in churches, charities and neighbourhood initiatives, the lessons are clear:
• Create visible wins that people can point to. Paint it, patch it, play it, even if it’s not perfect.
• Design for speed experiences that shift momentum. Small risks, real experiments, fast follow?through.
• Remember that change is not only told in documents or meetings, it is embodied in what people see and feel together.
That’s where belief grows. Change is contagious when it shows itself in sights and in motion.

The Catch Limit: Casting Positivity and hope onto the water

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I’m after a new hobby that has space and an outcome, so I found myself musing about fishing as a possibility. As an activist, a lover of river banks, piers, beaches and sea, it felt like a good fit. As someone who’s spent more hours wrestling with books than bait, there I was, speaking with a mate about the possibility of giving fishing a go. His response has lingered: “If I was to guess your next hobby, fishing would never have even made the list.” And I could see his point. Yet what really struck me was the gentle admiration he voiced, not so much for my angling nous, but for my optimism that I might catch more than the permitted two salmon per season.

Two salmon. It’s a paltry number, really. Yet, for me, my instinct and reflex, is to look for the glimmers of possibility where others might see scarcity. I wonder why is it I approach things like this, glass brimming with hope, an assumption of success even when the river is running thin?

Somewhere beneath this buoyant surface is the quiet undertow of whats gone before. The ripples of old stories, the clatter of childhood. I’m no stranger to the terrain of adversity, that stretch of years in my childhood where hardship edged the seasons, and the river of life often flowed murky. The textbooks label these sorts of things “adverse childhood experiences,” and the narratives attach warnings of gloom, fragility, risk. But that reality, that living, breathing, evolving gives me a wonderfully subversive logic.

I’ve come to see that within the chapters marked ‘difficulty’ there can be a strange kind of resource. Resilience as muscle memory for hope. When challenges came and physical flight was not an option, it taught me to scan the horizon not for loss, but for what might yet come into view. The fisherman’s prayer, “Maybe this cast,” echoes something deeper, a conviction that each attempt carries the possibility of a different outcome, even when the books and the bylaws would say otherwise.

It’s not always conscious, this tendency to override the limits and reach for the next best outcome. Sometimes it’s just stubborn curiosity, or an overinflated sense of self, often it’s a refusal to let the story be written in advance. Other times, it’s a conscious act of rebellion against the predisposition of pessimism. Where others see the posted sign, two salmon, part of me assumes success and wonders, “Yes, but what if?” There’s a joy in that question, a wild grace in believing the river may yield something more than it’s supposed to.

My friend’s remark that he admired my positivity was meant kindly, and I think it was recognition of something we don’t always name: hope isn’t just naivety, nor is it denial. Sometimes it’s born from the long, gradual work of braving the years where things were sparse and the nets came up empty. Fishing, then, becomes less about the catch than the casting, a test of faith, a hope for life to surface.

There’s an old saying on rivers: one fishes not for fish, but for restoration but for the me outcome, the catch remains important, so I’m not sure if it will make the new hobby list, but I do like the idea that it might be a way to keep practicing that muscle, stretching hope beyond the limits set by authorities and old stories. Because after all, two salmon is the rule. But possibility and hope like water, can never be wholly contained.