JFK said “a rising tide lifts all boats” when speaking about the economy, but when you apply the quote to change, development and organisational culture there’s a couple of prerequisites. Making sure people aren’t stuck in the mud in the first place, or that the organisation isn’t anchored down on too short a rope so it can adapt as the tide rises.

i love how playful metaphors are but yet too often we don’t approach them with the playfulness needed to get to the real learning potential contained. We have all been in the room when someone says ‘but the metaphor is limited’ or ‘the metaphor breaks down when’ or the classic “you’re pushing the metaphor too far”. But if instead of thinking like that we could just kept playing it for a while, exploring its weaknesses as much as its strengths, letting the ideas run, and perhaps it ties into next weeks post on the third stage of ideation. There’s loads more we could do with on the JFK quote, like holes in the boat, stuck in the mud etc to help systems learn and change it’s too easy to say we need to move on and stop playing when there may still be gold in them there hills if we dig deep enough.

Back when I working for the diocese I was at meeting and one of the issues raised was the “mixed ecology” is an oxymoron because an ecology is either mixed or not an ecology. However I still think it’s a helpful phrase and the truth of statement actually offers more resources for a playfulness because often play includes the need to suspend belief for a while, to imagine and laugh at absurdity of a boat so stuck in the mud that it doesn’t rise with tide but slowly becomes swamped whilst Laurel and Hardy do their best to bail it out, remove their shoes and socks until at last they have to swim for it and I’m sure there’s some great learning to be explored by asking questions like what are they using for bailing,  how often are we addressing symptoms rather than cause and amyriad of others.