Back in the room

Only me…

I’ve held off from blogging for a while – lots of reasons like health and work and maybe I’d run out of steam but perhaps my silence has felt most strongly necessary in recent months:: I’ve been keen to avoid creating more noise when there’s more than enough amateur epidemiologists shouting their partial grasp of what is a highly specialist field and their hand-made spreadsheets. It’s been hard for the real experts to get through, so I didn’t want to make things worse.

By the way, I’m not sure that we’d have the same thing going on – challenges to expert modelling and cross-country expertise – if we were dealing with a different kind of emergency like a major nuclear incident or an extreme global weather disruption but – hey ho! – something about the devil and idle hands goes here….

So I’ve decide to return here to collate some of the thoughts I’ve been musing on, many of which are more like sideways looks at the human issues around this – most of which are HERD-y.

It may not surprise you but I’ve found this experience very revealing of all the stuff I’ve/We’ve been banging on about in recent years: from the Super Social Ape on.

It’s like we’ve been participants in piece of spooky social science: an imposed deprivation experiment. As if by stripping away all of the real world social things we have come to rely on in our lives and work, we can see how essential our social side really is; how fundamental these social interactions of all sorts are in keeping us feeling safe, sane and grounded; the primary role they have in our working and home lives and the very small amount that we do on our own.

So, lots of stuff to point at and ponder. Noticing and musing.

Before I start, here’s something to remind you of where we were before I switched the mike off: the last speaking gig I did before the lockdown. The very lovely people at Watch Me Think invited me and some other folk to share our thoughts on what to do in (what were already) interesting times.

Update: password is “allshookup”.

Of course it is….