It is the start of a busy week in a very busy season. I’m on a train Saturday morning at first light. I’ve left my house before the sun to start a week that is representative of the weird corners of my life right now. Today I’m off to Christchurch, hoping that the skies, cloudy here, will be clear on the flight down so that I can catch a glimpse of mountains on this short flight, snow-capped from the first fall of early autumn snow.
Today I’ll present about Kegan’s theory today to a group of researchers who are thinking about knowledge. They want to understand the connections between New Zealand’s new curriculum, the way schools need to change to face the 21st century needs, and the way teachers make sense of diversity. And they think that Kegan will help them with that.
Monday I’ll head to work at NZCER and wrestle with large issues in the world and important issues in our organisation (for the blog we’re writing about helping to shift education into the 21st century, click here).
Tuesday I’ll facilitate at a meeting at an organisation where I’ve been doing lots of leadership development work. It’s an interesting request for them to have me come in for this meeting between the chief executive and some of his senior leaders. About half of those leaders have been through a quick programme with me (and Keith), and the organisation is wanting them to both use those leadership skills/habits/ways of thinking to change the way this meeting feels.. Wednesday Keith and I will do a one-day programme with the senior team in that same organisation (would be nicer if these went in the opposite direction, but such is life). And Thursday Keith and I will give a two-hour keynote workshop to the New Zealand District Court Judges about how they might think in new ways about their work and their growth.
So it’s a week where I teach about development to researchers, teach about development to leaders to help them develop, use developmental ideas to teach about leadership, and finally use all these ideas to help leaders begin to enact change in a real-time situation.
This is not just a to-do list of my week so you’ll understand the silence or write to me with sympathy. This is the braid of my work life that I’m trying to understand, the mix of my activities in proportions I’m trying to get right. I love each of these pieces, love the braiding of research, practice, and teaching. I relish the opportunity to touch them all in a single week, to test my own knowledge and have it bump up against these many varied situations, to have the proximity of these different ways of thinking about and working on the same basic problem (how do adults grow on the job?).
And at the same time, it’s such a disjointed and fragmented list. Half of the groups I’ll work with this week I’ll never see again; the other half I am getting so immersed in I can hardly see anything else. I’ll move from context to context, teaching the same thing more than once but in these different ways; I’ll be surprised if I don’t screw up the presentations, lose the one I’m doing now for the one I’m doing next, find myself blinking, doe-in-the-headlights wondering which group this was again.
I have been wrestling with this coherence problem my entire work life. I am not interested in doing one piece of this work—am not wanting to give up the research or the writing or the teaching or the consulting. But there isn’t one job with all those bits. And so I do a piece of this here, a piece of that there, and hope that in the end these little bits add up to something bigger than the sum of hundreds of day-long workshops. It’s so hard to see the pattern of my life as I’m weaving it. Enough of this shade? Too much of that one? And how does it contribute to the knowledge base in the world? How does it contribute to the lives of individuals? To the mission of organisations? I’m not sure, and maybe won’t ever know until it’s behind me. Seems a hard way to craft a work life, especially when you’ve only got the option to write a first draft of life, without being able to go back and edit and rewrite.
Today I’ll fly off into the grey clouds. Monday I’ll meet with Robyn and think about my work life at my day job. I am excited to be in the space I’m in here; it is a privilege and an honour to be with people in the many ways I have to do that. And in two weeks, I’ll get the vantage point on my life that only travel offers when I head to the US. Fasten your seatbelts. In a time like this, there is always the potential for unexpected turbulence.
ps The picture today is just a randomly beautiful sunset from last week. And I can't even describe how magnificent the plane ride home was. Seriously, this is the most beautiful place I have ever seen, and it's changingly beautiful again and again and again...
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