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In music, one of the most popular patterns is the Call and Response.  In this pattern, the Call is made by a musician in the form of a musical phrase, which is then responded to by an answering phrase, the Response.

A key quality of a true Call and Reponse is that the Call is a musical question, performed to create the space for an authentic Response to emerge.  However, in many leadership teams there is often a lot of calling being done with no space being created for responses to be heard.

Calls that will probably remain unanswered often begin from leaders making statements like ‘We must send a message to the workforce’, rather than creating a questioning space that will encourage genuine response.  Even when these messages are presented as Steve Denning style stories, there is often no space left for responses from other members of a team.

However, if a band played music like Steve Denning tells stories, it would probably sound like karaoke, rather than an inspired and passionate band of musicians effortlessly calling and responding to each other.  A band from Manchester, The Get Out Clause, have taken Call and Response to a whole new level in the video for their song, Paper.

Unable to afford professional camera equipment and a film crew they filmed themeselves in front of CCTV surveillance cameras at over eighty locations around Manchester.  They then requested the footage of themselves performing under the Freedom of Information Act and edited their video from it.  In any team, whether it is a Mancunian band or an executive leadership, information usually flows more freely when using patterns of Call and Response.

Recently I have been exploring a number of clients dreams that feature the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown.  Although Gordon is a regular visitor for many dreamers, such as the Independent’s Catherine Townsend, his current unpopularity seems to be making him a very popular dream character.

One dreamer described a dream in which he was trying to escape from a horde of pursuing zombies who were being led by an undead Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling.  The gang of ghouls reminded him of the zombified cheap labour and game show contestants at the end of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s Rom Zom Com Shaun of the Dead.

Often when we dream of being pursued by something unpleasant in our dreams, we are avoiding an issue that we really have to deal with in our waking lives.  The more pressing the issue becomes, the more dramatic and scary our dreams may become.

Usually the issue creating the tension in our waking life centres around making a seemingly  unpopular decision that will actually the healthiest and best choice for us.

When we dream of a leader, particularly a political leader, he or she usually represents how we experience authority and how we make decisions or let others make decisions for us.

Zombies usually symbolise parts of ourselves that we are neglecting, areas where we feel dead inside, and burdened by responsibility, we are merely shuffling through the motions of being human.

For this dreamer being pursued by Gordon and Alistair, the issue in waking life was that he felt under chronic pressure from his family to conform to conventional expectations.  However, he is a talented guitarist and songwriter, and the decision he had to make was between parental conformity or following his dream of being a professional musician.

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After recent work on the Dreamwork Fragment Identifier, I felt it would be interesting to see my personal site as a pattern of connected fragments, rather than a hierarchy of menus.  So here it is in all its retro Polaroid glory - the navigation is a bit quirky, it depends on click rhythm and number, but I enjoy that - it can be quite serendipitous, or will be when I load more personal fragments on to the site.

My favourite fragments so far are Radio Free Edinburgh - a soundscape of self liberation, and Aerobat Inverted - looping the loop in a Scottish sky.

Many organisations treat creativity as a resource, something to be tapped into that will somehow fuel their profits.  As recently described in Collective Spirit, we often view creativity as a sometimes volatile spirit that can help power our progress. 

This perspective can often lead to businesses seeing creativity as a finite reservoir that will run out at some point, and can only be replenished by attracting new talent.  However, the search for new talent can soon escalate into a War for Talent with the price of talent increasing in proportion to its perceived scarcity.

This is a similar concept to Marion King Hubbert’s Peak Oil theory, and its contemporary descriptions by activists such as Richard Heinberg.  It is also reflected in attempts by large corporations to capture and secure talent rich territory through mergers and acquisitions, sometimes involving hostile action. 

However, instead of releasing long term creative energy to drive sustainable profit, the talent that has been won is usually burned out very quickly.  Either that, or a corporate takeover will work in a similar process to the initial formation of oil where talent becomes crushed by the pressures of corporate stratification and is soon indistinguishable from long dead dinosaurs and rotting vegetable matter.

Some enlightened organisations experience creativity as a way of working, rather than a fossilised and jealously guarded resource.  Instead of trying to continually trying to purchase and secure creative potential, they create possibility spaces where the human spirit of their workers can shine through.

How does an Ambient Self in an Ambient Organisation find meaning in the Ambient Space that is being created?  We usually find meaning most powerfully in that which most strongly reflects our identity.

In many organisational spaces it can be difficult to discern authentic meaning from the constant background noise of unfocused activity.  This often results in an organisation that has no coherent identity, and usually generates politicised and antagonistic silos.

To find meaning in an organisation’s space, we have to look at how individual and organisational identity is projected into that space, and how it is reflected back.  In Dreamwork, we use tools like the Identifiers and Reflectors to detect and connect where people consciously or unconsciously find meaning.

The found meaning is expressed and shared as narrative fragments and in multimedia clips.  As people in the organisation begin to see and realise where they and their colleagues find individual meaning, they often become aware of a deeper shared collective meaning.

Why even bother trying to create meaningful space?  Surely the purpose of any organisation is to generate profit, rather than meaning?  When people realise there is no meaning in their work, they usually stop working, because it seems pointless.  The more meaning they find in their profession, the more value it will have for them, and the more value it will create for the organisation.

Meaning cannot be forced on them.  They cannot be forced to find meaning in what they do.  Like Frank Lloyd Wright ’s creation of meaningful space, their own Ambient Space has to emerge from the context of their own intentions and purpose.