Disturbing Conversations

Listening to the "mood music" of the news at the moment, we have an abundance of disturbance. As I wrote last week, I think we should be grateful for that. The disturbance is a signal and a low-intensity reminder of what we need to address before it becomes something much more severe.

They manifest in our reactions to political promises that seem to have the shelf life of a supermarket sandwich, or the surfacing of deep systemic issues of organisational culture in cricket. Or it might be the concerns we have that social media has mutated from a beneficial tool to a toxic money-making machine. And, of course, the mother of them all, the adoption of weasel words "phasing down" humanity’s use of coal at COP26.

The challenge for us is how do we harness disturbance? What do we have to do to find its source, as well as deal with its immediate symptoms?

The last two years have provided us with a varied set of disturbances and valuable laboratories in which to examine them. But, whilst, as the s…