CUSTOMER SERVICE TRAINERS NEEDED

Can you present complex information in a dynamic, lively way?
Are you comfortable working with a wide range of people?
Can you work reliably and professionally as a sub-contractor and be available at short notice?

Diversityworks Group is seeking Expressions of Interest from trainers, preferably with the lived experience of disability, to provide disability awareness training for people in front line customer service roles.

Continue reading CUSTOMER SERVICE TRAINERS NEEDED »

Creative diversity at its best!

Quote of the Day

Peter Drucker - "The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different."

Rounding off

It's been a while since I blogged properly and those who have been following are probably wondering where I've been. Quite a bit has happened in the last three weeks –let me do a bit of a plotted history and I'll wind up with a reflective summary of my overseas learning.

31 March - 5 April: Manchester
I blogged about the Bodyworlds exhibition, but of course that wasn't my reason for being in Manchester. I spent a day with disability arts organisation Full Circle Arts, as keynote at Fayre eXchange, a networking and development day for artists. The audience ranged wider than Newcastle, both in age and experience. The day was packed with different activities - keynotes, panel discussions, workshops and networking - and could well have been relaxed over two days. I was left with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction at having not arranged to work longer with the artists I met, particularly with the younger people who were obviously enjoying and benefiting from the experience of being immersed in an environment of mutual support and inspiration. Once again I was also inspired by the experience of hanging out with artists with unique experience and my resolve to organise a network of artists in Auckland (and perhaps NZ) was strengthened.

5 - 9 April: Devon (Cullompton, Exeter)
My brief for The South West was to engage with cultural and emerging entrepreneurs as part of an "Entrepreneurs In Conversation" series sponsored by the Cultural Leadership Programme. A small group gathered at Exeter University and – catalysed by my exploration of experiential diversity – a satisfying discussion began about context, culture and identity. Once again, though, with a mere two hours, the dialogue had a chance only to germinate and I was left frustrated at having to leave the group with the conversation at such an embryonic stage.

While in Devon I had the pleasure of spending time with my friend and mentor Moya Harris, ex-Director of Equata (now Kaleido) in the beautiful Cullompton district. Sadly, however, during our stay we received word of not only the admittance to hospital of Mahinarangi Tocker, but also the death of my travelling companion Claire's aunt, to whom she was very close. Given this additional stress we decided to cut our trip short and return to NZ without visiting Hawaii to attend the Pacific Rim Conference.

We arrived back on Saturday 12 April and the last week has just been a blur of jet lag, early morning waking and grief over Mahinarangi's death (compounded by the Mangatepopo River school trip tragedy).

Summary/reflection
So, here are the gems that I have taken from the trip:

1. I am an international thought leader: The highlight of the trip was certainly the conceptual breakthrough of Constructive Experiential Diversity (CED), moving on from Constructive Functional Diversity's impairment/disability focus to a framework that reframes and explores marginalisation on all fronts. I received repeated feedback that I am leading this way of thinking internationally – it is new and cutting edge, and I need to share it more widely. I see a clear role for WISE SPECIES™ as the structure that explores the diversity of individual and group experience in more depth, transforming it into constructive and creative expression.
   
   
2. I need to bundle theory with application: Another clear realisation is that I need to bundle speaking about the theory of CED with its practical application through WISE SPECIES™. I left people wanting more in the UK, which is good up to a point, but I need to start negotiating a longer engagement with clients in order to deliver value for money and return on investment.
   
   
3. I want to promote all aspects of social change as innovation: It was fantastic to be able to speak to people involved in social change and draw parallels to other areas of business innovation. I think activists, artists and frontline welfare workers need to be thinking of what they are doing in terms of innovation and see the response they receive as a natural reaction to innovation. For example, disabled artists who come across market resistance to their work need to stop thinking of this as discrimination and look at how to market their innovation better. Similarly, social workers and counsellors could inject creativity and passion into their work (for themselves and their clients) by seeing their role as supporting people to innovate their lives and promoting it as such, while understanding the innate resistance to new ideas that humans have, especially about themselves.
   
   
4. I am buoyed by the belief that NZ is served and limited by scale: It is interesting, I think, that the social, environmental and resource issues we face in NZ are both compounded and alleviated by our population size. We have the same range of issues, but if that range of issues were a piece of string, our string is much shorter than most other societies. So the (negative) impact is therefore less extreme than other populations, but so also is the (positive) opportunity to make change. Given this dichotomy, the challenge is to leverage the limited impact while accommodating the limited opportunity. Inverted, this means celebrating the relative harmony of our society while innovating cost effective ways to address inequity.
   
   
5. It may sound glib, but I believe that creativity and play need to lead the way: At the risk of generalising, I think we take society's ills far to seriously. At one end of the spectrum the general public have a tendency to over-catastrophise situations, which often compounds them (eg. boy racers, challenges to religious traditions), yet there is another equal inclination towards trivialising issues (eg. social attitudes to disabled people, the impact of economic and political hypocracy). I believe that employing principles of creativity (design, organic development and lateral thinking) and play (lightness, exploration and fascination) is key to improving our social and environmental future.
   
   

The Herald explains...

On 18/04/2008, at 12:54 PM, darren.bevan@... wrote:

Good afternoon Philip
Thanks for your query.
I can assure you it was a genuine mistake in the processing area and we are sorry about it.
It was actually a technical error and I will explain how that happens. We moderate all comments and a large number of words are highlighted automatically when they come in in case the comments around them could be defamatory etc such as racist terms. The word lesbian is one of them highlighted as we have a number of comments through claiming a certain high profile person is gay and that person has warned that they would take legal action is that statement is ever published as she says it is not true.
So your use of the word lesbian was highlighted but also accidentally omitted.
Our original story on Ms Tocker which triggered the comment thread on Ms Tocker made it clear Mahinarangi was a proud member of the gay community.
I can assure you there was no intention to omit that fact and on our busiest day of the year (also handling hundreds of tribute comments on the school trip tragedy) the technical change got the better of us.
Again our apologies.
Regards
Darren Bevan
Online Content Moderator
APN Online

Homophobic Herald

I'm flabbergasted - the Herald censored my tribute to Mahinarangi Tocker.

In my original post I wrote: "...my gay, disabled, vegetarian comedian status could never beat her place as a Maori, lesbian, crazy (her words) musician."

I just reread it - they deleted "lesbian" before they published it, reducing her to a Maori, crazy musician. She so wasn't.

How homophobic. How insulting to both of us. I'm lost for words.

Farewell my minority soulmate

(Image sourced from nzherald.co.nz)
There are few people I've known who could outdo me in the minority stakes - Mahinarangi Tocker, who died today following an asthma attack that left her without oxygen for a period of minutes, never let me forget it. She trumped me well and truly - my gay, disabled, vegetarian comedian status could never beat her place as a Maori, lesbian, crazy (her words) musician. And she was a comedian as well, really - her humour knew no bounds. Though our paths crossed too few times, when they did it was always hilarious. I still laugh when I remember us discussing how the voices in our heads knew each other, and though I never quite understood her idea about iPods for wheelchairs, I knew that, somehow, they could have caught on. I will always have the upmost respect for this gorgeous woman who so staunchly supported the kaupapa of mental health, queer rights and musicianship, yet never let these labels define her. She was, is and always will be a beautiful soul who experienced life uniquely and expressed herself creatively, richly and dynamically. And though she struggled with herself at times, she could equally laugh at herself. That, in my estimation, is the quality of angels. My dear friend, colleague and minority soulmate, I'll miss the laughs. Arohanui e hoa aataahua. Rest in love.

The slow but necessary evolution of social technology

While queuing for nearly half an hour this morning to buy tickets for Bodyworlds at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, I was looking at an old Linotype machine on display. While musing that I'd expect an institution specialising in science and industry to have devised a more efficient way of queuing for and buying tickets than traipsing through a temporary, prefabricated building hardly wide enough to allow two people to pass each other, I was also contemplating the technological advancement of humanity.

It seems incredible that, in just a hundred years or so, the industry of typesetting and printing, which used to involve such cumbersome machinery, has come to be executed with such speed, accuracy and quality within the virtually unseen mechanisms of laptops and desktop printers. In fact, the physical production function is now almost redundant. This blog, its style and distribution are evidence of the linotype of the future.

Were those ten decades a waste of time? Could we have skipped the labour- and resource-intensive age of paper printing, saved a lot of money, steel, ink, and trees, and brought the technological environment of electronic printing forward a generation or two? How would that have impacted on the environment, the economy, politics even? Would the world be a better place? Would we have missed out on anything had the literature of the past not been mass-produced on the page but on the screen instead? Could it have been? Didn't anyone envisage the screen while they tirelessly built the linotype and used it with excruciating laboriousness?

I think these kinds of questions are the source of my greatest frustration when it comes to social change. I can see the digital screens of tomorrow's humanity: knowingly accepting diversity as natural, effortlessly recognising the synergy of commonality and uniqueness (similarity and difference), playfully celebrating our dichotomous significance and insignificance. Yet everywhere I look are the human linotype machines of intolerance, discrimination, carbon waste and economic greed needlessly bashing out page upon wasteful page of poverty, marginalisation, environmental devastation and misery.

Can't we skip this age of archaic social technology?

Yes I know I'm being unrealistic and naive - I'm arguing with myself as I write. Of course the computer and desktop printer wouldn't (couldn't) have been invented without the gradual evolution of technology: the typewriter, the Gestetner Cyclostyle machine, the dot matrix printer. Individual human beings themselves evolve cell by cell, stage by stage, from fertilised egg to foetus, child to adult.

Social change, by comparison, also takes time. Note to self: allow it to take time.

Ok, ok, but meanwhile, I feel like I did leaving Bodyworlds: vaguely nauseous yet strangely fascinated and intrigued!