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To The Sea

Some of you may remember, on our 2014 Summer holiday to France I had a frustrated attempt at making a travel based collage, a la Kurt Schwitters. I also had a couple of abstract attempts to represent water, and at the time I wondered if I might combine the two ideas.

Last weekend I came across the bag of travel tickets I kept from the trip and decided to pursue the combination idea. I cut and played with a number of shapes and thoughts, before deciding on this:

To The Sea

The tickets pieces are intended to represent the journey itself, and the kind of plant life you might find in the sea – that’s the idea at least!

I had several attempts at playing with this design and it changed a lot on the way. The big spray of tickets in the middle took a while to form in my mind, and once it did, the rest came quite quickly.

Unfortunately I can’t find most of the earlier photographs, but here are the final tweaks as the design came to life. This piece is on 24 x 32 cm 270 g/m2 water colour paper.

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Creativity Constrained – HR Tech Haikus

Today my blog post
Is based on the haiku form
Will it work or not?

Haiku: Noun. A Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five.

Today my blog post
Is based on the haiku form
Will it work or not?

I spoke with Heather
Tweeting from a conference
About HR tech

She encouraged me
To give haiku tweets a try
Here are some of mine

Data has a soul
And to find it you must search
Way down in the mine

Data makes patterns
Numbers as flow and beauty
Your work is your art

Human capital
A name devoid of feelings
I’m not a number

HRTech Haiku
Sort the data from the flow
Aha! Now I see

Data in the cloud
It’s raining information
Drowning in numbers

Heather wrote some too
She said I could share with you
OK here we go

Data are just bits
Of fact, wrapped up in stories
Truth requires both

Data cannot drive.
It doesn’t do anything
Unless asked nicely

Workforce analytics
How do we measure spirit?
With data ripples

Engage your data
Algorithms need love too.
No more lonely code

Great #HRTechConf
Have a people hangover.
My brain is too full.

Creativity
Ofen driven by constraint
You do more with less

My Week Sucks – Who Am I Kidding?

Bad things in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.

Monday, what a drag. You know how sometimes nothing goes wrong enough to make a fuss but somehow everything sucks just bad enough to leave you hollow by the day’s end? Yeah – that.

Monday evening – read Laurie Ruettimann’s blog post – felt better, more purposeful again.

Tuesday, quick out of the blocks. I always get excited when orders for Stop Doing Dumb Things come in, and I’m due a delivery from the printer with new stock too. While I wait for the DHL van to show I kick down my to do list.

Tick, tick, tick – I’m on the case, take that Tuesday! Delivery arrives – world turns upside down.

IMG_2789The top row is how the cards are supposed to look, the bottom row is what has arrived from the printers. Ouch! I reminded myself – ‘keep calm, there’s a solution in here somewhere’, and rang the printer. It turns out that three orders, including this restock, are all wrong. And to rub salt into the wound – some are going direct to clients, and the correct card template has been overwritten. The problem only affects a few cards in each deck but long story short, I am going to have to rebuild the complete set again from scratch.

IMG_2798

Time to take my medicine and get on with it. I start on Tuesday afternoon and finish on…

Wednesday. After several hours of retyping, setting and colouring I’m done. Proof it – approve it – get on with it. Wednesday afternoon is all about prepping my management accounts and playing catch up, and so too is…

Thursday. I’m getting on with stuff, and yet drifting a bit, suffering some kind of sorry for myself post panic hangover. Then I check an email that arrived during all the hoohah from Joan, who I met two months ago in Illinois. It said:

‘You definitely made an impact in my world and the story you shared about your father’s pocket watch is still with me. I’ve started to follow your blog & professional posts as I so enjoy your writing. Wishing you a great day. Thanks again for all you do & share to help everyone else be better & do good things!’

Two things. 1 – Thanks Joan, what a lovely note. 2 – I think my week sucks – who am I kidding? Something went wrong, it got fixed, nobody died. I got a whole bunch of stuff done and best of all, Joan appreciates me. What’s not to like, dumbass! (Note: I’m talking to me right there, not you).

For the most part I have an optimistic outlook, and yet this week is a great reminder for me: negative stuff is a fact of life, it creeps in – and boy does it grow quickly when you let it. I think Meatloaf said it best when he sang: Bad things in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are. Or something.

I’m off to read Laurie’s post again, then I’m going to take Friday off and make a long weekend of it. May your week also close out in spectacular fashion.