Back to School

Waiting in a line outside Vincent Square, with my parent hat on, it is a discombobulating experience to go back to your old school of over 30 years ago.  

What makes great schools, great? Why is it perceived that it is so hard to replicate what great schools do?*

How much influence do parents and teachers really have on children as compared to all the other forces cajoling, buffering and nurturing our children? 

The qualities of curiosity, empathy and creativity - qualities I value in myself and others.     How are they nourished in schools ?

How do you shape girls and boys into good women and good men?

I don’t have answers but I do have a few observations and some hope.

On the elite side, my grandfather went to Cambridge presumably as a partial recompense and apology for colonial rule in Malaysia. My father went to Cambridge due to nepotism and a polite letter my grandfather wrote to the Master of the college.  I went to Cambridge as I was gifted, worked hard and had extraordinary teachers and educational institutions.  I came out with the top first in my year and a scholarship to Harvard. I then learned some of the craft of play writing and poetry, and have ended up a writer and a fund manager.

As a scholar to my school, you can see my name in the 1992 section. 

Although the power of elite networks remains strong, I would not have made it to Cambridge on the word of my father.  While challenges remain, meritocracy has arguably partially developed. Like the late Hans Rosling’s point in Factfulness large challenges remain but today is better than the past. 

I have now toured 3 elite prep schools and continue to interview pupils from elite private schools. I have experience across the spectrum into state and learning disabled education.  

I remain hopeful.

In the 1960s,  if you studied languages at O-level (16 years old) you would achieve great grammar but you could hardly speak much and would not be able to converse in Paris. 

Similarly, for maths your geometry would be great you might know Euclid but you would know nothing of statistics.  

Today, the ability to converse and to understand statistics is - rightly in my view – prioritized although the joys of Euclidean geometry are mainly untaught now. Education has evolved. 

While walking round these schools listening to teachers and senior staff; hearing the children - seeing the classes – looking at the messages three items stuck me:

Everyone is learning about notions of sustainability

Everyone considers diversity important

An articulation of values and “growth mind set”… learning from failure, happiness before success,  with ability comes responsibility…

All these ideas were strongly expressed (whether in state or private) to an extent that I do not recall 30 years ago.

Education has moved on, and it’s for the younger generations to evolve and reject those of them before them (which is why the voter turnout for aged 18-25 in recent local elections, general elections and Brexit are somewhat disappointing)

And so to… with ability comes responsibility…

I do think matters might be very different, if those in the upper tiers of society, and for instance under one measure that would include everyone earning more then £30,000 a year and about 40% of the country did give back a more substantial portion to those in the bottom 60%.

I’m not thinking money. I’m thinking more about time, experience, learnings. Perhaps, we’ve always been so – I haven’t examined closely – but we’re so concerned with the near-by day-to-day, the grind of life, it seems like we struggle to reach out and cross divides.  It’s one of the small ideas behind the mingle. If that top 40% gave back 2 hours of time a week to something other than themselves, I wonder what our world would look like.

Source: Factfulness, Rosling (2018) quoting UNESCO

Diving back to education and away from Level 4 rich country concerns, I also see hope in Level 1 country concerns.  Look at the rates of literacy, and of children who finish some school. It’s been incredibly positive. Still a lot of work to do, but every reason to think that those trends will continue as basic educational teacher practice start to be embedded in Level 1 countries (alongside basic health practice, electricity, hygiene.)

Dipping back to Level 4 London concerns, I am syncretic over many ideas. I simultaneously hold ideas about educating an elite (and we can see every generation a handful of boys and girls who go on to be country and company leaders trained through this system – which I am a product of) and a comprehensive system. I also have a lot of time for a “home school” ideology  , and a “technical-vocational-mastercraftsman-system”. All of these systems have run in parallel with pros/cons for decades and will likely run for decades more (the decline of the UK Mastercraftsman technical system being of detriment, in my view, versus the German continued investment in that system).

Still, watching these young boys and girls, it does feel hopeful. I’m unsure how I feel that there’s no space for Spike here in these institutions. There’s barely a Spike-shaped space anywhere in the world.  But, do I see an Oscar space shape with a gentle, quirky boy?
 

Over 30 years ago, I was 6 years old going on 7 as I started at WUS. Small and not super sporty, I found a second home in the pottery studio. I remember Miss B – her deft kindness in letting a shy quirky thoughtful boy while away break times with some clay (below is one, now somewhat currently broken I made 30 or so years ago) but also her emotional insightful intelligence in when to nudge such a boy into outdoors action.

Many an autumn day,  30 years ago, I would chase leaves falling from this exact tree and try and catch them. 

This creative thread remains with me today (see clay play post).

A pot I coiled and made about 30 years ago, now ready to be repaired.

Still she is on my list of teachers and mentors I have a lot to be thankful for (Gideon Lester here plus a few others,  Adrienne Kennedy here).

I guess this system believes that if you run with the swift, you run faster. Certainly, some fall, and I see, some to never recover. But at least with the cohort I knew and am in touch with, I see they’ve grown from little boys into great men.

Compassion, kindness and honesty. 

Curiosity, empathy and creativity.

Service, openness and love.

These  - along with independent critical thinking - have been taught to me and I’d wish to teach my children.

---

*Part of what makes certain schools great are the external speakers and visitors who come. These people can't go everywhere and are often draw to schools in easy to reach places and with strong historic reputations. This is not an easy thing to scale or replicate.

Source: Children's Commissioner (2011), Children and young people's views of education policy.

One concerning systemic note is whether we - adults - are listening enough to what children want from their education. One slowly increasingly positive note over the last decades is the importance of the child but it arguably still lags.

If you consider companies now use customer net promoter scores and via Amazon in level 4 countries we know the 5 star rating of every product... then the rating children give British schools is not brilliant.

Only 1 / 2 enjoy lessons...

Source: Children's Commissioner (2011), Children and young people's views of education policy.

And most children can tell when teachers are poor...

This would suggest a simple teacher Net Promoter Score as reported by children could be a useful measure to note and perhaps to incentivise on ?

---

More thoughts: My Financial Times opinion article on long-term investing and how to engage with companies.

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man. On play and playing games.

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude.

A provoking read on how to raise a feminist child.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here.

---

Neurotribes: Legacy of Autism, Neurodiversity movement

A look into the arguments behind the concept of neurodiversity: that autism can be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with strengths that have contributed to culture and technological advances... also examines the history of autism with a lens emphasis on hearing the stories of autistic people themselves.  The below is a short extraact from Steve Silberman NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently (Link to Amazon here).  (Note his original observations on Hans Asperger are already considered out of date - and wrong - in the light of more recent work, and the latest addition of the work corrects this)

In Neurotribes, SS quoting Oliver Sacks:

“Sacks cast light on the challenges that they face in their day-to-day lives while paying tribute to the ways they bring the strengths of their atypical minds to their work. “No two people with autism are the same: its precise form or expression is different in every case,” he wrote. “Moreover, there may be a most intricate (and potentially creative) interaction between the autistic traits and the other qualities of the individual. So, while a single glance may suffice for clinical diagnosis, if we hope to understand the autistic individual, nothing less than a total biography will do.”"

[On the current state on the heterogenous nature of genetic factors found]

....The authors of a major study published in Nature admitted that even the most common genetic factors brought to light in their research were found in less than 1 percent of the children in their sample. “Most individuals with autism are probably genetically quite unique,” said Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. UCLA neurogeneticist Stanley Nelson added, “If you had 100 kids with autism, you could have 100 different genetic causes.” A wry saying popular in the autistic community, “If you meet one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism,” turns out to be true even for molecular biologists. In 2010, I spoke to one of the fathers I’d interviewed nine years earlier. He told me that he was no longer worrying about what had caused his daughter’s autism. Instead, he was concerned about her future. She was about to “age out” of the modest level of services that the state of California provided to the family. Despite years of behavioral therapy, her skills had not developed to the point where he and his wife felt confident that she would ever be able to live on her own. “The question that keeps me up at night,” he said, “is what will happen to our beloved daughter when we die?” With the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) currently estimating that one in sixty-eight school-aged children in America are on the autism spectrum, millions of families will be facing sleepless nights in the coming decades. Many autistic adults are not exercising the strengths of their atypical minds at companies like Apple and Google—instead, a disproportionate number are unemployed and struggling to get by on disability payments. ...

... One of the most promising developments... has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions....

... The notion that the cure for the most disabling aspects of autism will never be found in a pill, but in supportive communities, is one that parents have been coming to on their own for generations...."

Should be read alongside  Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree

---

5 lessons autism has taught me.     And from Japan,  a glimpse inside a 13 year old autistic boy's head,   a blog from E Price on living in a neurotypical world,  and click the Autism tag below for more posts on ASD thinking.

Thoughts from Autist living in a neurotypical world

A thoughtful blog about how one autistic person (E Price) functions in a neurotypical world. It’s a 15 min read about various aspects of their life and gives a tiny glimpse into the compromises needed.

It starts:

“I’m an Autistic person with a pretty put-together looking life. I always make rent. I have money socked away in savings and investments. I juggle several teaching jobs and do statistical and methodological consulting work. I sometimes find time to write. I have a social life. Except for the occasional noticeable chest crumbs, I present as clean and well-dressed. I manage my stress. I sleep. I eat.

I don’t think I strike the average person as disabled at all. I get work done on time. I show up to things I say I’ll show up to. I don’t show much distress in public. I rarely ask for help. Because psychological disorders are often viewed through a lens of impairment, people might call into question whether I am neuroatypical at all.

Viewing disabilities — and mental disorders — through a lens of impaired functioning is very flawed. The fact that I am functioning does not mean I’m not impaired, or that functioning is not hard. That I can survive, day by day, does not mean that I am thriving, or that my life is as easy as it is for a neurotypical person. And the aspects of my life that are impaired are rarely visible to an outside eye.

We often don’t see a person at their lowest moments — when they are crying and nonverbal, or engaging in self harm, or refusing to eat, or isolating from everyone they love. We can’t always tell if someone is struggling to make it through the work day, or if their sleep and exercise habits have been disrupted. And we don’t know, from the outside, what a person has been forced to sacrifice in order to live a seemingly “functional life”.

A lot of us “function” because we have to.

A lot of disabled or mentally ill people are able to work a job, pay rent, and get by through an elaborate system of compromise and sacrifice. We may have abandoned career paths that were too demanding of our mental energy, or lost relationships that were too socially or emotionally taxing. ...”



“Even with all the immense, unfair advantages that life has given me, life as a neuroatypical person is hard. There are many careers paths I could never successfully follow, and workplaces I could never inhabit. Frustratingly, this is not due to a lack of interest, motivation, or skill, but because I’m not good at existing in a milieu where small talk, meetings, ambient noise, and social politics are abundant.”

A thoughtful read check it out here from E Price.

---

5 lessons autism has taught me.     And from Japan,  a glimpse inside a 13 year old autistic boy's head.

Running Effective Meetings

I had an awkward moment at a moderately important board type meeting recently. At 11am (as I had written to everyone beforehand more than once) I said I had to leave. The meeting had run 2 hours which was the agenda time allotted. The Chair asked where I was going? As if to say "isn't this meeting the most important matter in the world?"  I replied "to an event I had committed to several weeks ago, to which I had told you" and promptly left.

There are many types of meeting and different types of effectiveness. I now Chair and have chaired several types of these semi-formal to formal decision making and oversight meetings and have some thoughts on making them effective.  They are of a different timbre to creative meetings and confusing the type of meetings I see leads oft times to ineffectivness.

Making these meetings efficient and productive takes preperation time. 

Ideally the chair needs to work the CEO or other key decision makers in the meeting to ensure the agenda points and clear and prioritised.

Once the points to raise, discuss and decide upon are known. The Chair needs to carefully allot or review the alloted time for those agenda points.   This is a crucial skill.  Too little time will mean the meeting will not run well.

At this point, you need to decide if there is then too much in the agenda and adjust accordingly.

This (1)  time setting (2) priority setting and then (3) agenda adjustment are 3 crucial areas the chair should resolve.

Appropriate papers then need to be sent with enough time in advance for people to read (although I will note another a completely different type of meeting which will not use advance papers - this meeting has members read papers all together and make a decision with the same knowledge base).

If the meeting members are not reading the papers in advance, you need to tell them and then potentially remove them from the board/commitee if they do not have the time to commit. 

Ensuring board preparedness is an item that you should have assessed on a regular basis. As is  self evaluation and skills audit if this is a formal board and meeting structure.

At the meeting, you need to be deadly efficient at keeping the time alloted correct yet allowing enough debate to flow.   This is where member prep and time allowance come together.  Members unprepared can take time up with unnecessary clarifications.

Still in your quest for effectiveness you must not abandon intriguing points and useful ideas.  However, when these interesting points arise but not directly relevant to the topic you need to capture them and park them.

If seen this called a nugget harvesting or the parking lot system. 

Note the idea nugget. State you are closing this nugget topic but noting it down to be followed up appropriately.  Putting it in the parking lot.

If a decision is needed to be made.  The decision maker needs to make it.  It might not be the chair but you have to make sure the decision is made.

There may be a case for delaying the decision due to a lack of information.  However in a well run meeting all the appropriate papers should been prepared.

You will never have 100 percent of the information.  Making decisions under uncertainty will be a mark of the quality of your decision maker.   Having all the information prepared will be a mark of the strength of your team and also the strength of your oversight.

Keeping to time. Ensuring decisions are made. Action points are noted.  Good ideas go into the parking lot for follow up.

Allowing members to leave on time is another mark of an effective meeting.

The chairs job is not finished here. The chair should follow up effectively on parking lot ideas, also with the CEO or specific board members or presenters on any points or decisions that need to be made.

Putting it all together you have:

-Effective preparedness

-Time Management

-Make decisions

-Save good ideas

-Follow up

---

More thoughts: My Financial Times opinion article on long-term investing and how to engage with companies.

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man. On play and playing games.

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude.

A provoking read on how to raise a feminist child.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here.

Interviews are useless

I am not a fan of the usefulness of interviews. The research on job type interviews (unstructured) suggests they do not work as intended. The research on structured interviews is modestly positive if very well structured.  This was struck home to me as I sat through a semi-structured selection process for a networking group. All 8 of us in the group were fascinating (and vouched for by someone in the network), but in practise the group interview only assessed how well we could present ourselves in a narrow, artificial way with  bias to those good at presenting, and with some extravert factors. (I say that as someone who does have presenting skills)

I believe it would have been better (or at least equal and less hassle) to use a random process. This was further reinforced in the pub later where the natural flow of conversation between the 8 of us was an order of magnitude better.

Still, the unstructured interview is not going away any time soon, but – gentle reader – if you take one message from this, is to realise interviews very limited effectiveness in judging any thing to do with a job.  See below for the academic study on it, plus NY times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/opinion/sunday/the-utter-uselessness-of-job-interviews.html

http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm121130a.pdf

(Note, from my reading one of the more effective ways of testing someone in a job, is to give them that job for a trial period – although this is impractical in many instances, it’s one of the driver for the value of internships and one of the problems of how to give internships)

To travel is to learn

My parents told me often while growing up that while school might be education, to travel was to learn. 

Travels in my youth were an incredible learning experience for me.  There are too many to recount in totality here (perhaps one of the only advantages of the economically tricky small travel agency and maybe I will slowly recall a few on this blog)  but seared into my memory is going to Borneo when 16, staying in an open cast gold mine and climbing Mount Kinabalu.

A view from Mt Kinabalu

There were many in the poor village kampungs who would have loved to work in the gold mine. Living in places with no running water and where a dollar a day is considered wealth was eye opening for a middle class scholarship London boy.

Only 100 or so years ago did society think that children had a right to work and certainly I passed through cultures where what we might consider sweat labour was considered sought after jobs.  On the other hand it is a downslope from cheap labour into modern day slavery.

Still for a London boy on an enormous budget of $10 or more and with security of an emergency credit card it was thought provoking.

And those days were pre-internet and travel while not like the 1950s was still much slower than today.  So a mind, a note book and no smart phone were a recipe for learning. 

Tribes in north Thailand where nearby poppy growing was the richest commodity.

The reality of the poor while walking the slums of Benares (armoured by the naivety of youth, where I’d never walk now; but how else to end up playing chess in the ghats and an exchange of world views pre-internet - you Japan, you China?  London, English? Really? Tell me about Princess Diana?)

The mixed infusion of a buffalo sacrificing Christian worshipping area of the middle of unknown Sulawesi, Indonesia

And semi-nomadic hunter gatherer tribes settinglingly down to a stuck lifestyle.

This is preamble to my worry that my young family now does not travel. Autism does not lend itself to travel.

But of late, I’ve appreciated I can change my mind set and open my eyes again.

To travel is not only about distance.

How many of us have been to Plumstead, London SE18 ?

I’ve now travelled around much of London and tiny parts of England to discover while not as drastic as tribes in ancient jungles, there are learnings to think about.

Why did this newly planted cherry tree amongst the modern design stone wall crossing look so out of place in an area of poor looking buildings and infrastructure?

10 minutes down the road why was (Royal)  Woolwich seemingly more vibrant ?

I don't have answers to those questions. As I was a passing through traveller. But with eyes open I had the same  type of provacation as I had watching elephants working in northern Thailand. 

Heritage London bus route

I'm travelling on many random buses of late. One of my favourite remains the heritage bus route 15 between Trafalgar Square and Tower Hill. It has a conductor and is the only old double decker bus service still running. 

A history of it can be found here:

"....Almost 50 years on the Routemaster continued to be London's work horse. In the summer of 2003 there were still 20 crew operated routes running over 500 Routemasters on the streets of London. Suddenly in August 2003, Route 15 mysteriously lost its Routemasters soon followed by Route 11 in October and Route 23 in November; only months after the last Routemasters had been refurbished by Marshall. Things were not looking good. 2004 came and ten routes were converted, making it clear that Routemasters were not here to stay. By 2005 that number had been slashed to fewer than 100 Routemasters running just three routes. Time was quickly running out for London’s Routemaster.  An announcement was then made by TfL that all Routemasters would be withdrawn by  the end of 2005. ..."

More emoji equals more happiness

Our studies converge on three central findings. First, people use emojis in text-based communication to convey emotional experience. Second, the amount and diversity of emojis causally increases happiness during social interactions. Third, across 122 countries, higher total amount and greater diversity of emoji usage per capita and per user correlate with higher national happiness. Across levels of analysis, our results suggest that both the amount and diversity of digital emotion expression influences well-being.

An academic paper looking - essentially - at emojis  :-OOO !! ;-)  

Will Smith on Failure. Fail Often. Fail Forward.

Fail Forward. Fail Often.  "Failure is a massive part of being able to be successful". 

Will Smith echoes JK Rowling on the benefits of failure, and also billionaire investor, Ray Dalio. 

Dalio's views on mistakes sound very much like Neil Gaiman's view on mistakes, one written by a story teller (I take a look at Gaiman's commencement address extolling mistakes in an earlier post) and the other written by an "investor-philosopher".

Will Smith probably has a larger following than Ray though...

---

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio  on Principles.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here.

More thoughts:  My Financial Times opinion article on the importance of long-term questions to management teams and Environment, Social and Governance capital.

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man.

Art languishing in offices

Much interesting art languishes in corporate corridors. It wouldn’t make me sad, but I hardly ever see anyone stop and view. If this art truly brought different perspective to office workers, I’d be pleased. I’m unsure if I see that happening. Here is one recent pieces. Anthony Gormley’s Hinge. Sitting in a law office in Fetter Lane, London.  It’s well sited though.

My Son Is Not Rainman

‘I would like to travel the world with you twice. Once, to see the world. Twice, to see the way you see the world.’

From John Williams’ book:  My Son’s Not Rainman.

“ Well, The Boy is a wonder. He’s my wonder. Despite the challenges or maybe even because of them, he’s the very best thing in the world. You could line up every precious diamond in Minecraft and it wouldn’t come close to how precious he is. And, of course, I’m biased. But I want people to give him a chance. To look past some of the seemingly strange, challenging behaviours and the outbursts. To chip away at some of the rock and discover this brilliant, dazzling boy inside just waiting to shine. That’s why I wanted to tell our story. We only really celebrate disability in this world when there is a skill involved. The Paralympics, amazing though they are, celebrate the ability and aptitude of the athletes. Well, sometimes just ‘being’ is enough. And we don’t celebrate just ‘being’ enough. Yet often, it’s in the smallness, in the everydayness of life that real beauty occurs. And that’s what I want all this to be about: a celebration of the everyday, of ‘being’. MY SON’S NOT RAINMAN BLOG

It was autumn 2011 and I’d been booked as a stand-up comedian for an office party in a London comedy club. From a comedian’s point of view, gigs like this are notoriously difficult, full of people who don’t really want to be there, apart from the one person in the office who had the brainwave in the first place. The rest of the audience are largely drawn by the prospect of a free bar more than any great desire to be entertained. Still, I was a relative newcomer, at the ripe old age of thirty-nine, and I knew very little about which gigs to avoid or what was a good or bad audience. Someone was willing to pay me to get onstage and tell jokes. Cracking. Let’s put what happened next down to naivety. The thing is, I’d always wanted to talk about my family life when I was onstage. Other comics did it; for many it’s the staple of their sets, talking about their wives, their children, the foibles of everyday life. I knew my home life was different in some ways, not least because The Boy’s mum and I had separated some years earlier, but I could still share it with people couldn’t I? Couldn’t I? The comic before me went down a storm. Stories of screaming toddlers in supermarkets and his wife’s inability to understand him; they lapped it up. Then it was my turn. I got onstage, opening with some of my old material that I knew worked, just to get them onside and reassure them that I was funny. I got a round of applause for the first joke, the seal of approval every comic hopes for. They were going to be OK. Now seemed the time to hit them with the new stuff. ‘I’m a single dad,’ I said, building in confidence, ‘which basically means you all think I’m a much nicer person than you did twenty seconds ago.’ They laughed at the time, although now it’s written down it doesn’t seem the funniest of gags, I grant you. We’ll put it down to one of those ‘you had to be there’ moments. ‘Why is that?’ I continued, the glare of the stage lights beating down on me. ‘Why when I mention I’m a single father am I meant to be some kind of hero? Single mothers? You’re all benefit-sappers apparently, but single fathers, ooh, we’re all heroes. Next year it’s me and a war veteran fighting it out at the Pride of Britain Awards.’ They were a good audience. Things were going OK. I relaxed a bit more. I started talking about my son, about the things children do, how they drive you mad sometimes. That familiar sound, the laughter of recognition, filled the room and, shallow as it might sound, a little bit of it filled my heart too. It felt good. I was on a roll. I decided to talk about my home life some more. ‘My son,’ I said as one joke finished and the laughter was just ebbing away, ‘he’s autistic.’ Silence. Time. Stood. Still. Whatever had gone before was suddenly over. Two hundred people just stared at me. The party pooper had put an end to their night. Each blank face looked out at me from the shadows with the same thing written all over it: ‘We’re having a night out. Why are you telling us this?’ I was booked to do twenty minutes that night; I managed seven. I didn’t even have a chance to get to the bit about cerebral palsy. I left the stage dejected, broken. They hadn’t just rejected me as a comedian, they’d rejected my son too. As I snuck out of the back door I could hear the next comic onstage, talking away about parents’ evenings and once again laughter filled the room. I caught the train home, emotions changing with each passing station, from incandescent rage to utter sadness. I’d like to tell you that by the next day I’d moved on, but it took a fortnight of dwelling on every moment of that night before I eventually picked myself up. And then I cancelled every gig I had booked. (That sounds fairly dramatic –there were only six in the diary. I wasn’t quite ready for prime-time Saturday-night television just yet.) If I couldn’t find a way to talk about the thing that mattered to me most, then I didn’t want to talk about anything at all. There had to be a way, though. There had to be a way to share our story. Despite my son’s diagnosis, and maybe even sometimes because of it, my world is filled with joy and laughter. That was all I ever wanted to get across. He’d faced discrimination at every point of his life to date. If I could only get people to understand him more, maybe, just maybe, that might change. So, in October 2012, nearly a year after that fateful corporate gig and with my son’s age reaching double figures, I started to write a blog, all about him. I referred to him as ‘The Boy’, primarily to save his blushes, but also because that’s what he wanted to be called. And over the next couple of months I began to put together a comedy show about the two of us. I thought if people know the subject matter beforehand, maybe they’d be more open to it. It turned out that there was no ‘maybe’ about it. People read the blog and came to the shows. Lots of people. And they laughed. In some small way, they shared the joy. It seemed they understood The Boy and accepted him more than I ever thought they would. This book is just another part of that process –another opportunity to share the highs and lows of our lives together. I don’t want it to be just a story about autism; I want it to be about a young boy who happens to have autism –there is a difference. He will forever be more than just his diagnosis. And there’s more here, much more. Fundamentally, I want it to be about every brilliant piece of him. I want it to be about belonging, about fathers and sons, about all our childhoods, about turning on a light when the monsters come out at night, about how if you keep looking for what’s wrong you might just miss the very thing that’s right. I want it to be about laughter, lots of laughter, proper hurting-from-the-belly laughter that comes in waves and then ebbs and flows to live on in memories long after the tears have stopped. I want it to be about love. Bucketloads of the stuff. About discovery, about adventure, about knights slaying dragons, about superheroes, about victory for each and every little man in this world. And long after I’ve left this world, I want it to be a book for you, son. Although I’ve shared so much of it with you over the months I’ve been writing it, my biggest hope is that one day in the future you might sit down in a quiet moment, turn to the first page and read it all from cover to cover. Know you are loved, precious boy. This is our story.”

The book and blog are funny and they make the ordinary extraordinary or perhaps the extraordinary more ordinary looking at their adventures and hopes and dreams and challenges. 

The blog is currently in hibernation but the archive and book are still good.  

Amazon link to blog here   (March 2018 currently 99p on Kindle)

Another worthy addition to the literature on ASD. 

Making a paper bird plus ESG speaking

I've done a lot of ESG and event speaking in the last 2 weeks. If interested checkout these few posts on LinkedIn. It's in the terrible humble-brag form, but interesting nonetheless. But more importantly the above video of me making a flapping paper bird... as my thinking of intangibles with Stian Westlake (previous post here). Below, me in Stockholm (the picutre doesn't seem to fully embed :-(.

And me in London, talking with Sustainability / People talent  people  from Novo Nordisk, Vodafone and Naspers.

And in London again, speaking more ESG.... with the wonderful My-Linh.

What I learned from this helper walking the platform

“Everyone has sad patches.  We need to accept who we are.  We are All individuals, with some rainy days and some sunny days.” 

That was part of my conversation with M. She walks the platforms at South Kenton and helps anyone feelingly poorly mentally and contemplating jumping.  

Spike has taught me a lot about being mindful and happy in the moment; but also the stoic side of dealing with rainy days which have to happen.  

One other tool I use is the “talk to everyone” technique. There’s a line of work which suggests that making human connections even small everyday ones gives us deeper meaning and contentment in our lives. It’s not necessarily always talking, but it is often through connecting at some level.  

And it’s by saying hello to M on the platform that I learned her role and heard her wisdom.  

---

 How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man.       

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  and  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude .

On Autism: some thoughts from non-verbal ASD Naoki Higashida and his book Reasons I Jump. My own twee Things I learnt from autism, such as, Everybody is Somebody's Wierdo.  And below the last post on how one Mum doesn't use a high-functioning label any more.

Difficulties of Autism Labelling

This mother speaks to the complexities of labelling in her Washington Post article.  It chimes with the David Mitchell piece I blogged on recently.   

When labels do not come close to describing what they are attempting to describe perhaps they become unhelpful?

From Washington Post: "...My 10-year-old son can change from an adorable, quirky little dude to an aggressive screamer in a second. He sinks so far, so fast, that I forget about his strengths and drown in his weaknesses. I wish I could make it stop.

There’s a diagnosis that explains it: autism... A child with an autism diagnosis, no matter how intelligent, charming, or funny, has challenges, and they aren’t mild. According to a recent article in The Economist, Britain’s National Autistic Society survey found that only 12 percent of so-called high-functioning people with autism in that country have full-time employment. As reported in Science, another study found that autistic adults without a learning disability were nine times more likely than control subjects to die by suicide....   

Modifiers have no place in a home where a child aces 20 math problems, builds a stuffed animal fort with his sister, devours a plate of meatloaf, shoots 20 baskets on his closet-door hoop and then sparks instant chaos without warning. Over mouthwash. Only strong effort makes James as competent as he is — most of the time. And sometimes even that isn’t enough.

Public understanding of autism, as well as my own, has improved over the past 20 years. It’s neither all ability nor all disability, but it’s always some of each. ...  It’s now autism spectrum disorder for everyone who qualifies for a diagnosis. No more modifiers or alternative labels. And that’s as it should be."

See her full WaPo piece here.

And David Mitchell:  "“So how autistic is your son, exactly?” “Well, his sensory processing is pretty cyan these days. Speech-wise, he’s light magenta. A nice canary yellow when it comes to motor control and memory functions, mind you. Thanks for asking.”"

---

 How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man.       

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  and  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude .

On Autism: some thoughts from non-verbal ASD Naoki Higashida and his book Reasons I Jump. My own twee Things I learnt from autism, such as, Everybody is Somebody's Wierdo.

After a social media break

Until relatively recently, I took about an eight year absence from social media. I didn't miss it. I don't miss items I don’t know about and never had. I thought I would observe what I've seen coming back. 

I left at – what it now turns out to be – the height of blogging. I look at my old theatre blog roll and vast majority of bloggers have stopped. My little blog here remains mainly for friends and people who've met me, and is my small response to producing the type of content I want to read. 

If you don't see the stories you want – write them! 

I do miss those blogs. The theatre ones gave me a lively insight from critic to practitioner to audience. What I see now is a shadow of then. Ever pragmatic, I do not see that short era coming back. 

I've seen many short form tweets, as noisy and divisive. I have seen pockets of wonder there, Robert MacFarlane's words of the day. The story of Megan Phelps-Roper leaving her religious cult. The way you can dive down into one person's threads of thought.  But, despite Phelps-Roper's story, I am with Ray Dalio that we've mostly lost the art of thoughtful disagreement.  

The weaponisation of Facebook and its response (with links to thoughtful early investor and critic) was as surprising to me as it was initially to Mark Zuckerberg, but obvious in hindsight (perhaps the clearest but least useful of the 4 sights: oversight, foresight and insight). 

Still, I see social media reflect humanity. The best of us, the worst of us. I've seen a post on the death of a partner, next to a birth of a child; the sorrow of a sudden infant death, the joy of a cancer cured; cake recipes next to diets; incredible generosity for a struggling homeless lady next to streams of hate. 

I've observed Zuck's stated purpose – of connections – flourish, when bringing together vehicle transport enthusiasts in a way unthinkable 20 years ago.  

It's allowed me to reconnect with an early dramaturgical teacher, many theatre people and allowed me insight into disabled and other communities, I would have struggled to find. 

Like does seem to connect with like, which leads to less thoughtful disagreement and less creativity to difficult problems; and my small contribution leaning against that is in the Mingle and in pushing for real world connections. Minglers have really enjoyed it. 

Taking a step back, like so many tools of human ingenuity, it can be used for good, or used for ill; or used for cat memes. 

But, if those who know better, or can do better – if those people step away – then the eco-system will be poorer. 

Social media embodies many facets of humanity,  it's not going away, and it will be what we make of it, for better or worse. 

---

More thoughts:  My Financial Times opinion article on the importance of long-term questions to management teams and Environment, Social and Governance capital. 

 How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man.       

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio on  on Principles.