Welcome To Shrinkonia. : About.

The best blogs are like Desperate Housewives, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. You can enjoy an individual episode, but true bliss only happens by watching every single episode from every single season from these fabulous television series.

My two favorite blogs are Fluent Self by Havi Brooks and Penelope Trunk by, well, herself. Every blog post is great on its own. But you miss more than half if you only read a single post. You miss the steps that Havi and Penelope had to go through to get to their insights.

It helps to be familiar with the unusual level of metaphorical expressions at the Fluent Self blog to understand that a post about moving to Bolivia is actually referring to not having children.

And with Penelope Trunk … well … uhm … you have to understand large chunks of her background to appreciate her advice.

For me it is not actually the individual insights that are important. Well. They are. But not that important.

Yes.

It’s the explanation on how they get these insights that makes me an eager subscriber to the blogs.

I wrote as a note: “It’s the journey that is more important than the destination.”

But I cannot say that out loud without throwing up. So. I quote myself to make it less cheesy.

That’s my problem with books.

It is a final product. All polished up. Shiny.

A book provides a coherent view, a description without hesitation. Without gaps in the argumentation.

But reality has gaps and is not coherent. Authors do have hesitations. And doubts.

How they cope with doubts and how they resolve gaps, now, that is far more interesting.

I think.

But that is probably because I have a blog. And doubts and hesitations. Lots of that.

Oh. And gaps. Way too many gaps. And holes.

I realize that I hardly share my process on how to combine sociology, psychology, management, leadership, project management, communication and everything else that comes to my mind.

I found one post that tried to explain how I make complex stuff less complex.

“The path I am on is spiral. It looks like I am running around in circles. Heck. It sometimes feels like I am in this loop. Lead actor in my own Groundhog Day. I write about topics and revisit them again and again over a longer time frame, refining them, adding to them, and mixing topics I didn’t know were related.”

Hmmm.

I actually do use techniques.

Visualization for example.

I have a notebook in which I make drawings of concepts.

Hideous drawings. But that is beside the point.

(What is his freak flag? Reading cues.)

You have to simplify when you draw.

(Using expressions of identity as attractor for your people.)

If you make a lot of drawings, a common visual language emerges. You use several symbols over and over again. The use of identical symbols reveal a hidden link.

(How groups collapse and renew. This was the basis for The Adaptive Cycle In Social Systems.)

(Balance between homogeneity and diversity.)