Introduction Letter to the Medium Community
By: Amanda Maintenance
Tags: Introduction, Organization, Research, Resilience, Ideas

From Mike Thomas: http://atomicrobotdesign.com/blog/htmlcss/create-a-sprite-sheet-walk-cycle-using-using-css-animation/

Dear Reader,

(TL;DR — “We Make the Road By Walking”)

Thank you for welcoming me to this place dedicated to the sharing of ideas. I feel a sense of privilege to be in a position to write this letter to you and look forward to exchanges that may arise between us.

A little introduction to me, then some words on what you can expect from the story I plan to tell.

First, I like to think. I think about things academically, logically, aesthetically. I think about things with humour, with lightness, and heaviness. I think rationally and emotionally. I think about the way I think about things. I write my thoughts and sometimes read them later and think I know not what I thought. I do not think my thinking is separate from my body. I think to find assumptions and to ask them what purpose they serve.

Formally a member of the academia professional hierarchy, I teach programming and computational science at one of the oldest brick-and-mortar Australian universities. Also living through a doctoral program, feeling my way along lines separating expectations of the academy and lived life. You can characterise my employment experience as “somewhat tense”. I am not alone in this by any stretch, but it can feel lonely. Unsurprising to many of us who are compelled to explore ideas, aloneness is far from an unhappy state. The silent challenge is tuning communication channels inside a peerage that alienates lowcomers as the default setting.

Most of this past decade has been spent researching the notion of resilience. The ability to bounce back. We might acknowledge the irony, or perhaps the aptness, of the correspondence of this to my ongoing personal experiences. More specifically though, I am curious about the resilience of our organisations, aka “organisational resilience”.

Authors of research papers in the field tell us that resilience is of growing importance because we live in calamitous times of increasing turbulence and uncertainty. Factors such as tight interconnectedness across increasingly global supply chains, unpredictable weather events due to climate change, incomprehensible financial instruments, the threat of terrorist attacks and other ‘existential’ threats tend to feature. This can make for persuasive reading, motivating emotional buy-in through fear-tapping the unknowable, the unmanageable, the unthinkable.

A widening pool of generally accepted knowledge about the nature of resilient organisations gathers, developing its own dogmas and specialist language, and beliefs about the social importance for investing in group resilience. We can swim a little beyond these domains of attraction, to wellsprings of some rather interesting things.

We will explore some of these throughout this Medium series. Although the appearance of posts will be linear from a timedate perspective — one is posted before another, obviously! — there is clear potential here for finding other paths through the material. Making our own maps. It is likely that many of the instalments will not focus on resilience directly, as there are many concepts the research domain sweeps aside that I am seeking to develop.

I have no time-frame commitment. Rather, I commit to allow this material to be woven over time.

With acknowledgement to conversations between Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, “We Make the Road By Walking”. I also state my commitment to responsive thought and finding ways across the digital divide.

Yours,

Amanda