Somebody's food - lessons learned for project work

Our project "somebody's food" has come to an end.  And there are very interesting learning lessons to take forward.  

It was a great experience to be working with other academics and practitioner.  At some point during the project, we had to stop and reflect about our own goals to be pursued.  Also because myself as a PI was trying to move forward without much success.

Coming from different disciplines (engineering and management) and backgrounds (media, technology venturing), it transpired that our goals were about a) ensuring successful adoption of a technology  (anaerobic digestion) whilst also b) making sure people were going to use it.   And c) supporting our university campus managers who needed to meet specific targets (i.e. reducing single plastic use or food waste).  

Some of these goals were not explicit at the beginning of the project.  They gradually emerged.  And had to be managed.  One element that helped in this regard was to design a future campus vision, where all these goals could coexist.  And so we did, following a suggestion from our industry partner.  We included a slightly different goal instead of implementing anaerobic digestion: composting, its supporting processes and behaviours.  In preparing the vision, it also helped that we had an implicit common ground that became more prominent:  The circular economy or CE.  This is a kind of paradigm that suggests transforming business practices to eliminate if not reuse waste emerging from them.  

At this point in time, we have shared our vision with several campus managers.  There is a wealth of activity to meet waste reduction targets and generate awareness about waste.  We keep updating our vision to consider new possibilities and also the feedback received.  

Before I forget the last two years

 My workplace is moving on as you may have gathered from previous posts.  At a meeting this week I did not recognise half of the people attending.  Most of them joined in the last two years.  And if felt strange in many ways.

As if I was now one of the oldest people who have been away for two years.  Years of rushing to prepare online material in the midst of hot summer and with a view of a pool in the garden, tempting me to jump in and stay and forget about lock downs.

Years of teaching with a mask, almost choking in my first session, not sure how far I could be from the audience and aiming to put a smile.  Quantitative methods teaching with a mask, a challenge, also because it was the first time being in the big auditorium as a lecturer.  And as time went by, I felt more confident.  Letting colleagues carry on.  

Years of being at home and delivering sessions where it felt I was on a radio program.  Not seeing people's faces and assuming they were there.  Struggling to get a response and when it came, feeling elated if not scared.  People were there.  

Years of juggling, children at home and with home work, one of the least pleasant experiences.  How could we replicate their classroom, their teaching methods, whilst attending to other things?  Perhaps I did not have what Mary Catherine Bateson calls peripheral vision, this communicative capacity to jointly improvise and adapt to situations that has at its core the idea that we are fluid selves.  Perhaps as a result I was not self-compassionate enough to lower standards, or if I did, I felt frustration.  

Years of asking if I was or am in the right career.  Reading Sir Ken Robinson's finding your element helped me realise I am good at connecting people with learning opportunities, and having as well as developing original ideas in my teaching as well as in my writing.  

I can, but not fully enjoy writing journal articles, unless I can see how they reflect what I am: someone that likes to promote coexistence even if it often affects me negatively.  Someone that enjoys being alone as well as in the company of just a few.  

And someone that still fears disappointing others.  But I am better at managing this.  The last two years taught me that I can be absent and the world is not going to crumble.  

So before I forget: There is no need to be too worried about what comes next.  Let us keep the worries in check.  And people are there, even if we do not see them.  

Messages of and about eco-anxiety

The Cop26 meeting is now about to finish.  There are many important lessons that all of us as individuals could grasp, some of them clearer than others.  What follows is my own take on what has happened. I present my own messages of and about eco-anxiety.

At work, we have been encouraged to present what we have been doing (teaching, research, engagement with the community) to better understand the complexities of climate change.  During this summer me and some students decided to explore how our campus is currently dealing with food waste.   We were fortunate to be supported by other academics and a manager of an anaerobic digestion company.  It has been a very helpful exercise for learning to talk to them and also to interact with campus managers in different areas like accommodation services and food production.  

As a result, students prepared and delivered a great presentation where a key message was that we need to better recycle food as well as prevent its potential waste.  How we carry this out could then be divided into two aspects:  

• Increase the value that we attribute to food recycling via better messaging, support processes and awareness
• Adopt new technologies like anaerobic digestion or AD.  

Tackling both of the above requires working on promoting a cultural if not behavioural change in our attitudes to waste and specifically to food.  

During the presentation the audience was very receptive and open to the ideas we were presenting.  One aspect that surfaced to be further considered is that how feedback about the need to generate cultural and behavioural awareness needs to be continuous and at all levels of academic and administrative activity in our campus.  Technologies like AD or those to better support better food waste monitoring (weighting, data analytics) as well as recycling are already available.  Why is it that only a few university campuses in countries like the UK are doing something about food?  

It seems to me that the higher level resolutions and agreements of Cop26 by governments need to be both reflected and challenged by local actions from universities, councils and private companies working together.  This is something that again requires a cultural mind shift from management of these organisations.  

Perhaps more importantly we all need to acknowledge that so far the desire to do something about climate change and doing it now is generating more anxiety than awareness.  Myself I had to slow down in my work and let students and the company manager carry on because I was feeling overwhelmed with so many messages from the media.  

Eco-anxiety is not only an individual but also a collective 'illness'.  During summer of 2021 I started to feel that any change about climate change is going to be slow and has to be concerted: it is difficult to mediate between parties that have different views about what needs to be done.  Every step has to be reflected upon and negotiated.  

This despite what many organisations have already in their strategic plans of achieving net-zero by a certain date.  It is also true that some actions are going to produce more impacts than others (i.e. not flying is more impactful than buying or using electric transport).  So perhaps it would be more important to assess and agree on these actions collectively.  And to establish ways of incorporating our conversations about such actions into strategic plans.  This could also help us all to deal with our own eco-anxieties.  

Navigating through a climate change field

 Our world is now witnessing a global summit to talk about climate change.  Some of us have also decided to contribute to it by organising and running local activities.  At my workplace, we have a full agenda that involves students and businesses.  

For me this was going well until I started to feel what some people call eco-anxiety.  I do not like big gatherings or feeling that I am out of place.  Talking about how we need to do something now and urgently to save our planet got to me in a bad way.  Because to my mind I have been doing things.

From buying and using an electric bike to changing our old family car to one that does not emit too much carbon dioxide to refurbishing our house loft with foam insulation to reducing my car travelling to eating less meat to working with students on looking at how campus food can be better managed, I now feel that somehow this is not 'enough'.  My perfectionist self has kicked again on the face of so much information.  

Perhaps a better way of framing what I feel and think is to say that climate change is a very complex thing and that we are still learning how to do things.  It would be better to be more aware that we are also part of complex systems whose direction(s) are the result of many individual actions.  At the moment, there are some parts of such systems which I find difficult to navigate with, possibly because they are entrenched in their own and radical views about what needs to be done now.  

We need to gain more awareness and continue doing things.  But for me I need to take a small break from all this talk on climate change and breathe.  Maybe take a back seat and let things unfold.    It would be good to listen to what goes on and share what we have learned or what we could be doing differently in our lives or work.  

But not at my own expense.  

Forthcoming Book: Creativity in Management Education - A Systemic Rediscovery

I have pleasure to announce my new book which is due to be published by September 2020, and which I talked about previously in this blog.  

(Click on the image to go to the publisher's website)

The book is the result of critical analyses of management education and myself as a student and currently an educator.  I venture to explore a number of ideas to help us all rediscover ourselves and regain a sense of creativity and transcendence, for our own benefit and for the benefit of those people around us.

Educational institutions are now being challenged to offer new forms of delivery, and with it a rethink of their roles in societies.  In this regard, this book could offer insights on what to do and where to start.  Among other things, I speak about compassionate and technology mediated interactions, which could help us keep ‘soft’ educational tyrannies at bay, and enable us (re) discover different roles and practices to redress power imbalances generated by such tyrannies.  

So if you want to know more about educational tyrannies, myself, my experiences of nurturing creativity in and out of the classroom (the good and the bad, the ethical), buy the book or recommend it to your librarians or sponsors.  

There will be an electronic version available by August 2020 😁😁.

Further links: 

Link to Springer (has PDF promotional flyers)

Link to Amazon’s website (has bit more of detail)

Creativity and the planet:Bike recycling

During the last academic term, me and students of one of my courses had the opportunity to visit the Surrey Bike Project, a social enterprise whose main remit is the recycling of bicycles.  It is a very interesting organisation that gathers many volunteers as well as youngsters around the topic of repairing, servicing and selling recycled bikes.  

Royal Holloway Students with John Thurlow, Project Manager

My students were asked to observe what goes on there, ask questions,and then select one specific process that they could improve, all of this using creativity ideas and techniques.

They did a great job coming up with solutions.    Some proposed a generic process of attracting more customers or enhancing the visibility of this organisation, whereas others focused on improving the diagnosis, repair and quality check activities and even suggesting new processes (i.e. making wallets out of tire rubber tubes).  

In the UK, the bike industry is economically strong, and within it repairs/recycling contribute a good deal.  The Surrey Bike Project provides education to youngsters who have left traditional education for whatever reason.  This is a great human aspect of the organisation. Other organisations around the country are also providing education through recycling in what appears to be an emerging, hybrid model of operation.   

This visit made me think that many of us, in our own ways, are doing something for the planet.   For creativity to emerge we need to set up spaces for different minds to come together and explore a common problem.   In her book "Peripheral Visions", Mary Catherine Bateson talks about the importance of setting up such spaces so that people can join in, learn and be allowed to make mistakes.   Like learning a language.   That is what the Surrey Bike Project does, ensuring a very high standard of quality as well.

I am sure my students learned a lot from this visit and the work that followed. I am also sure that John, Jim and colleagues from the project benefited from having different perspectives about their organisation.   We hope to continue our conversations and learn from each other.    

My Creativity Book Tour - Second Stop: Paris, France

Sahid and Imed from IMT, Myself and Ines from Royal Holloway

It was a pleasure to accept the invitation from the Information Systems Department of IMT (Institut Mines-Télécom) Business School to visit them in Paris, and use it to present my book on Managing Creativity.  I was also fortunate to take one of my undergraduate Royal Holloway management students, Ines Boussofara,  to be part of the conversations and activities during this visit. 

IMT staff were very kind, making sure I was looked after at all times. That also included helping us move hotels when reservations for our second night there were missing!.

At my book presentation, it was great to see how my colleague educators and researchers wanted to make something workable and usable of the book ideas. Something to guide information systems researchers or company managers. Perhaps something that could be publishable in a journal article.

Staff members from IMT Business School, Ines and Myself

My answer to this was that the book is an attempt ( a risky one considering pressures to publish journal articles) to bridge gaps between disciplines (creativity, systems thinking).  I added that my proposal to use the systems idea as an inquiring device to help me make sense of my own creativity (which then became two creativities) could be of some use.  I had to say though, and referring to my own research, that in the field or discipline of information systems we have become good at using some ideas as 'front ends' of systems implementation or adoption processes.  In this regard, I wished we could talk to students and to other researchers less about success and more about failure and anti-innovation.  

At IMT creativity means innovation, making ideas happen, making them commercially successful. Students are continuously challenged to work with others from different disciplines, to learn how to do things on the go, to present ideas, to elaborate business plans. This is a valuable form of creativity, one which in management education has taken center stage. It might be useful to see it as a form that could be further enhanced by linking it to creators' inner motivations, a form that if it fails, should not take down creators with them. 

IMT Incubator Hall of Fame

Me talking during the seminar (I was just getting started!) 

During the presentation, it was rightly pointed out by the audience that the ideas of the book, in a way which I did not fully intend, could help us reflect on creativity, its manifestations, how it unfolds in contexts like universities, and how it could become a mere instrument of economic power if we do not pause and reflect.


Another question related to this latter aspect of creativity was about how we could enthuse our management students to think of big ethical questions. This is not only relevant for students in information systems but in all other areas of management. Perhaps by consciously developing our creativity, we could then use systems ideas as tools to help us talk about ethical values and do something about them.


To make this happen, it might be that we need to acknowledge that we as educators and our students pursue limited forms of creativity, those which help us secure employment or give us economic and social benefits in the short term. It was good to know that at IMT they also value mindfulness as an alternative to living our lives in pilot modes.  This commonality, together with possibilities to entice students to think of using their ideas to deal with pressing issues in our societies (i.e. recycling), could help us positively shape the role of education in helping us all to save our planet. 

Ines and myself at the IMT business/technology incubator. Be mindful of the alien!  

Ines made great contributions at the seminar by giving her own examples of how the use of some creativity tools (i.e. de Bono's six hats) and working on 'real' problems (i.e. student ideas for recycling at residences) have enabled her to identify and appreciate different perspectives, and think of new ways of using information technologies to deal with emerging problems.  During our visit, she taught me a lot about her use of social media and mobile technologies.  I could see that she belongs to a new generation of people who make technology part of their daily lives, as perhaps I did many years ago! Maybe it is time for me to learn new things.

I was left curious by other questions related to how some social structures or institutions shape our creativity.  My book has a framework to help make sense of some of these when it comes to collaborate between academics and social organisations.  This idea that the use of systems thinking might not show these structures or institutions keeps popping up when I talk with other academics.  I would still like to think that we have some degree of freedom when deciding to include or marginalize these structures in our creativity efforts.  

Thank you IMT for having me, hope to be there again soon! 

Creative Recycling: Our relationship to waste and to ourselves

On the 10th of August 2018, I was interviewed on the BBC radio as a recycling 'expert' (you can listen to the last ten minutes of the 3 hour programme on the link).

To prepare for this, I read and thought what could be the best piece of advice to give to people who are unsure of what to recycle from the waste of their households.  

This, in the wake of recent claims from different organisations about the futile efforts of some recycling (saying that not everything that can be recycled becomes recycled), and of some local council proposals to reduce the number of times that waste is collected from households.

So I wanted to raise the issue of our relationship to waste.  My reading took me to consider how waste has become something of value to many organisations, and how social enterprises help them to improve their recycling as well as the design of products to make them easier to recycle or to dispose.  

After my reading, and also getting an email from my thoughtful friend Andy Hix, I started thinking like that as individuals, we often conceive of waste as something that becomes foreign to our homes, to our lives.

With a better and more inclusive view of waste, one in which we establish a kind of acceptance relationship with it, we could start thinking that it is not waste but ourselves with whom we would need to become better friends with. Friends that knowing the good and not so good about each other, work to make their relationship work.  

For myself, in the last few years recycling has become a way of accepting that there are times when I feel anxious and in need of clearing out my mind. Managing waste allows me to get back to what is important for me, to spend time organising my thoughts and my lifestyle.  When anxious, I do lot of recycling.   When not, I let waste sit for a while, so that I also enjoy its company (bit weird I know, but then I can think of what to do for the benefit of both of us). Waste also allows me to have a conversation with my wife about future plans.  

Recycling (which involves classifying waste, taking some of it to recycling centres, and making sure the waste bins are ready for collection) makes me feel in harmony with myself, my loved ones and the rest of the world around me. 

Prior to and after the interview, I have started to become more interested in recycling information and have become a bit more aware of knowledge about it.  It is interesting to see that many products from the supermarket have recycling information, and that this information suggests consulting further with local recycling centres about their capabilities to recycle different parts of products.  

At the interview I was asked what could be recycled. I think I gave a couple of suggestions. I felt though that I couldn't get my views across too much.  Maybe I was not the sort of expert they were expecting.   Or maybe there was little time.  

Anyway,  I finished by saying that anything we can do to help a bigger recycling system in our society could help.t

For me, it is time to continue thinking if and improving my relationship with myself and waste through recycling.  

What about you?  Are you too busy to even taking the waste bins outside?  That might signal you do not have a good relationship with yourself.  Time to review it my friend :)