I had another experience of  'slogging' this week. One of my development projects on behalf of my family and my ancestors! is to try and construct our family history. I began by recording some conversations with my mum and dad. They are now approaching 90 and they are able to recollect their childhoods and the stories they were told about their families. I turned this into what I hope will be the first chapter of a family history that my siblings and my children can carry on developing. I then turned to Ancestry.com thanks to the generosity of my sister who bought a subscription. Over the last couple of months I have spent a lot of time (probably far too much)  slogging away at the various records that can be accessed. Sadly many of my ancestors were called Thomas Jackson and they lived in Manchester and that generates an awful lot of possibilities. So far I haven't even got my grandfathers birth certificate. But using my imagination and I hope reasoning power I have fabricated a lineage going back to the 1790's. It might of course all be wrong but the point of my story is that in slogging through the records this week for probably the best part of  6 hours and feeling very frustrated because I wasn't making any progress, I suddenly found a record that seemed to fit and push me back another generation. The joy that came from this moment of seeming to make progress out of this tedious search was enormous and it was a real boost to my morale causing me to stay with it for much longer than I intended. So out of slogging can come reward and satisfaction as a bit more of a problem seems to be resolved and out of these moments progress is made and potential solutions emerge that would not have happened without the slogging because the information or idea is deeply buried within the quest. So slogging away at something may be deeply dissatisfying but it is the pathway to discovery and achievement.

And yet one more example of emergence today. I had an email from a talented illustrator I had worked with in the past. It was a speculative email enquiring about possible work opportunities. I emailed back to open up a conversation about a possible role as an artist in residence at our forthcoming conference. Over 3 or 4 emails I tried to draw him in. I could see he was interested and he eventually agreed. I was delighted and immediately created a new web page to host information about our two artists. I then spent the best part of two hours creating a new explee animation to show off his work. It was both enjoyable and I felt creative and I was pleased with the result. There was no way that I could have anticipated this activity in advance of it happening. It emerged through interactions in my work ecology and being able to create opportunity for someone else to apply their talents to a new situation that they found appealing.

The creativity in development project focuses attention on the way creativity emerges through individuals' development processes but this week I have experienced very little creativity as I slogged away reading and editing contributions to an e-book. But 'creating' the e-book is a really important part of  our developmental strategy and giving feedback on each draft manuscript is essential to helping the contributors develop their piece. 

The experience caused me to reflect on the role of 'slogging' - in developmental processes.  To slog is to keep doing something even though it is difficult or boring. Slogging involves working on something in a steady, determined, methodical and often repetitive way. It also implies that progress is slow and perhaps laborious, in contrast to starting something new which is full of enjoyment or finishing something where there is a sense of achievement and fulfilment.

When you start something your imagination is engaged and you think freely and adventurously about the what it is you want to do. You feel energised as you put the building blocks in place like new relationships, infrastructure or the making of tools and you see a lot of progress in a short space of time. But after this initial excitement there is often a much longer period of 'slog', when you just have to knuckle down to work that is more systematic and routine and is perhaps not so interesting and exciting, but which is absolutely necessary for the success of the project. Slogging is often the way you complete something that you started and its where most of the effort and least of the reward resides.

Every significant developmental process has elements of slogging within it and the harder and more challenging it is the more slog there is. In fact for some development projects perhaps 80 or 90% of the time can be categorised as a slog. Slogging away at something requires persistence and determination and focus. It's easy to get distracted when you are in slogging mode. I recognise the symptoms of continuously looking for things to do other than the things that I should be working on - including writing this piece.

So how do I deal with this need to slog in a development process? The first strategy I use is to convince myself that it has to be done, not tomorrow or the next day but now, and the best way of doing this is to publicly commit to a timeline. Another strategy is to break the job that needs doing into smaller bits and set a target - I'm going to do these things by this time. The third thing I do is reward myself by taking a break and doing more interesting things when I have done a certain amount of slogging. My daughter who has been revising solidly for her mock GCSE's for several weeks became very adept in this technique. The fourth thing I do is periodically make a list of what I have done so I can see the progress I have actually made.

But even when we are slogging we can still be inspired if we are able to notice the right things. I watch my daughter, who is a mum to three young children including 18 month old twins... slogging away day after day. It's a good word to describe the daily routines she undertakes. I know it's hard work because I look after the twins one day a week.. The only thing she ever complains about is not having enough sleep and the effect that this has on her ability to perform her motherly duties the next day. The way she approaches her tasks  teaches me how to extract pleasure and joy from the many moments that emerge when you are looking after children if you approach them positively and imaginatively, and you look for the good and interesting things to emerge. She is a master at turning  the repetitive and mundane into joyful experience. And I guess this is where the inner motivation to sustain herself resides as well as the sense of purpose, duty and responsibility for the care and wellbeing of her children. I guess the reward for all the slogging involved in bringing up young children is to see them learn and develop so that they are able to do the things they need to be able to do to be successful in life.

Perhaps we derive different psychological benefits from starting something and slogging through it. Starting gives us the motivational force derived from visions and being able to see a different future while slogging enables us to build resolve and determination to secure that future. Looking back over the last few days I didn't feel at all creative and perhaps there is little in the way of opportunity for creativity when you are slogging away at something. But one thing is certain, while creativity is essential to the success of a development project so is slogging. Please share your experiences and insights of slogging in the development process.

Sometimes the development of an idea falters because it is just too expensive to turn the idea into a practical reality. But good ideas are never lost they just get put on the back burner. About 18 months ago I started a business project called storyshare. The basic idea was to help people create stories that were personally meaningful and help them bring their story to life through illustration, sound and animation. I made a business plan and attempted to find some illustrators - one of these became our LWE community illustrator so this part of the process was a success. But at the time I failed to see how I could make it a commercial success as I could not animate the illustrations without a great deal of expense and I knew that the potential market would not buy the service at a price that would cover the costs and make a small profit. So the idea was put on hold - until this week when I discovered the explee animation tool. I can now see how it will be possible to animate the illustrations in an inexpensive way so the cost of the service would be limited to the illustrations themselves. I thought it was a great example of how advances in technology can suddenly liberate and idea.  I offer my story as an illustration of what explee can do.  The illustrator is Kiboko Hachiyon. Thanks again to Chrissi Nerantzi who drew my attention to explee.

If creativity is a novel relational 'product' growing out of the circumstances of our life (Carl Rogers 1960) then development - the ability to be able to do something new,  is an example of such a product.

Sunday was mostly a wet and windy day so I spent quite a bit of time on my computer. I began exchanging emails with Chrissi Nerantzi about the possibility of creating an on-line course and over the space of a few hours she sent me and my son, who is also working with us, a whole pile of links to various web tools and examples of what the tool was capable of doing.  Here's an example
From: Chrissi Nerantzi
Sent: 05 January 2014 22:23
Subject: You have received a YouTube video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dksXr4GQMfk&sns=em
Something like this might also work for the conference? 
Chrissi

My son followed the link and gave me a glimpse of what it could do. It's a powerful, intuitive drag and drop tool for creating short animations which can be uploaded to youtube. I love animations and over the years I had financed and collaborated in a number of animation projects and I know how expensive and time consuming they are to produce so I was really excited about the possibility of being able to produce one for myself.

This morning I had a go at making my own animation through a process of trial and error. Over an hour I managed to create a 40 sec clip introducing our conference which I embedded in the conference website. In doing it I knew I was trying to achieve something specific. Looking back I can see that I had engaged in a piece of personal development through which I learnt how to make an animation using this software. It was very satisfying to make something so quickly and so easily. I also felt that I was being creative and the clip I produced, being entirely new to the world - was creative.

So my development and creativity emerged and merged from and through the circumstances of my life. Thanks to Chrissi who drew my attention to the tool and my son for showing me how easy it was to use, and having the time, interest and a potential use for the product - I engaged in and completed a piece of impromptu personal development and was able to be and feel creative in the process!

A contribution to the Creativity in Development Narrative Inquiry
http://www.creativityindevelopment.co.uk/

With Christmas over our thoughts turned to the big things we wanted to achieve this year. The outside of the house needs painting and my wife wants a new kitchen so both featured in our discussion. Our youngest will complete her GCSE's and she reasoned that for all her hard work she deserved an extra special holiday - going to Australia to see family she hadn't seen for 8 years. I would also like to go as my father is 90 this year. Another daughter at university was explaining her strategy for getting work experience and employment in the summer while our son clearly wanted to keep his options open and not be tied down too much. Then there was a family wedding to factor in and leave to be organised.  All these things came into the conversation and all vied for a share of our time and resources. We were in fact creating a plan for the family: a plan that required us to use our imaginations and ideas, that required us to appreciate each other's perspectives. It also required us to  analyse ideas in order to understand their consequences and the resources they would need. There was negotiation when there were conflicts of interest and persuasion to justify one possible course of action over another.

The process of planning was not dissimilar to any business planning exercise I have been involved in. From this simple situation we can deduce that planning is an important process to help us achieve goals that have to be accomplished by a group of people in more or less the same time framework with a certain set of resources. We can see that it is an emergent and iterative process through which ideas are proposed, shared, evaluated, refined or rejected with the people who need to be involved. I also noticed that the planning process 'degenerated into actually doing stuff'. For example when we discussed the possibility of going to Australia my wife had to check out when she could take leave and I got involved in looking at possible flights and routes.

Turning to 'work', my immediate task at the start of this new year was to pick up all the different bits and pieces relating to our 'Learning Lives' conference in March. The process itself is part developmental - in the sense of creating opportunities, building new relationships, communicating and selling the ideas, guiding presenters and contributors, and making sure everything connects and fits together. And partly practical delivery - updating websites, administration, reviewing and editing contributions for the e-book etc. But ultimately lots and lots of things have to come together by March 26 and perform on the day and that requires planning. So I spent the best part of two days working through in a partly random partly systematic way all the things I and the team has to do. Again planning morphed into doing. For example, having decided I needed to send a gentle reminder to all contributors of the e-book - I crafted a personalised email and sent it to the main authors. Through this process a solution to a problem emerged: the problem that we could only offer a small number of speakers the opportunity to speak at the conference might be addressed by creating podcasts for all the speakers to accompany their e-book chapters. New ideas definitely emerge through the planning process.

When I worked for an organisation I used to make detailed and explicit plans to make myself and my team accountable to managers and project boards - in fact I still do this for Lifewide Education at the scale of an annual plan with some broad goals and targets. But at the nitty gritty scale, 'working plans' tend to be broad headings that act as a prompt for doing stuff and the what it is that is done generally emerges in the act of doing. So planning and doing at the level at which it really matters are intimate partners.

So why do we plan? I guess we can all think of many reasons. It's about trying to see into the future and appreciate how you might influence aspects of the future by doing things that will help you progress towards that future. In this sense planning holds the visions of your purposes and what you want to achieve in your life and when it is a collaborative thing it serves the social purpose of creating a shared vision of what you want to achieve together. 

Planning  requires both the creative imagination and the more analytical functions of our brain. It  encourages us to imagine what might be and how the 'what' might be achieved. To draw from the past and project into the future. It encourages us to create designs for processes, relationship building or new physical or virtual things. It also provides a prompt for the evaluation of ideas and potential actions. In doing so we can imagine the consequences of actions, the resources we need, the risks we may need to take and things to avoid. Creating a plan might leave us more or less confident in what we intend to do but these feelings are based on a deeper understanding rather than ignorance. Two much planning can demotivate us as the full implications are revealed - that is why I like to work with the big themes eg 'I need to write a weekly blog,' and work out the detail as I go believing that I will never embark on a course of action if I really know what is going to be involved. Above all, in the social world of work, plans provide me with a road map to give me a sense of direction but I am happy to redraw the map along the way knowing that the execution of a plan is much more about improvisation as situations are encountered and the opportunities and risks within them are understood. This is where my creativity lies in the planning aspects of development.