Sam and his team did some demolition and laid some new concrete for us on the weekend. Towards the end of the day I had two separate interactions that went very similarly;

“Do you like your driveway?”

“Yeah”, I say “It looks good”.

“It’s what we do (smiling with pride).”

You could tell they loved doing a good job. I stood on the road at one point with my neighbour Paul and we joked about how these blokes were the real deal … one of them had the trademark blue singlet and fag hanging out of his mouth. Lovely to watch.

Derek and I have agreed that this year, 2011, we will put some energy and resources into developing our strengths. In part that means sharpening the focus of what we offer to the market. Another dimension is fuelling the brain juices with the stuff that motivates us in that direction.

The first expression of that is a new offering we launched in January: the IT Team Health Check. The second, starts today, participating with a bunch of other likeminded people, in the Reos Partners Learning Festival. Adam Kahane’s work has been formative for us in the social innovation and facilitation work we do at Ergo so it will be good to see him and his associates host some discussion here in our home town.

There is something that moves deep inside when I come to the end of a complex or challenging facilitation assignment and have delivered over and above. I love the look in people’s eyes when they reflect back on what we have accomplished. Inside I say to myself, “It’s what I do.”

This year, even this week, I hope you find yourself doing lots of the stuff that, for you, is in the sweet spot. May there be plenty of opportunities to step back and say, “It’s what I do.”

While I concocted some lunch food (fig and goats cheese, and gnocchi and roasted vegie salads; burghul with currents, lemon and pistachios) Maria and her friends sat on the deck and talked until the afternoon became the evening. This is an amazing bunch of women.

The stories they tell, one after another, would not even be construed by commercial TV current affairs producers. We laugh embarrassed laughs at the near comical scenarios, I wouldn’t believe them possible if I’d heard them second-hand. The people they work with are amongst the most broken in the community and they regularly fall (or jump) through the cracks in the system inadequately designed to support them.

We sit there on our ponsy deck eating bobo food. Polite society carries on while people improvise on the margins. This group of friends have their own incredible journeys … and yet they find the strength to give of themselves everyday with no recognition.

I’ve worked briefly with Simon McKeon. He is an extraordinary person who deserves being named Australian of the Year for 2011. But with no disrespect for Simon, women like these are equally deserving. They work with some of the most difficult people. The conditions they work under would not be tolerated by large numbers of us. They are creative, even eccentric in the way they turn up every day and seek to make life better for others. What they do demands skill, grace and perseverance … everyday. And it is mostly invisible.

They are a testament to the beauty of humanity.

It makes me think about the way the tertiary educated community serves others. We think our way to service. We have theories, frameworks and ideologies that fortify us. And I smile when I hear these women talk about how useless many formally trained social workers are.

Perhaps it is in part because we are uncomfortable, in formal work and educational environments, talking about the one thing that makes the biggest difference. The thing that we all acknowledge is the most important thing in life, yet the thing that we talk about least in our professions. Love.

It has been over a year since I picked up a copy of AFR Boss. It hasn’t lost its edge. There are certainly more provocative publications on the shelves, but the thing that sets Boss apart is the audience; The Financial Review readership. Most radical mags preach to the converted.

This month’s Boss contains articles on:

• Flood clean-up volunteers in QLD
• Tips to eliminate weasel words (a regular column maybe)
• Facebook and social media
• Refugee employment programs
• ‘crowd-funding’; how social media is changing fund-raising,
• as well as an add for a AFR Boss sponsored conference on connecting the heart and mind in leadership.

The point is not to do a little promo for Boss, but rather to think about how advocacy works in the business world. The whole mag is framed around leadership: an issue front of mind for business leaders. The media is at home; that is the style and layout sit easily in a boardroom – the media doesn’t get in the way of the message. And the figurative microphone is given to peers, business people speaking to business people.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about this is the experience I had last week, working with a group of people who were fully engaged in the developing conversation being played out in the media relating to Australia’s commitment to foreign aid. The ability to speak and be heard is built on a foundation of relationship built up over many years.

Sometimes, those of us who are committed to playing a part in building a better world think that we can lever influence by the right-ness of our message. I have seen people develop anger and even bitterness when their message doesn’t get traction. But my observations from last week and my weekend reading of Boss remind me that the hard yards are in building relationships of trust; looking for common ground, the things that connect rather than divide. It is on this foundation that we can speak out for change.

But what about Egypt? Sometimes large scale change can only be achieved by revolution. However, we should be thoughtful about the difference between a forum for the competition of ideas and the abuse of power. In most cases, our primary opportunity to work for change will be to speak into forums built on relationships of trust.

What do I stand for? What are my causes? (or what am I currently complaining about? Do I care enough about it to do something?) With whom do I need to build bridges in order to engage the conversation? By all means we can build communities around the cause by long discussions with like-minded people, but lets not confuse that with advocating for change. Throwing stones from a distance is easy.

This post was going to about lamenting good stuff from the past that has been overtaken by progress:

One of the joys of my childhood was summer holiday travel. That travel often involved visiting my parent’s friends’ houses. On one such occasion I was unwell, so running around outdoors (the preferred option) was replaced with sedate indoor entertainment. I was ‘sent’ to one of the bedrooms and given an old hard cover book of magic tricks to keep me occupied. It was a classic text, full of those old hand drawn illustrations typical the time before publishing included photographs. It still sits on my bookshelf.

I was hooked. In the years after that I spent countless hours in front of my parents full-length mirror attempting to perfect sleight of hand manoeuvres. Along with one of my mates, we would put on little shows for family, friends and primary school fates. While we could get hold of books to feed our passion, our semi rural town in Tasmania didn’t feature any shops remotely likely to stock the stuff we wanted. Some we could make ourselves or improvise, but when it came to the real stuff, our lifeline was Bernard’s Magic Shop in Elizabeth St Melbourne. We would save up our pocket money and chose supplies carefully, filling in order forms torn from the back of magic magazines, and then enduring the six or eight week turn around to open our parcels. Those were the romantic days when magic was the domain of top hat wearing, penguin suited males and misty black backdrops.

When I moved to Melbourne 25 years ago I was delighted to see Bernard’s shop in the flesh. To me it represented childhood innocence and connection to an era that celebrated a brand of entertainment that is rare in these days of electronic entertainment.

Last week, I happened to walk past and see the sad and sorry sight of an empty shop, dirty and deserted. My heart sank. I never met ‘Bernard’ but I wondered how gut wrenching it must have been to pull the plug, not just on the business, but on an era. In the subsequent days I periodically pondered nostalgia, I thought about the things from my childhood that are gone forever, ways of living and being that my own kids understand as ‘the olden days’. Of course everything moves very quickly. On the one hand I recall the old shops in my home town before the supermarket era, Coles variety stores and ‘real hardware shops with dirty floor boards. And then, recalled the exclamation from one of our kids a few years ago when we were describing our first use of computers, “What use is a computer without the internet?” Indeed.

And so I wondered about the passing of time and the impossibility of holding onto some of the really good things in life. As I sat down to write this reflection I thought I’d see what remnant of Bernard’s exists on the net.

… and lo and behold, I discover that Bernard’s has moved to a bigger and better location!!!! Doh!

… or is that ‘lol’?