This year’s Systemic Spring School will be held this year in the beautiful Lake District.
Chris and Patrick at play
I’m excited to be co-hosting a conversation with participants with my long time friend and mentor, Chris Blantern, exploring how people keep their personal values alive at work. We thought it would be fun to learn about this phenomena through an art-based exercise, i.e., showing each other what it feels like through the use of images.
For some, the trend for non-profits to be more business-like is necessary to ensure survival and sustainability – a no brainer. For others, marketisation or what’s been called advance capitalism may be antithetical to our own ideology, values and beliefs. According to one healthcare practitioner, the biggest challenge in the NHS is discerning how to go on in an ideologically contested and politically regulated context.
We invite you to a conversational space where people can share, reflect and co-create meaningful ways of keeping personal values and beliefs alive at work.
I am a ‘People Practitioner’ who has, over the years, been swept up by the tidal wave of change that has seen my profession go from being called Manpower Management to Personnel Management to Human Resource Management, and now back, well sort of… to Systemic People Management. I came up with the last phrase because I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with working within the confines of the ubiquitous neo-liberal approach to categorising and organising people. I believe that people are people, not merely assets, human capital or resources. While we do find fulfilment from PRODUCTivity, we are ultimately human beings, not human doings. I would like to transcend who we have become and becoming in a marketized, monetarised world and leave the corporatist worldview that reminds me so much of the allegory of Plato’s Cave.
I love God, my family, playing guitar, following Arsenal, travelling and taking and editing photos. This website is a celebration of all these things and more.
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