Ways of working

I drove to Providence today in search of wicked problems -- actually to meet Deb so we could work together on her section of the proposal. All Rhode Island public libraries are closed on Thursday mornings to compensate for the wicked problem of a limited budget, so we had lunch at the Cuban Revolution first. All fired up, we adjourned to the Central Library reading room and made good use of the free Wi-Fi while we worked. Only drawback was the library did not own a copy of Weick's 1979 Social Psychology of Organizing, so we had to make do by leafing through pages on Amazon!

Driving in Providence is definitely a "wicked problem" for me -- I took the wrong turn both going and coming and had to make a huge detour each time to get back going the right way on the right road. Thank heavens for my GPS -- but I have a suspicion that my wrong turns were due to GPS ambiguity in the first place! Next time I'll take an old fashioned map!

As for our symposium proposal -- it's at the stage of, "How do we know what we think until we see what we say," a quote often attributed to Weick, but claimed by others too.