Exploratory Writing: Everyday magic for life and work

To explore this for yourself, try developing a metaphor that you discovered in your Chapter 9 work and found particularly helpful into an analogy that might help others understand the topic better. If you’re really stuck, here are a few examples to try: Leadership is like hosting a dinner party because… Organizational culture is like climate becaus

as Peter Elbow points out: ‘So much writing time and energy is spent not writing: wondering, worrying, crossing out, having second, third and fourth thoughts… [freewriting] helps you learn simply to get on with it and not be held back by worries about whether these are good words or the right words.’3

Let’s experiment with upwards counterfactuals first: set a timer for just one minute and write as many sentences as you can, as quickly as you can, starting with the words ‘If only…’. Don’t stop to think, don’t censor yourself, don’t consider anything as being too trivial or too painful.

What does success look like today?

When Professor Steve Peters, author of The Chimp Paradox, was working with the GB Olympic cycling team he had a rule: athletes could come and complain to him, but if they did, they had to complain for 15 minutes without stopping.

As Walt Whitman so insouciantly put it: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).’7

If you and I were sitting together and able to do this exercise in person – wouldn’t that be great? – I’d simply ask you to take a walk outside and bring me back three things. They could literally be three things you bring back into the room with you or they might just be something you see that you come back to tell me about. So you might bring me

Ready to have a go at creating a concept diagram of your own? You can use a timer for this if you wish, but you might find it easier to go with the flow. Once you’re clear on the concept you want to illustrate, simply brain-dump onto paper – or better still onto post-it notes – what elements need to be included in your model. Then look them over –

Inquiry is simply the act of asking questions to which we don’t know the answer – or even questions to which we think we do know the answer, but which we’re open to reconsidering. It’s how curiosity expresses itself, and as we saw in Chapter 3, curiosity is at the heart of exploration.