User:GregSpencer
Greg Spencer - Community Sense-making and Entanglement Huddersfield, West Yorkshire (United Kingdom)
Intro
Roots in horticulture, adventure sports and the outdoors led into 30+ years disappearing down rabbit holes in everything from chaos and complexity (1980s) through anthropology, hermeneutics and critical theory (1990s) / child development (2000s) to constraints based approaches to sports coaching (2010s). A focus on the interactions of those who have seen things differently (everywhere from Pre-colonial Asante to rural Norfolk) has fed into sustained engagement with ideas around entangled lives.
Formal (volunteer) roles as Regional Chairman and Area Coaching Representative for British Canoeing and in a variety of clubs and across the outdoor industry have led into working to get National Governing Bodies in sport (and in the wider world of sports coaching) engaging with wider agendas using tools and methods from anthro-complexity (including the Cynefin® Framework and SenseMaker®).
Roots in Lived Anthro-Complexity
By the mid 1990s, a miss-spent youth revolving around leadership and coaching in the outdoors had fed into experience from co-ordinating a drop-in centre in Rugby to developing programmes of outdoor education, environmental education and living history in Georgia, USA. Undergraduate experiences ranged from Engineering Mathematics at Loughborough to Global Change in the Institute of Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth but a fascination with complexity eventually led to a PhD research on the history of pre-colonial and early-colonial Asante (West Africa).
A stint integrating communications technology into education and developing community sport in Surrey led into a hugely productive phase driving community projects in East Anglia, first as Chair of a community playgroup and of a connected community centre, then as Chair of Governors, Safer Recruitment Governor and Finance Governor of a school and as co-founder of Cluster Governance at a time when major funding streams for meeting additional needs were devolved from County control. Highlights included roles on two key Norfolk Governor Network committees (one working with the Chair of Governor Services, the other involving liaison with the Director of Education).
A relocation in 2012 led to leadership roles in the Open Canoe Association and within British Canoeing and to experience delivering everything from transformational experiences in residential programmes to major national and international events. By late 2019, working behind the scenes to influence strategy and major projects was beginning to give way to major independent projects around a theme of Enriching Lives In And Around The Water.
See the "I am a guest in someone else's conversation" episode of The Talent Equation Podcast for details.
Recent Projects and Initiatives
Work in early 2020 on an ecological approach to clubs started pulling together everything from practical experience catalysing lived complexity in communities to anthropologically informed postgraduate research and from a background in managing constraints within Governance to wayfinding approaches to skill development. Spin-offs from immersion in UKCoaching Coach Developer Conversations and Communities of Practice included blogs on Social Artists in Coach Development (linked to the Wenger-Trayner's Social Learning Systems work) and on Inspiring Engagement Through Pleasure in Movement (linked to Serious Savouring).
In mid-late 2020, an ongoing project around inclusion and diversity finally took centre stage. A keystone piece dug into whether some of the rebellious spirit that’s been part and parcel of so much in the outdoors for so long might actually give us a basis for taking our pastimes forward. That has overlapped with increasing involvement in the WeAreLiminal community, with the Next Stage Radicals, with Human Learning Systems Communities of Practice working within Sport and with work around Meaningful PE. See Changing the Sign on the Door for an example of the resulting thinking.
Following many months dominated by Cognitive Edge events (including an Exploratory linking Anthro-Complexity to Harold Jarche's work on Personal Knowledge Mastery, a Retreat around Semiotics and Aesthetics and a Masterclass on Aporia), sense-making and decision support has taken centre stage. Work continues on a Triangulator tool (now being deployed by British Canoeing) and priorities for 2021 include catalysing informal networks through which the world of sport might better understand and support those promoting meaningful PE.