“You could call yourself a coach, you know. It would make things so much easier.” The thing is… I have this weird association with the word. Real coaches use words like energy, space, connection, awakening, woo, wooo … And becoming a coach after you’re forty? It’s such a cliché. “You do use those words. Just […]
Author Archive | Bas De Baar
The Oddball Empire Armada. And A Transition Support System By Seb.
“Did you notice all those strange little floatation devices around us?” Yeah. I did notice them, Darwin*. Fellow travelers. It is really starting to look like an entire fleet of small vessels. Wow. * I have too much conversations with my blog. And my blog is called Darwin. “Hmmmm. We should start calling you all […]
Play: An Alternative to Culture Engineering and Conflict & Competition
Later this month this blog has its 6th anniversary. In preparation for an anniversary post I was going through some of the early posts and noticed how dominant my engineering background was. “Change” was all about creating mechanisms to “create” change. Even when “culture” became a dominant topic on this blog, I talked about some […]
How to let go of control. Maybe.
We think we’re talking about a key for a better, happier humanity as a whole: recognizing that the fluid movement necessary in transitions is the structure we seek. It’s not the solid walls, the monuments, the groups and ideas etched in stone that we were taught would keep us safe. And after another couple of […]
If you are part of the domain you are trying to understand, play with storytelling.
Working on A Travel Guide for Transitions has taught me many things. One being that to get insights and understanding of domains which you are part of, you can play with storytelling. Play with writing styles, play with video, play with personal maps, play with metaphors, play with language, play with the actual end result. […]
Change Is Coming. A Travel Guide for Transitions.
I am very excited because we just finished the editing process of our new book! A Travel Guide for Transitions: Because Freaking Out About This by Myself Totally Sucks by Lori Kane and Bas de Baar What happens when so-called experts on transitions are facing major life transitions themselves? It may not be what you […]
A Map of the Project World. Ah. Finally It All Makes Sense. To Me.
I am very excited about how my map of The Project World turned out! It combines my love for map making and storytelling. It contains many of the things I talked about the past 5 years about the different stuff you do in projects. “What amazes me about these early globes is that people built […]
Transition Support Systems. And Wile E Coyote.
“So. Someone called you the Wile E Coyote of transitions. You’ve come a long way from writing about working in global and virtual projects to being compared to a cartoon character that straps itself to rockets to catch a bird. Respect. Really. Great job.” It’s all the same, Darwin.* [*Yes, I have conversations with my […]
The Fluid Movement Movement And The Guards of All Things Certain.
“You should be more aggressive and promotional about the stuff you’re saying. Be more like: ‘This is what you need to do, I’m telling you, because this will solve your problem guaranteed! Trust me! Booya!” I don’t know, Darwin. I am saying that there is never one way to solve or do something. It always […]
Free ebook: The Context Machine: Leading CloudWorkers
In the summer of 2010 I wrote a series of posts on this blog called The Context Machine that was my attempt to answer the following riddle… “If you are a Project Manager that operates for a short period of time in a foreign organization, with a global team you don’t know, in a domain […]