His blog is headlined:
"Mike Chitty's Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in the Community blog.
"Speaker, Trainer, Coach, Consultant, Adviser - for a different perspective on enterprise"
I had the good fortune to spend some time with Mike this morning when he visited Paces.
Two notes before I return to my meeting with Mike.
Yesterday, I posted some brief thoughts on the SAHK Business Model - notably the way that conductive education is at the core of the business model and, conversely, that the business model is permeated and informed by conductive education; that conductive education has something to say to and about management and not solely about professional practice. It would seem to me that an organisation can be conductive in, for instance, its Aims and Values, or in its management style and much else besides.
The other day, Andrew Sutton wrote in a blog post "Conductive Education as Universality. Who does it?"
"Over many years I have come across all sorts of people who have said things like 'My mother (or my father) did Conductive Education with me, though she did not know it'. Such nonsense,one might retort, your mother could have had no idea about Conductive Education."
This, I suspect, is an experience that others have had: of meeting people whose 'world view' or 'view of the world' is somehow conductive, without any knowledge of formal conductive education ("pedagogy/upbringing").
In his blog post "Education, Community and Complexity", Mike wrote:
"Lets start with ‘enterprise’. First, empty your mind of all those misconceptions that I must be talking about ‘business start’s, ‘cash flow forecasts’, ‘profits’ and ‘Dragons’. "I am not. "I am talking about enterprise as a measure of ‘agency’ in one’s own life. The extent to which an individual is able to recognise what ‘progress’ (another slippery word) means and to take action its pursuit. This is what I mean by enterprise.
Do you not like that, as someone engaged in and thoughtful about conductive education: "a measure of 'agency' in one's own life"?
Further on, Mike writes:
If we are serious about developing ‘enterprise’, rather than managing the outputs that most enterprise funders are looking for, we need to concern ourselves with the development of self-interest and the accrual of power. We are in the realms of person centred facilitation and education. Not business planning. This is an enormous shift both in what we do, and how we do it.
Helping people to clarify their self-interest and find the power to pursue it requires very different structures and processes.
Substitute "therapy" for "business planning" and this, for me, resonates: "We are in the realms of person centred facilitation and education. Not therapy. This is an enormous shift both in what we do, and how we do it." I seem to have spent a lifetime trying to explain that to education officers, social workers and all manner of multi-professional types.
You must read the whole article for yourself. It is not all strictly to the point I am pondering here and the vocabulary is not that familiar to conductive education discourse; neither does it wholly represent the fullness of our conversation this morning but it is the best I can offer you when I ask the questions:
Is it possible a "Speaker, Trainer, Coach, Consultant, Adviser - for a different perspective on enterprise" thinks and sees the world conductively without knowing it?
Is it possible that the practice of conductive education for adulthood (as for instance in Paces Mission statement "... supporting children with disabilities into independent adulthood as active citizens ....) might have something to gain from a conversation with such a person?
What do you think? Is it possible? What might that mean for the 'universality' of conductive education?
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Footnote: ".... a measure of 'agency' in one's own life ...." I could not have phrased more succinctly what I have also wished for Sarah - indeed for all my 3 children - that she should have "a measure of 'agency' in her own life".
I have been here before. As I wrote this footnote, I chanced upon a posting (looking for something else that I did not find!) of mine "An orthofunctional organisation". I quoted Dr Hari:
" ....conductive education enables individuals to build up a new quality of life and a new quality of intention to achieve higher levels of co-ordination and some increase in coherence and power .... For the everyday course of life this means that the individual is able to establish aims (intentions, to retain them, to monitor progress towards them, to resist failure and to overcome obstacles to their achievement."
Is that not something like "being enterprising", as Mike Chitty holds it?
