JOURNAL

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound

My invitation was to participate in an organisational visioning event as an ‘embedded psychological observer’. My invitation had been courtesy of the organisation's Group Human Resources Director, following a ‘suggestion’, i.e. a direct command, from the organisation’s chairman and CEO, a man often described in the organisation’s press releases as ‘wildly charismatic’.

From a psychological perspective, zombies in this context don't signify something to be feared, but rather a latent aspect of the self that has been suppressed by the pressures of corporate conformity. The idea that this talent was "dead and buried" reflects a past decision to abandon a passion, likely due to a perceived lack of opportunity or the demands of a traditional career path. The return of the zombie is an unconscious signal that this talent is still alive and demanding attention.

W. Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality management, famously stated that fear in an organization is the single greatest inhibitor of improvement. This profound insight leads to a critical question for any leader: Who truly owns fear in an organization? The answer, as explored in a talk on this subject, is not a simple one, but a complex web of shared responsibility, with the ultimate ownership resting squarely on the shoulders of leadership.

In the first of The BTN's series of videos with the Association of Business Psychology winners, Ian McLaren Wallace discusses his multi-award winning method of 'Archegyral Mapping: Transforming a Cultural Landscape'. The video delves into Ian's unique approach and the presenting issue his client was facing. Ian then analyses what his approach to the issue was, what measurements were put it place to examine its impact before finally providing tips to anyone looking to use this process in the future.

The gloaming comes late to Angus in high summer, a slow seeping of indigo into the wide sky above Strathmore. I walked the verge of the B-road, the air still holding the day’s warmth, the drone of the last homeward car fading into the buzz of the insect-thick grasses. Ahead, they stood: the Aberlemno Stones, time-deep and silent, their grey flanks catching the last of the sun.

Will human leaders be replaced by artificial intelligences? It's a question that has moved from the realm of science fiction to the boardroom, captivating executives and futurists alike. The rapid evolution of AI technology, with its unprecedented ability to process data, optimize processes, and make lightning-fast decisions, has led many to wonder if the traditional human leader is becoming obsolete.

Leadership is changing from a static set of prescriptive corporate competencies to a dynamic framework of adaptive learning processes. The change is driven by a shift in ownership. Once, leadership was owned exclusively by corporate entities. Now, it is increasingly owned by leaders themselves.

There are places that seem to exist out of time, and the old military bridge over the Allt na da Ghob is one of them. Tucked away in the deep cleft of Glen Lyon, it is a structure of grey stone and memory, a crossing point not just of water, but of worlds. To know it, you must visit it in more than one light.

To come to the Angel is to feel the land rise. You don’t so much arrive as ascend towards it. On this particular afternoon, a long heat had settled over the Tyne valley, bleaching the sky to a pale, ceramic blue. The air was thick with the thrum of distant traffic and the scent of hot tarmac and dry grass. And there it stood, on its low, man-made hillock, a creature of rust and air. It did not loom, not in the way a cathedral or a skyscraper does. Instead, it held its ground, its vast wingspan a statement of presence, a quiet assertion against the shimmering horizon.

To walk towards the Five Sisters on a long summer’s afternoon is to feel the landscape rearranging itself around you. They are not mountains, not in the geological sense. They are bings: vast, man-made mounds of spent oil shale, the industrial relics of West Lothian’s past. Yet as the sun lowers, slanting its light across the Central Belt, they assume a monumental quality. Their rust-red flanks glow with an intensity that seems to belong to another continent, another kind of stone.

The road-name is a command, an inheritance: Rest And Be Thankful. But in the blue pre-dawn of a summer morning, with the air still holding the memory of night’s chill, there is no thought of rest. The stillness is a summons. Across the glen, the mountains are presences, their familiar shapes etched in shadow against a sky paling to primrose. Ben Narnain is a broad-shouldered giant of schist, but it is its neighbour that draws the eye and quickens the pulse. Ben Arthur, The Cobbler: a fantastic geology, a shattered castle of a mountain whose three summits trouble the horizon.

The old ways are the best ways, my father says, and he should know. His life was spent in the dark, in the deep places of the earth, following coal seams that ran like black veins through the rock. Now, retired, he walks the high places, the wide-open spaces of Assynt, a man revelling in the sudden, glorious light. We walk together, his pace still steady, a miner’s gait on the mountain’s spine.

To go up the Bealach na Bà in the late gloaming of midsummer is to feel the land tilt on its axis. The road, a tarmac ribbon on an ancient drove-way, leaves the sea-level world behind. In the low, slanting light, the Pass of the Cattle begins its catechism of rock and air. My car’s engine labours, a modern pulse against the deep, slow beat of Torridonian time held in the sandstone that crowds the verges. This is a road of absolutes, a vertical conversation. With every hairpin bend, the world below – the scattered crofts, the pewter gleam of Loch Kishorn – recedes, becoming a map of itself, a memory already forming.

The track is a pale thread drawn across the hill's flank, a line of crushed stone and grit that sings under the tyres. To climb Ben Chonzie by bike is to feel the mountain in the legs, in the lungs. It is a slow conversation with gradient, a negotiation with gravity. The bike becomes a simple machine of translation: muscle into motion, will into altitude. On this summer’s afternoon, the air is thick with the scent of warm peat and the drone of the occasional bee, a sound that seems to be the very hum of the heat itself. The land here is old, a rumpled blanket of gneiss and schist, softened by millennia, and the track is a modern imposition, a way made easy, but the effort remains real, honest.

To walk up into the dusk is an inversion of the usual order of things. I leave the road late, when others are descending, their faces ruddy with the day’s work. The air by the roadside is thick with the scent of bog myrtle and the low, peaty exhalations of the Flow Country. Before me, the path up Ben Hope is a pale nerve-ending in the vast body of the mountain, a line of geological memory worn into the Moine schist by the tread of millennia. I am walking against the clock of the sun, chasing the gloaming upwards.

The air, on this Scottish spring afternoon, is honeyed with the scent of gorse and damp earth. From the shore of Loch Earn, Ben Vorlich’s shoulder is a great, green heave against the sky, a line drawn by a sleeping giant. The path begins softly, a yielding track through bracken and last year’s flattened grasses, but you learn a mountain first through your feet. The ground soon hardens, its grammar shifting from soil to stone, and the gentle inquiry of the foothills becomes a steep and demanding question.

The path to the sea is a thread of darkness before the dawn, and the tripod’s weight is a familiar ache across the shoulder. Below, in the half-light, Bow Fiddle Rock crouches, less a landform than a leviathan sleeping in the slack tide. Its arch is a drawing-in of breath, a stony inhalation that has lasted fifty million years. To come here with the 5x4 is to seek a different kind of time, to step away from the fleeting instant and into the slow, deep pulse of the land. The air is salt-sharp, cold with the memory of night, and the only sound is the shush and drag of water on the shingle, a constant turning-over of old stones.

To walk the Flow Country of Caithness as the light fails is to feel the land’s deep grammar. The ground underfoot is a lexicon of sphagnum and peat, written over millennia. You follow the old paths, the ghost-roads, drawn towards the low humps that rise from the moorland like sleeping beasts of stone. These are the Cairns o’ Camster, a long barrow and a round cairn, their shapes softened by the slow creep of five thousand years.

The rain has ceased, but its memory clings to the air. It is a morning of bright clearances, the sun finding apertures in the fast-moving cloud, casting down sudden, intense beams that turn the wet grass to a dazzle. To walk into the Crawick Multiverse at such a time is to feel the landscape freshly rinsed, still breathing out the cool of the night storm. This is not an ancient place, not in the way of the stone circles that spine the nearby hills, but it speaks a language of deep time, a modern tongue for geological epochs and cosmic theories, built from the bones of a wound in the earth.

The light arrives early in the far north-west, and on this May morning it spills over the quartz-veined shoulders of the hills to pour itself into the Allt na Bruadar. The Burn of the Dream. It is a good name for this water, which speaks in a language older than Gaelic, a syntax of cataract and pool, of runnel and race. The water is peat-stained but gin-clear, running cold over a bed of glinting schist and the dark, rounded forms of ancient stones. Here, where the air is sharp with the scent of bog myrtle and wet moss, is a world entire.

To walk the cliff-edge at Duncansby before the world wakes is to feel the land dissolve. It is a midsummer morning, but the sun is a rumour, a lost pearl somewhere above the haar. This sea-mist, which breathes in from the North Sea, is a soft erasure of the world. It clings to the thrift and the salt-scoured grass, muffling sound, turning the solid headland into a place of ghosts and guesses. The air tastes of brine and damp earth. Below, the sea is a sigh, a rhythmic churn against unseen rock.

There are places where the land folds in on itself, where light and sound behave differently. The Dark Mile, the Ciaran Pass, is one such place. To walk here is to enter a crease in the world, a shadowed corridor of beech and oak where the road is a rumour and the air is thick with the scent of damp earth and leaf-mould. The destination is a sound before it is a sight: a low, percussive drumming that grows until it becomes the valley's very heartbeat. This is the voice of the Abhainn Chia-aig, the river making its hurried, churning descent over the falls.

The path to the gardens of Ecclesgreig House is a slow descent, a slip-road into a different quality of time. On a summer’s morning, the air is thick with the scent of damp earth and the low thrum of bees. But to walk here with a converted camera, its sensor altered to see beyond the slim jurisdiction of human vision, is to seek a different kind of light, a ghost-light that lies just past the edge of red. It is to go looking for the garden’s spectral self.

The air had that thundery quality, a strange, pressurised stillness that stills the birds and thickens the light. Over the Firth of Forth, the sky was a bruise of pewter and violet, and the water beneath it had turned a flat, unreflective grey. It was an afternoon for staying indoors, for watching the coming weather from the safety of a window. But the ness called. Its dark finger of volcanic rock, pointing out into the uneasy sea, was a line of invitation, a dare against the brewing storm.

You hear the water long before you see it. It is a rumour in the air, a vibration that travels through the soles of your boots and up into the bones of your legs. On a day of summer spate, after a week of rain has saturated the high tops of the Atholl deer forest, the Bruar Water is not the clear, sparkling thing of postcards. It is a muscular, peat-brown torrent, an artery of the hills pulsing with wild energy. The path that winds up the gorge is a civilised affair, laid out for the appreciation of a landscape famously curated by the words of a poet, but the water itself obeys no such niceties. It is all roar and rush, a thing of pure momentum.

We came to it in the honey-slow light of a late summer afternoon, when the sun had lost its midday ferocity and slanted long and gold across the glen. The air in Fortingall itself felt ancient, held in the cup of the surrounding hills. It is a place of quiet legends, a village that whispers its stories rather than shouts them. And at its heart, within the stone walls of a kirkyard, is the oldest story of all: the great yew.

The air on the path down is thick with ghost-water, with the atomised breath of the Tees. It is an afternoon in late October and the world is dissolving. Mist clings to the sessile oaks and the birches, muting the last of their autumn fire to a dull, damp gold. The sound is what guides you forwards, a low-frequency thrum that travels not through the air but through the soles of your boots, a tremor that speaks of immense weight and velocity. This is the voice of High Force in full autumnal spate, a river swollen with the rains that have scoured the moors of Upper Teesdale.

The world had dissolved to grey. Not the soft, shifting grey of a dreich day in the glens, but a dense, saturating whiteness that erased the boundary between earth and air. Ben More Assynt had vanished, leaving only the steepening ground beneath my boots. To climb into such a mist is to walk off the edge of the map, to trust not in sight but in older, deeper senses. My compass became a third eye, its needle a sliver of true north trembling in its liquid housing. Each step was a measured beat, a slow rhythm against the mountain's silence, as I paced out the distance, ticking off the land in hundred-metre increments.

To walk the Kilmartin Glen on a bright spring morning is to feel the past press close, to read a language written in stone and light. The air, sharp-edged and tasting of salt blown in from the Sound of Jura, seems to hold a different quality here, thrumming with a low, ancient frequency. This is a landscape that remembers. It is a palimpsest, its surface scored and inscribed with the passage of five millennia, and the morning sun is the scholar’s lamp that reveals the script.

You feel the spate long before you see it. It is a tremor through the soles of your boots, a low-frequency hum that vibrates in the bones of your jaw. We had walked in from the Spittal under a pewter sky, the air raw with the metallic tang of coming snow. Autumn was in its late, ragged stage; the larches had shed their gold, and the bracken on the hillsides was a deep, foxy russet. The path, slick with a mulch of pine needles and black earth, followed the river’s course, its water running high and fast, the colour of dark tea.

To walk the fairways of Lundin Links is to move across a surface of profound artifice. The green here is a managed thing, a baize of shorn and fed grass, its contours smoothed and its hollows calculated. It is a landscape made, not born, its language one of pars and birdies, of raked sand and the clean, percussive thwack of a well-struck ball. But to walk here is also to feel a deep strangeness underfoot, for this manicured world is punctuated by presences that do not belong to it. They are stones, three colossal incisors of grey sandstone, that break the gloss of the green with an abrupt and ancient force. They are witness-posts to a time before flags, before clubs, before the very idea of a game played across the land.

The sound finds you first, a low thrumming that builds through the soles of your boots to a full-bodied roar. This is not the river’s summer chatter, but its spring spate-speech: a raw, untrammelled monologue of snow-melt and storm-run. To walk towards the River Braan now is to approach a thing unchained. The air itself feels charged, heavy with the kinetic energy of water, and the scent is of cold stone and damp, breathing moss. The path, usually a gentle guide, becomes a cliff-edge negotiation with a liquid fury.

To walk the path to the Rumbling Bridge on a spring afternoon is to leave the sunlit world behind. You descend into a holloway, a cleft in the land carved not by footfall but by the ceaseless industry of water. The air cools, grows damp. The scent is of wet stone, of moss, of the deep, iron-rich breath of the earth itself. Above, the sky is a filigree of new-leafed birch and oak, the light dappled and uncertain. You are entering a gorge, an underland, where the normal rules of landscape feel suspended.

The path begins as a rumour in the gloaming, a pale thread spooling out from the road and into the deep hush of the summer morning. Mist has claimed the world overnight, snagging itself on the larch woods and draping the lower slopes of Schiehallion in a soft, white silence. To climb into such a fog is to walk into a forgetting. The world below, with its hard lines and certainties, dissolves. All that is left is the immediate: the damp press of the air, the scent of wet heather, and the mountain itself, waiting.

The path begins as a promise, a soft track winding from the road near Gairloch, but it soon becomes a question. On a day of high, bright summer, with a sky of impossible blue, the ground remembers water. It holds it in the deep, dark cups of the peat, releasing it with a sigh under the weight of a boot. To walk here is to learn the land’s language by foot, a grammar of bog-myrtle and sphagnum, of granite bones showing through thin, heathery skin. I was climbing towards the Fairy Lochs, though the name, with its fey whimsy, felt ill-suited to the day’s purpose: a pilgrimage to a place of sudden violence and long memory.

To stand at Tuilyies is to feel the rip-current of time. Here, in a green wedge of land beside the A985, the present rushes past as a torrent of steel and rubber. Lorries shudder by, their slipstream a sudden gust of wind, their sound a low roar that never quite fades. And in the middle of it all, four stones stand sentinel. They are a quiet refusal in a loud world, a lithic interruption to the asphalt's flow. I have come to see them not with my eyes alone, but through a lens that peels back the visible, a camera converted to the strange gloaming of the infrared spectrum.

In 2018, an employee at the airline Condor Airways, was tasked with buying some plastic cups, plastic cups to contain in-flight hot beverages for the airline’s pilots. It might appear as if this is a fairly clear or obvious or simple decision space, or even perhaps slightly complicated if you want to push the whole plastic cup procurement process. Anyway, cups were procured, at a good price, probably the price of the lowest bidder for the cup supply contract.

On the 29th February 1968, the man controlling the world’s most powerful military power broke down in tears. With hesitant words and a breaking voice, Robert Strange McNamara, (that was his actual middle name, Strange), the United States Secretary of Defense admitted the utter futility of his scientifically-managed war in South-East Asia. He openly wept as he attributed his failure to his overreliance on scientific management principles and newly devised computer spreadsheets.

As the CTO of a deep technology organisation specialising in human computer interaction I sometimes get asked, quite often really, asked about what methods we use for software development. And these questions, well often not really questions but statement questions and imperatives like you must be using Agile or Scrum or Kanban or Kanscrum or Scrumban or Waterfall or Scrumfall or lots of other method portmanteaus. It is very rarely that someone will ask questions like, ‘What are you actually trying to create, what is the outcome you desire, or what is the purpose of your work?’

‘Welcome to the HIVE!’  my client excitedly announced.  In this case, the Hive wasn't actually a beehive and we weren’t wearing special beekeeper’s suits or indulging in any form of apiary. HIVE was actually an acronym (how unusual) that stood for Holographic Immersive Virtual Experience. As we stood inside the dark empty cube of the HIVE, my client pressed a button on the remote that she was holding and we were suddenly bathed in the illumination of LCD screens completely surrounding us, to the left and to the right, front and behind, and above and below.