However, because of  Healthy and Safety regulations, the firemen could not use their lifting gear to rescue Alison from her plight. The lifting gear was perfectly safe and operable, having been used to lower Alexander into the shaft and then raise him back out of it. Alison was not so fortunate. She had to wait over six hours until a mountain rescue team arrived and then suffered a fatal heart attack as she was finally being lifted to the surface.

Unfortunately, we see much of the same behaviour in most large organisations where over regulated departments form into silos. Rather than focusing on the fundamental purpose of their organisation (such as saving the lives of those in peril) they adhere to artificial rules and targets that help to maintain their control of personal fiefdoms.

Absolutely brilliant Halloween cover from The New Yorker!

Apparently the ability to forecast this viral behaviour would be of great interest to ‘sociologists and marketeers, among others‘.

Sociologists, marketeers and others (I’m assuming ‘others’ is an academic euphemism for PR sociopaths) are always trying to identify ‘The Influencers’.

Even though The Influencers sounds like a 1960’s TV series about spies with special powers (or was that The Champions?), PR executives claim that influencers actually do exist and describe them as that mysterious group of people who have the special power of being able to influence other people.

Although it would be intriguing to explore why most modern PR methods are based on the plots of 1960’s TV shows, we can only the imagine the feverish excitement as PR lackeys identify the host influencers who will facilitate the spread of their latest viral campaign.

The purpose of these viral campaigns is invariably the promotion of pointless consumer goods that no-one really needs or the ongoing deification of some manufactured idol who is quite good at lip syncing and who also enjoys a bit of elective surgery.

Luckily for PR machines everywhere, influencer and influenza are derived from the same Medieval Latin etymology of īnfluentia, (so called from the belief that epidemics were due to the influence of the stars).

So to fully leverage the influence of the stars, hip and happening PR gurus are now designing their campaigns using epidemiological tools developed to analyse the spread of biological viruses, such as H1N1 swine influenza. The fundamental purpose of these campaigns is to use the stars to influence those unfortunate and ignorant herds of humans who don’t even know what they are missing.

Their method of retaining customers is to use a form of apostasy that is also popular with organised crime operations and while this may ensure short term commitment, it will undoubtedly lose paying customers to providers who actually treat paying subscribers like human beings.

Perhaps the Orange copywriter who came up their vision of ‘I am Everyone’ had predictive text switched on when they penned the slogan because at this rate, Orange will soon probably have only one customer left.

As humans, we tend to make sense of things by comparing them with other things that we already know. We make most of our decisions in a novel situation by matching new patterns with older patterns that we have already experienced, so we often end up making analogies to make sense.

However, as we know from working in the Dreamwork Space, any analogy is only as good as the context it is being used in. For example, the comedian Frankie Boyle uses Sarah Palin’s pit bull analogy to show what can happen when we take an analogy too far.

‘I’m like a pitbull, I’m tenacious.’ Yeah, that’s good.
‘I’m like a pitbull, if you leave me in the room with a child I’ll kill them’. Not so good.
‘I’m like a pitbull, if I take a really strong hold of your arm, the only way to get me to release my grip is to stick a finger up my a*se!’ A metaphor too far.

And believe me, Frankie Boyle is one person who knows about taking things too far! The lesson is, keep the analogy short, but so often in management, we take an analogy and allow it to become reality. So we end up thinking of organisations as machines with predictable and controllable behaviours. Or our brains as computers that just store data and regularly need to be rebooted and upgraded. Or relationships that are like binary ones and zeroes, either existing or not existing, instead of displaying the whole range of human interaction between two human beings.

As Dave Briggs, played by Robert Powell, remarks in the wonderful Detectives, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but teach it to fish and it will neither a borrower or a lender be’.

I have recently endured a tortuous and ultimately meaningless experience with one of the aforementioned organisations. Although the stated ethos of this organisation is to connect the masses in one glorious quad play world, what they actually did was to connect some bad ass Barabbas with my bank account details.

According to the vision and mission statements of the organisation, this should be an easy matter to resolve. However, it has taken months of seemingly endless and pointless conversations with Customer Concern Representatives in far off lands.

The only clear message to come out of this experience is that the stated visions and values of an organisation and how they are lived by the representatives of that organisation are usually quite different. This is not really surprising as it is folly to think that an organisation can have values and visions. It is people who have values and visions, not organisations.

So if you are fortunate enough to be in a lofty post of all-seeing omniscience, here are some questions you may find it valuable to reflect on. Who are the people who represent your organisation? Who actually has to live the values that you so zealously preach to the masses? How much do you value them? Do you value them enough to enable them to authentically connect with someone who needs help? Who are your representatives on Earth?

1. Your dreams will find your dreams.
2. You create the dream that dreams you.
3. What happens inside, happens outside.
4. If you have a why, you will always find a how.
5. You are dreaming right now.
6. A symbol without a space is like a bull without a china shop.
7. If you want to know who you are, look at what you are doing.
8. All need is unrequited love for the self.
9. If we never listen to the truths of others, we will never hear our own truths.
10. Meaning is what really matters.
11. Our dreams and stories don’t always give us the endings we expect, but they always give us the endings that we need.
12. The closer you get to the edge, the more you realise that there is no edge.
13. The best story always wins.
14. Own your own dreams.
15. Change your myth. Change your reality.
16. If you want to know about dreaming, ask your dream. In a dream.
17. Creativity and play are serious survival strategies.
18. Our shared spaces connect our private myths and our public dreams.
19. Other people are the best mirrors we have.
20. Show others how to dream their own dream, rather than forcing them to be in your dreams.
21. Your dreams need space. Walk in a wild place and listen to your heart sing.
22. The most successful organisations are the ones that dream.
23. Your future arrives one dream at a time.
24. Your dreams are in the spaces all around you.

When we dream, our millions of years of evolution meet the minutiae of our every day lives. We have evolved into dreaming creatures, organisms that don’t just have the experience of one lifetime, but have the distilled awareness of past generations and know of the possibilities of future ones. Working with our dreams is not merely an airy fairy self indulgence, but a spiritual adventure of great cultural significance to us all. Our myths and legends abundantly express that our unconscious awareness has access to wisdom that is usually unavailable to the conscious mind.

Only our unconscious really knows what our conscious strives to know. Our dreams are answering questions that we don’t even know that we are asking, and remembering all that we have consciously filtered and forgotten. This is what Sufi mystics termed anamnesis, the end of forgetting who we really are. When we dream, our fragmented identities connect to a more fundamental awareness and we begin to truly understand the mystery that we are trying to unravel.

Solving the mystery of who you are, who you have been and who you will be cannot be accomplished as a detached observer, evaluating your situation from a distance. Stepping fully into your dreams is the only real way to meet the person who you dream of being and to truly live your dreams you really have to be in them. Your dreams are not some vague things that may or may never happen. They are happening right now as you read these words and you can choose to immerse yourself in them or try to keep hiding from them.

And if you try to hide from your dreams, they will keep searching for you until you truly find your own self and can at last speak your own clear truths. As your dreams discover you, you begin to realise that you are not just living ‘the’ dream, whatever that might currently be. You are living and breathing your dream, the one unique, big dream that only you can dream. This dream is not just something that is happening to you, you are happening to the dream.

Remembering how to dream is as simple as becoming aware of the space and time that we unconsciously create. Our dreams take us to the edge of the known and unknown and illuminate all our realisable possibilities and potentials. They eloquently celebrate our individual uniqueness in a wider celebration of our universal awareness. Dreams invite us to step into our true power which can be scary. And magnificent. They honestly show us our beauty, our love and our truth. Your dreams are in the spaces all around you, waiting to be dreamed. Be your dreams now.

Most business analysts attempt to predict the future by analysing past patterns and extrapolating them in to a state of favourable future conditions. However, past experience shows us that this approach doesn’t always work. Although historic patterns do tend to repeat, our constant search for newness often invites the unpredicted into our lives. Rather than arriving in a long awaited and neatly packaged parcel, the future usually arrives in our current reality in the form of sudden flashes of insight and unexpected fragments of opportunity.

In planning for the future, the unexpected is usually associated with unpleasant surprises. When the unforeseen inevitably occurs, we repeatedly try to ignore it. If it’s not in the plan, it can’t exist. Rather than exploring these unanticipated opportunities, we retreat back into the comfortable past, waiting for the future to arrive and set us free. But the more we try to hold on to the old, the more that fragments of the future begin to appear unexpectedly in our lives.

We first become aware of the future in our dreams. Our unconscious awareness beams out from us in time as well as space and usually begins to sense the future before we become consciously aware of it. Like our dreams, the future arrives in seemingly disconnected fragments that we usually filter out because they seem to make little sense to us. We hear these fragments all around us in snatches of conversation, and see them in signs that we are not allowing ourselves to notice yet. As Henry David Thoreau observed, ‘Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven’.

These flashes often illuminate surprising insights and all of a sudden we see what is new. Our insight may appear to be a stroke of absolute genius, but usually all we have done is to notice something that we have been unconsciously aware of for sometime. It may seem to have happened suddenly, but like most overnight sensations, it has probably been knocking on the door of our conscious awareness for years. Although our inventive genius may seem like a solitary pursuit, its success usually depends on how many conversations we are engaged in and truly listening to what we are saying and hearing.

The more conversations we are in, then the more connected we will be. And the more connected we are with ourselves and others, the more easily we will be able to connect all the fragments of the future that are continually arriving in our lives. All these fragments are fundamentally connected, and they all reflect what our future looks like. By connecting the fragments that have most meaning for us, it can be surprisingly easy to release ourselves and create the future that we want to be in.