I'd like to meet my Headmaster again....

....but alas that won't happen as he died a few years back. This is the man who described me as an intellectual philistine when I was 17 and took it as a personal challenge to open my eyes to poetry, philosophy and the arts in general. I remember well the extra tutorials and homework for the summer holidays.

I can't say that he was my hero; he wasn't. I think we tolerated each other, with a bit of respect and thus co-existed without too much aggravation in the envionment that was first a grammar school and then a sixth form college.

I have forgotten much of what he said to me, but a couple of things have stayed with me and resonated through the years.

The first was his statement that "if you can't write it down you don't understand it!" I have often quoted that to other members of the change community and indeed to stakeholders and it has held true every time. The mere exercise of writing it down forces the deliverer to slow down, organise their thoughts and then leaves them open to critical review the way that a verbal presentation can often avoid or obscure. It also tends to highlight contradictions and critical gaps in the material presented.

The second thing I remember he said to me was after a few months of coaching (or was that forcing me) to write poetry, essays and creating precis of highbrow newspaper articles. He told me that I had no style (in terms of writing), but that when he read my work he heard my voice in his head, something he did acknowledge as having value.

The relevance of this wander down memory lane is that I have heard reference to finding one's voice as a blogger and wonder if this the same sort of thing.? Certainly as I write this Blog more it is becoming easier. That may be because I writing about things that stimulate me, but there will also be an element of practice.I also keep the pressure off, by writing when I feel like it and only then. I have not set myself a routine for posting with targets I can then beat myself up over. Instead this still has an element of fun about it and I suspect that as it was with my rugby career, when it stops being fun I will retire my pen/boots.

The other thing that would make him smile (or maybe grimace) is to see how often I have found myself helping colleagues craft documents. I am the man who works with numbers and pictures and patterns and has always struggled to write a letters, but at work, while not the best by far, I seem to be amongst the leading craftsmen with words.

So if he were alive I wonder what he would say about this blog? Wonder how he would categorise me now? Would he see any improvement after all these years? I am not out to show him he was wrong, just interested in a recalibration and maybe a little acknowledgement that a few things he said to me made an impression and have travelled with me ove 30 years or so.