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I've been on a 10-day grand tour around Europe, travelling through Sweden and Denmark and then visiting Germany, France, Belgium and The Netherlands. Staring last Friday (Jan 10) and getting beck to Sweden today, Sunday (Jan 19).
When I travel in my job, it's usually to go somewhere to attend something for a few days or a week (e.g. a conference). This time has been different though and I have come to think of my trip as a "dual fact-finding mission with side quests".
Fact-finding mission #1 - Art of Hosting in higher education
At KTH and in our new master's programme we are working with "Art of Hosting" (AoH) as often as we can (the full name is "Art of Hosting and harvesting conversations that matter"). I have written about it on the blog two times before back in 2022 (here and here). Me and my colleague Elina were interviewed about our AoH practices and experiences in December and one reason for my trip was to meet and talk other Art of Hosting practitioners with a special focus on people who practice AoH in higher education. To that end, I have had wonderful and very fruitful meetings in Hamburg (Frauke Godat and Sophie Dishman), Paris (Nancy Bragard, Mira Bangel, Florence Daumarie and Oana Juncu), Brussels (Ian Andersen) and The Hague (Mansi Jasuja). I also brought with me an AoH-related e-book called "Cultivating Change in the Academy: Practicing the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter within the University of Minnesota" (2013). I'm thankful for all the people who have taken the time to meet and talk to me as these talks have been very useful for me to understand 1) what we do differently at KTH, 2) how we can develop our teaching and 3) some concrete insights we can add to the paper we are writing this spring about our experience of teaching Art of Hosting at KTH (more about that later).
Fact-finding mission #2 - the 21st century court jester
I started to do stand-up almost three years ago. I in fact signed up for a course five years ago - but it was cancelled due to Covid! I then took a course in stand-up comedy two years later (and wrote about it here). I have for quite some time thought about what's next after stand-up. Since it is my sincere belief that every organisation needs a devil's advocate who dares to say say what everybody knows but nobody dares to utter (like "the emperor has no clothes"), I've concluded that beyond stand-up is the court jester. The court jester is the only one who is allowed to criticise the king (but gently and with humor and wit), but the jester is also works for the king for the betterment of the kingdom. So what does the 21st century court jester look like and how does he (or she) behave, dress and perform? These are questions I've been reading up on, thinking about, talked to people about and taking notes on for a year or two in preparation for this future performance. And so my second fact-finding mission was to travel to Paris and The Hague to learn more about the jester - past and present. In Paris I want to an exhibition at The Louvre called "Figures of the Fool" (it closes in two weeks). I also had the opportunity to talk and ask questions to one of the two curators of the exhibition, Pierre-Yves Le Pogam (conservateur général, Département des Sculptures). It was extremely valuable to first see the exhibition and then have the opportunity to talk to Pierre-Yves! In The Hague I later meet up with Juri Hoedemakers who gets jobs as a jester in the business world ("My mission is to bring back the role of the Hofnar in today's business world. Because who holds up a mirror to the kings of today?"). Juri has written no less than three books about the court jester (in Dutch, one is being translated to English) and he also writes his phd thesis about the court jester. I'd say his interpretation of what the 21st century court jester is and does is closer to a management consultant (with a few twists), while I'm equally or more interested in the performance in itself. We've talked before and will talk again but this was the first time we met in person and we had so much to talk about! I also brought some texts with me on my trip about medieval and modern court jesters, organisational paradoxes and humor as an agent of change.
The exhibition Figures du Fou at The Louvre
Side quests
I also took the opportunity to do a number of "side quests" besides the two fact-finding missions:
- I gave a talk at the Sorbonne (HCI Sorbonne) by invitation of last-year phd student Solène Lambert. I sponsored her postdoc fellowship application at KTH's cross-disciplinary research centre Digital Futures, but the competition was fierce and we found out earlier in January that she unfortunately had not been selected. The fact that she did her phd in only three years makes it hard to compete against others who have four years or who also teach and then can stretch out their phd over a period of five calendars years. I was anyway very surprised by the huge turnout of people who came to listen to my talk about wicked problems, about our new master's programme in Sustainable Digitalisation and our introductory flagship course "Leading complex change processes". The title of my talk was "The chief source of problems are solutions: how to teach engineering students about complexity and sustainability". I was also taken to a two-hour lunch after my talk and had delightful conversations with half a dozen people from Solène's lab, and, with a former master's student from KTH, Tove Grimstad Bang, who was also currently finishing up her phd thesis in Paris. Below is the invitation from LinkedIn in French just for the fun of it!
- I listened to a concert with one of my favourite French (actually Quebecois) artists Alexis HK in Rouen. I was both lucky and unlucky because it turned out that not just one but two of my favourite French artistis were performing on the same day and in the same city - and at the same time. I chose to listen to Alexis HK since I hadn't heard him live before and it was good, but I still think I chose the wrong concert because it was equally much a show (in French) that I couldn't follow and with music that was specially written for the show. So in the end I didn't get to hear any of my favourite songs of his (but I did get to see Alexis HK up close and I could listen to his wonderful voice, but still, I had prepared by listening to all his seven studio albums non-stop for a month and I had nothing for it...
Alexis HK and Benoît Dorémus
- I also meet up with my very good friend Roy Bendor (TU Delft) in The Hague and he had graciously invited me to sleep at his place for two nights. I also met his son and his daughter (his wife was away) and had many great conversations with Roy. As it so happens, Roy will visit us in Stockholm for two weeks later this spring as a Digital Futures' Scholar-in-Residence and I will surely write about that in May.
- I managed to meet up with my phd student Joe Llewellyn who is in Amsterdam. I already wrote about that in my previous blog post so I won't say anything more about it here.
- I meet up with a friend, Hanneke, who gave me a tour of Amsterdam and of the Van Gogh museum. She works as a tour guide and I can't image a greater luxury than enjoying her company and having her give me a personal tour of the city and the museum. Any question I had about Van Gogh's life, she could answer. I also had dinner with her and her man, Julien, who invited me to his apartment.
- I surreptitiously happened to share my sleeper car on the train from Hamburg to Stockholm with a very interesting man from Belgium, Dirk Holemans, who has been a researcher and a politician representing the Green Party in Belgium. He now leads a green think thank and had been invited to Stockholm to talk about his just-published book "Enough: Thriving societies beyond growth" (co-authored with Lara Ferrente and Elze Vermaas, pdf version available here) at the Swedish green think tank Cogito. We really had a lot to talk about and he invited me to join him at the event where he was going to talk on Monday night. I would have come had it not been for a previous engagement! The really fun thing is that when we had breakfast, I could hear three Swedish guys talk about the same event (reading the invitation, who would be in the panel) and I told them that the speaker was sitting just beside them. This led to a three-hour conversation with three guys who were active in the Green party's youth (or possibly student) section. I thus has super stimulating company on the train and it didn't matter the least that the night train form Hamburg was delayed for three hours due to "upkeep of the tracks" (we arrived at mid-day instead on 9 in the morning).
All in all a terrific trip. This was in fact one of my very best work trips ever.
Invitation to my talk at Sorbonne
Breakfast at Hotel Les Theatres, Paris
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