The Great Glen Way

At the end of May we walked 73 miles from Fort William to Inverness along the Great Glen Way. Stayed at the Great Glen hostel in North Laggan and the Loch Ness Youth hostel - both very good. The route is shown here. We got pretty wet in the first couple of days, as the rest of the UK basked in sunshine. But it was good to see the forests, the Caledonian canal, the lochs and the hillsides in all weathers. Fantastic plants! Felt great to be out walking each and every day, catching up with old friends, and away from desk, computer and the general busy-ness of life in southern England. The walk was more varied than I expected. Here's a little of what we saw.

Accept uncertainty, prepare for surprise

Interesting article from Ian Scoones on UK preparations for swine flu. He refers to Emery Roe and Paul Schulman's recent book High Reliability Management. Scoones is critical that 'early warning approaches' that rely on local knowledge have been largely ignored in our top-down culture. He concludes:

Preparing for a pandemic means preparing for surprises – and being ready to respond rapidly and flexibly under conditions of uncertainty. As the experience with avian influenza has shown, this may require more than simply the top-down, "active and aggressive" technocratic responses being urged.

Roe and Schulman also suggest a need to work more with local knowledge and to value the skill and judgment of middle-level professionals often taken for granted. Skills are needed to work with uncertainty and to prepare for surprise, including systemic thinking. Our government seems to have focused on trying to control....including trying to control how we sneeze. Scoones' article points to rather different priorities and lessons to be learnt here.