The kids are thinking about Stamboul, as have Patrick and I. I’m encouraging them to journal about what they’re thinking, what they’re afraid of, what they hope to see, smell, eat, and hear. L is enamored with the idea of the luxurious bath, the hammam, D is worried about making mistakes and inadvertently offending someone.

Patrick surprised me with some travel books this week, and I’m working my way through them. They are food and history, long walks and a couple of Pamuk novels. And one includes an excerpt of John Feeley’s Stamboul Sketches, which is so evocative and beautifully written I’ve been reading passages out loud to P.

Istanbul is best seen from a seat by a tavern window in the Passage of Flowers, froth-crowned Argentine in hand. The city is at heart nothing more than the sum of its citizens, and most of these will eventually stroll by your window or sit next to you, drinking from an Argentine themselves. You will get to know the Stamboullus in this way, and later you can visit them in the monuments they inhabit. This is the Levantine approach to sightseeing, a distinct improvement on the Guide Bleu.

One thing I find compelling in his writing is his intense focus on local faces and street scenes to paint a picture of life in this enormous, diverse, and ancient city.

Still life with cat, yarn and travel book.

Istanbul, I read in other passages, is awash in feral cats, which brings to mind our honeymoon in Rome, where we snuck triangles of soft cheese from our hotel breakfast plates and fed them to the cats who inhabit the ruins of the temple of the Vestal Virgins. I spent some happy hours there, feeding the cats and sketching for a few watercolor paintings. I read that our pensione in Stamboul has at least two resident cats; I look forward to meeting them.

Meanwhile, I am home planning the trip and thinking (of course) of knitting projects to bring on my journey. Reading through the Turkish Cultural Foundation’s website I of course light on Turkish knitted stockings, where I discover to my delight that Anna Zilboorg (whose book Marvelous Mittens is a deep well of inspiration) has written a book on them, called Fancy Feet. I do believe a trip to the library is in order.

Of course, this means Anna has herself been to Turkey, and now I want to go drink tea with her and knit and talk about Turkish textiles. For now, her book will have to do.

I hear a lot right now about “the new normal” in government administration.  Like many vertical markets, governments are slowly realizing the old model of business (and its funding) is gone forever, and that new strategic and practical plans are needed to help people re-tool for “the new normal”.  Re-tooling of course requires change, and change is both dangerous and scary.  How do we get through these tough times with our sanity and our careers intact?

Late last week I had the chance to discuss Leadership on the Line, a book by Harvard’s Ronald A. Heifetz and Martin Linsky, with a great group of local government people.  They were people from nearly every department in area local governments, at a range of levels from non-supervisor to director, gathered as part of an intergovernmental leadership development and discussion group.

The main ideas and questions that bubbled up were varied, from broad and sweeping to detailed discussions of practice.  I took that as a sign that this book gave people some real food for thought as well as practice.  That was due, I believe, because of the book’s mix of discussion about leading other people, leading oneself, and self-care for the leader in high-pressure situations.  Leadership, they noted, is full of a variety of pressures, because it’s aim is helping people change, an inherently dangerous profession.

Leaderhip on the Line is organized around the framework of understanding whether the problem in front of us is adaptive or technical.  Adaptive problems require uncomfortable changes; one example given of adaptive challenges vs technical challenges is heart disease.  Repairing a diseased heart through surgery is a technical problem.  Getting a person with a diseased heart to quit smoking, lose weight, or change their habits is an adaptive challenge.  It requires a changes, those that are often quite difficult,  in the behavior of the person in question.

One question brought up by one of the members was given that resistance frequently accompanies the change brought by adaptive challenges, and that a leader’s job is to help make that change happen, when I am in the position of having to “turn up the heat”, how do I know when the heat has been turned up high enough?  Too high?

We discussed team motivation and building, including some great (and some frankly hilarious) examples of how different groups’ managers build solidarity and recognize their employees’ achievements.  Some mechanisms were formal, some quite silly.  Some of the people in the group weren’t sure if maybe wackiness in team building took things too far.  In my own team building experiences, I can only say I’ve found it not only helpful but essential.

Coming from the software development world, I talked about the practice of standing scrums (daily short meetings used as part of agile software development) I’ve used as a project manager to communicate with my teams during software development projects.  It sparked a lively discussion among some line managers about how non-technical teams might use them to ensure all members of a team are moving down the field towards the goal together.

Overall, I’d recommend the book to anyone dealing with change in their organization (which probably includes most of us right now).  It gave a good blend of theory and practice, with loads of examples from real management examples.  During these difficult economic times, a book like this might be just the thing to helping you find your way through the changes undoubtedly happening inside your own organization today.

A 4.3 earthquake woke up the house this morning.  Guess Mother Earth knows how to celebrate.

Happy Birthday to my beautiful boy!