I guess my years at the Audit Commission created an intolerance in me for stuff that looks like it restricts people’s creativity in the search for premium efficiency or effectiveness. My initial prickliness when reading Euan’s piece More is Less has subsided with subsequent readings.

For me, my podcast is more about art than efficient communication – it is no more an attempt to become a radio star than my blog is an attempt to get a job writing full-time for a newspaper. But doing anything in this interconnected world means doing it in public. And doing art in public means there are mistakes out there and stuff I wish I’d never done (no I’m not going to link to examples!), stuff where I’ve struggled to express myself clearly, as well as the bits I’m really proud of.

As I said (with my ranting trousers pulled right up to my armpits) the other week when it was suggested that podcasting is a “bad idea” (with additions for emphasis in square brackets)

Let’s look at this in another context to try to show you what I’m talking about. why do I bother getting dressed up, travelling into the city and pay a lot of money to sit in a theatre for hours on end to see some people “act out” stuff that Shakespeare wrote down [very effectively] 400 years ago. I mean, I even have his complete works on my bookshelf – I can read all of them [with extreme efficiency] without leaving my house, in fact I can read some of one play and then skip over to another – this stuff’s all on DVD anyway. Hey, even worse than that, I hear my kid’s school is going to do Hamlet next year – how crap is that going to be ?!? – those kids should just stay in and read.

That said, it’s also about me learning to use a communication tool for which I see organisational applications – where efficiency and effectiveness of communication are important – but as with other learning, one has to do the inefficient in order to see the efficient, to do the ineffective to truly see what will be effective.