Another but similar to rejig CofE doceses

 I was interested in this thought experiment. It appears to be a 'from new' rethink, but I'm intrigued as to how similar it is to a proposal from 12 and more years ago by Gareth Miller. I have previously blogged about it and this post will guide you to the various webpages that could help understand it.
 The author of the title-linked article describes what they are doing thus:

... an exercise in visualising what the provinces and dioceses of England might look like if:
– the Leeds model of several episcopal areas one of which overseen by the diocesan were "rolled out" across England
– more, much smaller provinces were created and some of ABC's workload (long acknowledged to be too great by far) was redistributed
– dioceses and episcopal areas are usually named for current centres of population rather than nostalgia (ecclesiastical or otherwise.)County Dioceses in England:

So, you'll see some similarities in terms of distribution of areas but different groupings of areas. It'd be good to have a discussion about this. I fear that reformers would end up dissipating energy into arguments about what ways of slicing the cake would be best and so the status quo would remain by default. However, the question about the huge disparity of cover by the provinces of Canterbury and York, does begin to raise the issue.

 You'll see from these two maps that there are a lot of similarities. The main differences I can see are the place of Salisbury (in SW or south central areas), Chichester and whether Yorkshire and the North East are one entity or two (I think two would be better).

I'm beginning to think also that perhaps proposing a new Anglican British Isles with the 9 or 10 proposed provinces for England and then also the structures for Scotland, Wales and Ireland also included, should at least be talked about. (I suspect the other nations wouldn't want it but still ...)

Beyond the geographies, the issue would be about costs both of transitions and also of maintaining the polity structures. We'd probably have to consider how best to have decision making done so as not to increase overall costs. But economies of scale of province over dioceses could help.

I'd love to know what other people think and whether we should campaign about these ideas.
It might also raise questions about the CofE's democratic deficit ie. the fact that ordinary CofEers don't get to elect general synod member directly and that GS is worked in such a way as to routinely make difficult participation by lay people who are employed in regular sorts of jobs -but maybe that's another post /topic...

We crave creativity but reject creative ideas

Actually this is so true, now that I have seen it laid out in this report of the research, I recognise that (as someone a lot of people would characterise as 'creative') I have spent a lot of time in my life either trying to get people to give a creative idea a chance or to at least let me give it a go to see if it could work. So I think that they're onto something here (and yes, when I've been able to try stuff out, it has often 'worked' and when it hasn't it has often generated newer and better ideas).

Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. ... The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.

Why we crave creativity but reject creative ideas

To be better organised, know yourself

It's true: Want to be organized? Know thyself. | Unclutterer: "Someone who is easily distracted shouldn’t have an intricate paper filing system based on numbers and codes. Someone who takes his shoes off at the front door shouldn’t have a shoe organizing system in his bedroom. The more a system reflects how you live and your preferences, the more likely it is to work for you."
When I started out in ministry I bought Michael Saward's filing system. It's a well thought out system and I was able to use it, but found it a bit of a faff. A few years later, I came across a piece of advice that led me to abandon the system. You see, I'd found that Michael's system reflected his interests and priorities. There were things that her was clearly interested in and thought to be important for a clergybeing to have in their filing system which I just didn't use at all, and there were things I needed to add in that were relevant to my interests and priorities that clearly weren't his. So there were point at which his filing system creaked or echoed hollowly.

The piece of advice that helped me to recognise the reality and re-think how I organised my filing cabinet was this: "don't construct a filing system but rather a finding system". In other words we need to think about how our own minds work in order to think about how we might re-find information at a later time. So I began to ask myself: where am I likely to look if I want to re-find this? I recognised that, quiet often, I work by visual memory (whereabouts I might put something) and by my own classification system. So I grouped things according to semantic groupings that meant something to me and had the labels on the files in different positions so that a visual element was introduced.

I'd suggest trying it yourself, if you don't already.
Of course, this means that some of us also need to ask a further question: "Do I really think that I'm going to want to find this again? Or is this developing into an information graveyard where I respectfully bury things that I won't want to disinter?"