Braving Uncertainty Maps for the Journey

Jim Ewing started his professional life as a rocket scientist, but it soon became evident that his real passion was for people. He saw that life is about navigating change - braving uncertainty, living well at our ‘ learning edge’ . He set out to develop a way to support others, “ a conversational, casual, no-frills and no-waiting intervention to be a first responder for individuals and for groups when steep change and life redesign come calling” . Over time he grew a successful consulting business, working with companies and organisations innovating through change or tackling ‘ wicked’ problems. He designed a family of maps to support this work - simple frameworks for transformative conversations for use with individuals, groups, communities, organisations. Here Jim introduces the maps and the thinking that lies behind each of them, plus the conversational craft that brings them all to life. For those interested in pursuing the practice further, he points in the final chapter to Executive Arts, the small circle of colleagues and fellow practitioners to whom he entrusted the further development and spread of his work.

In 1979 Jim Ewing committed himself to working on his inner passion: facilitating individuals who were striving to express their talents and commitments as fully as possible. After a dozen years of rocket science, Jim abandoned his engineering roots to learn all he could about Transactional Analysis, Gestalt Therapy, Psychodrama, Voice Dialogue, and adult aging and staging. Each of the maps that Jim developed is based on the core insight that creative motion on the path of learning, design and transformation begins with hints, clues, guesses, slips of the tongue, unknowing and making it up. In other words, in the shadows rather than in the known. Each provides a process for generating such material and for capturing it in a way which is later transformed to reveal patterns which open the door to discovery and creative testing. The disciplines require both spatial and linear thinking in equal measure, calling on the whole person, and are most powerful when taken as a learning path to a different insight about the world.

Foreword, Braving Uncertainty, Change and Transition, Supporting Transition, The Insight Cycle, STUCCO, IMPLEMENTO, IMPACTO, TRANSFORMAP, The Path Ahead, Appendix: A Brief History of the TRANSFORMAP