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John McGurk's blog

Thinking on the Run: 23.08.11

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Three days a week when I run for half an hour in the morning in my local park. While I am puffing against age and gravity I think. I think about my plans for the day. I think about what I am going to achieve that day and I think about stuff. The stuff I won't bother you with is my personal piffling journey around Streatham Common. Who wants to read a dull pavement pounding blog? Who could do better than Murakami whose brilliant book "What I think about when I think about Running" is the running memoir which laps the rest. No health tips from me though I will share this. Running three times and eating a healthy low carb diet can always be undone by tiger bread, butter and too much Stella. When I am on the running and rationing phase it gives me the discipline to stay off two bothersome B's: beer bread and butter. Though i will still enjoy these  occasionally.  For me that's the real learning and it’s attested by my considerably more slender friend Liz Hall editor of Coaching at Work.

But not only do dolphins have big brains allowing language and collaboration but their creativity and capacity for innovation would put James Dyson to shame.

Most of the time when I am on the run, I think about ideas. A lot comes from books and TV. Last night for example I caught up with BBC's big beasts documentary Ocean Giants. I had always been ignorant about the intelligence of dolphins and whales. But not only do dolphins have big brains allowing language and collaboration but their creativity and capacity for innovation would put James Dyson to shame.

In the Pacific shallows of Western Australia they have engineered their own fishing nets of threshed mud in order to trap the few fish available efficiently. They also have the cunning to let a stingray search for fish using it’s echolocation as their sonar to steal it’s prey from thick sea grass. Dolphins have such curiosity and they definitely have a sense of self. Top marine biologists reckon we will have parsed their clicks and yelps into an understandable communication within five years. What do you think they'll say? “Listen we are with diving in and out of aquarium pools, and just because we look as though we're smiling..!”

The whales in Alaska though where the highlight. They team up to corral shoals of elusive herring. One blows a jet engine equivalent blast of noise to stun them, one creates a bubble pond to herd them near the surface and another scoops up the constrained shoal allowing the others their turn. That's what I call collaborative!  Catch up on the BBC I player http://tinyurl.com/3lbsv3s. As an LTD specialist it has made me really think. There is much we can learn from TV and that will be a recurring theme as I think on the run.

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