NICK NEAL-USECHE

My name is Nick Neal-Useche and I am a professional working in communications, innovation and sustainability. My interest is how to use communications more effectively between different cultures in order to innovate new ideas and transform received or traditional practices into more sustainable ones.

Just to unpick that a bit, when I refer to cultures I do not just refer to the idea of culture in the traditional sense but really mean any forms of practice which in some way separate one part of society from another. So, using myself as an example, I have many forms of culture in my life. I trained as a chemical engineer, so I have the culture of being a chemical engineer. However, I trained as a chemical engineer at Sheffield University, so this means I have a slightly different culture than the culture of chemical engineers. I studied there between 1990 and 1994, so yet again you can say that my culture is different for that reason only. In fact you can go on to redefine culture into narrower and narrower bands.

There is word in English which is “Lore”, it is contained in the word Folklore for example. Lore is a useful term to use to define culture. The Lore of Chemical Engineering for example can be defined in various ways. Lore is not a static thing, it is a changing thing which changes with new technologies, new social experiences and new economic, environmental constraints. For example, the Lore of making a cup of tea in England used to be: boil the kettle, heat up the teapot, put in the tea leaf, add the water, wait for 3 minutes to brew, pour into cups, add milk and sugar to taste. However, my lore of tea making is now more like this: put teabag into cup, put water into cup, put in microwave for 1min 45s, take out teabag and put in compost bin, add milk and brown sugar to taste.

The above are relatively trivial examples but I think you get the idea. My hypothesis is that these different types of lore which we all possess are our own personal preferences in life, our own routines, our own things which we do which make us unique. These are all fine, and they form a type of language between different people. However, these different Lore´s can get in the way when it comes to working with others because even though we may use the same words, we may not have the same understanding of things. There are various reasons for this which I will explore on this blog in time.

I have decided to label my work with the name