partum intelligendo

Cognitive Edge training - day three comes free

The one course that I always recommend is Cognitive Edge's Practitioner accreditation - whether you're a communicator, facilitator, knowledge manager, leader, innovator... The new batch of courses have just been announced (details below) and they've changed the pricing structure quite a bit - if you've attended the practitioner two days, then the third day on SenseMaker is free.

The next London course is coming up at the end of the month (31 January - 1 February). I'm honoured to have been asked to co-teach the course with Michael Cheveldave, so I'm looking forward to it. Hope to see you there...

1) Cognitive Edge Practitioner Accreditation

The two-day Practitioner Accreditation course provides practical ways to manage under conditions of uncertainty, understand the power of business narrative and discover new ways to use human networks. Attendance at the course provides accreditation and membership to the Cognitive Edge Practitioners' Network. The SenseMaker® workshop will be free for all participants who attend the 2-day Accreditation Course. Please indicate in the 'Extra Information' box if you are attending the SenseMaker® workshop.

Accreditation course information is here:

http://www.cognitive-edge.com/accreditation.php

Register for Accreditation here (dates stated below are not inclusive of the SenseMaker® workshop):

• Washington DC, USA: 11-12 January
• Dallas, USA: 25-26 January
• London, UK: 31 January - 1 February

2) Cognitive Edge SenseMaker® Workshop

The one-day SenseMaker® workshop is focused on teaching how to configure, sell and interpret narrative projects that use the Cognitive Edge SenseMaker® software. In each location, it directly follows the Accreditation class (above). We recommend that participants from the two-day Accreditation Course also attend the SenseMaker® day if they would like to run narrative projects using the software. To attend the SenseMaker® Workshop (and not the preceding 2-day Accreditation Course which makes it free), there will be a small charge to cover room hire and catering. The charge will be 150 dollars, pounds or euros depending on the unit of your local currency. We have a capacity of 24 in these classes, priority given to those who are booking into the prior 2-day Accreditation Course.

SenseMaker® Workshop course information is here:

http://www.cognitive-edge.com/sensemaker.php

Register for the workshop here:

• Washington DC, USA: 13 January
• Dallas, USA: 27 January
• London, UK: 2 February

Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge

Firstly - thank you to Harold and apologies to others: the link to the slides that I posted on Friday didn't work. It's fixed now, so they're accessible from Capturing an organisation's narrative.pdf (3573.9K).

There's an excellent new video up at Cognitive Edge's website and on their YouTube channel:

Today Cognitive Edge is happy to present a short video introducing the importance of organisations making strategic moves from systems built around principles of robustness, to systems that are built on the principle of resilience.

Traditional management has tended to focus on developing robust systems which try to prevent failure. However, in light of increasing interconnectedness of events and the complexity this introduces, the ability for systems to plan for the avoidance of all foreseeable incidents has become limited.

In this video from Cognitive Edge, called Risk and Resilience, Dave Snowden highlights the strategic importance for organisations to refocus on the creation of resilient systems. Whereas robust systems try to avoid failure, and become crippled in the event of it, resilient systems accept that failure is inevitable and move from focusing on prevention to focusing on early detection of events and fast recovery from them.

This video can be found in our Videos section. You may also follow this link to all the Cognitive Edge videos on YouTube, for our previously released videos on Introducing SenseMaker®, How to Organise a Children's Party, and the Cynefin Framework, amongst others.

Details of Dave's regular one-day seminars entitled "Leading Through Complexity" can be found here.

[From Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge]

Resilience is a topic I've been thinking on recently - and there's a blogpost due on exactly that shortly. (But there are a couple of projects that need attention first...)

Cognitive Edge European Network meeting - Hamburg, Monday 16th May 2011

A reminder - it's only 11 days until the next Cognitive Edge European network meeting.

As ever, anyone who's done the Cognitive Edge practitioner training is welcome - and the focus is on the practice, not the theory. Conversations are organic, not planned, although there are usually some elements planned in advance.

This one is in Hamburg, hosted by Christoph Schlegl, running from 1100 to 1600.

The venue is:

Die Akademie für Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft
Alte Rabenstraße 1
20148 Hamburg
Germany

The venue is easily accessible by public transport from the airport (fare €2.80, time ~ 50 minutes)

Lunch is a mere stone's throw away at a great restaurant with a fab lake view.

More details will, no doubt, follow in due course.

There’s a Google map for the location at:

http://maps.google.de/maps?q=Alte+Rabenstraße+1+20148+Hamburg+

To register, so that Christoph knows numbers, please head for Eventbrite.

European capacity for sensemaking and complexity

We're building European capacity for our clients and our projects!

I'm delighted to make the official announcement that UK-based Narrate and Netherlands-based Top Innosense are partnering to create the sense-making capability that can support the projects that we're seeing across Europe. With experts like Harold, Ton, Erwin and Aart-Jan, we're looking forward to sharing some of the projects we've each been doing for clients around customer insight, employee engagement, social media and more.

The Top Innosense team describe themselves thus (via the not-entirely-clumsy Google Translate):

TOP innosense helps organizations make better use of the insights, ideas and intelligence of large groups of people. And we usually mean big big.

Whether it's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians, hundreds or thousands of employees or patients per day, TOP innosense can help you understand what's happening and what drives them. And then we will help you to translate this knowledge into action. So:

• Are you looking for an effective method to develop new products and launch?
• Want your competitors by better understanding the needs, opinions or suggestions of your customers?
• Would you really let your citizens participate in the city?
• Do you understand the numbers behind your last patient satisfaction survey?
• Want to make better use of the knowledge of your employees and / or the aging wave cope?
• Are you looking for an effective method to develop new products and launch?
• Want to adjust your strategy in time to adequately respond to future developments?
• Want to improve your service and your service portfolio innovate?
• Want to identify dangerous situations before something really goes wrong?
• Do you know of employees who leave your organization hold?
• Or do you have another challenge facing the familiar management tools not answer that?

TOP innosense then you've come to the right place!

 

Stalk like an Egyptian

 

I'm head-deep in my dataset of micro-narratives from Egypt today stalking results - I hope to put something up later in the week to show what emerges from all this fabulous data. (For a taster, here are a couple of quick triads from the project:

  

In the meantime, however, I wanted to point at two important blogs on narrative, particularly counter-narrative and the ideas around using narrative in security situations.

The first, somewhat inevitably, is Dave's blog today: Counter narratives. It's a subject I've been vocal on recently - and am writing about in a current piece - that the obsession among some groups with "developing a counter-narrative" is flawed, doomed and a waste of energy. The problem usually being addressed - the idea that some opposing group has an overarching narrative that must be resisted/countered - is in itself somewhat flawed, but the idea of a counter-narrative meeting story with opposing story will make matters worse, not better. Where narrative is concerned, you cannot disrupt a narrative with a stronger/more powerful counter. Instead you need to take a different approach - Aikido/Tai Chi for instance - deflecting the narrative and finding alternative narratives that divert, not confront.

The second blog I spotted today, was Cynthia Kurtz' piece, Narrative inquiry without participation, looking at narrative - initially in response to a recent conference on narrative in security, but with some excellent points about the more generic use of narrative and the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. (I should say that, while I haven't ever met or spoken with Cynthia, I enjoy her blog and the article she co-authored with Dave a few years ago is still one that introduced me to much of the world of complexity and, in particular, the Cynefin framework.)