partum intelligendo

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...)

CASE presentation materials

Yesterday afternoon was another interesting presentation - this time to the CASE group of internal communicators from Higher Education. Smart people, fun afternoon and just to add to the mix, I got to speak with Ghassan Kharian of Kharian and Box, who I haven't seen in a while. Following his presentation was a challenge...

I promised to post a number of things here:

My presentation slides: Capturing an organisation's narrative.pdf (3573.9K)

Links to the method papers for Anecdote circles and The Future Backwards at the Cognitive Edge website

For people starting to explore using story in communications, this post might be a good place to start.

That Innovative Internal Communications workshop - the slides, the reading and the video

Friday was an odd start - I'm used to catching the 0430 train to St Pancras for an early Eurostar. I'm also used to clubbers getting off the train on their wasted way home as I get on on my equally wobbly way to work. What I'm not used to was whole families getting on trains that early in the morning with camping chairs, picnics, etc. It was, of course, the Royal Wedding that day and they were off to find their spot from which to view all the ceremonials...

I, however, left the country.

I was running a workshop in Brussels for European Commission colleagues on Innovative Internal Communications. And I promised, as always, to put up various things afterwards here.

The slides are here: Download 002 Internal comms masterclass - initial slides.pdf (4519.5K)

The basketball video can be reached via here: basketball video

The promised reading list is here: Download 006 Narrate recommended reading list.pdf (84.9K)

There were a handful of other publications I took that aren't on the standard list: John Kotter's Our Iceberg is Melting; Steve Farber's The Radical Leap; Robert Bolton's People Skills; Chip and Dan Heath's Made To Stick and a couple of back copies of ECO.

References and resources from HEERA conference presentation

For everyone at yesterday's HEERA conference session, here are the main slides and some of the resources I mentioned:

• HEERA Conference slides
• For the basketball video I mentioned.
• More on Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework:
  • The Harvard Business Review article on complexity/leadership/decision-making by Dave Snowden
  • Dave's in-depth article on complexity and its implications, "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world"
• And my perpetual book reference: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein - required reading for anyone trying to understand or influence people's decisions and actions

Upcoming speaker slots and keynotes

As the year winds down, I've decided that I won't be doing any more speaker slots between now and the end of January - I'll be doing keynotes on communications for a few public sector/higher education professionals, but focusing my time otherwise on projects. And I'll be limiting sessions next year - as SenseMaker and narrative takes off, I want to make sure that I'm involved to guide projects. Speaking slots will therefore be in short supply - contact Anne to book them.

2012 will be back up to speed again - and hopefully talking about some of the current crop of projects.

Thanks for understanding.

Tony

Henley Alumni Medical Suppliers conference slides

Thanks to all at last night's Medical Suppliers forum - despite the late hour and the dreary weather, they offered bright and challenging questions and sparkling conversation after I'd presented. I promised the slides:

Presentation to Henley Medical Suppliers Forum, September 2010

Not today, but soon...

I'm currently busy putting together a new talk for tomorrow night's Henley Business School Alumni Medical Suppliers Forum, editing an article and writing two others - one for Melcrum on how negativity and dissent make an organisation more healthy and another for the Medinge Journal on Branding and Complexity.

And I want to put up some reflections from last week's excellent The Big Push Back event at the Institute of Development Studies and the new paper from a group I hadn't come across before - the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

But none of that is likely to happen today or tomorrow, I'm afraid. I will put up my slides after tomorrow night's presentation, however.

And to give you a head's up on future posts. I am putting together a series of reflections and observations on using Cognitive Edge's SenseMaker software suite - some practical thoughts on process and use, others on potential uses in areas like impact measurement, innovation, employee engagement, knowledge etc. In particular, I'll talk about how I see multiple uses of a single system getting in the way of its deployment - it's not uncommon for everyone to see use in it, but then being unable to decide who "owns" it.

There's also going to be a series of posts interspersed over the next few months, picking up on some of the material I talked about to the LGComms conference earlier. I focussed on one application of narrative, mentioning in passing how important it is in Strategy, Branding, Content, Vision, Knowledge and Leadership. Everyone attending had plenty of experience, but I've had one or two requests for more detail for each one - so that's going to be in the mix too in the coming months.

For now, though, I'm heading back to Keynote...

Informatology 2010

Spent today at the Informatology conference at Russell Square today - some great conversations and presentations.

As part of the Leadership session, I spoke briefly, then we ran a 45 minute anecdote circle - some great stories coming out of it. Thanks to all who joined in!

I promised I'd put my slides ( Download 001 Narrative in leadership) on "Leading with Stories"; the ebook on Mythology, Leaders and Leadership ( Download Mythology, leaders and leadership - Narrate on leadership). I didn't mention it, but for Leadership, I'd also recommend the HBR article that Dave Snowden and Mary E Boone did: "Leader's Framework for Decision Making", available here. It's a fabulous and straightforward introduction to important concepts about complexity in organisations.

Leeds Castle Leadership - the communications piece

Thanks to everyone at the Leeds Castle leadership event today - an whistle-stop challenge on communications, with an abbreviated Anecdote Circle thrown in. At the break a few of us were talking about The Future, Backwards and, naturally, I recommended Gary Klein's Sources of Power.

The slides are Download 001 Putting public in the picture.

Upcoming training course

The next masterclass on storytelling that we're doing with Melcrum is fast approaching on 17th November 2009 in Central London.  Details and registration are here.

I'm also speaking next week at the Leeds Castle Leadership programme for local government.  These will be the last two public speaking engagements this year.  I've got a couple of planned sessions in January and will post details of those shortly, but I'm not now taking any more until February.

For those interested, I've got the slides and MP3s for the talk at KCUK 2009 earlier this year, where I talked about "Retaining business capital" - a long-winded and jargon-laden way of talking about sharing experiences and knowledge.

The slides are here: Download 001 Retaining essential business capital and the audio - in four pieces - is here: Tony Quinlan part 1

Tony Quinlan part 2

Tony Quinlan part 3

Tony Quinlan part 4

(Thanks for the recording go to Kathryn Chin - the excellent now-freelance conference organiser. Tweet/thank her at kat_mandu_)

Standards for England conference slides

I've spent the last couple of days in Birmingham with Standards for England at their Annual Conference. The slides are here: Standards for England presentation October 2009

It's highly pictorial, so may not make a huge amount of sense without the audio. Of which there isn't one for this presentation. I will, however, put up the audio and slides shortly from the KCUK session earlier in the year, which covered some of the same material.

Tony Quinlan, Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Upcoming conference

I've agreed a couple of further public engagements in the first quarter of 2009, and won't be taking any more conferences/internal events now until after April/May, although I'm happy to talk now about later events.

One public one that's agreed now is the Ark Group's European conference: "4th annual internal communications: a vital business function in difficult financial times".  I'll be chairing for the two days 11th-12th February 2009 in London.

Further details on Ark Group's website at www.ark-group.com

 

I will be re-running the Narrative Tools masterclass with Melcrum later this month, but there's some confusion over dates - I'll put details up once it's confirmed.

KCUK - Building a change management strategy

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week's workshop at the KCUK conference.  Various odds and sods off the back of the session:

• My presentation slides are here

• The basketball video I mentioned.

• The Harvard Business Review article on complexity/leadership/decision-making by Dave Snowden
• Dave's in-depth article on complexity and its implications, "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world"

It was a distinctly Reduced Shakespeare Company take on the subject - so we're thinking of building a full one-day masterclass around it.  Thoughts to me at tony@narrate.co.uk

Internal communications conference references

As promised, here are the various references from yesterday's presentation at the internal communications conference:

1. The Neuroscience of Leadership from Strategy+Business magazine - a good start on how to change behaviours 
2. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein - an excellent book that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand or influence people's decisions and actions 
3. Larry Brilliant's excellent videocast from TED is here

My slides are also here

Mark Barratt made reference to Bill Quirke's Making the Connections: Using Internal Communication to Turn Strategy into Action.

We talked about blogs and where to start.  My best recommendation is to Google for a personal interest and "blog" and go from there.  For work, do the same with the area the organisation is working in.

Amongst my (too-long) list of blogs that I watch, I particularly recommend:

• The Obvious - Euan Semple's ongoing exploration of using social media in organisations
• Black Belt Dojo - a blog focused on internal comms from Liam Fitzpatrick and Sue Dewhurst
• Cognitive Edge - Dave Snowden's always challenging and useful look at knowledge, leadership and the realities of working with people
• Neville Hobson - leading edge thoughts on using social media and web 2.0 tools in PR
• People, Passion and Principles - David Maister's advice and experience on developing professional services (relevant to anyone supporting people supporting other people)
• WorldChanging - posts on ideas to change the world
• nfp 2.0 - great blog aimed squarely at the not-for-profit world and how social media can support it

We also talked about the importance of leadership.  I wrote recently about leadership specifically - the ebook is here - and other useful blogs include The Practice of Leadership and Leading Questions.

Don't forget the commitments of myself, Mark and Olivia yesterday - we're all more than happy to talk/mentor/console in future.  And use Media Trust's Matching service!

Technorati Tags: internal communications , media trust , conference references

Workshop references

Thanks to the participants in today's workshop - it makes it so much more fun for me and useful for everyone when it's interactive and relevant rather than one of my monologues.  It's always where I'm aiming, but it helps to have a great bunch of people like this one.

As promised, here are some of the references:

• Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework is best explained in this article;
• Richard Wiseman's colour changing card video is on YouTube here;
• My original blog about the other video on cognition and attention is here;
• The slides themselves are here.

We've already got another Change Management in the Public Sector masterclass in the works for December - more details when I have the brochure.

What a great start to the day

Afro-Celt Sound system playing on the headphones, sun on the Thames...

Workshop references

References for the session this week with Engineers for the 21st Century run by Forum for the Future:

Style guides:

The Guardian's style guide is downloadable from this page.  The download link is here .

The Economist's is online here.

The BBC's is here.  The download link is here.

I also mentioned Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire (Bpg - Other) as a resource for anyone doing presentations and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life for general writing advice.

For people looking for some exercises to warm up writing muscles, I've just come across this useful website: one word - a sort of Writing Down the Bones on speed.

 

 

Technorati tags: writing exercises, Forum for the Future

Seminar references - ITV, London, Thursday 28th June 2007

I'm behind on some of the references from recent speaking engagements, but here are the references from yesterday's session at ITV:

The fonts and support for people with dyslexia are at Textic and the fonts are here.

Style guides:

The Guardian's style guide is downloadable from this page.  The download link is here .

The Economist's is online here.

The BBC's is here.  The download link is here.