partum intelligendo

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.