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

What's in 4,000 stories? What about 100?

Two contrasting weeks working on very different narrative projects - both fascinating in their own right. And both doing SenseMaker™ analysis under time pressure, but with datasets that couldn't have been more different.

1. At a conference with friends in the US, we gathered people's feedback on a particular organisational issue. Over two days, we collected just over 100 stories - about 8,000 words. Two of which were swearwords - I love it that people drop the pretence when they give feedback like this. Closing the survey at 8pm on the Thursday night, I had a few hours to analyse and feedback to the plenary session on the final day.
   
   The analysis itself was actually straightforward and fascinating - the difficult bit was deciding what had to be left out in the final version - I had only 20 minutes to present. And then generating the slides from the material. The results were well-received - and as always happens with narrative research, there were plenty of "oh! Really?" moments, as well as humorous ones
     
2. The second project has been a much larger affair. Over 4,000 stories collected over the past couple of months. Initial analysis of topline trends and outliers is easy - and equally fascinating. Again, it's possible to get headlines and interesting materials quickly from this much material but then you get into the nuances and hypotheses that arise from the first cut of results.
   A different difficulty arises here - there are so many interesting routes to take through the analysis:
3. 1. What happens as level of education goes up? Age?
   2. If I combine ideas about the future with ideas about poverty how do the results look? And then level of education? And age?
   3. How do all of the above change depending on a) time of day b) day of the week c) where we collected

The answer to both is, of course, to know what's interesting to the project owners and put degrees of focus in those areas after the initial top-level analysis. And to look for evidence around some of the key assumptions - are they right or misjudged? And to indulge in a small amount of exploration according to my own instincts - after all this time working in this field I've got a good (but not infallible) sense of spotting oddities and anomalies that need to be highlighted.

Feet on the ground once more

A nice feeling this morning - I realise that (for the moment at least), I've got two full weeks in the UK to work on projects - the first time I've had that long a chunk of time in one place since June/July. Hence the silence on the blog.

The upside of all the travel has been some great projects and sessions - most of them in North/South/Central America with the odd excursion to Europe - but I realise that when I'm doing substantial travelling and working, I'm not (yet) good at staying on top of email and other communications routes. I'm better than I was, but still - too big an inbox for my comfort, so one of the things to work on in the next fortnight (in addition to final reports and new projects) will be clearing out the emails. So, if you sent me something and haven't heard back, I'm not ignoring you - and there's a good chance you'll hear from me this week or next.

I'll also be back on the blog more - with opportunities for people who have schools nearby that might want to join in Children of the World. We're about to launch phase 2 of the project and would welcome anyone wants to get their local school involved...

Dots to be joined...

It's been a busy couple of months - with a number of things that I'll be putting up here in the coming weeks. Including, excitingly, the next pilots for the Children of the World project...

In the meantime, however, some apposite quotes around ways of making changes and the work we've been - and are - doing at the moment.

"[He] started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say, 'This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought, 'This is the people ought to be, how do we change them?'

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

"'A healthy galaxy is forever poised on the edge of chaos, transixed between the sterile wasteland of order and the mad wilderness of rampant entropy.' ... [The organisation] was structured to thrive on diversity, multiplex thinking, multicultural societies.

"Nice trick. Starting is easy.

"It's keeping it going that's so hard."

Heaven, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

"In a world where everything is connected, advance signs of change, of turbulence, are likely to appear only when we look in unexpected places."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

"Narrow-gazing not only leads to kinds of misfires, it also fatally constrains the ability to imagine good ideas or policies. The chance for real brilliance or flair is usually best seen out of the corner of the eye."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

"[Chinese students instinctively knew] the environment contained clues to what was about to happen. If you stared at a single spot in the world around you, that incipient sensibility would be dulled to the point of uselessness."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

Yup, as I've said before, Joshua Cooper Ramo's book is great - my copy has pages and pages of underlined phrases. Read it. Just read it.

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.

Brussels this Friday 29th April 2011

I'm in Brussels this coming Friday to run a workshop for the European Commission in the afternoon. (I'm missing the Royal Wedding - you can probably tell how much that matters to me...)

I've got some time between arriving in the morning and the actual workshop at 1pm in the afternoon - anyone for coffee and conversation?

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.)

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

Improving sales, employee engagement using stories - the masterclass

Following the recent Pfizer case study, we've decided to run another masterclass - this time looking specifically at tools and techniques to apply narrative and storytelling in organisations.

Date: Thursday 7th April 2011, 9.30-16.30

Venue: Regus, Central London

Register: http://narrativemasterclass.eventbrite.com

Cost: £295 (Early bird tickets until 8th March £195)

This will be a very full day - expect to get your brain filled! We'll look at how to gather stories, as well as a conglomeration of the recent projects we've been working on - we've compiled a case study with all the learnings from a variety of different situations.

In the past few years, the use of stories has shifted from being "how you engage or tell your audience" to a much more sophisticated approach that monitors, measures and feeds back - making narratives the single most effective way to engage and understand audiences.

Narrate is at the forefront of using stories in organisation - including a recent project: Using stories to improve sales in Pfizer. (Case study from Strategic Communications Management here)

 

This intensive day will focus on how to collect, analyse and use stories to generate engagement, understand and adapt culture and improve bottom-line results through increased sales, greater innovation and spot opportunities for "more for less" approaches.

 

Collecting and listening to stories, however, requires particular skills that do not come naturally to most communicators. Nor is it something that everyone can pick up from a manual. This workshop will give participants practical advice and experience in using these techniques, along with feedback to guide them in using them effectively, including:

• How to collect stories in large volumes
• Pitfalls to avoid in capturing stories
• How to examine the stories for patterns of behaviour and belief
• Easier decision-making

Who should attend?

Anyone wrestling with complex problems such as:

• creating culture change
• increasing customer loyalty
• building trust
• improving sales results
• capturing the knowledge of retiring employees
• extracting lessons from projects
• improving service
• managing customer relationships

Fingers crossed for Oscar success...

I don't usually do weekend blogs, but this is special. At the Oscars tomorrow night, up for Short Film Documentary is Killing in the Name from the Global Survivors Network. My friend Carie Lemack was showing it at the House of Lords the other week while I was at Peter Hennessy's lecture up the other end. And she'll now be busy working out what to wear...

Fingers crossed...

Next Cognitive Edge European network meeting - Hamburg in May

Last Friday saw what was by all accounts a great Cognitive Edge European network day in London. And there was general agreement on the next one - Christoph has volunteered to investigate venues and host the next one:

Date: Monday 16th May 2011

City: Hamburg

As always, more details will follow, along with confirmation shortly that that's where we'll be. For now, put it in the diary...

Complexity, SenseMaker

Masterclass - "a total lifechanger" for internal communications

I was talking with a client recently who asked me about the internal comms masterclass where we first met. Ark Group had asked me to run a masterclass that had got some great feedback and he wanted to know when he could send some of his team on a similar one.

We're talking about running a tailored version of the original one in-house for him, but I've decided that we'll run a public masterclass ourselves as an experiment as Ark have pulled out of the communications arena altogether.

As it's the first one and we want to keep it tailored to participants' needs, we're going to limit attendance to 10 people in the first place. I'll be leading it, but we'll be having some guest speakers along the way.

Date: Tuesday 22nd March 2011

Venue: Central London

Time: 9.30-16.00

Cost: £310
Early bird registration (before 8th March): £250

You can book online at Eventbrite: More for less - a one-day masterclass in internal communications

And we can adapt and offer it for in-house communications training - just ask.

The details:

In the current climate, individuals and organizations are under increasing stress. As a communicator, you are being asked to deliver more results in less predictable environments with fewer resources. Whether an experienced professional or a recent recruit, this masterclass will equip you with ideas, practical techniques and clear next steps.

It is perfectly possible to deliver "more for less" - what it requires is a new set of persepectives and tools to address employee engagement and internal communications.

This one-day masterclass will help you

• Understand and define the realities of internal communications in the current climate
• Generate understanding, buy-in and collaboration inside the organization
• Deliver and evaluate real behavioural changes
• Collect more content than you know what to do with
• Understand the limits of what you can do and can't do

Previous comments about Narrate masterclasses:

• Totally innovative! I’ve never done anything like this and enjoyed it. Am bursting with ideas for how I can apply this in my workplace – thanks for showing me all these things!

• A total life-changer!

• Excellent away-day. Practical and theoretical. Grounded in lots of examples and stories. Liked that it was a small group as lots of opportunities to share and network.

• A very useful course and I have learnt a lot of things that I can take back to the office re. communications.

• A very good course that I will recommend to colleagues.

An interactive day, focused and adapted to meet participants’ specific situations and challenges, it includes practical tools, principles, guest speakers and examples of communications from different sectors – to ensure that as a participant, you come away with pragmatic, useful material to put into action the minute you get back to your desk.

Masterclass leader:

Tony Quinlan, Principal Consultant and Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Tony is a business alchemist who founded Narrate in 2000 to create more effective, healthier organizational cultures and communications. He’s passionate about breaking out of rigid, purely rational communications to create real cultural and behavioral change. A member of the Cognitive Edge network, he is always exploring new ideas and practices, looking at current business practices from a different perspective. If you want 12-step models and the “same old, same old”, then you’ve got the wrong man.

A frequent keynote speaker and conference chair, Tony writes on communications, branding and culture for international publications and blogs at www.thenarrateblog.com. Today, he is a writer, keynote speaker, communications coach, masterclass presenter and international consultant. But he has also been a radio presenter, radar designer, TV tuner, dishwasher, lift attendant, software programmer and presented live public roadshows to 8,000 people at a time. Needless to say, he has stories about all of them.

Overall agenda:

9:30 Registration and refreshments

10:00 Introductions and objectives

• Making the course relevant

10:15 Thinking about internal communications

• Principles and goals

10.45 The role of the internal communicator

• Opportunities and obstacles
• Skills and support
• Collaboration and confidentiality

11:20 Morning Coffee Break

11:50 Communications in challenging times

• Mergers, redundancies and acquisitions

12:30 Innovative internal communications

• Better results on lower budgets
• The communications mix

13:10 Lunch

14:10 Dealing with major comms projects

• Values, change and organisational myths

14:50 Understanding the internal audience

• Using internal surveys
• Evaluating with meaning

15:30 Discussions and Next Steps

16:00 Close of Masterclass

Meeting at the Balawat gates

Yesterday morning, I managed to meet up with Shawn Callahan of Anecdote who's over in the UK at the moment. Coffee in the Great Court of the British Museum is always a treat, although the overcast sky outside meant the fabulous roof wasn't shown to best effect.

Afterwards I sneaked a look at a couple of the objects that features in last year's A History of the World in a Hundred Objects podcasts on the BBC.

And then popped into one of my favourite galleries - the Mesopotamian era. The blurred picture here is of the fabulous Balawat gates, which I stuck into the children's novel I wrote a decade ago. (No, never commercially published, although there are about 100 copies circulating among friends and family.) Rather than let it languish, I've started putting chapters of the novel, The Phoenix Egg, up here.

The Mesopotamian era fascinates me - although I haven't read half as much about it as I want. (The bookshelves behind my desk still feature my copies of Ancient Iraq; Mesopotamian Myths; and Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia - all of which still feature bookmarks halfway through them...)

My reading - is it something about a science training - mirrors what Dave talks about. If I skim a book, I always fear that I'll miss some crucial piece of information, so my reading is always every page, every word. I don't always take them in that way, of course: I read Dante's Divine Comedy twice in my early twenties in two different translations but can't honestly say I remember much of Paradise and little more of Purgatory. The Inferno, however, I found much more my thing. I worry what that might mean...

More for Less

There's a long blog coming tomorrow on new ways of gathering customer insight using signification and SenseMaker™, but this came out in yesterday's Dilbert and can't pass without re-posting...

It doesn't have to be a death spiral, but there are too many managers focusing on the less rather than the more. Not helped by the fact that the more requires some new ways of dealing with the world - and if you're a less manager, that's a big shift to make...

Using stories to increase sales at Pfizer

The secret's finally out - this project last year was with Pfizer. This month's Strategic Communications Management magazine features Pfizer Communications Director Nigel Edwards' case study on the overall project.

If I'm honest, we were very proud of this one. Fast response, fast gathering and fast analysis - and using SenseMaker produced some fantastic, usable insights.

 

In Nigel's words: 

"The approach of gathering stories paid dividends...the subsequent analysis gave us insights no other method would have."

There was one additional piece that wouldn't fit into Nigel's case study, so for completeness I'm adding it here. It comes from the breakout box on the last page: "Understanding the results." The article includes an example of a histogram (polarity/diad) but here's the same for a triad:

In the triangles, each dot represents one set of indexes from a rep – i.e. their response to a particular story.

The overall pattern, therefore, gives the relative strengths of perceptions on each issue.

Boxes have been drawn around major clusters, with the number of data in each shown

SenseMaker

Details for the Cognitive Edge European Network meeting

As promised, here are more details of next week's European Cognitive Edge network meeting, kindly hosted by Mark Woodman.

Date: Friday 18th February 2011

Venue: Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, London

Time: 10.30 to 16.00 GMT

If you're coming, can you please register at EventBrite here as we want to have an easier system of keeping track of who's coming than collating email replies.

There’s a Google map for the location at:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/Location/hendon/index.aspx

That page has a link to printable guide to getting to us at:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/Assets/msex_product_WEB.PDF

Attached is Mark's own marked up map showing Hendon Central Tube (Northern Line Edgware branch) and Hendon overground station (First Capital Connect from either St. Pancras International or Luton Airport Parkway). On my map routes from the stations are in red. There is a 183 bus near the Hendon overground station that comes right to the door of the University, but for most people the walk from Tube or train is 8-12 minutes and more predictable.

Complexity, SenseMaker

Qui persuadet persuadores

I've just got the December/January issue of Melcrum's Strategic Communications Management (SCM) magazine - presumably because the February/March issue will have a great case study of a project we did last year with a pan-European salesforce to improve revenue and sales on a particular product. I'll let you know in due course when that one comes out - and add a piece of additional material that got cut from the final article.

This issue, however, includes an article about something that always seems to get missed in most communications programmes: the communications team themselves.

Sally Jackson of EDF Energy writes about how to work with the internal communications team during change - focusing in particular on the often-overlooked fact that they may be trying to reassure the rest of the organisation, or at least clarify things, while going through substantial upheaval themselves.

I'd go further.

Too many communications teams are tasked with engaging and explaining the new vision or the new organisation to the rest of the business. (I'd challenge that there are better ways of going about all of this, but for now, let's assume that that's the process you're stuck with.) So, we have a bunch of people who have been given the task of making something appealing and understandable to everyone else.

How much time have the change drivers put into convincing the communications team? Have they been engaged or just presented with it and told to get on with it?

A decent team will, of course, ask questions to clarify matters for themselves and will be professional in communicating that onwards. But we know how subtle metaphors and cues can be in triggering responses from people. A professional team, with doubts, will give that impression in their work.

Increasingly, when we're involved in change processes, we insist on what appears to be a superfluous piece of work at the start of the project - working with the comms team as though they were the end-audience, engaging and explaining and working with them.

To twist the old maxim (and take liberties with my schoolboy Latin):

qui persuadet persuadores

Why do we have nuclear weapons?

Saturday night on BBC Parliament (you mean you weren't watching?) saw the broadcast of Lord Hennessy's lecture last week on Cabinets and the Bomb from the Queen's Derobing room in the House of Lords. It's available on iPlayer here until Saturday 12th February 2011.Lord Hennessy lecture - Cabinets and the Bomb.png

It's only half an hour long, edited down from the excellent hour that I was on my way to last week. As such, it therefore misses the great Q&A session that Peter did at the end.

The lecture itself is great - Peter is that rare thing, an intellectual with an understanding of the need for anecdote and context when talking about great issues and moments of national policy. There is also a glorious hint of music hall in his delivery.

I'm biased of course - not only is he a friend, but in addition to being the Lords Speaker lecture, this was the inaugural Michael Quinlan Memorial Lecture in honour of my Dad - who is mentioned at the start of the lecture.

[As a pure aside, I couldn't help but reflect that around the room were a series of wooden carvings of scenes from the legends of King Arthur - the Queen's personal equivalent of the Catholic Stations of the Cross perhaps?]

Solitude standing

A colleague in an organisation I partner with recently asked me for a CV for the website. So far, so normal. Then they asked for a list of presentations - something I've never really pulled together before. So I delved through the conference folders to find those times when I've stood at the front of a conference hall.

It turned out to be broader than I remembered and I'm rather proud of it, so I thought I'd share it. (I've taken out duplications like all the multiple workshops on storytelling, internal communications and change, along with repeat appearances at conferences.)

Presentations

 

• Working effectively through times of change, Knowledge Management in the Public Sector conference, September 2007
• Understanding employees and organisational culture, Association of Police Public Relations Officers annual conference, November 2008
  
• Mapping mentally complex situations, Innovative Visualisation and Cartographic Language conference, Luxembourg, April 2009
• Complexity and Creativity keynote presentation, Annual conference of creativity academics, University of Greenwich, July 2009
• Challenges and opportunities in a crisis keynote presentation, Local Government Communications annual conference, Nottingham, May 2009
• Retaining essential business capital, Knowledge and Content UK conference, London, June 2009
• Change management in the public sector series of workshops, Ark Group, London, Singapore, Leeds and Manchester, 2005-2007
• Developing a knowledge sharing culture, London, January 2005
• Narrative for public policy, US State Department Strategic Communications network, October 2009
• An introduction to narrative, Royal Navy Information Operations training programme, November 2009
• Putting the public in the picture, Local Government Leaders programme, Harlow, December 2009
• Internal Communications masterclass, Ark Group, London, January 2010
• Narrative in Leadership, Informatology conference, London, April 2010
• Babies, bathwater and targets - future trends in healthcare, Henley Alumni conference, September 2010
• Why good research isn’t enough, Higher Education External Relations Association annual conference, December 2010