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

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.

How to see your wifi networks

One of the things I'm always on the look out for is interesting visualisation - ways of presenting information that make it more engaging, understandable and hence easier to make decisions from. This one has nothing to do with any of that, but it's lovely.
Take a tool from one discipline - in this case surveying - throw in a little technology - wifi and LEDs - and some long-exposure photographs. And here you get to see the shape and strength of the wifi networks that cocoon us.
It's taken from YOUrban.

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs.

A four-metre long measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

More here:
http://www.nearfield.org/2011/02/wifi-light-painting
http://yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting-wifi/

Photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timo/sets/72157626020532597/

In case Vimeo has video problems, there is also a Youtube version here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxdjfOkPu-E

Over-simplifying the cutbacks

Reduced budgets are producing some interesting approaches to the necessary decisions to be made.

A recent visit to the Blackberry Clinic in Milton Keynes showed me one of them: it turns out that the local PCT, having to cut budgets by a substantial percentage, had gone for the simple approach - stopping all treatment in the last couple of months of the financial year, no matter what stage patients were at. The first cutoff came for referring patients from GPs, the second a few weeks later when treatment itself stopped. It meant, of course, GPs handwriting letters to take straight into the clinic on the last day, desperately getting people in ahead of the deadline.

It's a similar situation to that being considered in North Ayrshire - if the education budget's too small, make the school week four days instead of five and raise the starting age to six.

In terms of the Cynefin framework, both strike me as being at the extreme of simple responses to making necessary cuts. Many other organisations (and probably other areas within those organisations mentioned above) are taking a more complicated approach - analysing, streamlining - but staying within the current structures and bounds. Still working on the premise that these things are predictable.

A complex approach might offer something new - but requires a shift in thinking. It offers, ultimately, the potential for substantially new ways of providing services with fewer resources. It is not, however, entirely possible to predict at the start of the process precisely how the service will be provided at the end - it requires a degree of perspective shift that can be uncomfortable and a willingness to trust early on - it demands courage of those leading an organisation.

The best place to start is small for many of these projects, of course. Develop the tools and attitudes needed for radical complex change in niches where it can provide major benefits, but where the difficulties will not impact too strongly on either people or reputations. With the learning that those early projects bring, it becomes a more confident and straightforward act to start on more significant projects - where the impact and the payback starts to show.

There is potential to take the cutbacks and develop very different delivery services - but trimming away, whether done at the most basic level or after much analysis, is unlikely to bring those benefits.

Complexity

What if... Up was first made in the 1960s?

Sometimes we like to play with counter-factuals - what if things had happened differently at this point? what if this market had been addressed instead of that one? It's usually for serious reasons and can be highly educational.

This, however, is a counter-factual that is utterly frivolous.

Recall, for a moment, Up, Pixar's great animated film (we all welled up in that silent first half-hour didn't we?). Now imagine that, instead of being an original screenplay, it was a re-make of a 1960s film. The original Carl Fredricksen was, of course, the great Spencer Tracy. And here's the trailer. Enjoy!

Here, there and another one missed...

For the rest of this week and next, I'm going to be guest-blogging over at Cognitive Edge's guest blog, as well as here. I'm going to try to keep the blogs different, but I'm sure you'll understand if I just say - "I stand by what I said over there..."

And in an echo of yesterday's post, there's news about the Cognitive Edge accreditation course that's coming up in a couple of weeks. No surprise to anyone that's been on one of the courses, but it's now full. And this time there aren't likely to be any places freeing up.

Best book early for the next London or European courses then!

Complexity, SenseMaker

It's too late, but there's hope

Apologies for the radio silence this week - normal blogging should resume tomorrow.

I blogged the other week about The Story, the excellent event in London on 18th February 2011. All the tickets are now sold, but if you want to go but haven't got yours yet, there is still hope.

As with last year's, there is a page up "How Can I Get A Ticket" - in which people who've got a ticket but can't now make it make them available via the comments. If you want to go, watch those comments...

Workshops and events on SenseMaking, Story Collection and The Story

It's a busy month coming up for narrative and sensemaking in London. Some of the excellent events coming up include:

Cognitive Edge accreditation course - 2nd-3rd February 2011

Details of what you get on the course are here, but it's a course that we highly recommend for communicators, organisational development specialists and km people - everyone in Narrate has been on it as a matter of [sic] course. Register online here.

If London isn't convenient, they're running a series around the world in the next couple of months. Dates and venues are here.

Anecdote storytelling workshop

A fortnight later, Shawn Callahan of Anecdote is in town with his one-day storytelling workshop on 16th February 2011. Shawn's been working in narrative and storytelling for years, and is always good. (He's also a Cognitive Edge member too - we like to stick together!) You can register for the workshop here.

Shawn ran an excellent blogpost recently "The Uncanny Valley of Business Storytelling" - it describes beautifully why he (and we) have an instinctive distrust of over-constructed stories and the field of organisational storytelling that looks great, but doesn't resonate - far less deliver reliable consistent results.

The Story

The Story is an event running on 18th February 2011 in London. (Unfortunately on the same day as the Cognitive Edge European network meeting.) It's only into its second year, but last year's event was excellent, organised by Channel 4's Matt Locke, and looked at story from all sorts of angles - televisual, games, interactive and more. This year's event is also supporting the new Ministry of Stories, a project that's been set up in London based on Dave Eggers’ 826 foundation. (A separate blog to follow on that one, once I've had a proper look.)

There are only a handful of tickets left, so hurry along here to get yours. If you need further tempting, check out the stunning list of speakers here.

For those who've asked, we won't be running any workshops for the next couple of months - if you were looking for something like the sessions we've run with Melcrum and are in a hurry, I'd strongly recommend either the Cognitive Edge session for the overall sensemaking/complexity/narrative or Shawn for specific storytelling materials.

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

In-depth looks at Complexity, Narrative and Children of the World

The pilots for Children of the World have been fantastic - collecting over 7,000 stories around the world. Working on them with Cognitive Edge was fascinating, challenging and fun - the ideal project!

While we gear up for the next iteration and roll-out, I'm conscious that I don't think I got around to sharing here the in-depth papers we put together as part of reports from the project.

There are three:

Complex Dynamical Systems Theory is an excellent piece by Dr Alicia Juarrero that underpins so much of the work we've been doing.

100816 Narrative-Research_Snowden FINAL is Dave Snowden's article that informed (and was I suspect informed by) much of the implementation of the Children of the World project.

Signifier Mapping is Beth Meriam's illluminating piece on how the signifiers for Children of the World were derived.

All three are full, intelligent articles that deserve proper attention. Turn off the email and the phone, get a comfortable chair and a drink and sit back...

SenseMaker course and narrative techniques - London and around the world

Cognitive Edge have just announced their courses for the first half of 2011 - both for their accreditation course (full of excellent facilitation exercises and deep, valuable background on concepts like complexity, the Cynefin framework and narrative) and for their SenseMaker training days.

Get in early and there's an Early Bird discount.

It's one of the strongest recommendations I ever make - these courses will change the way you see your work and give you massively valuable tools that allow you to deal with the new realities of business complexities.

Details for workshops around the globe are here.

London dates are 2-3rd February 2011 for the accreditation and techniques, 4th February 2011 for SenseMaker.

Do yourself a favour - book yourself on one.

(And no, I get no commission if you do - I just think it's that good...)

Complexity, SenseMaker

The lost art of the placard

Stumbling down Whitehall this morning felt like a return to 1984/5 as students demonstrate over funding. This time it's about tuition fees, back then it was grants, a quaint notion lost in time along with the dodo, mining and Cliff Richard looking his age.

The placards were a little disappointing - many were the mass-printed ones provided. Of the rest:

• 'I'm not happy' seemed a spectacular pointing out of the obvious

 

• 'I'm Welsh and I'm angry'

 

• 'Education? Education? Education?' seemed to have missed that the party that had previously campaigned on that slogan had actually lost the election

The one in the picture, however, used humour well to get the message across. 'We'd like to teach the world to sing but we can't afford our music degrees.'

The History of the World - the 100th object

One of the great podcasts from the BBC is reaching its conclusion - and it has just announced how it will finish.

I love my morning drive - I usually end up listening to podcasts - it's the University of Prius. A favourite this year has been the joint venture between the British Museum and the BBC - A History of the World in a 100 Objects. Each one is a 15 minute snapshot narrated by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum.

It all started off in January 2010 with the Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool

And using objects in the British Museum to delve into fantastic anthropology, it's covered Art, Leadership, War, Protest, Religion, Work, the Family and far more. The objects have come from every corner of the globe. (Globe's don't have corners, but allow me that licence, OK?)

It's also opened up the project for people to nominate their own objects - a great piece of open-source, collaborative work.

And it will be finishing next week with its 100 object: Solar-powered lamp and charger

The full list of programmes is here. 100 programmes at 15 minutes each. A well-spent 25 hours...

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

Cognitive Edge European Network day

After the recent success of the first day organised from within the Cognitive Edge European network, we're planning the next one. It will be in Brussels (venue to be confirmed) on 15th October 2010. All Cognitive Edge network members are welcome - the emphasis is less on theory, but on the practicalities of running projects, using the techniques and the SenseMaker software.

If you want to come along, please contact the Organiser Supreme: Anne Wilson at anne@narrate.co.uk

See you there?

The corporate memory-makers

An interesting, if slightly underdone, article in today's FT: Management - The corporate memory-makers.

Some interesting points in it - the idea of using oral histories is of course a good one. (Given that I'm running another workshop on how to do them in-house on 18th February with Melcrum, I would say that.) And the idea of using retirees and frontline staff - of course both these groups tend to have informal fora to tell stories anyway - a good example being the intranet website set up by the tech-savvy young helpline staff at IBM in the 1990s, that gave them space to share all the bizarre calls they'd get looking for PC help.

What's less emphasised in the article is the learning available (it gets a mention in the last part of the article, but quickly passed over). Those same IBM call centre staff would learn from the shared stories - new techniques to deal with callers, quirks of the technology, etc - along with the shared sense of belonging it generated.

The best way I've so far discovered to collect this material is Anecdote Circles (free how-to guide from Cognitive Edge here)

And, beyond gathering material and stories, we've found they have multiple uses:

• Generating new understanding
  We ran a series of anecdote circles with a UK government department around the idea of leadership and while the focus was on collecting material for the communications and development teams, many of those involved went away enthused with new understanding of what leadership might entail.
• Closing projects
  It's mentioned in the last paragraph of the FT article, but it can be a fabulous thing to wrap projects up, particularly when combined with a celebration. Far better and healthier than the traditional lessons learned exercises (which tend to be the same as previous lessons learned)
• Starting projects
  Another element, perversely, is to run one as part of the project startup phase. This way, the team can get a good assessment of each other, what their previous experience is (as well as how they perceive the world) and potentially spot future obstacles. (We've all had the experience of sitting three months into a project at a blockage and someone piping up "this happened on the last one too - what we did was...") Better to get that at the start than halfway through.

The difficulty, surprising to many people, is what you do with the material afterwards - it's possible to generate hundreds of stories in a short space of time. Listening or watching or reading them all would be impossible from a time perspective, but more importantly would be futile as we'd dismiss many and become so entrained, we'd miss the relevant ones.

It's been the thing we've struggled with at Narrate in the past decade - what do you do with a mass of stories - but having worked on projects in the past year with Cognitive Edge and their SenseMaker suite, we're now working on some exciting - and highly valuable - interactive projects. More on that later this week.

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.

Five Tribes, not Two

A fleeting visit to Geneva yesterday - it's always nice to arrive at the destination at 9am, in sync with everyone else's working day, but leaving the house at 5am really doesn't work for me, particularly when there's a school governor's meeting at the other end of the day. But all that travelling means clearing some email and finally catching up on some of the recent TED talks on the iPod.

The one that struck me most was David Logan's on tribal leadership . Nice to see the focus being on groups of people rather than on the individuals - although I'm not sure about the categorisation of five basic types of tribe (with apologies to Frankie Goes To Hollywood for the poor blog title above). One thing useful that I'm going to think further on is David's comment about the need to communicate with levels above and below where we are - making the conscious choice to talk only to one level is fine, but often isn't it just an assumption that we're all on the same level. Or, more perniciously, the only people worth talking to are.

I was also intrigued by his comments on the Worldwide poll as being such a startling thing from a market research company. Shouldn't that be an obvious one, just difficult to implement?

It also plays into my concerns about how research and surveys are done - while they're great in some places, I've spoken a lot in recent years to communicators and influencers about the lack of meaning in survey results and hence the confusion about what actions to take next. I think surveys and market research are an industry and a model with a powerful sway and a need for continued investment that distorts there actual usefulness.

[In the interests of disclosure, I've spent much of this past year working on pilots for an altogether different way of looking at cultures around the world, involving stories naturally. There'll be more at appropriate moments on this blog.]

Written by Tony Quinlan, Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Random stories or last.fm?

There's an increasing trend I've noticed recently among people looking at stories - to take a brief look at stories to find the ones that "typify" the organisation.  And, because of the perception of storywork being highly resource-intensive, it's generally a very small number of stories that are used.

Somewhat akin to the periodic iPod randomizer memes that crop up (the latest being here) - fun to see what comes up, but from such a small sample it's impossible to tell what's actually the dominant taste.

For example, my five random songs this morning were:

Beachcomber Voodoo by Julee Cruise (The Art of Being a Girl)
Haunted House by Leon Redbone (On the Track)
Better Be Home Soon by Crowded House (Farewell to the World)
Somebody Told Me by The Killers (Hot Fuss)
Losing My Religion by REM (Precious Rarities)

And it would be very easy to see patterns and make assumptions about my musical taste from that.  Even more so if, by chance, an artist were repeated.

Yet a better way of seeing the bigger picture is to look at Last.fm (my profile is here) which builds up a cumulative picture from thousands of pieces.

Similarly, it's more accurate to look at larger volumes of stories and pick out patterns than it is from taking a small sample of stories from within the organisation.  And, despite the assumptions, it doesn't have to be either difficult or expensive - it's relatively straightforward to build systems that gather and collect story material in volume and to be able to see the patterns that emerge. Software like SenseMaker^TM make it very simple to look at thousands of story fragments quickly.

From those patterns, it might be possible to see specific stories that dominate a culture, but they'll be far fewer and not necessarily the ones that come out of a simple sample of a few hundred stories...

Newton vs free will

From Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y:

"Newtonian cause and effect suggested that someone wound the original clock and set it ticking, and that every single action in the universe could be predicted - if you had something powerful enough to do the prediction.  There's no free will in that world: a world where everything can potentially be known.  In that world, I'll get up in the morning and do what I have been programmed to do: as though all my actions are just computer-game dominoes, triggered by other computer-game dominoes.  It's what happens when you try to combine God and science.  It's narrative, pure and simple.  There's a beginning, a middle and an end. And the middle is only there because the beginning is; the end is only there because the middle is.  And in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Take away that cause-and-effect narrative and you have the quantum world, disturbing enough in its own way, with all the possibilities of multiple universes and infinite probability.  But if you don't take it too seriously, and if you factor in evolution and economics, and everything else that's taken for granted in our world, then you have at least the illusion of free will."