In case you missed the twitter anouncement, Aiden is the guest blogger at Cognitive Edge this month. He will be posting for another week about practitioner related issues in applying sensemaking techniques in organisations. Read his posts here.
Meetings. More meetings. Many more meetings. This is what many of us see when we take a glance out our diaries. It's a daily drudge. The endless stream of back-to-back meetings is the bane of corporate existence. It's a wonder we get any work done! It's also not surprising that the new coping technique that most meeting attendees employee is called "nod-in". You know exactly what I'm talking about. Why? Because, if you had to be honest, you know that [...]
I've been watching with interest the proliferation of parody spoof Twiiter user accounts over the last while. These spoof accounts have been generated by witty anonymous users to take cheap shots at large, global organisations who are doings things worthy of critique. One of the best examples is the BP Global Public Relationsaccount. Of all the parody accounts created, the PR-type accounts are the most common and they represent really cynical, sardonic and incisive viewpoints on what big corporates [...]
I recall a session we were facilitating with a group of scientists from a parastatal here in South Africa. The overall project was focused on uncovering the organisational culture drivers of, and barriers to, performance management within the parastatal. Our session happened in the later stages of the project when it was time to develop interventions that were aimed at shifting the patterns. It was at this point that we introduced the notion of a safe-fail experiment as a way to learn [...]
My new concept for the week is salience. Before Leon from Occam's Donkey introduced me to it, I have to admit I didn't even know it existed. However, now that I am aware of it, I think it's quite an important factor in much of the work we do. Maybe I should start with a definition -Salience is the state or condition of being prominent. The Oxford English Dictionary defines salience as "most noticeable or important." In short, salience theory studies what people deem [...]
