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 [...]
Who? This is a call to all leaders, employees and practitioners to engage and collaborate with us on the following subject: How do you facilitate knowledge transfer between older experienced employees who are about to retire and younger inexperienced employees in an organisation? Why? Organisations are facing the pain of losing their experts to retirement, in some cases without having sufficiently given these experts the mechanism to share their knowledge, expertise and wisdom. Discussion points include: What impact have you [...]
You're probably wondering why The Narrative Lab has been so quiet over the last few months? Although there's no real excuse for our silence, I thought I'd give you an update on what has been keeping us so busy. Firstly, Aiden became a proud first-time dad of a beautiful baby boy called Daniel James a little over a month ago. For those of you with children, you'd understand that this life-changing event can keep one quite busy! Natasha Govender joined [...]
The Narrative Lab will be hosting, with Cognitive Edge, the annual Cognitive Edge Accreditation Course in Midrand from 11th to 13th May 2010. Steve Bealing, CEO of Cognitive Edge will be here facilitating the course along with Sonja and Aiden. If you want to discover practical and pragmatic ways to manage under conditions of uncertainty, understand the power of business narrative and discover new ways to use human networks, then this course will provide you with the introductory theory and associated open [...]
It has been some time in the making, but we're finally ready to publicise our association with the SASOL Inzalo Foundation and their use of narrative techniques and SenseMaker. Here's the official press release: The SASOL Inzalo Foundation, established by Sasol Limited, the world’s largest producer of synthetic fuels and a significant contributor to the South African economy. The aim of the Foundation is to focus on skills development and capacity building for South Africa, in the critical areas of mathematics, [...]
We all know people like this ... "they refuse to speak-up or pitch-in when ideas are developed, are unable or unwilling to go to key meetings, and generally don't have the will, time, or inclination to help their colleagues, but then repeatedly shoot-down the decisions that are made, refuse to help implement them, and bad mouth their more hardworking colleagues" One of the best examples is someone who refuses to vote and then bemoans the outcome of the election and [...]
