Cognitive Edge

Making Sense of Complexity: Joburg & Cape Town Accreditation

We are proud to announce the arrangements for hosting back-to-back Cognitive Edge Accreditation courses in 2012. After the sold-out inaugural Cape Town course in 2011, in partnership with theUniversity of Stellenbosch Business School, we will be back in Bellville from 28th to 30th March 2012. Thereafter we will be in Johannesburg from 2nd to 4th April 2012. Steve Bealing, CEO of Cognitive Edge, will again be joining us from Singapore to facilitate the accreditation. Spaces are limited to 24 only, so be sure [...]

By Aiden Choles|January 18th, 2012|Categories: Complexity|Tags: aiden choles cape town, Cognitive Edge, Complexity|0 Comments

Join us for our first Cape-Town based Cognitive Edge accreditation training (March 2011)

We are pleased to announce that TNL in partnership with the University of Stellenbosch Business School will be hosting Steve Bealing, CEO of Cognitive Edge from 8-10 March 2011 for the first ever Cognitive Edge accreditation training course to be held in Cape Town, South Africa. Detailed brochures are available here: - 2 day Cognitive Edge accreditation course - 1 day Sensemaker course Bookings made before the end of 2010 will receive 10% discount off the full course rates, so make sure you book your [...]

By Aiden Choles|November 15th, 2010|Categories: Cognitive Edge|Tags: accreditation, Cognitive Edge, training|0 Comments

Guest blogging on Cognitive Edge

I will be guest blogging on www.cognitive-edge.com for the next two weeks, so feel free to follow my "musings" there. I'll be discussing some of our current and forthcoming opportunities here in South Africa. Remember also to catch Dave Snowden @ the CSIR on the 19th of August where he'll be talking about "Making KM strategic to your organisation".

By Aiden Choles|August 10th, 2009|Categories: Cognitive Edge, Cognitive Edge, Cognitive science|Tags: Cognitive Edge|0 Comments

2009 Accreditation kicks off

The 2009 Cognitive Edge Accreditation kicked off in Johannesburg today. We're running the accreditation in conjunction with Cognitive Edge and Steve Bealing (CEO) is here from Singapore running the session. It's Steve's first visit to South African, and Africa for that fact. He's on a whirlwind learning curve on South African culture and traffic ... We'll be live-tweeting the event over the next few days athttp://twitter.com/narrativelab. Follow us there for course updates, thoughts and nuggets of wisdom on narrative and complexity.

By Aiden Choles|June 22nd, 2009|Categories: Narrative, the narrativelab|Tags: accreditation, Cognitive Edge, Complexity, Narrative, steve bealing, the narrative lab|0 Comments

The web’s secret stories

Spotting the trends and patterns in a handful of anecdotes is not a difficult task. Cognitively, it is within our grasp as humans. However, raise the number of anecdotes beyond that and it becomes more of a mental stretch and you require the assistance of another "intelligence". It is for this reason that we utilise the SenseMaker suite of software when running projects that gather hundreds of stories. Now, imagine you could collect all the stories published on the web, [...]

By Aiden Choles|September 3rd, 2008|Categories: Cognitive Edge|Tags: anecdotes, Cognitive Edge, jonathan harris, sense making, sensemaker|0 Comments

Once breakfast is over

What do you get when you pull together a former meteorologist, anenigmatic maven and a former narrative therapist? Answer:The Narrative Lab and pretty informative breakfast conversation oncomplexity in the business landscape. In an amazingly short amount of time we managed to showcase our keynote on complexity (The New Simplicity), listen to a customised podcast from Prof. Dave Snowden on the Cynefin framework, hear how our methods are applied in practice and to talk briefly about the SenseMaker software we use when working with mass narrative capture. Thanks to all our friends, partners, potential [...]

By Aiden Choles|April 9th, 2008|Categories: Cognitive Edge|Tags: breakfast, Cognitive Edge, Complexity, Cynefin, Dave Snowden, narrative lab, new simplicity|0 Comments

Our logo and design elements

In a recent blog entry, Dave Snowden commented positively about the design elements that make up our corporate identity. Coming from him this is a great complement, as the interpretation of abstract ideas such as "probe, sense, respond" into visually compelling graphic elements was a challenge! I'd like to express appreciation to our designer, Angela Lang for a job well done! Maybe I should elaborate a bit on why we selected probe: sense: respond as a tagline. We see our core focus area as [...]

By Aiden Choles|March 10th, 2008|Categories: Business, Cognitive Edge|Tags: Cognitive Edge, Dave Snowden, design identity probe, respond sense, the narrative lab|0 Comments

Dark matter in Organisations

A little gem from Dave on Day 1 of the Cognitive Edge Accreditation course we're hosting in Pretoria: The Dark Matter Theory asserts that there is much matter in space that we cannot see, but we know it exists because it exerts gravitational effects on visible matter. When it comes to organisations, and the complex way in which they operate, the dark matter theory can be applied i.e. there are things/forces that happen in organisations that we cannot see, but we know they occur because they [...]

By Aiden Choles|March 3rd, 2008|Categories: Narrative|Tags: accreditation, archetypes, Cognitive Edge, Complexity, dark matter, enquiry organisations, theory narrative|0 Comments

Enabling leaders to make effective decisions

Dave Snowden, founder of Cognitive Edgeco-authored (with Mary Boone) the front pagearticle of the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review. For those of us who've been involved in Dave's complexity and narrative work over the years, this is a key milestone - indicative of how our way of thinking is starting to make in-roads into mainstream thinking. To quote Tom Stewart (HBR Editor), "Most leaders are told that it is important to be (or appear to be) decisive. Fair enough — but how is one [...]

By Aiden Choles|October 30th, 2007|Categories: Cognitive Edge|Tags: Cognitive Edge, Complexity, Dave Snowden, leadership|0 Comments

HARNESS-ing Knowledge

One of the Cognitive Edge methodologies that Sonja and I have found to be building up a nice head of steam in South Africa is ASHEN. The process of eliciting the Artifacts, Skills, Heuristics, Experience andNatural Talent in the Knowledge Transfer realm has been very valuable – especially when one considers the challenges of knowledge transfer across generational gaps. We have begun to wonder though if the methodology might be expanded on to include elements that make for a greater depth in capturing [...]

By Aiden Choles|September 28th, 2007|Categories: Knowledge|Tags: ASHEN, Cognitive Edge, knowledge, Knowledge transfer|0 Comments

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