Yearly Archives: 2010

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Ineffective Knowledge Transfer Hindering Business Continuity

The state of rampant change in our organisations limits the ability to establish efficient business continuity – Aiden Choles Our organisations are operating in the midst of concurrent change. In this case we are referring more to internal changes that are constantly occurring within organizations, changes such as new employees expanding our teams, stuff turnovers, shifts in management and also mergers between companies. These changes have become common in the business environment but yet remain a hiccup to most of [...]

Incentives – why they almost never work

In most organisations we engage with, the first thing that is considered whenever a behaviour change is required is an incentive scheme.  If we need better customer experience ratings, let's incentivise the front-line staff; if we need people to share knowledge, let's link that behaviour to their KPA's; and so on, and so on. The problem is that incentives almost never have the desired impact, in fact, often quite the opposite.  We often refer to Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes [...]

By |July 7th, 2010|Categories: Complexity|Tags: , |0 Comments

Why BP’s engineers should take a break

One of the most enjoyable parts to many of our workshops is watching the reaction of people who fail to see a very obvious gorilla in a video clip because we told them to focus on counting basket balls being passed between two teams of players.  I'm not going to link to the video, because more and more people have already seen it and it spoils our fun! A recent post on Jonah Lehrer's Frontal Cortexexplains this phenomenon in a very [...]

The Narrative Lab presents: Wisdom Continuity “The Pain of Knowledge Transfer” #WisCont @WContinuity

What is the TNL Tweetchat about? Once a month, The Narrative Lab hosts what is called a TweetChat, a fun, engaging way to collaborate and discuss a variety of topics using Twitter. Our upcoming topic is "What impact have you seen the retirement or resignation of experienced employees have on your or other organisation's business continuity?" Who should be joining in the discussion? This is a call to all leaders, practitioners and interested individuals around Narrative and Knowledge to join [...]

By |July 1st, 2010|Categories: Uncategorized|0 Comments

Nod-in: buy-in’s nemesis

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 [...]

By |June 18th, 2010|Categories: Uncategorized|0 Comments

The truth: parody twitter accounts, anti-stories & synthesis

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 [...]

By |June 16th, 2010|Categories: Uncategorized|0 Comments

Language around safe-fail experiments

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 [...]

By |June 15th, 2010|Categories: Uncategorized|0 Comments

Water vs potholes – the problem of salience bias

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 [...]

The Narrative Lab (@WContinuity) on The Pain of Knowledge Transfer (#WisCont)

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 [...]

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