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 [...]
I came across this great little video by our friends at Anecdote in Australia. I think Mark does a great job at explaining complexity and why it's important to business leaders today.
As you would have seen via our blog, twitter feed and our newsletter, we are partners in the upcoming 2010 Employer Branding Summit (find out more here). We are especially interested in how organisations can tap into the power of narrative to improve employee engagement and build connections with possible employees outside of the organisation. In this article, Peter Schmitt (Tribalfish) draws on a very powerful metaphor of Spanish Geese to illustrate how organisations can capatialise on their employer brand. He writes: As [...]
James Geary gives a great TED talk on Metaphor. It's definitely worth watching. We've been convinced of the power of metaphors, especially base metaphors in human systems and the way they govern behavior. As Geary says, a metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words. They live a secret life all around us, according to him we utter 6 metaphors per minute. It's therefore not surprising that they have a tremendous impact on how we see and behave [...]
We've just released the first 2010 edition of our newsletter, Dialogue. It has some very important thoughts on the role of conversation in business and how leaders can create a conversation culture through the use of Conversation Agents. Read it here.
There is an interesting phenomenon in social psychology called pluralistic ignorance or the "Abilene Paradox". In short it is the reluctance people have to voice a minority opinion in a group, especially if they feel that they're the only ones holding that opinion. When a group seems to be set on a certain idea or action, people will often not voice their disagreement with it if they feel they are the only ones against the group's position. Often this is [...]
We're busy with a project in the education field requiring that we dip ourselves into a lot of academic research on the topic. Suffice it to say that I've not read as many journal articles since I graduated ;) Surprisingly (or not) there's been a lot of narrative work done in the education field regarding how people learn. One of the pertinent thoughts that I've found so far is the difference between the "analysis of narrative" and "narrative analysis. They [...]
