aidencholes

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]