I picked up on this post by Boudewijn Bertsch on the Cognitive Edge guest blog. It is an excellent narrative acount of how stories can be used to address safety issues in organisations. In many organisations, safety has become an administrative issue - when an incident occurs, a standard process is followed, and once all the boxes have been checked, it is filed away. Often, no attempt is made to make sense of what happened, or learn from the incident. While this continues [...]
I heard today of a large South African corporate that underwent a transformation. At a certain point in its history a new top-dog was appointed, and he decided, as the top-dogs are wont to do, to bark and bite most of the existing senior leaders out. This "old guard", also being well known in the organization as great tellers of stories (and in some cases, tall ones, but not the matter), duly left, tails between their legs. Not long after, [...]
I've heard it said often: "This year has just flown by!" This statement is also sometimes followed by: "It feels like time itself is speeding up!" As I've grown older I've been plagued by similar feelings and perceptions. In a twisted way, it has confirmed the correlation between the increase in ones age and the perception that time moves as a quicker pace. I recently discovered that there is a field of psychology that focuses on the perception of time. [...]
Over the last few years, we've seen many people jump onto the 'intelligence' bandwagon, with varying levels of success (and substance). Of these Emotional Intelligence (or EQ), which has become part of business jargon globally, is probably the most well-known. Others such as spiritual intelligence and social intelligence haven't really caught on (personally I feel the jury is still out on the business value offered by these concepts). While reading Stephen Denning's new book, 'The secret language of leadership', I came across the interesting concept of narrative [...]
I came across the following in one of Dave Snowden's articles that I haven't read for a while .. (it's quite long, so please bear with me!) "When people first become aware of the importance of narrative in organisational sense making, the often go through a stage when they think the best thing would be to tell stories in order to control the organisation or some issue. This belief is a swamp across which consultants must guide clients safely, because [...]
One of the anecdotes I'll tell in support of using narrative techniques within the organisational culture realm is this one, gathered from an anecdote circle in the banking sector: A client relationship manager needed to meet face-to-face with a client regarding a query on his account. This client had a reputation in the business for being grumpy, insolent and very volatile. Knowing this, she asked her manager to accompany her into the meeting ... for backup. During the course of [...]
I sometimes wonder if business leaders know what they’re missing out on by not embracing narrative techniques within their businesses. I remember facilitating an Anecdote Circle that drove this point home for me (which also caught the business by surprise a little). It was the first time this business had engaged in a narrative process when dealing with a problem. The issue at hand was a particularly bad run of resignations that had gutted the business of talented individuals during the [...]
