Have you ever been asked to find success stories and been unsure where to start? Done well success stories slide effortlessly from one teller to the next conveying company values, strategic directions and the good reasons why your company should invest in initiatives like communities of practice. Done badly the stories remain captive and moribund in content […]

I spent the past few days facilitating an event at the Mountain Heritage Resort at Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. It is a great place to run open space events with lots of comfortable nooks and crannies (both indoors and out) for groups to work on issues and a main room big enough for […]

A friend of a friend of our is a frequent business traveller. Let’s call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight, so he went to a local bar for a drink. He’d just finished one drink when an […]

An article titled ‘The power of ordinary practices’ was the seventh ‘most read’ of Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge articles for 2006. The articles includes the following: I believe it’s important for leaders to understand the power of ordinary practices. Seemingly ordinary, trivial, mundane, day-by-day things that leaders do and say can have an enormous […]

In 1805 William Clark notes in his expedition journal that the Mandans [a Native American tribe] believed that buffalos could be attracted to close-by hunting grounds by performing the buffalo dance. According to Clark, the hunters thought they could further increase their chances by having sexual relations with a woman who had been with a more powerful man. A bevy of buffalo […]

Almost a month ago after identifying some metaphors which described various styles of facilitation (eg. Conductor, Chameleon, Dictator) I asked What kind of facilitator are you? Following on from this, Simon Kneebone and I delivered a session at the Australian Facilitators Conference in Geelong exploring facilitator archetypes through story. We’ll be publishing more around this in time to […]

A few months ago Larry Peterson and I discovered and tested a great way to apply the Principles and Law of Open Space Technology to a “fishbowl” to create a dynamic, energized conversation with a whole room of almost 200 people in a short time frame. Some of the participants said: “I really enjoyed the openness […]

I was chatting to a HR Manager from a financial services firm this week and he told me this story about a workshop a management ethicist ran for their leaders. Over a week the ethicist collected stories from staff about how work gets done. Her aim was to create a convincing scenario that would be used in […]

Just a small thought for the day. I was chatting to the knowledge manager for a large Defence contractor today and he mentioned he’s having difficulty getting people to share information in an atmosphere of security consciousness. Whenever information is created the authors restrict its accessibility, effectively locking the resource away. If another team, in another […]

I had coffee with my friend Trevor Moore yesterday and we got talking about a system implementation he’s involved in. It’s a large project affecting more than 500 people in the organisation. Trevor shared with me a sketch he uses to illustrate what is likely to happen to staff performance as the system is developed, […]