I am in a plane to Brisbane reflecting on the second delivery of a 2.5 day leadership program we have helped develop for the Australian arm of an international company. A large part of the program used anecdotes collected from within the organisation on leadership behaviours and their impact. The feedback from the participants was […]

In 2001 Shell collected a bunch of stories and put them together in a booklet now know as the Blue Book, but with the official title of Stories from the Edge: Managing Knowledge through New Ways of Working within Shell’s Exploration and Production Business. It’s a landmark publication because it shows that a company in a […]

This description of sensemaking makes the most sense to me. Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. (Weick et. al 2005) I’ll tell you why. When I run lessons learning sessions I’ll often start the session by asking, “So, what did […]

I’m just in the process of building up some reflections for my workshop in Boston (you’re most welcome to register and attend) in a couple of weeks and thought I would share some snippets as I progress. You will notice some of the following text is directly from previous blog posts and some is new. Annette Simmons […]

Whenever someone asks me this question I tell them this story. One of our first narrative projects was to help a government department assess their occupational health and safety practices to see whether their policy and procedures were being following and to determine their training needs. We formed two teams to collect our data, one […]

Some people think a story must have a plot, character development, a protagonist, a turning point and a resolution. This might be true of a film script, a play, a novel etc. but in organisations stories tend to be much smaller and inconspicuous. Stories can range from well rehearsed retellings of a foundational moment in […]

Ira Glass in a public radio producer and host of This American Life. In this video Ira describes the anecdote as one of the two basic building blocks of a story. He also demonstrates how compelling an anecdote is to listen to regardless of the information being conveyed. It’s one of the reasons why we […]

Last week I returned from my morning walk to find my 11–year-old daughter filling the blender with ice cream to make a banana smoothie. My first reaction was to say, “What are you doing eating ice cream for breakfast? That’s a bad habit to get into. It’s unhealthy. You should stop having ice cream for […]

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 […]