It’s been over a year since we presented this workshop in Australia, so we are pleased to say we are running our narrative techniques for business workshop in Sydney next month. This workshop has been a tremendous success and we have recently revamped the workshop handbook. Here is a full description of the workshop. Here […]

It’s important for businesses to keep an eye on what’s happening on the web as so many new business models are emerging every day. Ross Dawson has done some excellent work pulling together a framework for thinking about web 2.0 and also categorised a bunch of existing services. I hope he will include Zahmoo when […]

Yesterday I discovered another large organisation who think they are using the Most Significant Change technique to evaluate their programs but they don’t do the selections. All they are doing is collecting stories of significance and then using those stories to illustrate the program’s effectiveness. This is giving the technique a bad name because the […]

Chris Anderson has listed his 5 top business books and I was struck by this explanation of why you must read Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Taleb. Why it’s a must-read: “The book says that you can’t predict anything—that when things happen, you try […]

Les Posen sent me this article (“This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)” by Benedict Carey) from the New York Times (might require a login) about how we construct our life stories. One of the question I often get asked is “by collecting stories aren’t you just finding out what happened in the […]

We recently blogged about the benefits of making sense of stories. Last week we needed to explain to a client why participation in the sensemaking process was important, both from a collective and an individual perspective. Some of our thoughts are shared below. Sensemaking is a process designed to enable groups of people to see […]

I have just finished marking a bunch of assignments. Not surprising the topic was narrative techniques in knowledge management. The students are masters level and I have to say I was depressed by what I received. The majority of the students were relying on Google and wikipedia to support their claims and arguments. The only […]

Many of you might not know that I got my start in business narrative working with Dave Snowden in IBM’s Cynefin Centre in the late 1990’s. It was an exhilarating experience. We spent four years creating a range of new tools and techniques for helping companies thrive in complexity, and story-based techniques were at the […]

I found a new blog this morning and while it’s a newie I’m hoping it will have some more good posts like this one about Walter Ong and the issue of redundancy in storytelling. The blog authors are Jim Stahl and Nemola Kalo. I found this quote Jim posted from Walter Ong very interesting: “Since […]

Ford Harding over at Harding & Company has written a blog with some anecdotes of his and others failures under the title of sadder and wiser. Here he has two good stories with strong lessons. Dave Snowden has often said that worst practices are more important in complex, unpredictable situations because it is better to know what […]