John Caddell has an interesting project he’s just started called The Mistake Bank. It’s a place to tell stories of some of your biggest stuff ups with the idea we learn best from our mistakes.

We can all tell stories about our childhood quite easily. What about our work, our workplace, our business? That seems far from easy. People tend to use PowerPoint over PowerPoint to convey their ideas. At Anecdote, we’re always finding ways to help people bring back stories to the workplace. Here’s some areas of storytelling that […]

When we start on a major change project we will often run a number of workshops with the leadership team to really get them to own and define the project. A big part of this activity is getting this group to collaborate and work as a team. In the past we have run sociometry exercises, […]

Yesterday my family and I spent the day at Movie World. At the end of the day we went to an Irish pub for dinner and talked about our favourite rides. The Superman and Batman rides were our favourites and we all agreed that the back story was an important factor. The Superman ride (rollercoaster […]

It’s said that stories create cultures; they propagate the assumptions and beliefs throughout the group in question. But it is specifically stories that create culture or is it something else? Before we answer this question it’s useful to have a definition of what we mean by ‘a story’. Here’s a definition I like from Annette […]

My friend, Alison Spencer, suggested I get a copy of James Harlow Brown’s book, Dangerous Undertaken, and I have to say it’s been one of my best Amazon purchases in some time. It’s a book about personal and organisational transformation written as a dialogue between a hot shot executive and a wise mentor he happened […]

The January ’08 cover of CIO magazine provokes an interesting thought about managing people: There’s so much to be done to bring and retain people in an organization. Hidden within these 23 points is a learning curve that the employee is expected to leap across. So what is the best way to ‘hang on to […]

Ford Harding has just posted two versions of the same anecdote. The first paints the consultant as the hero while the second focuses on the effort of the client. Ford wants us to consider which version would we tell and why. Version #1 Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning. Not long ago, a […]

I run a meetup group in Melbourne call Emergence and we get together for drinks and dinner each month. Our next meeting is on the 13th March at 6pm. For full details and to RSVP go to here. It very informal and just a good way to catch up with new people and talk about […]

Expect any anecdote you tell to be tested and retested, especially if you are a politician. Barrack Obama is a storyteller par excellence and so when he recounts a story you can bet there is an army of doubters checking out its validity. Here is the anecdote in question reported in the New Republic. “You […]