On a recent flight to Sydney, I was flicking through the Virgin Blue in-flight magazine ‘Voyeur’ and came across an interesting article about the ABC-TV series South Side Story, a documentary on the turnaround of the South Sydney Rabbitohs – an organisation that has seen its fair share of turmoil in recent years. Here’s a […]

Story techniques are becoming popular but I do worry that people will become overly focussed on capturing stories with the hope that someone will search the story database in search of how to get things done. The other, and complimentary, approach is to create workplaces where it’s natural to tell (and listen to) stories and […]

We are running a series of breakfast seminars in the coming weeks, exploring the use of narrative techniques for knowledge retention. It will be a mini ‘road-trip’ for us that takes in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, and we’re all looking forward to sharing our experiences, good coffee and great conversations. There’s been an overwhelming response […]

Annette Simmons, in her excellent book The Story Factor, warns us from adopting ‘the story voice.’ You know the one. The narrator starts by saying something like “I’ve got this great story” and then proceeds to adopt a kind of sing-song voice as they tell their story. You can tell it’s a performance. But it […]

I read Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer’s book, Hard Facts: Dangerous Half-thruths & Total Nonsense, and I was concerned managers would think that you could only make decisions based on data and analysis. So I was delighted to see this post from Bob Sutton setting out three times when data and analysis wont help. When […]

I’ve just returned from a couple of days in New Zealand working with my old colleagues from IBM. It was a fun to spend two days thinking and talking about knowledge strategy. I had lunch with Ross Pearce from IBM and he told me how he helped two parts of a company resolve their communications […]

Watching Andrew Denton interview Michael Parkinson on More Than Enough Rope on ABC television recently was a lesson in good interviewing techniques. Denton even admitted he only needed to turn up, say something to get started and then sit back and let Michael just tell his stories. Parkinson was relating how difficult it was way […]

Just cleaning up my Bloglines and thought I would share some of the posts I was saving. Brad Hinton reflects on oral history and storytelling and points to some useful resources. Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics) sharing Mark Twain’s view of work and play. If you have read Made to Stick, you might also like these […]

Aiden Choles has just posted a nice piece on how he used role play within an anecdote circle to collect stories. This is how it happened. He was starting to explore the prevalent myths in the organisation he’s working with when one of the participants mentioned change house cleaners. It turns out that at a […]

I was just reading Steve Denning’s latest newsletter and I noticed that he has picked up on the importance of story-listening in his latest book. He writes: Obviously, I’m a great fan of storytelling. And yet, I have to say, there’s also something basically wrong with the term, “storytelling”. If you take it literally, it […]