Viv McWaters has just posted an example of a story spine which reminded me of how we are using story spines in our sensemaking workshops. I was inspired to used this technique after observing how my dad made sense of something (a trivial example) after he had the opportunity to tell a story. Here’s what […]

Last night I met Cris Pearson, CEO of plasq, a small group of passionalte software developers. We quickly discovered a shared interest in storytelling, albeit from different perspectives. Plasq develop an award-winning software program called Comic Life, which is a program designed to create comic strips or arrange photos into a scrapbook. Mac users may […]

I read this lovely quote in the following paper, Petranker, J. (2005) ‘The When of Knowing’, The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 241-259. “When you are in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a wreckage of shattered glass […]

I wont say much at all here except go read this post by Les Posen (and definitely watch the YouTube video). It features a Welshman and I think you’ll be blown away.

Scientific American.com has an amusing piece by Steve Mirsky that highlights one of the reasons why experts shouldn’t attempt to interpret stories—there are many truths in a story (in fact plausibility is more important than truth) and you will tell the one that suits your purpose. For this reason we often work with many stories […]

For those of you who will be coming to our workshop in Sydney, we will be demonstrating our new Web 2.0 service called Zahmoo as well as Cognitive Edge’s Sensemaker.

I was over at Wikipedia today and ended up on the Anecdote article. Here’s their definition of an anecdote, which I think is pretty good. An anecdote is a short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is […]

I might have mentioned a few posts ago that we are currently helping a government department develop a staff induction program for their Aboriginal employees. One of the suggestions we’ve made is for new employees to seek out stories from others in the department as a way to create new relationships while also developing an […]

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 […]