Shawn recently blogged an interesting post on how to develop your narrative competence. The value of a developed sense of narrative competence is well recognised in the Medical field. Here’s an interesting one for pictorial narratives*. Do you think the figures below are both narratives? (*- From “Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition – NARRATIVE, Vol. […]

The military metaphor is dominant in many organisations. How many times have you heard colleagues talking about doing battle, gathering the troops, working in headquarters, having Chief EOs, FOs, IOs, OOs. Sun Tzu’s Art of War is often suggested reading for new managers. Here is an alternative metaphor—the organisation as a tumultuous household. Hillary Johnson’s article […]

Our narrative technique relies on the identification and extraction of anecdotes, typically from transcriptions. The ability to quickly identify an anecdote comes with practice so I thought I would take you through a way to develop this skill. First we need to have an idea of what we are looking for. The broadest and simplest […]

Having a casual surf on a sunday afternoon I came across this interesting Storytelling survival guide by David Boje. It seems a fairly comprehensive, if not provocative review of both theory and practice of storytelling in and of organisations. Provocative because he claims that the works of Snowden and Denning are naive. (I wonder what they think of […]

Earlier this year Shawn posted about a great site containing anecdotes about the development of the Apple Macintosh. Browsing through the archive I found this great anecdote written with real passion: Since the Macintosh team were artists, it was only appropriate that we sign our work. Steve came up with the awesome idea of having each […]

When something happens we like to tell others about it. This retelling of our experience often is done in the form of a story. “I can’t believe what Margaret just did. We have been working on the Acme project for 3 months and today she rings up, out of the blue, and resigns. I told her to get off […]

Some time back Chris Corrigan mentioned in his blog how social network mapping could help inform the invitation list for an Open Space event. I have also found that using social network mapping in conjunction with an Open Space event can be a great way to demonstrate change and create new stories within an organisation. The figures […]

One of things which we do alot of at Anecdote is Listen. Shawn has posted previously that story-telling is just half the story. The other half is listening, or as Shawn says “story listening”. So, I’d love to listen to you, to your story… to hear what you would like to read more of here on the […]

Fast Company calls it an ‘idea-driven narrative’. This genre, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, takes a simple (but important) idea and uses research, case studies, and personal experiences to enable the reader to see the world from a new perspective. Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki, is a notable addition to this enriching genre. I […]

Have you ever used the technique we call a ‘dotmocracy’ to get a group to prioritise a set of ideas/initiatives/actions? Each person is given five sticky dots (red ones usually—the ones you find placed next to paintings in a gallery to denote they’ve been sold). Each dot-carrier is then invited to place any number of […]