Until recently (yesterday actually) I have differentiated two types of organisational stories: those crafted to persuade an audience—this approach is typified by Steve Denning’s work at the World Bank and is called ‘Organisational Storytelling’; and stories that retell the day-to-day events which occur in a workplace—Dave Snowden popularised this view of narrative in his work […]

When extracting archetypes from a body of narrative, I have found it useful to give the workshop participants a large list of character traits to increase the richness of the process. Here is the poster I use. Technorati tags: poster, cynefin

If you want to see the power of anecdotes, just check out this site by Andy Hertzfeld. Andy has collected 117 anecdotes that document the development of the Apple Macintosh and categorises each anecdotes into topics like software design, marketing, inspiration and celebrities. It provides an excellent example of how narratives can be organised to […]

If you are building a business case to use narrative techniques in your organisation, here are some great quotes to sprinkle throughout the story you might tell your executive.

Ken Baskin presented this paper at the 2004 International Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy. I haven’t had a chance to read the paper yet but the topic seems interesting. Thanks to Fabio Boschetti at CSIRO for alerting me to this one.

After hearing Dave Snowden describe the importance and application of stories in organisations for the first time, I became extremely excited by the idea and raced off to write a story. I was in the middle of a project helping a client develop a competitive intelligence capability and the engagement was exilarating. So I wrote […]

There are relatively few available case studies that document projects using Cynefin techniques. I believe this will be remedied in the near future on the completion of the new Cynefin web site. In the meantime here is a brief description of a lessons learned project done by the Bank of Thailand which applied Cynefin narrative techniques. […]

There is a growing interest in capturing employees stories using video or audio. Experienced employees are walking out the door and taking their knowledge with them, leaving little behind. Senior managers are rightfully concerned; especially in government. Understanding why policies are they way they are and knowing what has been tried and what has failed […]

Eliciting stories from workers relies, in part, on asking good questions. But before people will provide their more personally significant stories they must feel comfortable and relaxed. A short ‘warm-up’ time is very conducive to genuine sharing. The ‘warm-up’ might occupy the first 10-15 minutes of a session. In most cases I begin by setting […]

“The universe is made of stories not atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980, poet) – The Speed of Darkness