May 2012
2 posts
16 tags
time to reappreciate the original software: paper
We at Sparknow are great believers in using objects, pictures and sounds to entice people (ourselves included) away from predictable thinking and into a more imaginative space. Here are four ways of using paper to achieve that.
1 | StoryCubes
‘StoryCubes are a tactile thinking and storytelling tool for exploring relationships and narratives. Each of the six sides can illustrate or describe an...
5 tags
using fiction in cultural change programmes
Last week we ran a workshop on narrative interviewing techniques and one of the topics that came up was how to report back in a way that’s engaging and, if necessary, hard-hitting without being off-putting.
It reminded us of a piece of research we did a few years ago around the merger of two large and well-established organizations. Our task was to:
1 | Understand how staff were feeling...
April 2012
1 post
3 tags
looking back to look forwards
Over the past 18 months Sparknow’s work has been increasingly around how to bring about organizational change.
While it’s an important shift in emphasis, storytelling and narrative techniques remain at the heart of our approach.
photo | Groume
To mark an inflection point in Sparknow’s evolution we offer these seven (a magical, storied number) lessons about organizational storytelling drawn...
February 2012
2 posts
starving to death on a full stomach
This week Sparknow attended Brian Storm’s workshop on multi-media storytelling at The Frontline Club in London.
I immersed myself in the methods of Mediastorm for one day. Weaving still images, video, music, text, ambient sound and interviews into pieces that tell stories is what they do so well.
Part of the learning process involved Brian talking us through the collection and production process...
1 tag
library futures
This weekend saw National Libraries day. It’s a good time to put the short term turbulence into a longer frame.
Here’s a short thinkpiece to help shift to a longer, and eventually more positive, narrative, in which this is just one turning point.
[Charing Cross library, banners in English and Chinese, February 2012]
In Wim Wender’s 1987 film “Wings of Desire” Hans...
January 2012
2 posts
7 tags
transforming ideas into reality in Madrid
Wed 18 January – enroute to Madrid: if any further proof of how necessary innovation and creativity are to business and industry in the current economic climate, it is presented before I have even set foot in the city. The Iberia in-flight magazine is carrying an ad for the 4th International Congress on Excellence and the theme is ‘Enterprise and innovation in difficult times: 10 stories of...
9 tags
the dérive as a tool for learning programmes
Here’s an extract from a research series with Clive Holtham of Cass Business School which explores slowness at work.
The ubiquity of digital representation of the organisation can lead to a situation where knowledge workers are skilled in perceiving the organisation through digital lens, but lack sufficient skills in the perceiving the physical actuality of the organisation.
We have been...
December 2011
4 posts
26 tags
story practice note, third and final part
In which we explore the ‘felts’ of stakeholder points of view, Who am I stories, metaphorical equipment, small stories that make a big difference, story listening, finding practice partner, and a few useful references to go exploring in. We end with collectors template.
stakeholders
The word stakeholder is dangerously abstract, and there’s a tendency to see stakeholders as an amorphous...
5 tags
the art of the narrative enquirer
A detour before the third and final part of the story practice note. I’ve been writing up narrative method and thought it might be useful to share this piece. It comes from a thing I wrote for Sage Publications a few years back, with some amendments. I’m relieved to find it seems to stand the test of time as a decent method statement.
‘In any research topic, there are two...
7 tags
a story practice note, part 2
What follows is a toolkit partly disguised as a reminiscence Don’t be fooled. Everything that’s said here has beentried and tested to breaking point. It can be guaranteed togive satisfaction if you give it a go. The main points are:
Organisations are made up of people, people tell and listen to stories all the time, so organisations are stories.
A discerning and planned use of...
4 tags
a story practice note, part 1
‘This practice note makes some suggestions for developing your resources as a listener to, teller of, and shaper of stories for and about the place you work in.
It was originally written for a client, in 2009. I’ll blog it in short pieces over the next few days. Today I’ll cover a bit about
what is a story
opening a door or a window
whose story is it anyway
two checklists for...
November 2011
2 posts
8 tags
'Surfing Soweto'
‘Surfing Soweto’ was screened at the South African Embassy in London last night. Here are some thoughts on the storytelling.
A bit about the film first. It’s a film-length documentary, about 90 minutes. We follow the lives of three young men from Soweto, largely through footage they’ve collected themselves, over three years. Sara has taught them how to use the cameras and...
16 tags
'but the rhino is facing the wrong way'
Fiona and I chorused in despair at the final session in a World Health Organization work/learning programme on collaborative meetings and products. Here’s a bit of the backstory but first I’ll tantalise you a bit with the rhino photo then wind my way back to it.
This is the second outing for a six-session series I ran for Alim Khan, working with WHO practitioners, whose projects and...
October 2011
1 post
9 tags
what would Wolf say?
Here’s a take on introducing multiple perspectives into a situation. It comes from a very interesting 12-year project exploring how to revolutionize communication systems that’s based on Christopher Alexander’s groundbreaking work on pattern languages in architecture.
I’ll start with the background to the project, and a little bit about pattern languages, and head towards...
September 2011
2 posts
9 tags
small conversations to identify useful lessons
Foraging in the archive (for which read desperately scrabbling through random unfiled stuff (see illustration below), I found this charming little piece from the online toolkit we developed with Defra a few years back.
We called these little things ‘back pocket items’ at the suggestion of Fiona Hiscocks, with the idea that it’s the kind of thing you could print out and tuck in...
6 tags
can cultural assets stimulate innovation I...
Nurture trumps nature as far as creativity goes - in effect the skill of creativity can be taught. This is one of the findings from a recently published survey in Harvard Business Review republished by CityAm.
It was also one of the themes that emerged from the 12th European Conference on Creativity and Innovation. 300 global attendees arrived in Faro last week bursting with ideas, enthusaism and...
August 2011
4 posts
6 tags
pocket guide to story collecting
Oftentimes we get approached to help with pieces of work/advice that fulfill more than one of Sparknow’s founding principles in this case, work that travels; work that benefits the global community.
Earlier this month the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Bogota, Colombia asked if we’d help them to think about how they might go about creating what they are...
25 tags
Correspondence #1 | story systems for your company
I was trawling the archives and reminded of this letter, into which we put a lot of work, which I share, edited a bit.
Sometimes I think our letters should get a wider audience. Somewhere between meetings, proposals and email exchanges, a great deal of effort goes into inviting people to make sense of story system possibilities for them and we do that as often through letters as through other...
7 tags
knowledge tours = knowledge transfer...
Those who follow our musings might recall that Sparknow (well Sandra Higgison mainly) has been interviewing a number of practitioners who’ve carved out interesting niche activities in the world of knowledge (management/transfer/exchange). The evolving role of the knowledge manager series is coming together nicely and throwing up many thrands (threads and strands) some of which we shared in a...
7 tags
back to life | using cultural assets to stimulate...
Writing this concluding blog reporting on the More than Money workshop on the road this warm Sunday afternoon in August, I am aware of how this reflection process which has not only allowed me to revisit the archives of research for the workshop and book Imaginative Muscle and have new conversations with people along the way, it has enabled a blog to be curated - longer than anticipated and one I...
July 2011
2 posts
5 tags
putting km tools to work I importance of...
A blog from Swiss Development Corporation hit my inbox this week. In it SDC practitioners were examining how some of the tools promoted by their original km team had been used.
Applying Knowldge Management Tools at Work is worth a read as is the Knowledge Solutions set produced by the km team at Asian Development Bank and perhaps the best of the lot Overseas Development Institute’s...
6 tags
objects surface stories I stories provoke a...
We knew this as Sparknow often utilizes objects as ‘introduction’ tools. Objects surface interesting stories, subjects, and avenues to explore; they overcome barriers in a group and are valuable icebreakers. We also found objects are catalysts for knowledge transfer and a powerful qualitative research tool.
Read on to learn from the second of our blog postings from the More than Money workshop,...
June 2011
2 posts
14 tags
principle #3 | liminality and principle #4 |...
Take one maguffin, add a strong beginning and a stirring close, fold in a cup of the remembering self, and wash down with lashings of sparkling crazy. You get principle #3 and principle #4 of making an organizational story system, the principles of liminality and curation respectively
For liminality I can’t much improve on the wikipedia entry, but I thought I’d try and...
7 tags
we are not alone I critical role of space and...
On a sunny day a few weeks back, Paul and I ventured north to Leeds Museum and Galleries to deliver/test Sparknow’s ‘More than Money’ workshop that draws on three years of commissioned [MLA London and London Development Agency] museums, libraries and archives research.
Aimed at organizations wishing to explore the new dimensions that cultural resources can bring to business development the...
May 2011
4 posts
5 tags
the whole world is being reorganised in my head
At dinner this week, my friend Megan pointed out that I have not reported back on my interview with Manuel Flury from SDC in Bern, which is very true and remiss on my part. The full profile is waiting to be written but as I’d been a little nervous of the approach we chose to take, here are my reflections on how we collected Manuel’s KM story.
Manuel met me from Bern train station at...
5 tags
what you don't feel you don't experience
These were the words of one of the participants in the first round of the World Cafe held on the second afternoon of the 4th conference on knowledge management and organizational learning in Bogota.
Actually these were not precisely her words, as I was hearing them through the veil of translation, with my brilliant and kind translator who sat with me patiently all afternoon and made it possible...
5 tags
like a fly in milk
‘Like a fly in milk’ is Colombian for ‘like a fish out of water’ I learned at our story workshop here at the CIAT - the International Center for Tropical Agriculture headquartered in Cali.
I first met Simone Staiger in Bern six years ago with the SDC, with a then (and soon to return to CIAT) colleague of hers, Nathan, Manuel Fleurie, and some other km4devers. Steph Colton...
6 tags
heating up meetings
Recently we made a delicious guidenote for a client into storying virtual meeting spaces to help them be more useful. I’m prompted to write about this by a McKinsey interview with Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, who says:
You have a meeting, and you have consensus without disagreement, you have nothing.
The whole interactive interview can be found here
To heat things...
April 2011
1 post
2 tags
a breathing process between generations
I’ve spent much of the day working on a presentation on storytelling to give in Bogota in a few weeks, and in so doing reminded myself of some of the things we learned when doing our first big oral history project with the Islamic Development Bank in 2005.
I thought it might be interesting to share an extract from the notes from the lessons learned session that Steph Colton ran with our...
February 2011
3 posts
7 tags
a generous listener
Yesterday I helped create a monster. Literally. While I didn’t actually pick any of its features (eyes tangy like pickled onions, hands spindly like spaghetti, a body like a condom filled with walnuts and beautiful feet), I helped vote for its name. The Pedicurous.
I was in a room full of story tellers. Artists, designers, bloggers, authors, sculptors, photographers, role players. I had worried...
4 tags
‘the best motivational message I've ever seen...’
So says Lucy Kellaway in an article today on FT.Com Management. The article draws on a ‘…standing on a burning platform…’ memo sent to all Nokia staff by CEO Stephen Elop to make this point:
Fear of death is motivating; so is the truth. Most employees are fed on a never-ending diet of flannel, so when they are dished up a helping of stark truth, the effect can be invigorating.
When...
4 tags
principle #2 | the second wave
The second wave is the moment in the process of recollection or discovery when the noise of received opinion, rehearsed story and ready wit make way for the signal of an authentic moment of insight.
That moment is probably unexpected, perhaps troubling, maybe magical. The second wave needs time patience, trust and the ability to hold a silence longer than most organizations find comfortable.
...
January 2011
6 posts
2 tags
from Takayama to London by way of Paris
It’s Sunday night and I’m on my way back from a day in Paris. My wife who is an interior designer has been at the annual Maison & Objet event at the Parc Des Expositions north of the city and was so enthralled she was late for our rendezvous; it’s pouring and visibility is lousy on the A26 as we rush towards the tunnel to make our 20.20 EuroShuttle.
Its a strange backdrop...
she looked at me blankly
It was October 2004 and I’d just left the world of publishing for corporate life at a global insurance broker. Enjoying a few drinks at a party in Clapham I was chatting to a uni friend I’d not seen for years.
“How’s the magazine going?” she asked.
With a big grin on my face, I told her that I’d recently handed it over to a new editor as I’d accepted a role at Aon in its knowledge management...
8 tags
fiction as a meeting place for facts and...
Here’s a handy blog I posted in July 2007 which I just looked up again as the only source of a reference about Dave Eggers I was looking for…
This takes me in two directions. I could pursue the route of memory, knowledge, rediscovery and so on, fueled by the warm glow of my current reading In search of memory, the emergence of a new science of mind by Eric Kandel (spotted in turn in...
10 tags
money, knowledge, good will
Eglantyne Jebb was an extraordinary woman who cofounded Save the Children with her sister, Dorothy, in 1919.
I’m researching the Save the Children Alliance just now so I skimmed the great biography by Clare Mulley which tells her story as the original humanitarian. There’s always great interest for me in finding the founders or foundations of an organisation, ever since a...
10 tags
principle #1 | the red thread
In China and Japan there is a legend or proverb that says an invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstances. (1)
The thread may stretch or tangle but never break. As a child grows, the thread shortens, drawing closer those people who are destined to be together, binding families and friends forever.
The term survives translation into both...
3 tags
British diplomats = knowledge managers
What’s the role of foreign diplomacy, diplomats and diplomatic communication? What are the insights for knowledge management?
At the end of November 2009 I posted a blog about the valedictory despatch, and in particular the valedictory dispatch of Sir Ivor Roberts extremely critical of the descent into business bullshit of foreign diplomacy. I don’t think we pulled the blog across so...
December 2010
7 posts
5 tags
the dangers of thin stories
Rob Walker and Josh Glenn have been selling random, valueless items on ebay, each with a backstory associated with it, to make a point about what urges us to buy.
The article about this in The Guardian the other day was subtitled ‘The true value of a gift is not how much it costs, but the story that we attach to it’ and tells us that
Conceptual consumption is what Mike Norton at the...
8 tags
food technologist = knowledge broker
I was at the woodwind ensemble Christmas party last night and ended up deep in a conversation about knowledge broking.
A bunch of people with bassoons, clarinets, saxophones, flutes, playing chamber music in the background while we ate, drank and were merry. I spent quite a bit of time talking to a couple of bassoons, as I was the only oboe there. One of them is a food technologist, passionate...
4 tags
the one-winged butterfly
This is the first of a series of posts that we’ll be making over the coming 12 months about how organizations and business networks can foster their story systems.
The title of the series – ‘the one winged butterfly’ – refers back to an experience we had in 2002. Early that year Sparknow started out on a five-year partnership (their description of the relationship) with the Swiss Agency for...
2 tags
sacrifice
I’m not much one for sporting analogies and references in a business context. I wince every time someone steps up to the plate, scores an own goal, touches base, or gets a hole in one, or when the sports psychoanalyst is wheeled on to talk about leadership. There’s a grain of reasonableness here, because some metaphors and references are so cliched they thud exhaustedly into the middle...
"have a go and apologise afterwards"
It’s Day Two at Online Information 2010 I’m chairing the opening session of the Social Media track; two interesting presentations, the first on a programme to bring new people on board more effectively, the second on how the use of podcasts has transformed the way knowledge is shared. Today’s speakers include Gordon Vala-Web of Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) in Toronto and Helen Clegg...
4 tags
knowledge and social media fill the vacuum
Chaque histoire a trois vérités: la mienne, la tienne et celle qui s’est réellement passée! “Every story has three truths: mine, yours and the one that really happened.
This Rwandan proverb came to mind a lot these last three days as I attempted to get to the annual Online Conference at Olympia where I was chairing a stream on social media in the context of knowledge management....
11 tags
the story concertina that is British army orders
I’ve been looking over some of the research I did earlier this year when exploring knowledge mangement for emergency preparedness and response. I thought it might be useful to share an edited version of an email to my client after a wedding where I explore the possibility of a common communication protocol for written and verbal briefings that expands and contracts, depending on time, place...
November 2010
7 posts
4 tags
strategy needs poetry, rawness and people
I’m writing from Hammamet, in Tunisia, where I’ve the privilege of spending some time with colleagues from around the world who work together on preparedness and emergency response in health. I’m not here directly as part of the training that’s going on, but to support it and work alongside it on the work we’ve been doing for a little while on an information and...
4 tags
‘they do not even know how to make mango chutney’
Curry and peacekeeping in the Congo was one of the items on from our own correspondent on radio 4 this Saturday and I thought I’d share it as a good example of an impact story, following on from recent blogging here.
You can read it, or listen to it on the podcast. Text comes to just under 1000 words and I reckon that it was about 7 minutes or so? that I listened to driving back from...
4 tags
cuts
Cuts have been on my mind recently. Right now they seem to be in the news day after day.
Yesterday Victoria was telling me about the slash-and-burn approach to knowledge management at a big public institution here in the UK. And budget cuts feature in a lot of the conversations we’re having with our clients and others with an interest in our work.
But this morning I’ve been thinking...
3 tags
'an anthology of self'
Annette Simmons has a decent categorisation of types of story that both Sparknow and Anecdote have adapted. From memory:
who am I
why I am here
teaching
vision
values in action
I know what you are thinking
Not perfect, but serviceable handles for getting your head round the range of storytypes that might be seeded into one engagement. I dislike the phrasing of the last and think about it...
3 tags
Dogville & Atticus Finch
I want to draw attention to the tireless work of Stephanie West Allen, who,constantly brings to life the grit of story in the law and so the dance between facts and persuasive fictions and factions in a more generally relevant sense. She blogs regularly and she posts to Working Stories.
(It may help you to know the root of my rootling around here: I’m holding in mind here three pieces of...