Dialogue - Narrative Blog

Regrettably, Prof Snowden has had to postpone his visit to South Africa.  When new dates have been scheduled, we will post another notification.

Our Complex Approach to Monitoring and Evaluation workshop will continue, Prof Snowden will join us via video conference.

When presenting, one has to be certain you are okay with receiving questions when you tell the audience you would like the presentation to be a two-way conversation. This was the case for me today. I was speaking to the Cape Town chapter of the SA Organisational Development Network, focussing on our approach to Narrative Change Management. What should have been a 60 minute talk turned out to be a 2.5 hour discussion.

A large focus of my presentation was a case study on the Change Story we developed for a certain organisation. We were working with a team of European consultants on the project who were highly skeptical about a story's effectiveness. Today, after showing a video of one Change Story I passed a comment when discussing the effectiveness of a Change Story that I doubted whether it would have as large an impact in Europe as it does here in Africa.

A hand shot up.

Prof Dave Snowden's annual visit to South Africa will happen in August this year.  He will be in SA from around the 12th to the 25th of August, mostly lecturing at the University of Pretoria.

He does have limited time available between lectures, so if anyone would like to book some of his time for meetings or to present a workshop, please let us know.

We will be conducting a one day workshop on Complex Approaches to Impact Measurement where Dave will be the keynote speaker.  The date hasn't been confirmed yet, but will probably be towards the end of his visit.  If anyone is interested in attending, please contact me and I will add your name to our mailing list for the event.

We often laugh at the perceptions people have of Africa and her people, like the one that we still have wild animals roaming the streets of Johannesburg.  Hopefully the thousands of visitors that came to South Africa for the 2010 Soccer World Cup will dispell that myth once and for all.  Another persistant (and more worrying) perception seems to be that African culture and intelligence is inferior to those of Western nations.  Most people still think that the various Europian colonists did Africans a favor by introducing Western culture and religion - so-called "civilisation".

In most organisations we engage with, the first thing that is considered whenever a behaviour change is required is an incentive scheme.  If we need better customer experience ratings, let's incentivise the front-line staff; if we need people to share knowledge, let's link that behaviour to their KPA's; and so on, and so on.

One of the most enjoyable parts to many of our workshops is watching the reaction of people who fail to see a very obvious gorilla in a video clip because we told them to focus on counting basket balls being passed between two teams of players.  I'm not going to link to the video, because more and more people have already seen it and it spoils our fun!

Meetings. More meetings. Many more meetings. This is what many of us see when we take a glance out our diaries. It's a daily drudge. The endless stream of back-to-back meetings is the bane of corporate existence. It's a wonder we get any work done! It's also not surprising that the new coping technique that most meeting attendees employee is called "nod-in".

You know exactly what I'm talking about. Why? Because, if you had to be honest, you know that you employ the technique yourself ...

I've been watching with interest the proliferation of parody spoof Twiiter user accounts over the last while. These spoof accounts have been generated by witty anonymous users to take cheap shots at large, global organisations who are doings things worthy of critique. One of the best examples is the BP Global Public Relations account.

Of all the parody accounts created, the PR-type accounts are the most common and they represent really cynical, sardonic and incisive viewpoints on what big corporates are up to. Anther example is FIFAGlobalPR. One source describes the BPGlobalPR parody:

In the wake of the worst environmental disaster in US history, comedy can still provide healing power, especially when BP (British Petroleum) is the brunt of all jokes.

British Petroleum has reportedly asked Twitter to shut down the account.  Twitter apparently responded by telling BP to fix the leak first (nice!). Here are other examples of the spoof tweets ...

I recall a session we were facilitating with a group of scientists from a parastatal here in South Africa. The overall project was focused on uncovering the organisational culture drivers of, and barriers to, performance management within the parastatal. Our session happened in the later stages of the project when it was time to develop interventions that were aimed at shifting the patterns.