Aiden Choles's blog

As you would have seen via our blog, twitter feed and our newsletter, we are partners in the upcoming 2010 Employer Branding Summit (find out more here). We are especially interested in how organisations can tap into the power of narrative to improve employee engagement and build connections with possible employees outside of the organisation.

In this article, Peter Schmitt (Tribalfish) draws on a very powerful metaphor of Spanish Geese to illustrate how organisations can capatialise on their employer brand. He writes:

We've just released the first 2010 edition of our newsletter, Dialogue. It has some very important thoughts on the role of conversation in business and how leaders can create a conversation culture through the use of Conversation Agents. Read it here.

We're busy with a project in the education field requiring that we dip ourselves into a lot of academic research on the topic. Suffice it to say that I've not read as many journal articles since I graduated ;)

Surprisingly (or not) there's been a lot of narrative work done in the education field regarding how people learn.

One of the pertinent thoughts that I've found so far is the difference between the "analysis of narrative" and "narrative analysis. They are not the same thing apparently.

We are proud to be an Event Partner for the 2010 South African Employer Branding Summit to be held at Deloitte, Johannesburg, South Africa on 23 March 2010. We invite you to join us and spend a day with 9 employer branding specialists including International Presenters from USA, UK and Australia to discover the value of building a sustainable business through employer branding strategies.
 
Summit Chairman Brett Minchington MBA from Australia who has delivered employer branding events in 30 cities in 20 countries over the past two years will join international and national guest speakers to share world’s best practice in attracting and retaining talent including:
 
·         Heather Polivka, Director of Employer Branding at United Health Group (USA)
·         Peter Schmitt, Managing Director, tribalfish (UK/South Africa)
·         David Conradie, Director Human Capital, Deloitte, South Africa

As part of the initiation of an impact assessment project, where we'll be using SenseMaker to monitor the way tertiary students progress towards graduation, we have been given a stack of reading as background and context.

One of the quotes that has stood out so far is this:

Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organisation. In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work ... so much so that the conversation is the organisation.

Alan Webber - "What's So New About the New Economy." Harvard Business Review

One of the most novel, if not THE most novel applications of narrative I've come across in the last few years is the work of internet-artist Jonathan Harris. He has done some really amazing stuff with gathering stories on the web and rendering them as art projects.

In particular, We Feel Fine is my personal favourite. It's an almanac of human emotion. By trawling the web for blog posts, images and videos associated with the words "I feel ...", Harris has managed to measure the pulse of the world's emotional state. Amazing. Check it out.

I received a mail from Jonathan last night that launched the book version of the project. I highly recommend seeing the preview over here and then pre-ordering your copy here.

It will be a coffee table must-have.

We utilise a software suite, SenseMaker^TM, when working on projects that involve huge amounts of narrative as well as when a client needs to maximise their own decision-making capability in the face of a complex problem.

SenseMaker^TM is developed by Cognitive Edge, and Dave and the gang have released this useful video introduing the software.

This TEDGlobal video is one of the most poignant talks I've ever viewed. It is by Chimamanda Adichie, an African novelist, who shares some experiences of how encountering a single story of a person, people or country framed the way she viewed them.

Her point is that being exposed to a single story is very dangerous, and that we've got to open ourselves up to "balanced stories" in order to really get a grasp on the world around us.

If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with "secondly". Start the story with the arrows of the Native American Indians and not with the arrival of the British and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African states and not with the colonial creation of the African State and you have an entirely different story.

As I have written before ...

With all credit to Sonja on this one, we're toying with the idea of changing our title's and job descriptions within The Narrative Lab.

For a loooong time, we have been uncomfortable with describing ourselves as "consultants". While it may be true that we're consultative in our way of putting together projects of an emergent nature for our clients, we are certainly not consultants of the traditional fold.

And so, we've been grappling with a title that brings together the blend of facilitation, consulting, advisory, presenting and sensemaking projects that we love to embark on.

How about ... Conversation Agents?

At the heart of all we do is conversation. Whether it's gathering stories for a sensemaking project, or having stories told back into an organisations to enhance communications ... conversation is the root.

What say you?

One of the indelible lessons I picked up from my training as a narrative therapist is that words are important. If words are signifiers (that is, they give meaning) then the very same words represent a gateway through which we catch a glimpse of how a person views themselves, the world around them: their reality.

And so, the stories we tell about ourselves and the experiences we have in this world are significant ... more significant than you can imagine: they are the gateways into understanding reality and the way things are.

It is this "significance" of stories that I believe is what underlies the inspiration, motivation, connection and insight we gain from hearing the stories of other people.