Aiden Choles's blog

We are proud to announce the arrangements for hosting back-to-back Cognitive Edge Accreditation courses in 2012. After the sold-out inaugural Cape Town course in 2011, in partnership with the University of Stellenbosch Business School, we will be back in Bellville from 28th to 30th March 2012. Thereafter we will be in Johannesburg from 2nd to 4th April 2012.

Steve Bealing, CEO of Cognitive Edge, will again be joining us from Singapore to facilitate the accreditation. Spaces are limited to 24 only, so be sure to book your seat soon.

The accreditation is offered over three days, in two installments. Day 1 and 2 focus on the theory of complexity and practical tools and methods that can be used in making sense of conditions of uncertainty. The third day is the optional SenseMaker^TM training that will equip people in running their own mass narrative capture and sensemaking projects. 

The course brochures are available for download: 

• Cape Town: Day 1 and 2, Day 3
• Johannesburg: Day 1 and 2, Day 3

I was asked to provide a short description of our approach to research, and how narrative fits into it. Here it is:

Simply put, we use narrative as a vehicle through which we surface the mindsets, perceptions, values and beliefs that govern people's behaviour. We gather experiential material from people in narrative form to create a narrative database. Narrative is a helpful research tool because it cuts through the surface of opinions and simple analyses people give, and uncovers a more substantive description of how they see the world and choose to act in it. We then analyse the database for drivers and patterns within the stories that inform us about what governs people's behaviour with regards to a complex phenomenon e.g. safety, culture, diversity.

Towards the end of last year I asked a client to fire us. Well, not quite in those words. But I did tell them that we will not be facilitating anymore workshops on a certain project. It was something a delegate said in the second last workshop in a series of organisational culture sessions that got me thinking about the risk facilitators and consultants face in becoming the face of a project for a client.

It was the second time this group of employees had seen me as we were nearing the end of the second round of workshops on the project. Towards the end of the session I wished the staff well in the future, knowing that my official engagement had come to an end on the project, but that internal resources and champions would be continuing with it. A lady said, "Aw no, we won't see you again.

Most managers wouldn't admit to it, but I suspect that one of the reasons why team development sessions are not scheduled as often as they should be is because leaders are afraid of the 'dumping syndrome'. Dumping. That analogous phenomenon that occurs when a group of people congregate and then proceed to spew forth negativity, critique and bemoan that state of affairs in their team, company, city or country. It happens around the dinner table, in corporate passages, at the coffee machine and most notably in facilitated conversations. Dumping syndrome induces all kinds of anxiety for managers. You know this anxiety is acute when, in a briefing, the team leader tells you he doesn't want the session to be a 'bitch & moan' session. This is in the first instance an acknowledgement that the leader knows that there is reason for the likely dumping that the group will partake in, but secondly, that the leader is afraid of how such dumping will derail the purpose of the team session.

The entire Narrative Lab team, including a few others, has just arrived home after facilitating a metaphor elicitation process in Cape Town for a power utility company. It was a first time for us on a few counts.

Firstly, it was the first time we were running large group facilitation techniques with 400 people in each session. Secondly, it was a first working with so many people in just 45 minutes (there were four sessions), and thirdly, it was the first time we ran this particular process.

We had initially set out to surface a snapshot of what the safety story is in this particular organisation, but when I think about what emerged, I think we surfaced more than that. The nett result after the four sessions was that we had surfaced more than 80 unique metaphors relating to the safety culture in the company, and of that number, we found a dozen common base metaphors.

Dear readers of the TNL blog

You will notice shortly that we have a new blogger on our site. He is none other than David Sebe, our newest recruit.

As part of David's induction and development plan we invited him to chronicle his experiences in joining TNL (not to flatter us, although that may be nice) and to share with our readers his thoughts and reflections on the ideas, processes, products and clients that he encounters.

We are his first job, and I suspect that his reflections could be of some use to us 'older 'practitioners. 

Let's see where this journey takes us. Feel free to comment and engage with David's posts.

This morning I picked up on a tweet by Zahmoo (Anecdote's new story bank software) that pointed towards a post about the Periodic Table of Storytelling. I've spent a few mintues wading through it and I'm pretty impressed. 

TVtropes.org have done an exquisite job of plotting out the basic elements of stories, in both literary and film form. Besides the natural link to the work we do, I'm interested in this table because we have developed a workshop process based on Christopher Booker's work, The 7 Basic Plots. We help teams and organisations understand their current state and strategy through the lens of the basic story plots, deconstructing what they can learn about their identity and future. It's a pretty powerful process, one thatcreates an awareness that our stories are not always as fictional as we would like to think, but that they are rooted in the real dynamics of lived experience. The Peridoc Table of Storytelling nows provides us with another useful tool to use in such a process.

It's pretty fun to deconstruct your favourite stories using the Periodic Table of Storytelling. Spend a minute or two retracing the elements outline in examples such as Dilbert and Star Wars at the bottom.

We received an introduction email about two months ago from a graduate who had come across the work we do in his course on Knowledge Management. We were quite chuffed to hear that The Narrative Lab is getting some airplay in the lecture halls of some of South Africa's leading universities. We were however not in a position to hire at the time, but the tide has turned, and we have just welcomed David Sebe to the team.

David is a BA (Corporate Comms) graduate, and comes highly recommended. He will assist us on all our major projects and we wish him the best as he learns about the work we do.

We have just finalised the arrangements for hosting the second Cognitive Edge Accreditation in 2011. The first was the inaugaural hosting in Cape Town earlier in the year in partnership with the University of Stellenbosch Business School. The course was fully subscribed with a variety of local and international participants interested in the emerging field of Complex Adaptive Systems.

The second installment of the Accreditation is now confirmed for 1st to 3rd November in Johannesburg. Steve Bealing, CEO of Cognitive Edge, will again be joining us from Singapore to facilitate the accreditation. Spaces are limited to 24 only, so be sure to book your seat soon.

The accreditation is offered over three days, in two installments. Day 1 and 2 focus on the theory of complexity and practical tools and methods that can be used in making sense of conditions of uncertainty. The third day is the optional SenseMaker^TM training that will equip people in running their own mass narrative capture and sensemaking projects. 

The course brochures are availble for download here (Day 1 and 2) and here (Day 3). 

We're pretty interested in all things systems and change related. And so, when we came across the Nexus for Africa movement, we were introduced to the idea of "whole system change". Nexus for Africa is a two conference (12th to 14th September) will be a unique experience where powerful approaches to collaborative change, selected from a repertoire of more than 60 methodologies broadly referred to as large-group methods/ interventions, whole-system change, or large-scale change, will be used to illustrate how organisations and communication have been and can be transformed to tackle 21st century challenges.

There are early bird discounts available. Don't wait. We hope to see you there. Register here.