Sonja Blignaut's 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.

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!

My new concept for the week is salience.  Before Leon from Occam's Donkey introduced me to it, I have to admit I didn't even know it existed.  However, now that I am aware of it, I think it's quite an important factor in much of the work we do.

Maybe I should start with a definition - Salience is the state or condition of being prominent. The Oxford English Dictionary defines salience as "most noticeable or important."   In short, salience theory studies what people deem to be more important to them out of a series of options.  Politicians are especially interested in this, as it seems a very useful manipulation tool ...

You're probably wondering why The Narrative Lab has been so quiet over the last few months?  Although there's no real excuse for our silence, I thought I'd give you an update on what has been keeping us so busy.

Firstly, Aiden became a proud first-time dad of a beautiful baby boy called Daniel James a little over a month ago.  For those of you with children, you'd understand that this life-changing event can keep one quite busy!

Natasha Govender joined us in April. She's an experienced consultant with several years of experience, so we're really excited to welcome her into TNL.

Over the last couple of weeks, we've been facilitating a series of workshops around the country for the National Research Foundation (NRF).  The main purpose of these workshops is to introduce Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises who operate in industries that could benefit from Science, Engineering and Technology research to the THRIP programme (an initiative sponsored by the DTI). We'd like to invite you to attend the final workshop this week, if your business could benefit from such research.

We all know people like this ... "they refuse to speak-up or pitch-in when ideas are developed, are unable or unwilling to go to key meetings, and generally don't have the will, time, or inclination to help their colleagues, but then repeatedly shoot-down the decisions that are made, refuse to help implement them, and bad mouth their more hardworking colleagues"

One of the best examples is someone who refuses to vote and then bemoans the outcome of the election and the state of the nation! 

James Geary gives a great TED talk on Metaphor.  It's definitely worth watching.  We've been convinced of the power of metaphors, especially base metaphors in human systems and the way they govern behavior. 

As Geary says, a metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words.  They live a secret life all around us, according to him we utter 6 metaphors per minute.  It's therefore not surprising that they have a tremendous impact on how we see and behave in the world.