accreditation

The 2009 Cognitive Edge Accreditation kicked off in Johannesburg today. We're running the accreditation in conjunction with Cognitive Edge and Steve Bealing (CEO) is here from Singapore running the session.

It's Steve's first visit to South African, and Africa for that fact. He's on a whirlwind learning curve on South African culture and traffic ... 

We'll be live-tweeting the event over the next few days at http://twitter.com/narrativelab. Follow us there for course updates, thoughts and nuggets of wisdom on narrative and complexity.

The Narrative Lab will be hosting, with Cognitive Edge, the annual Cognitive Edge Accreditation Course in Sunninghill from 22nd to 24th June 2009. Steve Bealing, CEO of Cognitive Edge will be here facilitating the course along with Sonja and Aiden.

If you want to discover practical and pragmatic ways to manage under conditions of uncertainty, understand the power of business narrative and discover new ways to use human networks, then this course will provide you with the introductory theory and associated open source Cognitive Edge methods.

Course Outline:

Day 1: Strategy & Complexity
Day 2: Narrative & Project Design
Day 3: Successfully designing & delivering a SenseMaker project (optional day - dependent on numbers)

Course Brochure: downloadable at the end of this page

Venue: Focus, in Sunninghill, Johannesburg (to be confirmed)

Fee:

Day 1 and Day 2: R5,000 per delegate (ex VAT)
Day 3: R2,500 per delegate (ex VAT)

Bookings:

Contact Chrislia at admin[at]narrativelab[dot]co[dot]za for bookings and more information.

A little gem from Dave on Day 1 of the Cognitive Edge Accreditation course we're hosting in Pretoria:

The Dark Matter Theory asserts that there is much matter in space that we cannot see, but we know it exists because it exerts gravitational effects on visible matter. When it comes to organisations, and the complex way in which they operate, the dark matter theory can be applied i.e. there are things/forces that happen in organisations that we cannot see, but we know they occur because they have an effect on visible components of the organisation.

The difference is that in organisations, we can use narrative techniques to surface the "dark matter" in a tangible way. For example, we ran a narrative enquiry with a client recently that surfaced some organisational archetypes. Prior to the project, the leader could not understand why his staff complained about being overworked when there clearly was not an overload in the system (the visible effect). When analysing an archetype that emerged out of the narrative process, we discovered the dark matter: that employees had very little authority over thier workload and the task requests they had to contend with daily.