Cognitive Edge

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

We are pleased to announce that TNL in partnership with the University of Stellenbosch Business School will be hosting Steve Bealing, CEO of Cognitive Edge from 8-10 March 2011 for the first ever Cognitive Edge accreditation training course to be held in Cape Town, South Africa.

I will be guest blogging on www.cognitive-edge.com for the next two weeks, so feel free to follow my "musings" there. I'll be discussing some of our current and forthcoming opportunities here in South Africa.

Remember also to catch Dave Snowden @ the CSIR on the 19th of August where he'll be talking about "Making KM strategic to your organisation".

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.

 

We do this on an annual basis ... bring a Cognitive Edge heavy weight over from the shores yonder to train up local folk in the essential techniques of gathering narratives and using them to make sense of complexity. Usually, we bring our one Prof Dave Snowden. This year however we're bring out Mr Steve Bealing, none other than the CEO of Cognitive Edge to facilitate the training.

Once trained, you'll be a part of the global network of Cognitive Edge Practitioners (like we are) and be able to run your own programmes within your organisation.

Here are the details, or visit our training page for more info:

Course Outline:

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

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.

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.

Spotting the trends and patterns in a handful of anecdotes is not a difficult task. Cognitively, it is within our grasp as humans. However, raise the number of anecdotes beyond that and it becomes more of a mental stretch and you require the assistance of another "intelligence". It is for this reason that we utilise the SenseMaker suite of software when running projects that gather hundreds of stories. Now, imagine you could collect all the stories published on the web, and make sense of them in one visualization tool. This is exactly what Jonathan Harris does. Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and switch your phone off for the next 20 minutes:

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.

From 3 - 5 March 2008, The Narrative Lab will once again be hosting Prof Dave Snowden, world-renowned thought-leader in the areas of complexity and narrative, when we will be co-presenting a Cognitive Edge accreditation training course in Pretoria.  Prof Snowden is also known for co-authoring the cover article (a leader's framework for decision making) in the November 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review.

What do you get when you pull together a former meteorologist, an enigmatic maven and a former narrative therapist? Answer:The Narrative Lab and pretty informative breakfast conversation on complexity in the business landscape.

In an amazingly short amount of time we managed to showcase our keynote on complexity (The New Simplicity), listen to a customised podcast from Prof. Dave Snowden on the Cynefin framework, hear how our methods are applied in practice and to talk briefly about the SenseMaker software we use when working with mass narrative capture.

Thanks to all our friends, partners, potential par­tners, clients and client-hopefuls for coming along to our first breakfast conversation on Friday. For those that could not make it, we're sad - but there will be a next time.

As promised, we have uploaded Dave's podcast which you can download here(right click + save as - 8MB) and his accompanying slideshow here (right click + save as - 3MB).