Cognitive Edge

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).

We are proud to announce the inaugural N­arrative Lab Breakfast Conversation to be held on Fri­day 30th November. On the back of Prof. Dave Snowden's recent Harvard Business Review article on leadership and decision making, we will be hosting a breakfast conversation that will cover:

• Making Sense of a Complex World
A showcase of our keynote presentation on Complexity & Narrative
• Decision Making in a Complex world
An exclusive remote presentation by Prof. David Snowden, co-author of the front page article of the November 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review
• Using narrative in organisations
A brief demo of Cognitive Edge’s narrative software SenseMaker
• Invitation to participate in a South African project
Contribute to the development of a narrative database of Leadership & Decision Making stories
• Prof. Snowden’s HBR article on Decision Making
Receive a complimentary copy of the recent article in the HBR

Numbers are limited to 50, and R250 for a seat, so please let us know as soon as possible if you'll be joining us.

You can also download the Invite and Editors letter regarding Dave's article from this entry below­.

­Dave Snowden, founder of Cognitive Edge co-authored (with Mary Boone) the front page article of the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review.  For those of us who've been involved in Dave's complexity and narrative work over the years, this is a key milestone - indicative of how our way of thinking is starting to make in-roads into mainstream thinking.