narrative

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

Managing ethics?

The reality is that the realm of ethics is a profoundly complex problem, a problem that escapes direct management ... added to this complexity is the problem of human nature i.e. an unethical person is unlikely to admit to being unethical if asked. For organisations to effectively manage and report on ethics performance, a different approach is required – an approach that understands the complex nature of human behaviour, beliefs and values. To this end, we are exploring an offering that adoptis a complexity-based narrative methodology:

This blog entry on Open Forum got me thinking.  Specifically this paragraph:

"Find some truth tellers. The first thing every CEO must realize is that everyone is lying to him (her too). It just happens. They didn’t coin the phrase “shoot the messenger” for no reason. There are many wonderful organizations out there for CEOs that provide truth-telling services. Vistage is an international group whose tag line is something like “Have your answers questioned.” It’s pretty clear that their ideal customer is the CEO who recognizes that even people who are closest to them might shield them from important information and feedback. "

One of our key offerings is creating "upward" communication channels in organisations offering CEO's and executives the opportunity to access un-filtered narrative fragments, giving them a view of the inner dialogue happening in the organisation. A key question for us is: Do you really know what people are saying about your strategy, your team and the organisation when they're standing around the water cooler? ....

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.