stories

One of the questions Sonja and I often get when introducing ourselves is this, "Why use the word narrative? We find the word "story" easier to understand."

In response we've said that the word "narrative" has more gravitas to it and communicates that we're more than just story-tellers. However, of late we've begun to use a way of describing narrative that Anecdote use: the difference between big "S" story and small "s" story. Here's what I mean ...

I've recently begun an experiment ... I've joined Twitter. Some have admonished me for being so late in joining the party, and others have responded with a quizzical look that says "is this the thing that geeks do?"

A week into it and I have found it to be quite a natural extension to the status updates I do on Facebook, but with an edge. Twitter interests me because of the unstructured way in which people can broadcast thoughts, activities, links to interesting material, and well, just about anything that can be converted into 140 characters of text. In short, each "tweet" is a fragment of narrative. It is, as Scott Stratten wrote, the conversation that's happening, right now. It is also a platform that exposes our human desire to broadcast and share our stories - the stories about who we are, where we are and what we are.

Now, lets turn the thinking from a social network towards how this might work in organisations ...

Why are we so afraid to admit to making a mistake?  Failure, it seems, is universally seen as something to be avoided at all costs.  In a recent project where we investigated safety practices in mining, one of the key issues we identified was the tendency to try to hide failure by shifting blame, not reporting near misses, and scape-goating.  This, in an industry where learning from other's mistakes can save lives.

Broadly speaking, the heart of our business is about the gathering of stories (many stories) within organisations so that decision makers can better understand their organisation or problem they are facing. In a sense, we're story-aggregators.

Online content aggregators like Afrigator do a great job of funneling African generated web content into one easy-to-use place - that's a semi-official description. But what I think aggregators like Afrigator do, is to funnel stories, and fragments of stories. The challenge with dealing with this many stories is how to filter them so that one can make sense of what they collective is saying. This is done by searching for keywords and topics, but wouldn't it be cool if we could use Afrigator as a measure of the pulse of African stories?

I came across a great little anecdote while doing some research for a sports related project Sonja and I are working on - it will hopefully translate into a television series next year, but more of that once we're actually allowed to talk about it :) Here's the anecdote:

At the 150th birthday celebration of Grey College, Ryk Neethling gave an address in which he attributed his Olympic success to his education and upbringing at Grey. He recounted an experience he had with Russian swimming icon Alexander Popov, who attempted to speak to the Old Grey shortly before the relay world record in Athens. Neethling was oblivious to the approach by Popov, and stared "straight through him" as he was so focused. Popov said he knew then that a great performance was about to happen.
 
This anecdote got me thinking about how, if we are able to ask the right questions of a story in sport...

As part of a mining safety project we're currently involved in, we conducted interviews with several key industry stakeholders.  During one of these interviews we were told the following story:

A worker at a mine that has recently experienced a spate of fatal accidents told investigators that he knew the reason why there were so many accidents at this mine, and he also said that they would continue unless certain measures were taken.  According to him, the "ancestors" were angry because they were not consulted before the mine decided to allow women to work underground. Until they were appeased by a "cleansing ceremony", the accidents would continue.