Sparknow blog

Last year, one of the projects we worked on was the challenging history project which has now reported.

Challenging History is a manifesto for change in the way museums and heritage sites engage with contentious and sensitive histories. It is, at once, a community of like-minded individuals, a forum for discussion, a programme of ongoing professional development for practitioners and an advocate for change in the way our audiences engage with our shared history. It originated with the Challenging History series of seminars in 2009, held at the Tower of London (Historic Royal Palaces). The programme was conceived to explore the role, aims and outcomes of heritage and museum learning programmes in relation to difficult and controversial subjects.

It was a real pleasure...

If Emile Heskey is the answer, are we asking the right question?

Sunday’s depressing performance by the English team illustrates the old adage that knowledge out of context is just information. Despite both teams possessing the latest analytical technology, a more astute German team executed their tactical plan perfectly and embarrassed England. And historical contexts are important here; a non-goal scorer remains a non-goal scorer and is therefore unlikely to change the course of a game when coming on as a substitute.

KMUK 2010

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of chairing the annual 2 day UK knowledge management event (kmuk http://kcuk.wordpress.com/) held this year in Canary Wharf London. In addition to 120 or so senior practitioners the speakers were...

Rather in haste. So many blogs in my head, so few on paper.

However, I thought this article was a very interesting angle on the storytelling we do when faced with something we can make no sense of.

Paul Vallely is writing about how his family heard about the Derrick Bird killings while they were on a half term holiday in the Lakes. He writes about how in those circumstances we are ‘greedy’ for detail, resort to detail, must put our own stories in

And we drag ourselves into those stories by adding unrelated minutiae from our own daily existence into the experience. It is striking how many speakers weave into their story apparently unrelated details from their personal circumstance. “I heard about...

My old friends and colleagues at Telos Partners have been staging an event to celebrate the firm’s tenth birthday.

The venue was the vaults at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) – a series of interconnected subterranean spaces originally designed as riverfront warehouses. The womb-like environment was wonderfully appropriate. This was where Telos had its genesis, inspired by the Tomorrow’s Company Inquiry to create a consultancy dedicated to helping its clients deliver performance that can be sustained over time. Change and transformation are key themes in Telos’ work.

The vaults provided both an opportunity and a challenge:

• An opportunity in the sense that they are such a distinctive space – Sparknow loves spaces that take people out of their usual milieus, get...

Last week I was at the Communicators in Business Conference. Here are five fragments that, magpie-like, I brought back with me.

1 | emotional times ahead

The future belongs to women and to older people. By 2015 artificial intelligence will be as smart as human intelligence. By 2025 it will be a hundred times smarter. As computers take over the intellectual work, the people who matter will be those with interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.

2 | direction needed

Individuals are often passionate about their work but have little idea what they are actually supposed to be doing in terms of organizational objectives. No wonder only two in five employees rate their leaders as effective.

3 | planned confusion

Think of the leadership team as...

Here’s Madelyn Blair, talking about her recently published book “Riding the Current”.

I been feeling a deep, and rather surprising, sadness over the past couple of weeks. Finally I figured out that it was was to do with the knowledge transfer programme we researched, devised and oversaw for Museums, Libraries and Archives of London and the London Development Agency. The programme finished before Christmas, in terms of formal funding and programme activities. Since then, there’s been an evaluation and we’ve gathered in essays and materials from the programme archive to develop a small collection, as a report, which shows the story of the programme in a way that we hope provides some forward momentum.

I can’t yet quote from the report, although it’s very nearly done and will be doing the rounds of participants, contributors and advisory group pretty...

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical

Say rather that he’s apolitical

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down

That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun

For 30 years or so, I’ve treasured the wit and polish of Tom Lehrer and most especially ‘An Evening Wasted with’. So I’ve known, by name, of Wernher von Braun pretty much for ever.

So when I saw a biography by Michael Neufeld in the Smithsonian shop at Dulles Airport last week, there was no walking past. It turns out there was no sleep either on the flight back. I was gripped from start to finish (nearly finished, I skipped the last 100 pages or so). It’s a huge story and he was...

It’s not been easy trying to communicate to my partner what the Knowledge Transfer Programme is all about and how brilliant it’s been for all its participants. So the Hunterian Museum’s article on its new ‘soft skills’ modules, developed as a direct result of the Programme, was something tangible I could show my partner – here was the ‘so what’ for my doubting Thomas, clear evidence of the Programme’s results.

The mists lifted even higher as I suggested that maybe the regeneration programme he was working on could use some of these soft skill modules that the Hunterian had developed:

• Building Confidence
• Customer Service Training
• Diversity, Prejudice and Social Inclusion
• Identity and Self-Awareness
• Managing Loss and Transition
• Presentation Skills and...

I am in Telheiro a village in the Alentejo region of Portugal helping Mizette Nielson explore how she might keep the Manta Alentejana weaving craft alive. The visit is the idea of Alec Taylor a very affable and visionary Irishman who has developed the concept of the Virtual Advisory Board (VAB): a group of multi talented people that gets together over a weekend to provide advice and ideas to business owners.

It’s April 25th a big day in the calendar as on this day in 1974 a (relatively) bloodless coup overthrew the dictatorship that had ruled the country for decades and most of Portugal is engaged in celebration.

Looking up the hill through the mist that engulfs the Moorish castle that gives Monsaraz its...

For many, the story of citizenship no longer seem to work. And so, for the candidate, the key question is, what stories are broken and how can my story as a candidate heal or inspire or feed the hunger for a story of national government that works, that expresses the people’s voice? That’s the candidate’s mission in narrative terms.

Read on, Brown, Cameron, Clegg (strictly alphabetical, please note.)

This is from p.80 of Paul Costello’s book The Presidential Plot: the map, the story and the conspiracy to elect a president . I thought I’d look through my copy before going on Paul’s Obama walking tour of DC tomorrow and glad that I did given that it chimes so strongly with the British election...

Thus Paul Costello in the closing address at the Golden Fleece conference 2010.

He also said that the story most often starts when you get lost. Or maybe, as in my case, when you can’t get home.

Strangely, I’d been thinking about the importance of returns as a story concept, and here I am unable to return until at least Saturday and so lost, perhaps, in a story I wasn’t expecting.

I was lucky enough that Madelyn had recorded Paul on her iphone (great quality, astonishingly useful) and I wanted to listen over again to the lostness and think about it. So I’ve spent quite a bit of this morning listening back over to Paul and thinking about maps and lostness, maps and location, layers...

Our work with the Asian Development Bank in 2009 took us into the realm of creative producers in a way that delights me. We worked throughout 2009 to build a new narrative practice for the Bank, and two of the more visible products are a book – ADB, Reflections & Beyond – and a CD – Beyond, stories and sounds from ADB.

It was a tough challenge. The Bank wanted an oral history project and a coffee table book, podcasts and training programmes. I know from experience that oral history books and reminiscence are hard to do well. And as it turns out, it was even harder given that we had a pretty small clutch of interviewees and short interviews, rather than the long...

Here’s a small Easter storytelling egg. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about ‘who am I stories’ (See Annette Simmons), the small tears in the fabric of a professional front that allow the listener to see the frailties of the real person talking. These can easily be trivialised into kids and family side conversations, or golfing anecdotes, or over rehearsed into stories that are suppose to convey great personal significance but come off as manipulative technique.

In any case, I’ve noticed that I’m inclined to collect the good ones. So, for example recently at the cinema, I was struck by the true moment, with a sloppy old Hollywood twist thrown in by Clint Eastwood, when Morgan Freeman wobbled about in his Nelson Mandela accent and talked the...

Khao Lak, a tiny village in south west Thailand was one of the worst casualties of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26th December 2004. Whilst on holiday in this former rubber tapping community I was keen to learn the stories of the people who had survived the extraordinary natural physical phenomenon – apparently the second worst tsunami recorded in history.

It was with a sense of relief that I stumbled upon the Indian Ocean Tsunami Museum having faltered in my preliminary enquiries around the aftermath of the wave with my partner’s business colleagues in a Thai scuba diving company in Khao Lak. It was never going to be an easy story to unfold and I sensed the scars had healed over long ago. I later learnt that...

Last month in Manila as part of a new Human Resources strategy Asian Development Bank staff and Alumni were handed a book and cd, the culmination of an assignment to create a Living Archive for the bank that had begun back in November 2008. Here is the story of the assignment.

“…the story he told me about his work… made things come alive, and showed where my project fitted into a much larger and more complex picture than I had foreseen or understood.” Rajat M Nag Managing Director General.

In November 2008 ADB officials and alumni embarked on a journey to find new ways to share reflections, insights and experience. Recognizing the power of narrative to stimulate dialog and unearth the hidden stories that best...

As I sit here waiting to go to the airport, what are my abiding memories:

1 Of laughter and teamwork – the A team and the Super team – and the competitive spirit that emerges when you try and interview close to 100 people in 8 days in 3 locations; from the floor of a lounge; to the meeting room at HQ; to the Ministers office; to a small office in Darfur.

2 Of the people who work in this industry and whether there are stereotypes? For some its getting the sand between their toes and the dust in their hair, for others its the smell of the earth after the rain has fallen. Its the battling against all the elements and the unceasing struggle to help...

Over the past few years we have tried to strike a balance between doing and sharing. This year is no different and we are participating in a number of events where we will share some of the techniques and approaches we’ve used in client assignments:

• In April Victoria and David Gunn who worked as part of our team on the major piece of work we’ve just completed for Asian Development Bank in Manila will be showcasing the audio component at the annual Golden Fleece Storytelling event in Washington.
• May sees Philip and Christopher conducting an interactive working session at the annual Communicators in Business conference to be held in the UK. They will be illustrating some of the techniques applied in an assignment for Royal...

In the collections of the British Museum the world can write the new histories that it needs to understand its past and shape its future.

That’s what it says on the website. And now the British Museum are working with the BBC over the whole of this year to tell A history of the world in a hundred objects

This delights me, as objects and collections have always been at the heart of Sparknow’s work with storytelling.

• as place, to dress a room as a different space, say about having people bring objects that hold a message or story and have these objects become an exhibit or wall display
• anthropologically, as ways of witnessing an organisation and piecing...

Storytelling, earthquakes and getting through came to me through Doug Lipman’s newsletter today. It says so much about storytelling so economically. And that’s Doug all over. I was lucky enough to be with Doug presenting at what must have been the first conference on organisations and storytelling in New York in April 2000 or 2001. Madelyn Blair will probably remember, because she was there too.

I was talking about our work with doctors and nurses and patients and volunteers and others about working together to story a vision for a new integrated health centre which became the brief for an architects competition. And Doug came up to me and gave me some very beautifully pointed feedback about my own storytelling.

He’s a great teacher, a...