Sparknow blog

This is, I confess, a very selfish blog at least in the first part. A couple of years back I was lucky enough to see Helen Chadwick’s Dalston Songs and blogged about it

My neighbour (who would like me to point out that if anyone would like us to include a professional accordionist in our Sparknow offer, she’s ready and willing), is a friend of Helen’s and recently let me know that it’s coming round again at the Royal Opera House in early February.

I decided to wait until I’d bought my own slug of tickets before posting this blog. Yup, I really did.

I exhort, urge, beg you to get to this show. This is what I said about it in the email...

For Boxing Day we’ve selected the tale of a 12 year old living in Wiesbaden who tells of a very modern patchwork family Christmas situation.

Christmas Day from Sparknow’s Financial Controller Roger Doughty. A story of the 11 year old who gets his first Meccano set which his father spends Christmas Day playing with! And please listen out for the condensed milk disaster.

Day 3’s submission comes from Madelyn Blair. A tale of a 9 year old in wonderment on Christmas Eve as her father crafts the perfect Christmas Tree.

The second in our series of Christmas reminiscences.

Here Julie relives Christmas in Yorkshire and remembers the excitement of coming home to find the Christmas tree up in the window and the smell of Old Spice after shave.

Since 1997 Sparknow has had the privilege of working with clients in a variety of locations many of them with very different ways of celebrating Christmas Day.

We thought it would be nice to hear from a number of friends and “family” about the special times they’ve had.

From now until the New Year we will be publishing a set of reminiscences – please click on the attachment to hear each person’s Christmas tale.

The annual Online Conference often contains a session that challenges. 2009 was no different, the Day 3 keynote from author Charlene Li was thought provoking and entertaining as she illustrated how global corporations use social technology to listen to and interact with their clients.

Thursday had not begun well: the Piccadilly and District Lines were both shut and as a result the session kicked off late to accommodate those who got stuck in a tunnel. So Charlene had her worked cut out to warm up the 400 or so who made it in time.

Charlene’s style is chatty and engaging and her use of images to illustrate stories one I can identify with. She began by recounting the tale of Canadian country singer Dave Carroll who...

Its that time of the year again when the great and the good of the information industry gather in London for the annual bout of introspection otherwise known as the Online Conference and Exhibition. I was there last week with one of our client’s Ellen Collins of MLA London who was talking about the Information Literacy pilot programme Sparknow had helped run and in particular how “train the trainer” workshops had been conducted for two groups of librarians from across London who handle business enquiries from the public. As an aside it was good to finally meet Anthea Stratigos the CEO and cofounder of Outsell Inc the US based provider of information on the information industry whose forecasts, trend analysis and observations are usually spot on.

It’s strange how people start talking a different language when they get to work. Only a few days ago I was waiting to board an easyJet flight to Inverness when the following announcement crackled over the tannoy system:

At this point in time we’d like to ask those who purchased a speedy boarding ticket to come forward.

Now easyJet is a relatively young airline. It likes to cultivate an image that’s fun and informal. So it jars when it uses words and phrases like ‘at this point in time’ and ‘purchased’. On board we were treated to further delicacies: ‘throughout the duration of the flight’, ‘in the instance of an emergency’, ‘the lights will be illuminated’. I found myself wondering whether easyJet isn’t every bit as...

50 years ago tomorrow, I was born on Tarawa, a coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean, capital of what is known now as Kiribati and was then the Gilbert and Ellis islands. My mother struggled with a long labour, and eventually, a forceps delivery by a drunken doctor who, as labour dragged on, took himself off at one point for a top up and to read up on caesereans, which he’d never performed. Although by no means the family linguist, she gave birth in Gilbertese. My father waded through shark infested waters, his bicycle held over his head, to visit us in hospital.

How did my parents, a young couple from Northolt and Greenford in the suburbs of west London, end up in the Gilberts,...

The culture of change has reached Cultural Revolution proportions with no opportunity for new working methods to put down roots. Can it be that in wading through the plethora of business plans, capability reviews, skills audits, zero-based reviews and other excrescences of the management age, we have indeed forgotten what diplomacy is all about?

Labour killed the British diplomatic tradition of the valedictory dispatch in 2006 after this, the parting shot of Sir Ivor Roberts on leaving his post in Rome in 2006. Parting shots is a series of 15 minute programmes on Radio Four about this tradition and some of the things that were said.

Sir Ivor Roberts joined the Foreign Office in 1968 and retired nearly 40 years later. That’s a...

Thanks to Michael Margolis for this TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the dangers of a single story. I read ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ when I was in Manila, and it’s really a masterpiece of subtle, simple, complex storytelling from multiple perspectives set against a shocking period in Nigerian history, the Biafran war. This TED talk is a brilliant insight into the dangers of having a single story.

I think I won’t blog any more. Adichie says everything I’d like to say about the importance of holding in mind multiple voices and versions in order to approach what lies at the heart of things.

I’ll end with the Solpersteine.

Let me start with a handout I’ve been writing on story practice – partly because it needs to be written and used, and partly because I’m grooving into find a book voice that I like. I discovered in writing it (writing as discovery is important for me – I rarely know what I think or feel until I’ve fumbled to find ways to express it) that I really do prize the gathering in of raw materials. Someone once introduced me to the world of bushtuckering (foraging for carrots and potatoes in the autumn ploughed fields of Suffolk in our case, so pretty safe bushtuckering). And I think that’s a bit what it’s like gathering the raw ingredients from which to stew up...

My antennae have been out recently for the splicing together of different worlds and languages in an attempt to make a gateway for the reader from a more familiar to a less familiar world. I’ve also been plundering the library at the Tavistock, where I’m supposed to be reading about working groups, for things on narrative and narrative therapy, and anything that looks like a way of writing that slightly startles and unsettles, so making the space for the reader to breathe more deeply. This is all entirely selfish, as I’ve finally started moving into writing the book I promised the publisher longer ago that I care to confess and I’m trying to find a voice for it.

One of the books I stumbled over is by...

I’ve noticed the word ‘beyond’ coming up a lot in connection with our story work recently and noticing the distinction between stories that take you beyond and stories that take you behind.

The Wellcome Institute has an image award called ‘The stories beyond the images’, whose storytelling is layered:

• the image takes you into a story
• the story takes you into a place in science you might not otherwise visit
• the intentions, techniques and ambitions behind the images take you into the worlds of light microscopy, electron microscopy, confocal and multiphoton microscopy, high-resolution episcopic microscopy.

Obscurely, I was drawn into the world of microscopy by the gorgeous Darwin exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge over the summer, where I...

This weekend I made a semi annual visit to Sparknow’s Financial Controller to look at the numbers and our pipeline. Keeping abreast of a rapidly evolving business is a challenge as the diversity of client assignments expands. And it is vitally important to have a tight handle on cash flows and to be meeting deadlines and quality standards.

So it’s a sunny Sunday as I make my way down the A303 past Stonehenge pausing to stop at one of the UK’s longstanding roadside institutions, the Little Chef café. The chain of cafes has had a makeover. The garish red colour is still much in evidence yet they have decided to note fifty years of existence by making each outlet a living archive. What really struck me was...

I know I bang on about The Wire. And there’s only so much you can do to place that kind of provocation inside an organisation. But I did want to share with you this extract from the booklet that accompanies the wildly expensive CD:

There are two ways of travelling. One with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time…but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and...

It’s all about noise this week, and weird confluences.

Where to start?

Well, when I was writing about our soundscape experiments, I quite forgot to share with you the sound of the knowledge economy, shared with me by Paul Riches of BT. He made it a little while back for a presentation and was very generous in passing it on and allowing me to share it with you.

And since I wrote about the reasonably scary forest, the V&A Telling Tales exhibition has opened, so you can hear Frank Frenzy of Luminous Frenzy’s work for yourselves.

And then, I was in Ely Cathedral on Sunday, very taken by the carefully curated brokenness of the Lady Chapel, a reminder of the destruction that...

Resilience: accounting for the non-computable is an article worth looking through, whether your interest is in ecology and the environment, or in how to assemble knowledge from many sources and use it to sharpen insight. The abstract runs:

Plans to solve complex environmental problems should always consider the role of surprise. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to emphasize known computable aspects of a problem while neglecting aspects that are unknown and failing to ask questions about them. The tendency to ignore the noncomputable can be countered by considering a wide range of perspectives, encouraging transparency with regard to conflicting viewpoints, stimulating a diversity of models, and managing for the emergence of new syntheses that reorganize fragmentary knowledge.

Surprise seems such an important word...

Randomly, I picked up the Film bit of last Friday’s Guardian on the Tube.

Randomly, ‘beyond the silver screen’ or something very like it as a title, was Sparknow’s first event, in the summer of 1998, to explore digital storytelling and the role of image with Judah Passow, who’s work continues to amaze me. Complex storytelling in situations riddled with conflict. The importance of witnesses with integrity and real craftsmanship. These things hold true over 10 years on.

Randomly, I was drawn to read it and it’s really worth it.

In short, we’re ‘swimming in storylines’. In particular this:

Let’s crunch some hypothetical numbers. Take a media-aware person of, say, 30 years of age. Call him Ollie Overwhelmed. When Ollie’s great-grandfather...