Sparknow blog

For MLA London, both for the Bridge building pilots we’re working with, now for Challenging History, we’ve been quite dedicated to exploring the role that sketchbooks can play – a largely analogue tool for today’s knowledge professional. I become more and more convinced as I settle into using my own sketchbook that this could be a key evaluation tool, so I thought I’d share the guidance we’ve written by way of encouragement to others:

…managers, under the pressure of high-tempo day-to-day activities, often fail to make time for slower reflective practice. ……A reflective sketchbook is not a diary, is not a travel journal and is not a place to keep everyday notes. It is a place consciously to articulate half-formed ideas and ambitions...

I know we owe you the feedback from the story thing the other week. Shawn will be over here in a couple of weeks and I think we’re going to tackle it then. These things slip away from one like slippery fish. You think you’ve netted one and it wriggles off to swim free. Instead then.

I bunked off to go to the newly opened Richard Long exhibition at Tate Britain this afternoon. I’m quite weary and needed to feed my soul a bit in the relent production of work to deadlines that seems to be koshing me just now. (All greatly interesting work of the kind we delight in and pursue with verve and rigour, but it comes at a price as it’s so often...

From 1958 – 1997 the Radiophonic Workshop was the BBC’s experimental unit for electronic sound. There was a great article a little while back that put me on to them. I put in my growing pile of to-be-filed noticings, and then heard on the Radio that they were playing a one off gig last night ten years on. There’s lots in this. Innovation-wise, I was struck by the broom cupboard arrangements they had and, in particular, by this distinctive insight into their work being a craft, not an art, always delivering into an actual programme:

On the continent, state-run stations such as Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Radio Italia funded their own sound laboratories dedicated to exploring the new tape-editing techniques and grappling with...

I had a really intriguing email today from someone who wanted to talk to me a bit more about

large scale intentional community

I rather patronisingly (meaning to be witty) wrote back to ask if the intentional was an unintentional abridgement of international. And of course not it wasn’t, it was intentional:

I used the term intentional communities, as they refer to the top-down and relatively formal approach that has been taken.

This provides its own unique challenges – as people without any previous experience in setting up communities refer to their hierarchical and boundaried organisational design mind-sets.

Serves me right. Of course he’s right.

Anyway, with intentional community in mind I rushed off to the Woodwind Ensemble...

I’m supposed to be blogging a thoughtful and quietly impressive reflection on Story Week, but I’ve been distracted by finding this in my junkmail this morning. It’s a festival called How the Light Gets In, to which I’ve been alerted too late to attend. What I’m interested in though is that it appears to be Britain’s first philosophy festival, among other things, and that the lines of enquiry are actually very similar to those we’re exploring with the MLA Exchange programme, although we’re coming at it sideways by looking through the lens of archives, museums, collections, history, heritage and its role in today’s businesses. We’re meeting next week at John Lewis, to look at how they use their archive as an active business resource. I...

Chris Heiman continues his account of his Golden Fleece experiences

Day 2 (‘The Golden Fleece’ – day) was more of a workshop day, with a few sessions in plenary and a lot of breakout sessions in smaller groups. I had been invited to act as the host of the day and guide people through the programme. Being a theatre director with an acting background, I wondered what I could bring to this task that would be relevant to the day but also to do with my particular background – because otherwise, why not get someone else? I decided that while we all tell stories, the actor’s way is to get inside the story and embody it, ‘be’ it, as opposed to talking about it ‘from the outside’.

The International Storytelling Weekend took place in Washington DC on 17th / 18th April 2009. The first day at the Smithsonian Institute had the theme ‘Storytelling and High-Performance Teams’. It was mainly a lecture-based day while day two, on the theme of ‘Why Story Matters Now More Than Ever: Exploring Contemporary Challenges’, had more of a workshop format. Both days were incredibly rich in content. I had the pleasure of hosting/running the second day. More on that tomorrow. Today I’ll just tell you a bit about the lecture series.

How to create high-performance teams

Steve Denning set the tone for the first day in his keynote. His definition of high-performance teams struck me: he said according to his findings they were not only exceptionally productive...

So its Friday and here we are at the end of Story Week. Many thanks to all of you who contributed and here is our final story – something serious…

The organisors of the annual online information conference have caught the story bug and invited us to invite you to think about submitting a request to speak at this year’s event:

- Maybe you’ve been involved in creating a new application for Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo or Google?

- Have you made the move to the semantic web to deal with the digital explosion and the need for greater “intelligence” in your information?

- Perhaps you’ve found ways to exploit new Online tools to transform the way your organisation does its business?

- Have you changed your management processes to cope with this “always connected world”?

If you have and you’d like to tell your story to the world then please contact them via online-information

Our fourth story for Story Week is from the UK – please tell us what you think.

No red signal when minister plays with train set by Adam Sherwin (From Times UK Online).

All aboard the Adonis Express. Frustrated commuters will get direct access to the Transport Minister next week when Lord Adonis embarks upon a railway voyage to criss-cross Britain in six days. The Minister will board the Paddington to Truro sleeper service on Easter Monday, just one man, his laptop and a £375 standard class Rail Rover ticket.

On Saturday he will arrive in York after a 1,500-mile Michael Palin-style trip, involving 45 trains and extensive knowledge of the timetable. He will speed (hopefully) through Cornwall, East Anglia, the West Midlands and up...

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to Story Week so far. Continuing with our theme of “leadership”, today we are featuring a story from Dr Fiona Wood, who was recognised as “Australian of the Year” for her work after the Bali Bombings. And we’d still like to hear your ideas for Friday’s story.

When I saw the burns patients and I saw that we needed something radical to actually cover these large areas, that had to be more… They had to be smarter than traditional split-thickness skin grafting. We had to be able to do this better. And that was, I guess, the gauntlet that I threw down to myself. On the Sunday morning after the Bali bombing I got a call from the registrar, who...

Day 2 of Story Week is here. Yesterday we had a video with a big Story. Today we have a snippet, a small story of a day-to-day interaction in a workplace. Our theme for the week is leadership, so look at the story in this light. Think how you would feel in the same circumstances. And of course, please pass this on to your networks and encourage them to join the fun. The more, the merrier. N.B. We have yet to finalise a story for Friday – is there a video of a story on the theme of leadership (preferably involving a woman) that you’d like to suggest?

… we organised a workshop, it was really high pressure and done at very short notice. It ended up...

The Story Week is here! Over the next 5 days, we'll be offering you 5 stories of leadership - some momentous, some more low-key - and we're inviting you to tell us what you think of them. After you have viewed, read or heard the story,we'd like you to fill out the form below and maybe tell us a story of your own. We will be publishing (under a creative commons license) the aggregate results from this little experiment and also some of the stories that you tell us. So without further ado...let's crack on (and scroll down a bit to get to the end). Please get friends and colleagues involved too: the more the merrier.

In a desperate attempt to ship coals to Newcastle, I’ve had a fascinating afternoon with sixth term students of film production at the London Film School at the kind invitation of Margaret Glover. Laughably, I was supposed to teach them something about storytelling. I tried, but really they taught me more.

Here’s what I did:

• get them to bring an object that could be used to introduce their dreams and ambitions as a future film producer
• they chatted about this object with someone else and then the other introduced them back, through their object
• invite 3 storyholders to offer the turning point moment of a film project they’d experienced personally, and then have the detail around this turning point interviewed out of them...

Last week I paid a second visit to the annual Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) event held in the same venue (Excel in London’s Docklands) as the recent G20 summit. In 2008 the place was abuzz with new ideas. This year the atmosphere was much more muted and the talk not of expansion but more on how to keep existing employees motivated / engaged.

I attended a couple of “Topic Tasters” and a learning session. The latter held in an open forum sought to demonstrate the difficulty in getting people to embrace change. Asking total strangers to observe each other and then make 5 changes to their own appearance, which their newly found “partner” was supposed to spot was bound to cause angst among...

I’m going to be a bit indiscreet here about the behind-the-scenes barney I’ve been having with Matt Moore of Innotecture. He and I have been playing a game of story tasks, which he has, inventively, worked to turn into a story competition that we’ll be running (Innotecture, Sparknow, Anecdote) in May. It’s a rather neat use of google docs I think, so I hope they don’t invoke their draconian and greedy copyright clause and snaffle it in some naughty way.

Anyway, in order to get the competition up and running, we’ve been working between ourselves to dream up criteria we can all agree on as to what makes a good story. It turns out that we have profound disagreements, which we’ll no doubt have to sweep...

In haste I’m afraid (and acutely aware of derelicted duty while I’ve turned my attention elsewhere), but what a brilliant use of an archive to create living history, and a fusion of narrative, analysis, facts and stories around a complex subject:

Iraq war stories

There’s also a nice ending to my blog in January about the importance shoes in storytelling, which prompted Irene Stemler, whose Heroic Acts in Humble Shoes project I referred to, to get in touch. Her book

, a collection of personal nursing testimony in the US, is about to be published and looked like a gorgeous example of storytelling with verve and purpose to transform in this case a network of professionals. The blurb:

Each story opens with a photograph...

I’ve just come back from a couple of weeks working on story with a client in Asia Pacific and it was immensely interesting for many reasons. We’re working on 3 fronts:

• to review stories of impact and value that are generated and used in different settings by the organisation, and see how the processes and products can be redeveloped to be more valuable
• to take a look at the history and hidden stories and see how that legacy can be brought into view and built on so that the present and future are building deliberately on the past
• to develop a small network of ‘narrative practitioners’ who work with us on these, and other aspects of the way the organisation uses story to change...

I may be bold enough to guess that this is the only link to The Daily Mail you’ll ever see me blog.

Research shows that too much thinking spoils your golf. Those who chewed over their last and next shots did much worse than those that just whacked the ball, or did puzzles in between. Apparently something called verbal overshadowing means that your language centres are overactive and get in the way of your movements.

This reminds me of an excellent book, The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathon Haidt, which uses the analogy of the relationship between mahoot and elephant to describe the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

So should we throw away the ideas of the reflective organisation. Thinking and...

By Victorian times the distinction between the artisan and the intellectual was well entrenched in British society and still is today.But with markets, and assumptions about the marketplace, tumbling day by day, we have a chance to think again about the relationship between business and craftsmanship:

• Size and intimacy. As people fall out of large organisational structures into a smaller settings, the idea of the quasi-domestic mediaeval workshop has its place again. Lets take the idea of office, workplace, office at home, and look at a balance of autonomy and obedience to authority, independent and supervised work. Lets encourage ideas of individuality, not individualism, even if this is at the expense of short term gain and speed. Lets encourage ideas of apprenticeship and mastery, and...