Sparknow blog

It’s the darling little “breakout areas” that really tug at the heartstrings. On the concept drawings, there were all these attractive women in trouser suits drinking caramel lattes and laughing with their mouths open. Can that really be what led to those desolate little colonies of vinyl pouffes, ugly tables at awkward heights, and abandoned crisp packets?

Sam Leith made me laugh out loud writing in the Guardian this week about open plan spaces. So many anecdotes to share, so little time. The Skandinavian business school with empty formal breakout areas, while everyone squashes into some other space – anywhere so long as it’s not authorised; the desperation of those in open plan who are driven to hide at hotdesks, even if they have...

In haste, as I’m dashing out, but this seems too important to skip over.

Surgical checklists save lives is a story about how the simplest of simple interventions, properly adopted, has a dramatic effect on risk management. Analogue, plain, everyday lists. Note in the article how it feels it was beneath some hospitals and surgeons to deign to something so ordinary. And not just a few lives – the lists cut mistakes by 40%. 40%.

“Risk management checklists save banks” anyone?

Knowledge management, change management, collaborative working, new ways of working, transformation programmes. The subtle stuff, the complex interaction, the building of social capital is critical. And so are lists.

As ever, I’m reminded of the story of the youngest princess, banished because...

Frank Duffy, the D in DEGW, has written a useful article Lumbering to Extinction in the Digital Field about the design of the office. Worth a read by anyone interested in knowledge transfer, whether thinking of the built environment or the complex layers of current working practice and how they might play out spatially and peripatetically. He makes a good case for the death of the ‘brittle’ monolithic office building with standardised templates for layouts, and I think the analogy with the autocracy of hierarchy is worth drawing out.

I recall from the MLA research that Alan Johnson, the economist from the GLA on our advisory group, was particularly compelling in interview about how work has ceased in almost all areas to be...

Let me preface my first remarks here by saying they are entirely unpolitical, but I do want to share an eavesdropping on the bus from Saturday, and the only way I can share it is to tell you that my daughter hauled me out of bed on Saturday and to the march from Hyde Park Corner to the Israeli embassy (in passing I will notice the number of gloriously old fashioned banners for Dudley NUTs and Quakers and Haringay Unisons and so on that had been ferreted from cupboards and put to work, and the number of confident young muslim women, headscarved and loudspeakered, who seemed on very equal terms with the men doing the same…also a man selling olive oil just by Speakers Corner for some reason)....

The Science of Islam really got me thinking about the thirst for new knowledge last night. Jim Al-Khalili is a physicist and travels through Syria, Iran, Tunisia and Spain telling the story of the leaps in Arabic knowledge between the 8th and the 14th century. He makes a good case for the tangible legacy of Arabic learning, and for science being beyond Islam, Christianity, atheism, or any ownership at all.

In the programme he spoke extensively of The Translation Movement – a Bagdad based movement whose enthusiasm for the translation of Greek texts into Arabic generated for me a couple of insights that it would be well worth using as a lens through which to examine organisational knowledge and innovation:

• the eagerness to...

The second working session at ADB was held in the Atrium, a beautiful setting, with plants and trees all around us. It was conceived as a mixture between a presentation and a working session to enable everyone who attended to have an experience of the power of story and narrative.

I’d been working on the session since before we left London and I was really happy with what I’d planned. But after hearing about the over 100 people who had gathered in this space to hear the news that Barrack Obama had been elected the 44th President of the United States of America, inspiration struck and I decided to use President-Elect Barrack Obama’s victory speech as the heart of my presentation.

So after opening the...

It has been an astonishingly hectic few months. Sometimes in such situations when you are very close to events you lose perspective and need to reflect – so here goes.

Despite the gloomy prognosis everywhere about the world economy Sparknow is as busy today as we have been in years. We are close to finishing the Defra Horizon Scanning and Futures Toolkit, have just completed a really interesting piece of work helping Natural England to tell the story of their knowledge management programme and reported back to Asian Development Bank on a really stimulating trip to Manila. We are in the middle of work to help equip Royal Mail to build an involvement kit for managers to help with business transformation, working on knowledge transfer pilot projects...

Ten people sitting around a large table in a windowless, low-ceilinged room, animatedly tell stories of great examples of their organisation working at its best to deliver its mandate and embody its values. One, a dark haired young man with flashing eyes, tells a story of such commitment the other members of his group listen wide-eyed. His story is about pushing the envelope of the official processes, going below the ‘line’ and tapping into unofficial processes to get the job done.

The ten are taking part in a working session, which looks at the place of story and narrative in their organisation. These are impact stories, and it is clear they are important to the tellers and listeners alike. They come from various departments in the organisation,...

Carol Russell and I are on our way back to the UK having spent a very interesting and challenging week in Manila working with one of the region’s leading development banks.

During an incredibly full and hectic week of interviews, practice group sessions and surveying we have heard many moving stories of the impact development banks can have on the lives of real people and communities.

I’ve been inspired by people like the water expert and Community of Practice leader who has spent 16 years trying to ensure that global development communities pool knowledge for the benefit of all mankind and of the pride and passion with which they tell their stories and the impact on real people’s lives.

Among the audience at our big...

I am at my desk looking out on a cold crisp sunny morning having had plenty of time over a wet weekend to reflect on a very stimulating meeting of the UK Appreciative Inquiry network set against a backdrop of continued evaporation of confidence in the financial systems and a host of depressing billboards proclaiming a Recession.

My decision to attend was made fairly late: too many conflicting priorities it seemed but I’d reflected on the need to create some thinking space, to take a time out and mix with people whose enthusiasm levels I found energising the first time I went.

Held at the lovely Canonbury Academy in Islington it is an eclectic group of about two dozen. Many such as Anne Radford are 10...

Here’s a gorgeous little gift of story, thanks to my friend Josie. I really don’t want to spoil the aha moment 2 minutes in, so I’m begging you to go and look first before reading the rest of this blog……

See?

A marvel of invention, a triumph of simplicity, the imagination runs riot in the way that only the best ideas can bring on. I always remember Max Boisot’s useful idea that although there’s a continuum from conversation to commodification along which axis one slithers up and down in the knowledge and information transfer process, the really clever thing is to take a thing from one setting and move it to another (abstraction, Max called it), and, hey presto, come up with something new and...

Two meetings today, both fascinating and rewarding, each with quite a different feeling. Since I last wrote about feelings as information, this seems like a good time to put that into practice and observe both from about the same distance.

The first meeting was as a direct result of the MLA work. We met with someone recently retired from the Senior Civil Service, who’d got in touch after reading the reports and was very kind and encouraging about the kind of method we’d used and the results we’d had from it. We spoke at some length about the increasing interest in narrative and oral history in cultural settings, but that socially, politically and in business narrative is, if anything getting more lost despite being more talked...

Someone mentioned to me on Friday that the Sparknow website conveys to a passing stranger without an axe to grind a kind of impression (to some at least) that we do something or another with emotions in organisational setting, but of a rather obscure and fuzzy kind.

Naturally my first reaction was emotional, and not altogether warm. It reminds me rather of the way in which, in my olden banking days, I was labelled ‘creative’ with the unmistakeable message conveyed that this was not altogether desirable.

But second thoughts lead me to say yes, that’s just what we do.

I thought I’d assemble various experiences of this week – ranging from marking knowledge management dissertations, to attending the Craft Council Award ceremony to sitting in...

I am in Prague: my first time here and I can see why people wax lyrical about the architecture and scenery. Yet the hotel, as can be seen in the entrance to the dining room caption, is devoid of artefacts which is quite odd considering the abundance of fine art everywhere else. It feels stark and cold and makes me reflect on the need for objects around which conversations are often stimulated and much of our work is based.

Sabine Jaccuad and I were here to give a presentation / workshop to a group of senior internal communications professionals on some of our work: it seemed to be well received and stimulated a lot of conversation around the range of narrative techniques we apply. It was gratifying...

A plum pudding week. Note to self. Visitors are good for getting you out and about.

Yesterday we went and saw Hadrian at the British Museum. So much more to him than a wall. And how do you convey and sustain the imperial image in the reach of such a vast empire? Workshops would churn marble busts of the imperial family, so that people would buy and put in their homes. The coins were used for branding slogans (Hadrian, Restitutor and so on) and had silhouettes of the imperial family on them so that people could get to know their rulers. Fascinating that we might have got quite the wrong end of the stick because of a dodgy statue

What is the memo that Hadrian’s Director...

I’ve an American guest over and so parked the piling in-tray and headed with her and my daughter to the V & A to the Cold War exhibition.

Interesting as a scrap of knowledge-transfer witnessing that Madelyn remembers the Cold War and experienced it from the US, Laura studied it (origins of Cold War 1945 – 1962, containing Communism – wars by proxy in Korea and Vietnam) and I know virtually nothing about it except that I’m interested in writing a book (working title Unexploded Ordnance) about my father’s chance role as a District Officer in the British Colonial Service in one of the British H Bomb tests in 1957. This made for an interesting conversation space afterwards.

Anyway, there was tons of interest, likely...

Chris, Carol & I have been working on an event-sequence to help managers communicating change. We’ve been designing and redesigning small bite sized experiences that string together and, very carefully, build the possibility for new conversations and a different kind of mood of shared experience. From you (you being an amorphous bad enemy) and me (poor victim of you) to we (all in this together, even if the going is rough, and we’re all making tough choices).

I have a sudden echo of a memory here of Peter Marris, the sociologist In The Politics of Uncertainty (1982) he writes of precisely these questions of personal and collective perspectives on risk. What does it take to get people to see risk and collective and long term and...

I was rootling around in old stuff and doing a bit of pruning and gardening and found a note to self reflecting on our work with Kentish Town Health Centre in 2002, and how some of the modus operandi than has become part of our lasting practice:

• Democratising the workshop space One challenge was always to make sure that the doctors were not professionally and locationally superior in this workshop, which was on their territory and sponsored by one of the doctors. Dr Roy McGregor was very game when we asked him to be willing to pipe down during the day and gave us permission to start the day by telling people we’d told him that it was our day, not his, and so...

It is becoming increasingly clear that these are times of great change. Of parameter shift, of discomfort, of fear for the future. And perhaps for some of opportunity too, but still too immaterially so to articulate or even see. So why reflect on tea rounds against the background of our Sunday papers full of falling banks, defaulting promises, and uncertain options?

I am currently working with a client on a takeover. And at a critical emotional landmark in the process, when the acquired realise that their world is changing, the world as they know it today that is, conversation in the office veered towards tea and coffee. Because in this particular organisation this involves mugs that are porcelain, chunky, branded, and come from a kitchen cupboard before...

By way of segue into the main text, a mildly interesting note from the sparkive embedded in my memory, an anecdote sometimes shared, but never yet written down.

Sparknow is a double accident of a name. Originally we were very spirited about Illuminati as a name, because we’d all be reading The Mapmakers Dream by James Cowan, and we rather fancied ourself, cartographically speaking (we were bashing the mapping metaphor very hard indeed in those days):

Rumours of my work are reaching the farthest corners of the world. People who normally would not communicate with me are now doing so in the interest of sharing their knowledge. This is deeply satisfying to me. It means that there are others like myself, living as obscurely as...