Sparknow blog

I mentioned Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World recently in a blog, particularly pleased at chancing on ‘consilience’ or the jumping together of knowledge from different places.

Well, that certainly happened in our recent Sparknow workshopping team (Chris, Carol, Penny, Will, Victoria with Paul hovering, ever helpful, in the background). Certain other Darwininan qualities showed themselves in their very best light too – variation, selection, inheritance, flexibility, diffuse control, adaptability. And most especially redundancy.

Redundancy in critical systems is necessary to assure needed functions can be performed in the event of changing circumstances. In many life forms, alternate strategies for meeting vital functions – where failure can undermine viability – have evolved. Energy generation is an example where duplicative systems have...

A high point from the IABC conference yesterday was the opening talk by J.W. Marriott, Jr., Chairman and CEO of Marriott International. He was here (at the Hilton, as he did not fail to point out) to receive the 2008 Excel Award for excellence in communication, an award given to a business leader. As a great-grand father who has learnt to blog and communicate globally via new media channels to his key stakeholders, it was compelling to see how much key stakeholder to him meant the Marriott “Associates” from around the world. And that so much of his blog is about the company’s history, stories, anecdotes and people. And what he learns while on the road visiting, listening and mucking in across the Marriott International network.

I am in New York for the International Association of Business Communicators conference. Walking around the streets near the mid-town Hilton, it is impossible not to chance upon MOMA. And today there was action. W 54th was closed to traffic because sculptures were being moved around. Many people walking through stopped to look at large pieces of metal being lifted into the air, all wrapped up. Which makes me think of how strange these familiar pieces looked when out of context, and how people stopped because this was a whole new way of seeing the museum pieces turned inside out. Seeing afresh, peripherally, behind the scenes. Back to our point of how sometimes looking away helps us to see things.

The opening talk at IABC...

I had to go to Gordon Hill station, near Hertford North this week and had a 30 minute wait for the train back.

You’ll see from the picture that it’s a pretty dull kind of a station.

What you might find it harder to see is that there’s a tennis ball on the platform. Why? Whose? Did it drop from the bag of someone on their way to play tennis? Or someone (like me) with sciatica who is supposed to lie with a tennis ball jammed into the right buttock? Or a dog walker?

Then a train came in, and I wondered if someone would pick it up. Not actively, more as an idle speculation. When the train moved off the ball had gone. Oh...

Today I needed to buy new light bulbs. I am staying with friends and so to familiarise myself with the bulb that needed replacing, I unscrewed it and took it along with me to the shop. So as to get an exact match, this is not my house and I aim to please as a guest. Finding the light bulb aisle at a large home improvement store in the USA is a feat unto its own, so I required guidance, which started a conversation that I would like to relate here as a tribute to the randomness of employee engagement, or at least seemingly so, as this is much about what keeps people doing a task with passion, even though to most it may seem numb and...

I was reminded this week of an article I tore out of Washington Post Sunday magazine at Dulles on my way back from Washington. Pat Monk is an 87 year old sculptor, bursting with creativity, who works out of the Torpedo Factory, artists studios in a former Navy torpedo plant.

Actually, he’s not just 87 and a sculptor. He’s also a former rocket scientist, a physicist who once worked on the atomic bomb.

What brought it to mind was a comment at a meeting on foresight, security and the environment, on the need to develop ‘cognitive ability’ which would bring together different ways of thinking and seeing, make a space where both the studio and the lab had something to say. (Recent meetings about intelligence...

“When I went back, I thought I would get a history job at the University of Baghdad. That seemed important. We had a failed state. You have to get back to history to study what went wrong in Iraq. But with this job, I thought I could help Iraqis understand their past and build their future.”

This is Saad Eskander, director of Baghdad’s national library, in an article Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian yesterday. In fact, I nearly (and extraordinarily) bought June GQ, which I happened on in the hairdresser, which also had an interview with him. For Eskander a cultural and secular education is a key way to counter religious fundamentalism, and a library is a place which cuts across all partisanship and...

Waiting for a meeting in Defra yesterday, I noticed for the first time a very simple picture in reception by Richard Long who does

ART MADE BY WALKING IN LANDSCAPES. PHOTOGRAPHS OF SCULPTURES MADE ALONG THE WAY. WALKS MADE INTO TEXTWORKS.¹

This particular walk made into a textwork speaks directly to our work with the Defra foresight team, and to other work we’ve done, through the way we try and construct documents, use narrative and reorganise time and space in organisations.

In grand terms, Clive Holtham used to describe the timetables of an organisation as exogenous time: external structures imposed which make uniform units of time into which the organisation fits itself. Conference rooms bookable...

A few weeks ago I attended a presentation on how one organisation seeks to capture lessons from projects. Staff are encouraged to submit articles for critical review by trained editors; their submissions get “captured” in booklets and on a state of the art website with all manner of complicated search technology to improve retrievals. And contributors get rewarded for their articles both financially and in terms of career enhancement.

It is a prescriptive process and no stone is left unturned in attempting to highlight key points and the lessons to be drawn including the mistakes. It is not a narrative driven approach but it serves a purpose in a large multinational.

Today’s workers bemoan the lack of reflection time. They want to find “stuff” just in...

My daughter and I went to the Globe’s matinee on Sunday and had a marvellous day. My dodgy hip ruled out us being groundlings and standing (under the beady eye of tabarded ladies of a certain age who don’t like people to sit, nary for a second), so we sat in a dappling of sun and shade as the weather couldn’t make up it’s mind.

I haven’t seen or studied Lear for years and it was really striking to me, made more so by David Calder’s greatly unblustery performance, that King Lear is really is a blithering lost old fool.

In conversation with a long time friend and mentor yesterday, a recent visit I made to Dallas came up. And with it a response that I feel deserves recording. While discussing travels across and in the USA, Dallas was described as “somewhere I know I visited once, when on assignment with BP. All I remember was that the meeting I attended was interrupted by someone noticing there were cockroaches in the room, and the flurry this created”. It was delightful to me that this was the most memorable trait of Dallas, but also brought to mind the drudge of business travel, the formulaic sameness that numbs any curiosity and keeps us moving to no particular satisfaction or personal connection - even to far-flung locations - and the playful...

In an email to us today, Will wrote about a radio 4 programme that included thoughts on “how you can only contain so many facts but fiction can always change your view”. It made me think back to the big postmodern faction roundabout. And how sometimes showing something from the perspective of a story (fiction) can unearth painful or complex experience (facts) - think of Patrick Modiano’s novels about French collaboration – the creepy physicality of nostalgia he creates could not be conveyed in a report or historical account. Within organisations, the aspiration and role of Sparknow as a facilitator of the process of unearthing useful truths fits in this thought. When reality is too incomprehensible or untidy, the role of story and peripheral artefact can play a...

I was heading back from couple of design meetings for toolkits and workshops we are devising, and I was delighted to walk past the determined queue snaking back in the rain, with morelondon umbrellas, to experience the teletroscope outside City Hall. We so often (although luckily not in these cases) listen to clients ask us to make something acceptable. If it’s not what people want, they won’t come to it. But hey, who even knew they might ever want a periscope tunnelled under the Atlantic to watch, but not hear, people on the Brooklyn Bridge, scratch out messages to strangers and hold them up on little blackboards, and shake their heads in wondering, but enchanted doubt, over the story of how it came to be?

We...

I popped into the fishmonger for mackerel this afternoon, and while I was waiting for it to be filleted I was drawn to the very beautiful old photographs of the Purkiss fishmonger generations tiled into the walls, so I asked one of the white-wellied crew serving me about them. They were done last summer, and they are very pleased with them. I didn’t think to ask how they chose the photos, but I will when I’m next there. They sent the tiles and the pictures of to a firm in Essex who bonded the pictures, in sections, to the tiles. There’s a pretty big business in dolling up tiles I’ve noticed from our MLA work. Some lovely ceramicist deals with Kew and the British Library to decorate...

I was looking through old materials to see what we might make some new use of, and came across a useful workbook we did for an ARK masterclass that Claudine and I ran in 2004 on designing and delivering your EDRM programme as a change programme. Quite a bit of what we laid out about reports and the reporting process seems still fresh to me, so I’ve reproduced it below, and uploaded both an early illustration of a report design – in that case an information assessment – and a summary of the components which went into a piece of repair work around an EDRM programme where reporting and other activities are woven together into a whole dynamic. I’ve also fished out the old blog...

Chris and I set off to Heathrow at the crack of dawn today. What a long slow journey (and marvellous too, for finding out all sorts of bits of his past I didn’t know about on the return journey).

We convened with the client in a hotel cafe before a company briefing session to get to grips with a complex large workshop design in a few weeks time.

We had a written agenda of-course, but what really made the conversation start to build was scribbling the workshop journey out on A3 paper. There’s nothing like joint graffiti to get a sense of mutual ownership and a different conversation space.

It echoed something the Defra foresighters were saying yesterday about the importance of visuals to create...

Fiona Hiscocks and I had a glorious day today in the most august company. We’re building a small cadre of critical friends in the foresight world, to help us with shaping Defra’s toolkit/project book. Today we had the privilege of passing some seriously entertaining time with some of them.

In the morning we ran a peer assist. An ugly label, but persistently one of our favourite techniques for having a kind of slowed down conversation with breathing space, where there’s room to unfold and reflect on a challenge, and invite people to offer experiences which will help the person asking for help shape their thoughts and actions, without being unduly crowded by opinion and grand advice.

We’ve used it in workshop settings, virtually, in working...

This was my inaugural visit to the global story in organisations convention in Washington known as “The Golden Fleece”. I had heard about such luminaries as Steve Denning (Author and ex World Bank Official) and of the value numerous organisations attach to the discipline of story telling as a mechanism to look at themselves and their organisations differently. While Sparknow have used various theatre and improvisation techniques, dance was a concept I’d not considered but its simplicity as a way of illustrating teamwork was striking if offbeat.

What did I observe / take away?

For a start, that a skilled and loquacious storyteller / TV producer (especially when he is Irish and uses compelling images from the natural world) can hold an audience in the palm...

I’ve spent today in Bournemouth at the Futures Analysts Network meeting. I’m avoiding the obvious ‘Victoria cavorts on the beach and counts it as work’ pictures though. Something that comes at questions a bit sideways instead I think.

It was a good day. Shell’s Head of Government Relationships, examples of government use of scenarios, the launch of the revamped Foresight toolkit, a very interesting lunch conversation with a futurist, science fiction writing, former geneticist about whether there are, actually, only handful of scenarios because we can’t break out of boxed in imaginings about our future world, or the deeply embedded assumptions about what stories and scenarios consist in.

I was there on a mission to ground our own final phase of work with Defra

A few years ago we worked in partnership with the Swiss Development Corporation (SDC) to test story and narrative in a variety of scenarios and settings. To make it comprehensible to the layman we used the type of matrix car manufacturers use to extol the virtues of the GL vs. the GLX vs. the GLX “Turbo”. It proved to be a visually appealing way to conduct a programme of pilot projects

We learned that it is a very powerful mechanism to get at the hidden truths in organisations and get out those “water cooler” stories than if left un surfaced can easily derail mergers, integrations and most frequently the carefully crafted plans of incoming executives!

Last week while at the Golden Fleece...