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Sparknow was set up in 1997 by Victoria Ward upon her escape from the sharp end of the City. It has always been a network of interested equals, and each project pulls together a different group according to its needs and resources. Here are some currently active sparknow people:
Carol trained at the Jamaica School of Drama as an Actor/Teacher. She now works in Britain as a writer, storyteller and consultant using storytelling in organisations.
A professional storyteller since 1994 Carol has worked in schools, universities and libraries, designing and executing storytelling and Creative Writing courses. She was guest storyteller on BBC’s GLR for three years, and has also performed at many international storytelling festivals, including, the Scottish International Storytelling festival, National Storytelling Festival, Jonesboro TN, USA, the Timpanogos Festival, Sundance, Utah and the Cape Clear International Storytelling festival.
She has been working in the corporate sector as a consultant/storyteller since 1996, facilitating workshops and creating stories for a wide variety of companies. The first of many projects with Sparknow was a commission, in 1998, to find the story of their first big futures project.
As a writer her work has been commissioned by all the major British TV broadcasters, including screenplay, ‘House of Usher’, a short films made for the BBC, a half hour single drama, ‘A Suitable Candidate; for Channel 4. She was also one of the original, BAFTA nominated team of adapters of Jacqueline Wilson’s ‘Story of Tracy Beaker’. She is a member of BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and is currently developing three drama series.
Christopher works as a performance coach and consultant. Recent projects include communication and presentation skills training with senior management at BASF in Germany, performance training for Promise, a London-based branding consultancy, as well as internal communication training for the Royal Mail, and change management events for Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. Past work includes innovation and creativity training for Orange plc, communication training for psychotherapists at the Tavistock Centre in London, and storytelling projects with homeless people for the Big Issue Foundation.
He teaches improvisation at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London where he is also a member of the audition panel. His work as a theatre director and writer includes the stage plays “100” and “Food” both of which won the prestigious Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival and toured extensively in the UK and internationally. He has directed productions at leading British theatres including the Young Vic Theatre and Soho Theatre in London, and the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh.
Christopher’s work in business draws on his background in theatre to create events that are interactive, challenging and fun.
Fiona’s background is in systems engineering which may explain her interest in helping clients develop new ways of working. As a knowledge management consultant she specialises in social network analysis, social capital assessment, communities, knowledge disclosure, narrative analysis and intervention design. With an in-depth understanding of information technology and its applications, as well as the human side of change, she has a passionate belief in helping people to attain their full potential Recent assignments include story elicitation research to enable cultural diagnosis at the newly merged Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and leading the knowledge strand of a project for the Islamic Development Bank.
She’s about to move to Boston to study at the Kennedy School of Management. We hope she’ll get the chance to start the first Sparknow US office while she’s there.
She is an experienced and creative research analyst with knowledge and skills gained from working in exchange traded derivatives and in the field of sustainable development. She has identified a number of industry trends and emergent opportunities in both environments through her commitment and passion for horizon scanning.
Stakeholder dialogue has been fundamental to much of her research work.
Paul has a successful track record delivering complicated Corporate Advisory and technical due diligence projects combined with salient technical experience as a former board director of two software groups. He was the architect and “gate keeper” of Sopheon’s product development process on which it’s preeminent software Accolade is based and has undertaken a number of process and management evaluations assessments on acquired and target companies in the software industry for leading venture capital groups. He set up and ran the inaugural user group of Verity Inc in Europe and was the Project Director for a leading UK investment bank on the first deployment in the European financial services arena of Verity’s award winning search software.
Paul also has considerable recent experience in running information and knowledge management assignments for such organisations as Swiss Development Corporation, Islamic Development Bank, Transport for London and BMS Associates (global top 10 reinsurance broker).
He spent 25 years in the City, positions included Senior Manager Corporate Finance with Saudi International Bank and Vice President Research and Marketing with Zurich Financial Services. He is a Visiting Lecturer at London Metropolitan University, a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of the Online Information Conference and the Institute of Directors.
For a more detailed history see: 
View Paul Corney’s profile
This collaboration has led to both design and facilitation work across a very wide remit. Penny has worked on Spark projects Civil service departments, government strategy teams and jointly won a large project looking at the way people work and the move of staff to innovative work spaces in the BBC.
Penny also works independently and has been engaged on a number of long-term projects for the BBC supporting major change within the work place and looking at and the development of staff and team support processes through this change.
Penny’s specialism is in her effective facilitation both of large events and conferences as well as the more intimate space of workshop sessions. She also has a wealth of learning events design experience.
More recently Penny has utilised her broadcast skills to provide additional support for facilitated events and has produced down loadable material in the form of Podcasts that enable conference materials to have a life span beyond the event and give access to all staff via company websites.
An example of this is the work Penny did for BTSR where she produced two podcasts for their major events in 2007 including interviews with delegates. She also produced and edited a short film for a large event for BTSR hosted at BAFTA.
Penny is also involved in a social media networking group and produces a fortnightly podcast exploring social media and its benefits to the work place.
Philip is a branding and communications consultant, workshop designer and facilitator, writer who has worked with Sparknow for 9 years. As well as his work with Sparknow he has 20 years’ experience developing brand strategies for a range of clients on behalf of Wolff Olins and Saffron including Crown Berger, Egmont, Eurotunnel, Lloyd’s of London, National Housing Federation, Royal Opera House. He has also done internal com- munications consultancy for clients including Royal & Sun Alliance, Shell.
He has over 10 years’ experience with particular areas of expertise in the use of pinboard and worksheets. In a couple of cases workshops have developed into training courses: Writing for the Web (for the Cabinet Office, Essex County Council, Severn Trent Water) and Making Your Point (presentations training for Lloyd’s of London). He writes corporate brochures, websites, brand books and annual reports for organisations such as Department for Education & Skills, Department of Health, Electra Fleming, The Boots Company, Expert Gardener and Telos.
Roger has been Sparknow’s Company Secretary & Financial Controller almost since inception back in 1997.
Having always targeted age 50 as his …“last day at work”… he was within one week of leaving NatWest Markets when the phone rang. It was Victoria needing help to run Sparknow!
Roger retired from NatWest Markets Finance as Head of Cost Reporting and Control and was responsible for integrating the central finance functions of 3 disparate businesses of NatWest Treasury, Corporate Finance and County Natwest Securities in 1992.
After leaving the bank, Roger worked for Guide Dogs for the Blind helping train puppies in their first year. He was also local Secretary and then Treasurer for Guide Dogs in Hertfordshire before moving to Somerset in 2005.
Sabine Jaccaud’s background includes experience of academia, business management and consulting as well as visual and performance arts. She is a communication professional with a focus on the experience of an organisation from within. Some of the companies she has worked with are JP Morgan, PA Consulting Group, ABN AMRO, HSBC, BP, Corporate Express, Syngenta and the BBC. A Swiss national raised in Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe, she is bilingual in English and French with a doctorate in comparative and English literature from Oxford University and a management diploma from London Business School. Sabine works from London, where she has been living for over 10 years and has close ties with the USA. Her research interests include how the city acts as a catalyst for conversations and connections, and how organisations nurture their cultural assets.
Victoria Ward founded Sparknow in November 1997, following a career exchange-traded derivatives and operational risk management in the City and a degree in modern languages and twentieth century European art. She leads programme design work on most major assignments and takes a lead role as a researcher and analyst. She’s an honorary research fellow at Cass Business School, and is currently writing a book ‘Making Spaces for Change’. Her current enquiries are into ways to conduct narrative research while paying attention to role of the enquirer and to making a community round the research; journalling and personal knowledge development; theories and practices of knowledge work and knowledge transfer, and their implications in the 21st century workplace and working practices; concepts of ‘negative space’ and their potential application to knowledge and business process retention at times of upheaval, relocation and staff turnover. For her own edification and to practice journalling, collecting and witnessing, she can be found blogging at Sundry Items
Will is a web and interface designer who comes from an academic background in Philosophy of Language. He has been working online since 1993 and ran the Amnesty International web site for 10 years as well as advising and building for Oxfam, Scope, Oneworld and countless smaller charities and campaigning groups. He has won various awards, including one of the first Yell awards, a DMA Gold and site of the year from the UK’s Internet magazine, and one of his early (shared) projects was labelled ‘the death star of the internet’ by Wired magazine.
He specialises in emergent systems: community-driven websites, distributed authoring tools, collective narratives, knowledge-visualisation and large-scale collaborative internet projects. He particularly likes projects that combine philosophical rigour with an element of investigation and discovery, and he has years of experience at making complex tasks and data sets feel simple. He has been called a ‘hypertext fundamentalist’ by the Libraries Association, which may not have been intended as a compliment but remains his proudest accolade.