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We’ve an archive of papers, essays and case studies, some of which are available below. Over the next few months we’re planning to develop other things which take the best of what we’ve learned and noticed and make this available in a useful and friendly way:
Narrative enquiry: A way to get organisations (and the people in them) talking and acting differently Paul Corney & Victoria Ward June 2008 Business Information Review Vol. 25, No. 2, 105-120 (2008)
© 2008 SAGE Publications
That little copyright sign over 9,000 words of our effort gives me a little shiver of distaste. So wrong, the publishing systems, so wrong. Anyway, you can either use the link to go and buy the article, or download the one-pager in which I’ve put the abstract and the most interesting part, in some ways, which is the experimental layout of the article, as a kind of ‘derive’ with ‘marginalia’.
This article is actually a companion pair with one we’ve yet to publish, which describes the Sparknow narrative method in a very different application (good technie term there to make it sound applicable in some way) to the Knowledge Transfer Programme enquiry we’ve just finished for MLA London. When that’s available later in the year I’ll twin the two in some way.
Not in the article, but influential, in the playing about with designing it, is the Ken Gergen proposition that social constructionists are poetic activitists. Social construction propounds that meaning is only found through actively and repeatedly finding ways of “going on together”. And nothing can happen without it. If we are not careful, the dominant knowledge classes, shored up by ‘science’, power and authority (who have replaced the authority, power and knowledge of the church) automatically muffle other voices and insist on one dominant voice. Only by finding forms of engagement which encourage, and sustain, a plurality of voices is anything possible.
In all our work, and especially in trying different ways of writing and reporting, we’ve that intention to encourage and sustain a plurality of voices. I’d love to try and change the strapline for Sparknow to Sparknow: poetic activists, but I’m sure I’d get swiftly edited out. Such is the ironic smoothing of wiki-world. We’re all chiefs here.
This case study outlines almost our very first encounter with SDC. Looking at it now I’m struck by the efforts we made to liven up our recountings of client work, by the fact that it was the sound of Carol which first alerted Manuel to Sparknow and the companionable journey that started. But perhaps I’m most struck by the fact that it’s the wrong title.
‘The One-winged Butterfly’ is actually the more striking metaphor to come from the narrative mapping we did with them, to establish where storywork might revivify the narratives in the work and knowledge systems of the place – a striking image of the loss of narrative, a kind of organisational flatlining when the formal processes of project management and evaluation kick in. I think it’s no surprise that the metaphor was first suggested in French, rather than the English, German and Swiss the group were also working in.
The mapping tool (a kind of way to open up the hidden spaces in the tidier, more polished accounts of a project, episode or activity), combines the formal and informal dimensions so beloved of us knowledge workers with too much Nonaka and Takeuchi under our belts. The thrust of the time sequence helps move the first version of the story through and spread it out to take in befores and afters. generally People are quite surprised at what pops up below-the-line. We’ve used it in many settings – imagining a day in the future life of a postman, mapping an idea mission to Sudan with the Islamic Development Bank, finding stories of the difference made by integrated primary healthcare teams, reflecting on research projects in policy making.
Babette Wagenvoort illustrated the Story Guide for us, as well as work with the DTI and the BBC.
This Guide, and the Flyer that goes with it, are two of the major assets which resulted from a 5 year partnership (their choice of word) with SDC, the Swiss Aid Agency. We tried out different aspects of story as an instrument of knowledge exchange. It majors on the development of professional practice and facilitation in face to face settings, but also has some interesting exploratory references to what SDC calls the capitalisation of experience. In essence, how do you convert the baggy raw materials that might result from workshops and other sessions, into condensed final products, fit for distribution.
In work after this Guide was finished, the term intermediate products was coined to capture the idea of this iterative challenge, when working with Intercooperation on a project, now know as Water, Land & People. This project seeks to consolidate the lessons from water table management in different countries around the world, and SDC expressly asked Intercooperation to use story techniques to elicit, condense and re-present these lessons.
German, French and Spanish versions of the Guide and the flyer can be found on the SDC Process and methodic competencies research pages which describe it thus:
“Stories are an easy way of addressing the emotions and analytical understanding at the same time, thus promoting awareness. The Guide is designed to create story-telling skills and confidence. First, it contains instruments and model approaches for recalling and conjuring up mental images of experiences. Second, it suggests ways of structuring stories to make them interesting and intelligible. And third, it provides ideas about development cooperation contexts in which stories can be an effective communication tool.”
I also want to namecheck Jeannine Brutschin, now at the Novartis Foundation. Withour her velvet-gloved determination, the sprawling incoherence of the first Guide (some 300 pages in length) would never have found it’s way to this elegance and distillation. Thanks Jeannine.
Soapstone carving of a boat.
Written for Natalie Shell, who edited the February edition of AI Practitioner on Significance of Story: Gifts, New Techniques and Inspiring Examples
Stories give, rather than take, time. This is a special attribute, much neglected, but to be treasured, in a work world where we’re inclined to finish each other’s sentences, competing for time and space in the organisational agenda and politics. This short essay explores some different ways of opening up the neglected or squashed breathing and story spaces in organisations – invitation, corridors and stairs, journeys, exhibits and objects, silence and empty spaces, importing the story spaces crafted by others, as a lens through which to view the organisation. All of these, and many others, are ways to reorganise time, space, rhythm, relationship and perspective at work.
This is an edited version of a paper Stephanie Colton and Victoria Ward gave at the Smithsonian conference in Washington a couple of years back. It explores two pieces of work from the Sparknow portfolio. We use these to explore two linked questions:
The first relates to listening. What is the story-listening role of leaders? The second question relates to the layers of meaning and insight held within our stories. Related to this are some subsidiary questions:
Great Aunt Hetty’s pearls. Not real pearls of course. But as Sven-Erik Engh says, the mistake in organisations is to look for story-diamonds. Rather, look for enchanting pebbles and shells, polish them up a bit, use them for a while, then move on.
This is a ‘factional’ (factual in essence but dipped in fiction to protect the identity of our clients) correspondence between the authors during an oral history project for an international development institution celebrating its 40-year anniversary. Insights are drawn from a number of client assignments undertaken over the last 8 years that put story capture tools to work in the context of attempting to achieve broader strategic knowledge management objectives. In this case Victoria Ward – founder of Sparknow – was participating in the creation of a knowledge management strategy programme and acting as advisor to Stephanie Colton, who was project managing the experimental oral histories strand.
Authors: Stephanie Colton, Victoria Ward with contributions from Claudine Arnold, Paul Corney and Carol Russell Spring 2004
I see that when we wrote this we were fumbling around for something we are still fumbling around for, which is how to explain knowledge transfer as a slowing down, not a speeding up, in fast, demanding capitalist contexts. The idea of story as a capitalisation of something is uneasy at best. I see that we were rightly very keen on Jeremy Rifkin at the time (the Age of Access, with it’s proposal that we move away from ownership to other forms of wealth).
I’d like to marry Rifkin to Lewis Hyde if I were rewriting it now. His marvellous “The Gift” has greatly helped me disentangle thinking about what parts of an exchange are commercial and what parts are a gift for which it is impossible to pay in money. I think this goes to the heart of knowledge transfer, a knowledge economy, and the role of narrative and story in creating the necessary flow for both, whether that flow gets paid for or not.
Notes from an interactive session facilitated by Fiona Incledon and Victoria Ward of Sparknow at the Ark Knowledge Management conference ‘Managing for Health and Social Care’, London April 2004.
Think of a particular time when you have really enjoyed being part of a community. What things contributed to this enjoyment?
Think of a brand which seems to have the qualities of an effective community (e.g. Weight Watchers). What things seem to underpin this apparent success?
Think of a time when you have felt disappointed by a community. What things could have been done to make this an enjoyable experience instead?
We used Fiona’s picture on a postcard as the main exercise in our contribution. The prompt questions on the back left them to choose ways to share through personal experience, reflection on personal experience, or through the lens of metaphor and analogy by using brand as a conversation space. It could just as well have been books, films, TV series with likeable and dislikeable communities. It was an exercise similar to one we ran around that time at a session with the librarians from the National Library for Health (formally with an electronic slid in between National and Library), in which we also used narrative mapping to find sticky moments in building the role of health libraries in their communities of experts and users from which to generalise qualities and practicalities for a library in, or aspiring to, that position.
Recently back in touch with their km librarian, Caroline de Brun, I find that, as well as dropping the e (after all they are physical and virtual entities), they’ve been moved to become part of the NHS Innovation Institute, which is a great place from which to be effective. Libraries. Innovation. Of course.
Authors: Clive Holtham, Victoria Ward, September 2000
Absolutely my favourite paper Clive and I ever wrote, even though the other space and slow ones tend to get more feedback. The whole idea of knowledge as needing a shed, the privacy to incubate it, came about very early when we looked at the wear and tear of constantly being at the frontline of a performance culture.
We were also evolving the ‘sparkive’ at the time (still a chaotic work in progress much needing the return of Claudine to instil order) and I chanced (perhaps through Angie?) on the role that James Murray’s shed played in the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (it was cold, damp and ruined his health according to a biography of him I read recently, which also told me it was delivered over 30 years late, which makes us feel good about our own occasional scope creep). Throw in explorations in communities of practice and the role of volunteers in bringing sightings back from far flung outposts, and our interest (then, now sadly lapsed, but I hope soon to return) in running events to generate a warm, loud, disruptive and unlikely crowd, and that’s the cocktail that went into this. Several incarnations ran (including at Cass and at the Design Council) and we collided by chance with a proper art exhibition of sheds which I did put in as a postscript to one version but can’t currently track down. I’ll try.
I still keep a weather eye out for sheds as fundamental to the creative process. And then there’s Cornelia Parker’s Exploded Shed. But fragments are for another time place.
Author: Victoria Ward Published in Knowledge Management Review Issue 5 November/December 1998
This is a short version of a longer, messier, actually much more interesting paper I wrote for a conference in Sussex, I think it was. Early playing with ideas of maps and mapmaking are intrinsic to the birth of Sparknow, as the founding essay’s opening quote makes clear. This part of our birthright has rather got lost in the unhelpful shorthands of ‘mapping’ in other contexts. In fact I don’t even have an active category for mapping in my filing, I notice.
It might be nice to go right back to the metaphor, and what it held for us, to see if we can reactivate it as we knit together the face-to-face, written, and technological worlds we’re working in simultaneously now. We do use it a bit, but more as a term to describe our work to visualise stories and help find the darker corners of them by so doing.
Pure mapping might be a necessary return to the place were we began (and know ourselves for the first time etc).
And it’s worth twinning this one with Corporania, since they both tell the same story. Compare and contrast. Sometimes, Carol and I used to each tell our versions of the story (me first, I could never have followed her glorious tellings), and then discuss with people the consequences of the kind of telling. Same thing as ‘The Inspiring Pot’ which opens the Story Guide really.
