Converging nicely

My career path is finally starting to converge nicely after many experiments and diverging activities.

My interests in creativity, facilitation and problem solving are now being satisfied by my becoming an associate of Argenta-europ. Having spent five wonderful days in a gite in the Loire Valle meeting the team, learning new methods and developing a business plan we normed, stormed and formed whilst defining our niche as :

• designing and facilitating boosters
• developing and supporting company internal change agents
• helping companies manage innovation

Our new bright and breezy website will be up shortly

As luck would have it I sped straight from here, by way of a Butlins Rock Festival to meet up with the New Team at Narrate where I am also now an associate. Here we have great plans to run narrative based projects where possible using SenseMaker and met up with Steve and Michael from Cognitive Edge for an extremely useful top-up of what SenseMaker can do.

My environmental/storytelling interests (apart from an up and coming brownie jamboree and a possible ‘hedge story project’ – Cognitive Hedge?) will be primarily connected with the Tales 2 Sustain group of passionate storytellers I first met at Cae Mabon and then The North Pennines last year. I have just accepted an invitation to spend four days in a tipi in Somerset this September telling stories round a fire.

The perfect beer mat

Can you imagine how pleased I was to find this little beauty. Had to travel half way across France but there it was lying in the corner of a lovely little bar cafe. We always said that hexagonal beer mats would be much better than business cards and this little thing and its friends (is it la beermat or le beermat) immediately made me want to start analysing archetypes. So thank you Hoegaarden, the (newly) preferred biere of complex facilitators.

Rabbit Rabbit

Rabbit tracks in the snow

Last Saturday morning we managed to get down to Gibralter Point Nature Reserve before anyone else and were very surprised at the number of animal tracks left in the light covering of snow that had fallen overnight. Every year this is our ritual outing as an antidote to the Rock and Blues up the road. My friend David makes every visit a fantastic wildlife adventure spotting and hearing birds that you would never notice otherwise. Highlight this visit was a short eared owl visiting us from Scandinavia and casually swooping across the snow covered sand dunes at 10am in the morning.

See below for full species list:

Paws for thought

On Sunday morning I went for a walk along the beach at Chapel St Leonards on the Lincolnshire Coast (just above Skegness) with my friend David primarily for him to revisit and photograph a childhood holiday location. Walking along the beach watching birds, observing and discussing sand dune erosion we came upon what looked at first like exposures of a rocky wave cut platform which on closer inspection turned out to be heavy blue-grey clay. I presumed ( think rightly) this to be post-glacial boulder clay and it contained a lot of woody vegitative material.

Remembering a recent program on the coastal revealing of human footprints on a similar clay exposure I started to scour the strangely moonlike beds until I found this, and no before you even suggest it, I didn’t make it with a bit of stick.

Am I a committing typical business consultancy behaviour in finding exactly what I am looking for and first fit pattern matching, did someone draw this  in the clay the previous day or is this evidence of some large clawed beast that prowled the area 20,000 years ago?

Rock and Blues Conjunction

Just got back from an exceptionally good Rock and Blues festival at Butlins Skegness.

This is my sixth time at the Festival held annually in Skegness. This year, with so many of the bands of the early seventies on the bill, I decided to try my hand at a bit of Rock photography. As I stood at the front of the stage I recalled on several occasions that the remaining band members and myself had been in exactly this alignment more than 35 years before. This had an eerie feeling of a rock and roll conjunction:

Oliver Dawson’s Saxon who we used to see regularly at Sunderland Boilermakers then named Son of a Bitch.

Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash who I was once hit in the chest by a drumstick in the middle of Blowing Free.

Nazareth with the great Dan McCafferty and bassist Pete Agnew still rocking with the best of them.

Surprises of the weekend had to be:

• Chantel McGreggor whose guitar work is second to none as she glides gracefully and effortlessly around the stage while outdoing Eddie Van Halen, Hendrix and Robin Trower with such grace and ease – Utterly amazing.

• Skinny Molly doing roof raising versions of Sweet Home Alabama and Freebird.

• Young singer Gav Conder with Mick Moody Band who reminded me sometimes of Paolo Nutini and sometimes of a young Elvis. Definitely one to watch.

We had a great Saturday Afternoon session where it was good to see Maggie Bell still singing her heart out (with Dave Kelly) who I last saw with Stone the Crows back in 1972. followed by The Animals with a singalong to all their greatest hits and more.

Last but not least were great performances of  the Tygers of Pan Tang, Preying Mantis and Deborah Bonham Band.

More pictures on my Flickr:

KMUK 2010

Just had confirmation that I have a slot at this years KM UK 2010. Organised as usual by ARK Group and running over two days 15th and 16th June. I am hoping to consolidate a tight and concise session on Storytelling in all its guises. My draft brief is as follows, please come along and enjoy the fun:

Effective storytelling techniques for business leadership, to bring about positive business change

• How using storytelling will make your organisation improve knowledge sharing.
• Develop a greater sense of belonging in your communities.
• Improve creativity and innovation
• Inspire action by maximising engagement.
• Make sense of the patterns in and around stories so that you can become better prepared for the uncertainty of the future.
• Group Exercise: Take the first steps towards building a storytelling toolkit for your organisation.

Henley KM Forum 10th anniversary conference

I have been so busy catching up lately that I have not had time to look forward to the Henley KM Forum 10^th Anniversary Conference on 24^th – 25^th Feb 2010

I have spoken to the KM Forum twice before and it’s a great bunch of people attracting only the best speakers (did you see what I did there) but this anniversary event is building up to being a collection of some of the better thinkers and speakers including keynotes from:

• Leif Edvinsson
• Janine Nahapiet
• Dave Snowden
• Hubert St Onge
• Karl Erik Sveiby

This time I am running a practical workshop on the morning of the first day to explore perspectives on where we have been and what lies ahead; all done backwards, with hexagons, fancy dress is optional. Hope to see you there.

Planning for growth

I have just returned from a superb training day entitled ‘Planning for Growth’ aimed at small businesses like myself and delivered completely free by Business Link.

The day was very well structured and delivered admirably by the guys from Hard Hat who certainly know their stuff, and add some great personal anecdotes to the proceedings.

During the day we

• developed our Elevator pitch
• worked out our Gross Value Added
• assessed our Critical Resource Limitation
• and developed our Break-even and Target Value Added

At the beginning I kept feeling that my approach to business so far has been a bit of a paddle but by the end fully appreciated the great nuggets of advice on Market, Media and Message analysis and I drew up an impressive two year strategy with 90 day action plan and gained some incredibly useful tips advice and new contacts.

I really think this course is an absolute necessity to anyone in a business, small or large and as it is completely free does not impinge on your overheads.

Most memorable example of a business that diversifies during times when it cannot deliver its prime business was West Ham United which is itself a very TRIZ example of something that is sometimes one thing and at others another. The hospitality boxes can be booked away from match days as hotel rooms, pull in a double bed and instantly a room with an amazing view – brilliant. (No jokes about not being able to score from me)

executive box - hotel room with a view

Putting the Brrr in Brrrum

Frozen canal - Birmingham 13-01-2010

Last week I travelled across to Birmingham a day early to miss the predicted snow and made a good decision. Only eight of the twelve attendees made it through the snow to my training workshop.

This was a follow up to last years two day Cognitive Edge and storytelling based training workshop. This time we worked through a practical example of message mapping, looked at TRIZ with the particular emphasis on business metaphor and a practical demonstration of the Argenta  three diamond approach to problem solving. I have just recently joined Argenta as an associate so this was a good opportunity to fully familiarise myself with the use of methods outside a more engineering perspective.

I particularly learned a lot about the applicability of certain techniques and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Feedback from the client sounds positive:

Very thought-provoking and really interesting day, as we had hoped. A couple of the guys (have already) used message maps.

In the cold light of LED’s

Hat tip to my Argenta colleague Brian for pointing me towards this worrying US based story from ABC News  about the perils of the increasing use of LED’s especially in this case in traffic lights.

As the LED gives off very little heat it is now insufficient to melt away the built up snow and frost and has been cited as contributing towards at least one fatal road accident.

I suppose the big question is how did this ‘natural’ glass cleaning action get overlooked?. Was it that the engineer/inventor did not take into account the entire ’system’ and thereby was so keen to save energy that other aspects of the system were ignored? I guess the old warm glass of the old lights was by accident rather than by design.

In TRIZ terms the heat of the old incandescent light bulbs would have been identified as a ‘harm’ to the system (thereby wasting energy) but perhaps inadvertently this would be converted to a ‘benefit’ during the winter when it would melt frost, snow and ice to maintain visibility.

This is also another of those ‘hindsight’ situations of ‘well it should have been obvious to the engineer/inventor, shouldn’t it!’. No doubt Obama will be ordering an immediate return to the old bulbs or adding expensive winter heating elements to every traffic light across the U.S.

I quite like the ’simple’ feedback-based  solution quoted on the ABC news site:

In the meantime, the Department of Transportation uses big sticks to clean off the lights when it gets calls from drivers who complain.

I just wonder whether this is now a problem with car lights which are increasingly using banks of LEDs and may well have a reduced ice melting capability.

Perhaps just as worrying the picture above looks like it has been set up by journalists pelting the traffic lights with snowballs which would obscure any warning lights whatever the bulb type.