Storytelling’s coming home

Bit of an advertisment for my friend Geoff Mead who has a new book out (which I have just ordered) called Coming home to Story: Storytelling Beyond Happy Ever After   (with more info here) attracting 5 star reviews on Amazon and central to an interesting story based event in February:

STORYTELLING AND BOOK-MAKING

The Story Museum, Wednesday 1^st February, from 5.30pm – 8.00pm

Rochester House, 42 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP

(Ten minute walk from Oxford train station)

http://www.storymuseum.org.uk/the-story-museum/contact-us/map-and-directions

5.00pm – 5.20pm Optional Tour of the future Story Museum

The book launch will take place at The Story Museum, which celebrates story and storytelling and will open in Oxford in 2014. The Story Museum’s home is not normally open to the public and its transformation into a world-class museum will start this year.

The museum has kindly offered to give us a tour of the future museum building. If you are interested, please let Eka Morgan know:eka@storymuseum.org.uk. For more information about the museum and what it does, please see their website: www.storymuseum.org.uk.

5.30pm – 6.30pm Bookmaking

We invite you to enter into the alchemy of making your own copy of Coming Home to Story. Over a cup of tea or a glass of wine, guided by printer (and co-op member) Libby Rodger of CPI Antony Rowe, you can craft together the elements of the book – cover, book-block, head and tail bands, brightly-coloured ribbon-markers. For book enthusiasts, it is a perfect opportunity to gain a hands-on insight into the world of book production, and to take home a unique, hand-made volume.

6.45pm onwards Storytelling

Geoff will tell some Grimm’s Tales for Grown-ups, followed by more drinks.

You are welcome to arrive at any of the above times.

Please RSVP to sarah.bird@valapublishers.coop by Wednesday 25^th January.

We numb, to make the uncertain certain

Hat tip to Nerida Hart over on Linked-In for recommending this Ted Talk by Brene Brown on the Power of Invulnerability. Part way through watch for the part on ‘we numb…everything’ on why we strive to make the uncertain certain. Well worth twenty minutes of your time, bringing together complexity and storytelling in a brilliant example of sense-making from many narrative fragments.

The terrifying world of innovation

In the past twelve months I have embraced and thoroughly enjoyed a shift of emphasis from knowledge and sense making over to creativity and innovation. In hindsight the transition seems perfectly natural, as once you have made sense of a situation you can begin to reveal and resolve any emerging problems.
As I move closer towards the bough of the innovation process, without doubt the greatest challenge is how to turn ideas into action and therefore deliver innovation (not just creative ideas). I have facilitated so many workshops that have ended with enthusiasm, and buy-in to the ideas that have emerged yet three, six, nine months down the line hardly any progress has been made.
What I didn’t realise was that my presence in an organisation might, quite naturally, bring on aversion and fear.

Something that caught my eye in October this year and I have been referring to repeatedly during recent workshops is an article in the Science Daily blog about two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania

Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
Certain groups of people may have an anti-creativity bias

When creative ideas were presented to certain groups they associated the ideas with negative words such as “vomit,” “poison” and “agony.”
and this, the report suggests is why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary.

Last night reading Simon Baron-Cohen’s new book ‘The Science of Evil‘ while reflecting on ‘human cruelty’  he talks about individuals who have ‘zero’ empathy and lists ten new ideas. Two of which especially cried out to me, in which he highlights how lacking empathy may have a positive, even naturally selected benefit in society, hence ‘zero-positive’.

Idea 8: Zero-Positive is the result of a mind striving to step out of time … in order to see the eternal repeating patterns in nature. Change represents the temporal dimension seeping into an otherwise perfectly predictable, systemizable world.

Idea 9: When such predictable patterns are interrupted, for example by the existence of another person who might perform an unpredictable action, the zero-positive individual can find this aversive and even terrifying. Hence, zero-positives typically resist change at all costs.

Classic autism, Baron Cohen believes, is such a case of

total resistance to change, a retreat into a perfectly systemizable, and thus predictable, world. Unpredictable step-change innovation may therefore be seen as terrifying.

Finally, spending time at an airport with a colleague recently he pointed out at the taxiing aircraft and said that

the reason air travel is such a safe travel option is because innovation in the aerospace industry is almost totally constrained by improving safety and therefore inch by inch incremental safety improvements.

Pursuing innovation in such an ecosystem is therefore a huge challenge and does not end at the list of lessons learned, intricately analysed solutions or even fully populated action plan. How do we make the most of real fear and aversion?

And that, dear reader, is the challenge for 2012.

Steampunk encounter

Last week we maintained our deeply entrained pattern and returned to Whitby. A last minute cancellation of a cottage we had always wanted to hire. We entered its wood panelled ‘ship-like’ entrance hall and fell immediately in love.

The view from our cottage

We knew this was to be no ordinary week in Whitby. The Goth Fringe Festival was in town this weekend so as we walked along to the cobbled market square we were prepared for this group of alien visitors:

What we were not at all prepared for was a complete encounter with all that is Steampunk. We really didnt know what it was and until we googled it and Steampunk.com describes it as

steampunk is a genre AND a design aesthetic AND a philosophy

I just love their quote from Jess Nevins

Steampunk is what happens when goths discover brown

So outside the Tourist information our initial puzzlement was resolved:

I made this gun myself

Wikipedia explains steampunk as:

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history and speculative fiction that came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s. Steampunk involves a setting where steam power is still widely used—usually Victorian era Britain—that incorporates elements of either science fiction or fantasy.

Tea for two

Back at the bridge a crowd of photographers was gathering so I just managed to jump in and get this shot of my favourite of the all, the detail and precision taken was breathtaking. We saw him later walking home for his tea like the tin man:

resistance is futile

We never found out what these three were running from or to save but it must have been important:

C'mon sergeant, keep up

After an amazing weekend of characters like these, market stalls specialising in red male corsets, at least 6 hearses parked up by the whale bones it was then Halloween. At nine pm we climbed the 199 steps, on the east side, to the graveyard that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula and … it was completely deserted. Everyone had gone home. I took this picture from the top of the steps and realise now that the whole town has been strategically lit with delicate yellow, purple, pink and blue lighting. We thought the pictures in the photographers had been photo-shopped.

View from St Mary's Church on Halloween

Then as if that wasn’t enough for one holiday, Friday was bonfire night and we positioned ourselves at a point just below the Bram Stoker memorial seat on the West Side and saw an amazing display lighting up the whole of the town.

whoosh

Then just as we were packing up to leave, the proper official Goth weekend was starting up and streets were filled with a much younger and prettier generation of Goths and ghouls:

The facilitation contradiction

At the end of a workshop the ideal outcome is excitement, motivation and commitment towards the actions identified. My personal (greatly Cognitive Edge influenced) preferred approach to facilitation is to stay out of the context as much as possible.

The thinking behind this is that if the groups self-organise themselves around what they feel passionate about, self-reveal any insights, issues or ideas they might have, and then self-realise the sense to be made around these, then they will avoid the natural reaction to being led towards a pre-conceived outcome, and the ownership of the outputs will be complete.

Or so I thought until now. At a couple of recent workshops I have been left with most, if not all of the interim stage outputs, the piles of future backwards hexagons, the masses of emergent themed anecdote circle material and sheets and sheets of river diagrams, cynefin frameworks and message maps.

I fear that the issue of ownership goes further than the ideas, action planning and sensemaking of the workshop. For true ownership they need to also facilitate the workshop themselves. The process of facilitating a workshop internally gives the total feeling of control, no matter how friendly, involving and professional the external facilitator can be. In hindsight I now remember this feeling acutely when, as I worked in English Nature, we would proudly run participatory narrative workshops and feel a true sense of accomplishment that it was a totally, English Nature outcome. Problems, solutions, actions and facilitation.

There are however (I now genuinely believe) massive benefits from bringing in an independent external facilitator who spends all their time perfecting workshop methods, is alert to the energy levels, involvement issues, alternatives and options at every step of the process, likely session timings, flow of outputs into subsequent activities and many more unpredictable barriers.

In TRIZ terms this sets up a contradiction. How can a group ‘own’ the facilitation but ‘not own’ the facilitator in order to get the best outcome possible.

I don’t know the answer. In my work with both Oxford Creativity and Argenta Europ, I help develop facilitators via experiential learning with the intent that they will be self-sufficient in their own organisation, but what about the big, expensive, high profile, must succeed challenge or ‘Wicked problem’ that inevitably arises. Then what about the broader, interdisciplinary, merger, conference events where directive facilitation with a potential stake in the outcome, might be disruptive, distrusted and even damaging.

I guess the approach should be appropriate to the challenge and the circumstances and for this I would recommend a good scoping study prior to the event followed by a rigorous double loop lessons learned review afterwards.

Eco building

I watched the Grand Designs programme on a house built underground in the Lake District this evening and the end result seemed to lack any real fun or intrigue. While I was at Hautbois Girl Guide centre last week I was shown around their planned eco-village which has its main building about a third completed and the rest of the village in very early planning stages. My favourite eco-village of all still remains Cae Mabon in Snowdonia, once visited never forgotten, it still holds special memories of sitting telling stories round a fire in an iron age round house. Here is a quite recent story of how it all came to be and how Eric Maddern created such a magical place:

 

Where to drop the pebble

I owe a great debt of thanks to Cynthia Kurtz whose recent posts on her excellent ‘Story Coloured Glasses‘ blog have made me reassess the importance of storytelling in my work and especially reinforced her definition that it is ‘participative narrative inquiry’ which she is exploring to update the third edition of her book ‘Working with Stories’.

This reinforced my thinking for my recent workshop for youth leaders and particularly influenced my thinking at two meetings in Brussels this week on EC related projects.

In her most recent post Cynthia mentions a free pdf of the latest edition of the Participatory and Learning and Action journal available here.

Three of the best quotes in this journal, from Cynthia, in my opinion are:

the importance of face-to-face communication for the development of good relationships among the partners and to strengthen the sharing and learning among them.

Stories are anecdotal and local, but they carry tremendous value by creating a context in which facts can be better understood.

The ultimate reason to pay attention to stories, whether at the individual, family, community or regional level, is not so much because of what they communicate but because of what they help us discover. We tell and listen to stories in order to make sense of the world around us, and we do this both individually and collectively. Working with stories in your community can help you reflect on the past, understand the present and build a better future.

What particularly caught my eye on a quick skim was the overiding idea that ripples form as we intervene when using story based methods and therefore where best should we ‘drop our pebble’ to make these ripples deliver most impact.

Well our first feedback has just arrived from the youth forum we did last weekend and it has instilled in me great faith in this idea of ripples that might influence social change. I also think that the earlier  you encounter these ripples the better (ie younger the participants).

the students have come back from the weekend telling me of the brilliant time that they had so I just wanted to say thank you. The words they are using to describe it are: ‘fantastic, incredible, brilliant’ and many more such adjectives! They felt that it had really helped them to grow personally and to meet new friends and engage in problem solving so thanks again

Now that already feels to me like a pebble well placed.

The washing line of predictability

It was a misty Saturday morning at Hautbois Residential and Activity Centre, owned by Girlguilding Anglia, in Norfolk just outside Norwich. I had been invited by my friend Janette (Girlguiding Anglia Deputy Chief Commissioner)  to facilitate a workshop entitled “Together we can change the world” looking at innovative ways to eradicate extreme poverty, promote gender equality and ensure environmental sustainability. With participants (age 16-25) from very diverse backgrounds and cultures, representatives of  Pax Lodge, the Africa Health Organisation, Paston Grammar School (in Norwich), the GirlGuiding ASSK Team and ironically two girls from the Scouts.

The previous evening we had all met, had a lovely meal and ran through a few ice breakers.

Aided by my three topic leaders, Pippa, Jess and Kirsty who had organised and planned this entire weekend, we began the morning with a Gurteen knowledge cafe to explore each of the three topics, to make sense of the subjects by way of conversation so that everyone was informed enough, to decide which one they were most interested in and divide into appropriate groups.

This was swiftly followed by a Cognitive Edge Future backwards, one for each topic in which they explored the present, the past and the two worst and best case futures. I swiftly dropped my usual terms of Heaven and Hell as they immediately made individuals uncomfortable.

Superbly rich, thought provoking and intelligent material emerged. I only have room for the ‘Poverty’ example above but the others were again rich in metaphors from movies and modern culture to explain how bad things might get. I like to turn the feedback part of this session into the opportunity for storytelling  and by adding instructions from anecdote circles to the end of this session managed to capture what everyone got from the three ‘stories’. This material was immediately shuffled and sorted into patterns to reveal emergent themes.

A huge experiment spurred on by Dave insisting on twitter that younger people ‘get’ cynefin resulted in my proudest achievement. Taking events and situations from their relevant future backwards they placed them along a washing line depending on how predictable the outcome might have been. Dividing this line on the boundaries between simple and complicated etc led to a truly contextualised decision making framework, emergent from their own stories and perspectives.

Yes Dave, you were right they did understand the intricacies even though the framework illustrates some (but only a few) over simplifications. This framework would then be used later to diagnose appropriate interventions.

Taking the themes from above we placed these into a simplified river diagram (thanks Chris Collison) to produce a visual overview of the whole topic showing what level might be achievable and where things currently stand (by theme).

I added at this point a second Gurteen Knowledge cafe, this time on the subject of ‘the influencial use of social media and the web’ as a way of bringing to the fore how twitter and facebook in particular might be used to get ideas across, stimulate interactions etc.

For the next four sessions we moved into an Argenta style ‘innovation booster’, of the type we teach facilitators in MBDA. Firstly capturing everyones ideas as to how to ‘make a difference’ against each of the themes, building on each others ideas. Then using, my favourite, reversals and re-reversals looking at how we might destroy the topic. Then reversing these to look for more innovative, step change ideas.

We then voted for the ideas that intrigued or inspired most. These could then be positioned on the cynefin framework to help diagnose the appropriate intervention for an idea in that domain ie if Complex then carry out many different safe-fail experiments and see what works. Having suitably converged the material we had an evening of barbecue food, climbing and abseiling (of which I would only do the first of the three).

Sunday morning saw another gloriously sunny day I ran the string game, an Argenta favourite energiser, out in the garden and let them all self-realise that the human brain really does get stuck into one way of thinking.

Time this morning for raising the profile of storytelling as a method of sharing knowledge, and handling the media. I told my badger eating story then we looked at the Nancy Druarte ‘spark lines‘ and worked through examples of message maps as used in disaster zones such as New Orleans and after 9/11.

Having converged on a league table of ideas everyone was invited to cluster around an idea, that particular took their fancy, and complete a cartoon storyboard for that idea which is particularly powerful in that it encourages breaking an idea into stages, identifying barriers then scheduling the appropriate actions sequentially which is more than most good project managers can achieve. This was far and away the best session. Lots of discussion, laughter, great pictures and some unbelievably sophisticated thinking from participants as young as 16.

Pippa Jess and Kirsty closed the weekend by capturing personal pledges which were written onto t-shirts and proudly exhibited at the final fashion show out on the sun-drenched patio. In hindsight I could have run this better, and learned so much from the experience, but again the enthusiasm, ideas and courtesy with which they undertook my every instruction made me hugely optimistic about the future for in these young people springs hope and an intelligent awareness of what is going on and where change is necessary.

Pickings of Brain Pickings

Its been ages since I have just stumbled around the Internet looking for inspiration and tonight has been a really productive stumble:

Brain Pickings has so many interesting, amusing and genuinely thought provoking snippets I may be quite some time:

First up is the Five manifestos for life

Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

Thats my new motto, and I just love this new take on failing:

design takes a “fail forward” approach to creativity

Then don’t miss the wonderful Mapping European Stereotypes

Finally Collaborative Consumption – the Seven ways to Have more by Owning less

 

How do you solve problems?

One of my many roles at the moment is as a part time trainer for Oxford Creativity. One of their greatest attributes (apart from TRIZ, Karen, Lilly and Caroline). Their fourth greatest attribute is the use of cartoons to illuminate complex ideas and occasionally just very funny double entendres. Here is their latest cartoon and the current offerings of TRIZ courses which I highly recommend (and even pop-up as a facilitator on days four and five of the five day courses).

Are you seeking a reliable problem solving method that provides relevant and practical answers every time like the man in the cartoon? The TRIZ toolkit enables your engineering teams to understand and solve their most difficult problems quickly and effectively.

When experienced and successful engineers learn TRIZ, they make better use of their experience, knowledge and skills both individually and in teams, delivering:

• Fast understanding, definition and communication of important problems

• Creative, cost effective and practical solutions

• Auditable innovation

 Learn TRIZ

Introduction to TRIZ
29 September 2011 with the IMechE in London

1 December 2011 with the IET in London

The whole TRIZ Toolkit – Innovation and Problem Solving 5 day workshops

17 – 21 October 2011 in Oxford

14 – 18 November 2011 in Preston

5 – 9 December 2011 in Bristol (With the IMechE)

20 – 24 February 2012 in Oxford

12 – 16 March 2012 in Preston

TRIZ for IP Development

2 & 3 November 2011

29 & 30 November 2011

All delegates on our public TRIZ workshops will receive a copy of Karen Gadd’s book TRIZ for Engineers: Enabling Inventive Problem Solving (RRP £45). This colourful, accessible and practical guide covers all the tools seen on the workshop, and is an excellent reference tool to help you and your team solve your most difficult problems.

More information on each of these workshops is available on our website. Alternatively, we frequently hold free, 30 minute Welcome to TRIZ webinars which provide an introduction to the TRIZ tools and what the toolkit can offer. Register online via our Webex site here.

If you would like to book a place on these workshops, please contact Caroline or complete our booking form

These workshops are all available in-house, for more information please contact

CarolineDavies @ triz.co.uk

We look forward to seeing you on a workshop soon.