Over the last couple of weeks and especially on some long train journeys I have been drafting and redrafting a new Workshop for capturing Lessons Learned. My motivation was a recent event which I facilitated but which lacked an ending of any substance, with my wide eyed idea that everyone would be happy with the experience and would carry forward any learning in their heads to their next assignment.
A couple of weeks ago I met up with my good friends Geoff Parcell and Chris Collison who told me they were using anecdote circles to great effect within their work with the NHS. Well I have returned the favour and having studied their great new book ‘No more Consultants’ have adapted their river approach to fit. It now lies comfortably on a bedrock of narrative in an ecologically complex landscape and runs through a number of gathered Cognitive Edge and Argenta Europ methods which are individually powerful but together deliver far more than the sum of their parts.
The above picture is just a part of the overall plan but I rather like the idea that the source of the river is from the experiences of the past and that the reason the actual future is separated from desired stems from the fact that it immediately hits all the pile of issues directly in its way.
The breakthrough is that this initial hexagon and flip-chart based workshop is an initial probe into the complex domain of a single project, team or community. Once the sense starts to flow the eventual addition of SenseMaker would make the whole approach scaleable between teams, across offices, organisations or customer, supplier, partner relationships of importance.
I have worked hard to seamlessly integrate the forces of ambiguity, metaphor and archetype while allowing for the emergence (during the workshop) of three useful contextualised frameworks that will hopefully have growing importance long after the workshop.
Utilising the latest thinking on visualisation, patterning and a whole ecosystem approach, the real test now is whether it can truly deliver self-assessment alongside self-organised, self realised, sense making.
As a result I am offering these workshops at a reduced rate while I iron out the wrinkles. Please get in touch if you have a suitable reason to review, learn the lessons, make sense of a situation or just have an interest in the approach.
Ecology of Knowledge 
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