Workshops and events on SenseMaking, Story Collection and The Story

Published by Tony Quinlan on

It’s a busy month coming up for narrative and sensemaking in London. Some of the excellent events coming up include:

Cognitive Edge accreditation course – 2nd-3rd February 2011

Details of what you get on the course are here, but it’s a course that we highly recommend for communicators, organisational development specialists and km people – everyone in Narrate has been on it as a matter of [sic] course. Register online here.

If London isn’t convenient, they’re running a series around the world in the next couple of months. Dates and venues are here.

Anecdote storytelling workshop

A fortnight later, Shawn Callahan of Anecdote is in town with his one-day storytelling workshop on 16th February 2011. Shawn’s been working in narrative and storytelling for years, and is always good. (He’s also a Cognitive Edge member too – we like to stick together!) You can register for the workshop here.

Shawn ran an excellent blogpost recently “The Uncanny Valley of Business Storytelling” – it describes beautifully why he (and we) have an instinctive distrust of over-constructed stories and the field of organisational storytelling that looks great, but doesn’t resonate – far less deliver reliable consistent results.

The Story

The Story is an event running on 18th February 2011 in London. (Unfortunately on the same day as the Cognitive Edge European network meeting.) It’s only into its second year, but last year’s event was excellent, organised by Channel 4’s Matt Locke, and looked at story from all sorts of angles – televisual, games, interactive and more. This year’s event is also supporting the new Ministry of Stories, a project that’s been set up in London based on Dave Eggers’ 826 foundation. (A separate blog to follow on that one, once I’ve had a proper look.)

There are only a handful of tickets left, so hurry along here to get yours. If you need further tempting, check out the stunning list of speakers here.

For those who’ve asked, we won’t be running any workshops for the next couple of months – if you were looking for something like the sessions we’ve run with Melcrum and are in a hurry, I’d strongly recommend either the Cognitive Edge session for the overall sensemaking/complexity/narrative or Shawn for specific storytelling materials.