Last week saw the last Cynefin and Sense-Making (CSM) courses of the year, Dave and I sharing the presenting/facilitating duties. A full room of different backgrounds and nationalities, which kept everything interesting – lessons and applications getting swapped across sectors and countries. Following up is always a challenge – so Read more…
After a good six years of SenseMaker® projects, one of the consistent things has been the difficulty in feeding back results to stakeholders in ways that help them make better decisions. (I’m not a fan of big reports – partly because I think they tend to make great doorstops and Read more…
I’ve been working with SenseMaker® now in development projects for a few years and I was recently reflecting on how far we’ve come in what we do. Lots of lessons – often learned the hard way in the early stages, but never disastrously. It’s time to share some of those Read more…
Last Friday was the 2014 Design of Understanding day – a packed room at St Brides Library off Fleet Street, organised by the redoubtable Max Gadney of After the flood. He and I had come across each other in a hotel bar in Kigali, Rwanda when we were both working Read more…
When we do SenseMaker™projects, one of the things that regularly crops up is the difference between correlations and causation. It’s often the case that people read more into correlation numbers than is appropriate. And I always like having good examples for strong correlations that can be over-interpreted. Up until now, Read more…
The other week I had one of those fun weeks where the situations and people are so different from one day to the next, I was at risk of getting whiplash. On the one hand, I was lucky enough to join Anne McMurray and a group of people running interesting Read more…
The opening gambit of more than one past client project has been “help us get our story straight”. Sometimes it’s just that – the general story – sometimes it’s something specific: “help us get our customer story straight”, “our story on leadership”. It’s an interesting starting point, but demands a Read more…
There is a moment of great relief that comes in every client’s experience – the moment when the stories start to come in. And then the delight that not only are they coming in, but they’re coming in volume! There is a belief in the communications world that getting hold Read more…
When did you last try something new? Or test a brilliant new insight? What have you done differently in your job recently? There’s a trap that’s easy to fall into – improvement comes from just doing the same, only better/harder/more efficiently. There’s so much to do, there’s only so much Read more…
Part of my time this year is being spent as an adviser to two organisations that are merging. It makes an interesting example of a merger process. All relevant posts on the process are collected under the Merger tag. I set the scene for the Merger last month in this Read more…