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…
It’s hard to believe it’s already been three weeks, but 19th-21st May, I was part of a conference in Mexico on Soft Power and Public Diplomacy with Wilton Park, a UK government-related agency that organises thought-provoking and timely conferences around international topics. The conference itself was excellent – a tribute 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…
I recently ran a webinar with Michael Cheveldave about how to pull insights from SenseMaker® via the Cognitive Edge website. We recorded the session and all the questions and answers – the video and supporting materials are all now available to Premium Network Members at the Cognitive Edge website. It’s Read more…
I'm off to Colombia next week for the latest element of a great project to look at entrepreneurial attitudes across the country – this trip is to present some interim findings, develop some experimental interventions that we'll monitor in the next phase of the project. I notice that friends in Read more…
A short blog today – there’s a longer one that’s half-written about how we might build a framework for common central monitoring of multiple local projects, but that needs a little more teasing out and work to make it mroe practical. So today, the perfect lead-in – another new project 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…
I came across a glorious Churchill quote recently while reading Billy Bragg's The Progressive Patriot. It wasn't one I had heard before, but it sums up beautifully something that challenges many of the people I talk to – how to set direction and objectives for large numbers of people, many Read more…
When you’re presented with lots of excellent examples of people’s experience (the Northern Ireland 10,000 Voices project has already gathered 1100 examples of patients’ experiences), the temptation is still to read them all, and act quickly on the ones that strike you. … To gain a better understanding of the issues facing youth in Kyrgyzstan today, we’re introducing micronarratives – young people will collect, tell and interpret their own stories, providing a better understanding of the challenges they face in their everyday lives, and also helping to identify any gaps in the knowledge and skills of young people in order to shape the focus of our outreach activities.
Narrative research being run by the UNDP across Eurasia is providing useful insights to new programmes and activities. Using SenseMaker, new projects are about to be rolled out in Kyrgystan, Belarus and Georgia.