The one course that I always recommend is Cognitive Edge's Practitioner accreditation - whether you're a communicator, facilitator, knowledge manager, leader, innovator... The new batch of courses have just been announced (details below) and they've changed the pricing structure quite a bit - if you've attended the practitioner two days, then the third day on SenseMaker is free.

The next London course is coming up at the end of the month (31 January - 1 February). I'm honoured to have been asked to co-teach the course with Michael Cheveldave, so I'm looking forward to it. Hope to see you there...

1) Cognitive Edge Practitioner Accreditation

The two-day Practitioner Accreditation course provides practical ways to manage under conditions of uncertainty, understand the power of business narrative and discover new ways to use human networks. Attendance at the course provides accreditation and membership to the Cognitive Edge Practitioners' Network. The SenseMaker® workshop will be free for all participants who attend the 2-day Accreditation Course. Please indicate in the 'Extra Information' box if you are attending the SenseMaker® workshop.

Accreditation course information is here:

http://www.cognitive-edge.com/accreditation.php

Register for Accreditation here (dates stated below are not inclusive of the SenseMaker® workshop):

• Washington DC, USA: 11-12 January
• Dallas, USA: 25-26 January
• London, UK: 31 January - 1 February

2) Cognitive Edge SenseMaker® Workshop

The one-day SenseMaker® workshop is focused on teaching how to configure, sell and interpret narrative projects that use the Cognitive Edge SenseMaker® software. In each location, it directly follows the Accreditation class (above). We recommend that participants from the two-day Accreditation Course also attend the SenseMaker® day if they would like to run narrative projects using the software. To attend the SenseMaker® Workshop (and not the preceding 2-day Accreditation Course which makes it free), there will be a small charge to cover room hire and catering. The charge will be 150 dollars, pounds or euros depending on the unit of your local currency. We have a capacity of 24 in these classes, priority given to those who are booking into the prior 2-day Accreditation Course.

SenseMaker® Workshop course information is here:

http://www.cognitive-edge.com/sensemaker.php

Register for the workshop here:

• Washington DC, USA: 13 January
• Dallas, USA: 27 January
• London, UK: 2 February

Two contrasting weeks working on very different narrative projects - both fascinating in their own right. And both doing SenseMaker™ analysis under time pressure, but with datasets that couldn't have been more different.

1. At a conference with friends in the US, we gathered people's feedback on a particular organisational issue. Over two days, we collected just over 100 stories - about 8,000 words. Two of which were swearwords - I love it that people drop the pretence when they give feedback like this. Closing the survey at 8pm on the Thursday night, I had a few hours to analyse and feedback to the plenary session on the final day.
   
   The analysis itself was actually straightforward and fascinating - the difficult bit was deciding what had to be left out in the final version - I had only 20 minutes to present. And then generating the slides from the material. The results were well-received - and as always happens with narrative research, there were plenty of "oh! Really?" moments, as well as humorous ones
     
2. The second project has been a much larger affair. Over 4,000 stories collected over the past couple of months. Initial analysis of topline trends and outliers is easy - and equally fascinating. Again, it's possible to get headlines and interesting materials quickly from this much material but then you get into the nuances and hypotheses that arise from the first cut of results.
   A different difficulty arises here - there are so many interesting routes to take through the analysis:
3. 1. What happens as level of education goes up? Age?
   2. If I combine ideas about the future with ideas about poverty how do the results look? And then level of education? And age?
   3. How do all of the above change depending on a) time of day b) day of the week c) where we collected

I've just seen another article about how social media caused change in Egypt. (I'm not going to link to it - or any of the others - as I don't want to encourage the causal thinking behind it.) The other element I've seen mentioned as important in the Egypt changes earlier this year is that "everyone stayed on message."

Now, the former element had a role to play - but it's too tempting to assign it too much importance in the piece. The second - staying on message - is just wishful thinking on the part of someone who wants to convince their salary-payer to stick to the script - which is a dangerous and seriously wrong interpretation that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny of the facts.

There are two important elements here that intertwine:

• Social media increased the level of interaction between people and groups - creating favourable conditions for conversations and information to flow quickly and to wider audiences than was previously the case. It created an echo chamber that would respond to whatever messages started to resonate with the people interacting in the networks. In that sense, it seems to be a preferable, but neither necessary nor sufficient condition for mass change.
  
  One of the products of a spread of mass social media in Egypt was creating an environment in which events that were small-scale could serve as catalysts to the change. There were probably many potential catalysts, but notice is usually only given to the ones that actually take hold and trigger events. Any full-scale analysis of the Egyptian situation would need to look at huge volumes of data, paying particular attention to the outliers - to events that were briefly talked about but petered out before taking hold on a large scale.
    
• Messages - in fast-changing, diverse situations like a fermenting country - are rarely designed, planned and executed. Or at least, they may be, but that's rarely a successful strategy. The second fallacy I mentioned above arises from looking at an end result (i.e. an apparent clear message*) and thinking "How was that successful?". That thought, for people who spend their lives planning communications, leads to the assumption that the communication was planned - and that everyone stuck to the message. (It's tempting, but roughly equates to assuming that life is the product of "Intelligent Design".)
  
  Instead, I offer this: in the vast, inter-connected echo chamber mentioned above, many and diverse messages appeared from thousands of different people. Some were picked up and re-transmitted, increasing the echo factor and making them louder. As this happened, weaker messages that did not have the same appeal diminished, making the dominant messages seem even louder - increasing the number of people hearing them. At some point, these messages reached critical mass, drowning out other messages (which would still have been being generated, but would have had a higher bar to reach in order to be heard) - and outsiders observing the system at that point would note that "everyone is on message."

While this doesn't apply everywhere - bounded applicability after all - I do think that if you're facing a dynamic, fast-moving complex environment, planning can only show you roughly what not to do and broadly what might be worth saying. More specific than that, I don't believe that analysis and planning can take you.

Instead, I think a better, faster and more effective route is to take an evolutionary approach - diverse (but coherent) vehicles and messages, fast feedback loops to show what effect is being had and then rapid adaptation. Not with the goal of finding a single message or a best practice, but to develop a constantly evolving, more resilient approach.

*Which I would disagree with at the most basic level - the appearance of a clear message is more down to misinterpretation from a non-Egyptian cultural perspective, missing nuances and differences in varying communications.

One of the great truisms in communications and development work (these days, I seem to be having conversations in both areas and am aware of their similarities) is that "we want to hear from everyone, give everyone a voice". The principled, idealistic side of us believes that, but the pragmatic side veers away from it - if everyone had a voice, the result would be nothing more than noise. Single voices would be drowned out, and all that anyone listening would hear would be the general hum of thousands of conversations - with the occasional howl of outrage emerging from the sonic ocean.

One of the benefits of using SenseMaker™ - as was shown last week in an interesting environment - is that it allows for lots of voices (over a hundred in this case, thousands in another current project) but allows for patterns of meaning to emerge, without getting trapped in the individual words.

While the voice that is collected is personal, contextual and authentic - allowing people to say what really matters and why - the next step is all-important. They then then put tell us what that story, that narrative, actually means - by simply putting it into a simple framework. Often, as last week, it's a simple mark on a triangle. And it's then the accretion of marks from hundreds or thousands of stories that produces the emergent patterns - the overall voice of the population.

(With some judicious demographics collection it's then possible to see how different groups' voices tell different stories too.)

And from the patterns, it's then easy to drill back down to the individual voices - meaning that everyone's voice is heard and recorded, that everyone's voice has equal weight in the emergent patterns, but we can hear the overall voice of the people rather than just a cacophony.

It's opening up some truly interesting projects - more on which in due course...

A nice feeling this morning - I realise that (for the moment at least), I've got two full weeks in the UK to work on projects - the first time I've had that long a chunk of time in one place since June/July. Hence the silence on the blog.

The upside of all the travel has been some great projects and sessions - most of them in North/South/Central America with the odd excursion to Europe - but I realise that when I'm doing substantial travelling and working, I'm not (yet) good at staying on top of email and other communications routes. I'm better than I was, but still - too big an inbox for my comfort, so one of the things to work on in the next fortnight (in addition to final reports and new projects) will be clearing out the emails. So, if you sent me something and haven't heard back, I'm not ignoring you - and there's a good chance you'll hear from me this week or next.

I'll also be back on the blog more - with opportunities for people who have schools nearby that might want to join in Children of the World. We're about to launch phase 2 of the project and would welcome anyone wants to get their local school involved...

At some recent conferences, the issue of identity has cropped up a few times - usually with the underlying assumption that each individual has a core identity. It's a seductive idea - and one that I've seen permeate organisational human resources, the self-help movement and research fields.

The inference taken from that assumption is that our identities are independent of our location or context, that work done to change an identity in one environment will "stick", transferring to other environments.

But it's not true. Our identities shift all the time - and our behaviours along with them. They change by location, by environment, by role we're playing.

Harry Eyres' recent FT article after a meeting with Amartya Sen hints at this here: "Many hats, not just one".

To give an example of how plural such affiliations can be, Sen writes that “the same person can be, without any contradiction, a South African citizen, of Asian origin, with Indian ancestry, a Christian, a socialist, a woman, a vegetarian, a jazz musician, a doctor”, and so on.

(My daughters know that my nationality depends on the shape and size of the ball being used on the screen and whether the sticks on the pitch are 100 metres apart and very tall, or 22 yards apart and waist-high. My patterns of behaviour and attitude will change depending on whether I see myself as being sibling/consultant/facilitator/mentor/offspring or parent.)

That shift between identities can be subtle - but I've often thought that, when we want to stress or un-stress a particular behaviour, one of the ways to do so is to look at the roles that generate it - and use that understanding to develop new approaches or interventions.

I love Sen's phrase in the article "viciousness of single identity politics" that boils someone down to a single role on which a group focuses. By looking farther afield at their other roles, we give them more humanity in our own eyes as well as giving us and them more choices to look at.

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, I've tended to fall back on divorce rate and national statistics.

But now, courtesy of the excellent Tim Harford (who's "Adapt" I'm enjoying as a well-written layman's guide to approaches to complex systems and environments), I've got a new one. I won't spoil the surprise - go read it here. The cheap and short version - size matters...and correlates.

There are spaces left on the London course this Autumn for Cognitive Edge accreditation.  It's running 13th-14th September for the main Cognitive Edge background and methods, with the SenseMaker™ workshop immediately following.

For researchers, marketeers, communicators, as well as the more obvious knowledge management professionals, there is no course that I'd recommend more highly.  The first two days are highly experiential - learning techniques and the tools that we apply to help people Make Sense of their environments - great for facilitators.  Day 3 is for those who are planning on using SenseMaker™ for a narrative project.

Details and registration at the link.  (There is one in Dallas the following week, but the Washington DC one the week before is already full.)

Cognitive Edge - News

And, for full disclosure, I'll be at the London one, helping present and sharing some of our experiences with the tools.  

It's been a busy couple of months - with a number of things that I'll be putting up here in the coming weeks. Including, excitingly, the next pilots for the Children of the World project...

In the meantime, however, some apposite quotes around ways of making changes and the work we've been - and are - doing at the moment.

"[He] started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say, 'This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought, 'This is the people ought to be, how do we change them?'

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

"'A healthy galaxy is forever poised on the edge of chaos, transixed between the sterile wasteland of order and the mad wilderness of rampant entropy.' ... [The organisation] was structured to thrive on diversity, multiplex thinking, multicultural societies.

"Nice trick. Starting is easy.

"It's keeping it going that's so hard."

Heaven, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

"In a world where everything is connected, advance signs of change, of turbulence, are likely to appear only when we look in unexpected places."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

"Narrow-gazing not only leads to kinds of misfires, it also fatally constrains the ability to imagine good ideas or policies. The chance for real brilliance or flair is usually best seen out of the corner of the eye."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

"[Chinese students instinctively knew] the environment contained clues to what was about to happen. If you stared at a single spot in the world around you, that incipient sensibility would be dulled to the point of uselessness."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

Yup, as I've said before, Joshua Cooper Ramo's book is great - my copy has pages and pages of underlined phrases. Read it. Just read it.