aiden choles

Over the last few months you might have noticed how I'm writing fewer business posts on this blog. That's because my business has moved from being solo-preneur Aiden Choles to being a partner in The Narrative Lab. Anyway, we're a finalist in the SA Blog Awards 2008.

You can vote for us here.

Having just met Dion Forster face-to-face for the first time today, and having discussed the nature of his prolific blogging style, I like the image that Gino posted about the evolution of blogging. Very apt considering how I've had to learn how to focus my oline writing efforts.

A friend commented to me the other day, "Aiden, you've been quiet on your blog recently".

Indeed. 'Tis because I often get hit by a bout of laziness when the technical stuff on my site does not work to my whims. Case in point: my site gets upgraded to a new version (and theme) thus rendering my content editor as functional as a molten wax crayon in a 1-year old's hand. What's the problem?  read more »

This is the first time I'm blogging during a conference - I'll see if I can pay attention and write coherently at the same time. Instead of providing a chronological account of my time with Dave Snowden (founder of Cognitive Edge) over the next few days at Sonja's Dialogue conference in the Cognitive Edge Accreditation course.

I did the very same course roughly 18 months ago (after I had just read a couple of Dave's articles). It blew my hair back and am thankful I took some fairly rigorous notes. We're only 40mins into the day, but I can already see how Dave has improved in communicating the philosophy and background to his complex adaptive systems influences behind sense-making (making sense of the world so that we can act in it).

I do wonder though if I feel this way because I have journeyed with this thinking over the last year or so?

*He looks around the room*

Nope, people seem to be grasping this better than I did last year. Well done Dave!

Onto my next thought ...

I'm proud to be a blogger. But gosh, we have taken some stick in the news and media over the last few weeks, especially around the emergence of the SA male prostitute blog (would link to it, but unlike others I'm not anonymous and may be up for prosecution one day) . Patricia de Lille and David Bullard have also thrown their hats into this ring (not the prostitution ring that is).

But man, I love what Bullard is doing. He is holding up a big, fat mirror up to the blogging community and asking us damn serious (often clad in the usual Bullard sardonic tone) questions about who we are and what we do on this public forum.

When I look at the narrative pulse of the South African blogopshere, and how it is eating away at itself from the inside, I see Bullard's role being one that uncovers the often farcical nature of what we do in this space, challenges the inward-focussed "nepotism" that occurs and leaves space for someone to step up to the plate and bring some common sense to what we do.

I've been bending Mike's ear now for yonks, and maybe this is old news to you, about how the current proliferation in blogs and blogging is a fad. But a fad that has some deep roots and desires that are driving the Connection Economy. Blogs have come, and they will go ...soon. But the desire to connect, ooh ... this will be around for as long as sperm finds an egg attractive.

I digress ... social software is a symptom (in a really positive sense!) of a deep underlying need to connect. The cavemen did it after a successsful kill. The cowboys did it around a fire in the Wild West. And we do it today using the internet to spread our connections wider that before. The desire to connect is borne out of our desire to share and exchange our worlds. Mm, this sounds like a perfect time to throw in some profound Psychologist's quote: Cooley (1902) "... groups are the most basic social entity, meeting basic human needs for social interactions". Isolation is out, and connectedness is in.

Back to sharing our worlds. What is is that we want to share? We want to share information we know, information that we've found, information that we've found interesting, and in exchange we recieve the same when we log on to our favourite blog. We represent our worlds as information. That same information is then read and assimilated into the world of the reader, or at least some of it is.

But our worlds are so complex. Can we ever master representing it to those we want to share it with? Should we even try? Or should we try not to? So, we share and we exchange our worlds through social software. But in a-dimensional software tools, how do we represent the complexity of our worlds - the intricacy, the ambiguity, the tone, the emotion and the experience. In and of itself, social software will not gain us deeper and more menaingful connections. No, it will be our ability to translate our world into words, convey them meaningfully and captivate our audience with out presence.

I only know if one medium that does all of this ... Story. The metaphor of Story is the representating of our worlds in ways that use narrative, fable and myth. Great storytellers are the ones who share their world with us succintly, draw us into their experience and then make us a cup of tea. For an experience of this visit the Dilbert blog. I'm not alone in my belief in the power of story and narrative as the tool that will make us better communicators in the Connection Economy.

Tom Peters believes that a companies story will decide their success or failure. Dan Pinkbelieves that story will ensure that your information reforms itself from mere useless fact into high impact meaning. Dave Snowden uses narrative to convey organisational values better than the best written mission statement. Bill Ives uses storytelling to facilitate knowledge management. Steve Denning uses story as an organisation change tool.

But don't confuse the use of narrative and story with the fuzzy, quasi-emotional entertainment movement being used in management meetings and get aways. No, here narrative and story refer to techniques used in 2 ways:

1 - to construct/build narratives of an organisation that can be used to communicate values, facilitate knowledge management, improve communications, and the list goes on, or

2 - to use narrative techniques in team/group processes where discursive meaning is used to address problems.

Thanks for reading this post. Well done. I promise to be less verbose in future posts on the role of narrative in tomorrows connecting world.