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COGNITIVEEDGE

Wales Public Service Summer School 2008

Narrative & leadership

Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.

It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed. Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.

Terry Pratchett (1991) Witches abroad

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Thinking about the subject

Narrative is about managing meaning; enabling

effective action & engagement

Homo Narrans not Homo economicus

More about the ecology than the individual

A question of evidence: from outcomes to impact

Types of narrative workMapping & representing ideation cultures

Weak signal detection & dominant narrativesRevealing archetypes, values & themes

Living oral histories & knowledge managementQuantitative research methods & impact measurement

Metaphor in learning & the role of tolerated failure

Story-telling has a double meaning

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A naturalising approach

Based in the natural

sciences

Complex adaptive systems theory

Aspects of evolutionary psychology

The cognitive sciences

Types of systems

Ordered systems constrain agent behaviour

Chaotic systems: agents unconstrained

Complex systems: agents and systems co-evolve & are inherently unpredictable

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Simple

SenseCategoriseRespond

Best practice

Complicated

SenseAnalyseRespond

Good practice

Complex

ProbeSense

Respond

Emergent

Chaotic

ActSense

Respond

Novel

The Cynefin Framework


Wisdom of crowds

The jar of jelly beans at the county fair ...

... the average of the group is more accurate

No one must be aware of the guesses of others

So don’t confuse this with prediction markets

Mass consultation of citizens & interest groups

A simple test to prove the point

Three students with white shirts & three with black playing basket ball

Count the number of times those with white shirts pass the ball

There are two balls!

To avoid argument: if it leaves the hands of someone in white and arrives in someone else's, no matter how, it is one pass

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it seems that whatever we perceive is organised into patterns for which we the perceivers are largely responsible...As perceivers we select from all the stimuli falling on our senses only those which interest us, and our interests are governed by a pattern-making tendency, sometimes called a schema. In a chaos of shifting impressions each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognisable shapes, are located in depth and have permanence.As times goes on and experience builds up, we make greater investment in our systems of labels. So a conservative bias is built it. It gives us confidence

Mary Douglas Purity and Danger 1966

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Mapping ideation cultures

Mass capture of fragmented narrative material in

many and various forms

Distributed cognition, material is self-signified

Case: Understanding alien cultures

Case: Liverpool Museums

Understanding their impact on school children

Major issues with questionnaires & focus groups

Need to create a knowledge database for teachers

Single point of capture: the child’s story

Result: impact based measurement, knowledge management & real time monitoring

Now extending to living oral history in the slavery museum

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Measuring impact

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Staff are too child like & pathetic

Staff patronise children

Too much to see and its

overwhelming

Not enough to keep me interested

Rushed from place to place missed

things

Too much time in one place


Fitness landscape 1

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Archetypes, values & themes


Metaphor & failure

Complexity based simulation environments for

discovery & learning (increase tolerate failure)

Controlled workshop environment run in

experimental waves (3-4 per day max)

Adhoc generation of material by control group

based on ensuring continuous failure

Used as a research method

Displacement options

Anthropological study

Choice of metaphor

Use of techniques such as The Prisoners Dillema

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Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his window-sill.He had never seen a bird like this before. “You poor thing”, he said, “how ever were you to allowed to get into this state?”He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers.“Now you look more like a bird”, said Nasrudin

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