I'm looking forward to heading down to the Novatel on the Upper Esplanade in St Kilda for the annual ODA retreat. It all happens on the 24-25 August. I believe there are still some places to be had.

I'll be presenting a couple of sessions on using narrative techniques to support change initiatives. Lots of interesting sessions to attend. I'm looking forward to hanging out there for the two days and dinner and enjoying some excellent conversations.

Here's the website where you can get the details to register etc. Very reasonably priced.

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Last year Terrence Gargiulo and I delivered a webinar in the triple threat of storytelling. It was really popular and we had a great time doing it.

Well we're back for another webinar, this time we're exploring how to become a better storyteller by applying some specific and deliberate practices.

Here is our little marketing blurb. Sign up details are at the bottom of this post.

Have you wondered why you are not making better progress at becoming a storyteller at work? Are you finding it difficult to find good stories to tell? Are your stories relevant to your colleagues or do they look at you blankly wondering what planet you're on?

Spend 45 minutes with master business story practitioners Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Terrence Gargiulo of MAKINGSTORIES.net as they share deliberate practices you can employ today to be a better storyteller.

We will conduct the session as a conversation involving everyone. Yippee!

We expect you'll walk away with three things from this session:

• Three practices to deepen your storytelling skills
• Ideas from other attendees of how they improve their skills or what works for them...what works in their organisation
• Some specific resources for finding good stories

We're doing this webinar twice, one timed for Asia Pacific and the other for the Americas. Just click on the link of the webinar you want to attend and fill in your details.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Aust. EST  

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM USA PDT

Looking forward to chatting with you on the call.

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When we started Anecdote in 2004 our web presence consisted entirely of this blog. We gradually built content, and a following, but every now and then people would say, "we really love your blog but what exactly do you do?" So for some time now we've been planning a website that described our consulting work.

So it is with quite a bit of excitement that this week we launch www.anecdote.com.

In the coming weeks you will also see a refresh of the blog. It looks a little tired next to the new website.

Love to know what you think.

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People know us as the story guys and as more and more people realise that it's effective to include stories in their presentations the number of requests we get to suggest business related stories have gone up. Since we started the Anecdote blog we've used a specific category whenever a blog post includes a story: Anecdotes. There are now 120 posts in that category and each post might have multiple anecdotes. So lots of stories to peruse.

So today we introduce The Story Finder

We are hoping this will make it easy for you to find stories that you can use in your presentations. Pass the message on to your colleagues if you find this resource useful.

We will continue to add great stories wherever we find them.

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The Origins Asia Pacific Business Narrative Conference is a part of the Singapore International Storytelling Festival and is organised by The National Book Development Council of Singapore, with Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge.

The aim of Origins is to foster the practice of business storytelling and narrative techniques in the Asia Pacific region and to build awareness among government agencies and corporations of the power of storytelling and narrative for business.

The conference has three objectives

• To build a network of practitioners to deepen the practice of storytelling and story use in organizations.
• To create awareness of the broad utility of narrative techniques for dealing with business issues, their capacity to humanise the workplace, and to help organisations deal with complexity and uncertainty.
• To inspire leaders to take the first steps in applying narrative techniques in their businesses.

Why participate?

Narrative methods are beginning to have a substantial impact on businesses, particularly in the following areas:

• leadership
• communication
• staff engagement
• strategy alignment and execution
• issues characterised by complexity
• change management
• understanding cultural and attitudinal differences
• learning lessons
• building a collaborative work environment
• communicating tacit knowledge

Who should participate?

• Leaders of organisations, teams and projects
• Corporate planning and strategic planning roles
• Change managers and change activists
• Managers in knowledge management, organisational development and organisation learning roles
• People in training, instructional design, coaching and mentoring roles
• Corporate communications and internal communications roles
• Branding, marketing and sales roles

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I'm off to Malaysia in May to help run a leadership development program for a telecommunication company. While I'm there I'm meeting senior leaders from a range of companies and government departments and showing them our strategic story work. As an ex-IBMer I remember our CEO at the time, Lou Gerstner, say that strategies are the easy bit. But strategy execution is what's difficult. And if you want to get strategy execution right you needed world class processes, strategic clarity and a high performance culture. Our strategic story work helps everyone to really know and understand the strategy (they tell it as a story) providing the much needed strategic clarity.

I have two days set aside to meet people: 18th and 19th May. If you are in KL and would like to meet or you know someone who might be interested in our work, please send me an email (shawn@anecdote.com.au). Looking forward to hearing from you.

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We've just refreshed our materials for our popular Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop. We offer this workshop to organisations who are looking to build their internal communication and influence skills. We run it regularly for a variety of companies such as NAB, Jemena, BAE, and IBM and it forms part of our overall programme of Making Strategies Stick.

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If you are community of practice leader and want to experience learning in a relaxed atmosphere with some of the very best minds, then you might like to check out Bev and Etienne's BEtreat. It will be an interesting mixture of the professional and the personal. One day you will be at the cutting edge and the next at a birthday party, and your family is invited too. I wish they lived in Australia but for all those who can make it to California 6-10 July pop in, have some fun and learn something along the way.

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In late February and early March we ran workshops in Melbourne and Sydney with Kevin Bishop from the UK. The workshops focussed on Influencing Change using Stories. Until recently, Kevin was heading the change activities for 60,000 staff at the Royal Bank of Scotland. We learned heaps and the feedback from participants was fantastic.

The photo show the three of us (L to R: Shawn, Kevin, Mark) last Thursday at the LIW Centre for Leadership at Chowder Bay in Sydney. The photo below shows the group having lunch overlooking the harbour. You might as well do it in style!

Our venue in Melbourne was also fantastic - the headquarters of Lifesaving Victoria right on Sandridge Beach in Port Melbourne.

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part of The Singapore International Storytelling Festival

6-8 September, Singapore

Call for Case Studies

In early 2009 we (Patrick Lambe and I) wanted to see if we could put together a conference on storytelling for business. Our concept was for a very practical, workshop-focused conference, designed to help Asia Pacific business people apply story approaches to boost business performance. But we weren’t sure if anyone would come!

So we organised a two-day masterclass on business narrative as part of The Singapore International Storytelling Festival, and the festival did a terrific job in telling people about the event. We waited anxiously to see if anyone would register. Did Asia Pacific organisations really value storytelling as a legitimate and effective business technique? Patrick called me in Melbourne a couple of weeks after we announced the event: registrations were coming in fast. We were booked out months in advance.

This year we want to build on that success and focus on the many story practitioners in our region to create an event where we can learn from each other while also expanding the awareness of narrative approaches among the region's organisations. We’re looking for proposals for case study presentations from within the Asia Pacific region to share what you have done and what you have learned.

The conference has three objectives

• To build a network of practitioners to deepen the practice of storytelling and story use in organizations.
• To create awareness of the broad utility of narrative techniques for dealing with business issues, their capacity to humanise the workplace, and to help organisations deal with complexity and uncertainty.
• To inspire leaders to take the first steps in applying narrative techniques in their businesses.

Conference design

The event will have three parts:

Day 1 will be a closed practitioner's forum for the conference speakers and case study presenters only. We will spend the day sharing what we have learned from a practitioner's perspective. The day will be designed for dialogue rather than presentations.

Day 2 will be a public conference where practitioners will present case studies that illustrate the effectiveness of story-work; and

Day 3 will consist of a set of 1/2 day workshops to enable attendees to build their business story skills in specific areas such as coaching, organisational change, leadership development and communication.

Do you have a case study to share?

We are seeking expressions of interest to share a case study at the conference. We are particularly interested in stories of working with narrative in organizations, across private, public and non-profit sectors. They should clearly illustrate the value of how stories and storytelling can be used to meet the organisation's business needs.

Case presenters will:

• Participate in the closed practitioners’ forum on 6 September
• Share their case study in round table discussions in the morning of 7 September
• Offer to share a technique they have successfully used in a “techniques marketplace” session in the afternoon of 7 September

How we will select the case studies

We will select case studies based on:

• richness of the case for learning
• transferability of the lessons
• demonstrated impact
• innovative approaches
• geographic representation
• representation of different kinds of organization

Please send a short description (a couple of paragraphs) to both Patrick Lambe (plambe@straitsknowledge.com) and Shawn Callahan (shawn@anecdote.com.au) before 22nd March. We’re also happy to trade ideas by email or Skype if you want to develop an idea before you decide to put a more formal description together.

Shawn Callahan

Patrick Lambe

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Anecdote helps you harness the natural power of stories to bring your strategy to life. We help you tell your strategic story and then engage your employees in the strategic process so everyone has a hand in creating it. The result is a strategy everyone understands in concrete, specific terms where the level of commitment to its achievement is vastly increased.

We help our clients be more effective and resilient through developing their capabilities to work collaboratively, in teams, in communities of people with shared interest and expertise, and across diverse networks.

Contact Us

NB: For our regular readers you might be wondering why we are explaining what we do in a blog post. We just wanted to make sure people could find our services around making strategies stick and our four speciality areas.

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We often get asked whether we are running any public courses on our techniques but for the last couple of years we have reserved these courses for our clients.

But this February and March we are running one workshop on influencing change with stories in collaboration with Kevin Bishop, most recently the Royal Bank of Scotland's change manager in the UK.

If you would like to attend here are all the details.

We only have limited places so please let us know as soon as you can to secure a spot.

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It's been weighing on my mind for a couple of months now. I haven 't posted nearly enough blogs. There seems to be so much happening. Mark and I have been creating a new business focussed on helping companies make their strategies stick. It's been great fun and extremely well received. At the same time our lessons learning and leadership development activities are progressing at a cracking pace.

Mark and I want to thank all the wonderful people we've had the pleasure to work with this year. We are blessed to be able to work with so many talented folk. London for me was a blast and I'm still enjoying working with the Sparknow folk. Working with Patrick Lambe up in Singapore is always a pleasure and next year the business stream of the Asian storytelling festival will be bigger and better. I want to say big thank you to Kerenza who is a key partner for us. She is an inspiration.

Next year is shaping up as a watershed for business storytelling. I'm looking forward to doing more work with MIchael, Andrew, Brett and Kevin.

So a big thank you and best wishes for the Christmas break (in Australia this is when we get a good set of holidays). It will be great to get back into the swing of blogging next year.

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On Tuesday morning this week 27 members of the Creative Performance Exchange (CPX) met to work out what we could do to make a difference to climate change. Georges McKails and I facilitated the session and the group developed ideas for what we could do as individuals, what we could do in our role at work and what we can do as CPX members. Amir kindly volunteered to write up all the notes but I can tell you there was a passion among all of us to make a difference. Here are some photos of the morning. I'll post the results of our efforts as soon as we have them.

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I'm sitting here watching the sun peak up over the trees and bushes that define the boundary of our backyard thinking about the enjoyable conference I attended last week. It was called Celebrating Story and it was held at the Abbotsford Convent. Andrew and Sasha Rixon did a tremendous job organising the event. They created a lovely atmosphere that encouraged everyone to open up and share what they knew.

There were a few aha moments for me at the conference. The first came chatting to David Drake. Actually it all started listening to his presentation where he mentioned that some story practitioners dealt with stories as commodities. This made me bristle a little so I asked David after the session what he meant. What I learned from this conversation was something I knew from my knowledge management interests but never thought to apply it to stories. If you view a story as a thing then you will focus on the story structure, its impact, the lessons that can be drawn from it etc. and you will have a tremendous urge to capture it and store it in a database. If you view storytelling as a process you'll focus on the people involved in the moment, the narrator, the listener, the context and the environment and will probably look for ways to create these types of experiences. One view is neither better nor worse than the other, you need both. But it is worthwhile pulling yourself up now and then and being mindful of your perspective.

Have you seen playback theatre? It is when a troupe of improv actors act out, at a drop of a hat, a story contributed by the audience. Melbourne's Playback Theatre were a feature of the conference and I learned some valuable lessons from them.

Here is little technique the playback folk used which I think is great. I can see myself using it to help people enrich their visual palette when telling a story. Pair people up: a storyteller and a listener. The storyteller has to start their story by describing the place where the story begins: It all started in a tiny red brick house on the upside of the street. The poplar trees were blowing in the wind and my Dad was sitting on the front steps ... That sort of thing. The listener then has the job of interrupting the story at anytime to get more description. "Popular tree?" they might ask, at which point the teller needs to say more about the popular trees until the listener says "continue." The storyteller then just keeps telling their story from that point on. One of the variations they had us do is then walk side by side and reflect on our stories. There is something about strolling which improves the conversation. I'm sure Jane Austen would have had something to say about this phenomenon.

The other thing that was a little bit confronting for me, but highly valuable, was when the playback performers facilitated a large group to break down and respond to a story I told. They essentially played back the story and then yelled out the feelings they had when listening to the story. It was surprising what people felt really passionate about and helped me understand some of the really important things that were in that story.

My last discovery was fairytales. Andrew Rixon has been trying to convince me of the importance of fairytales in a business context and I must admit I dismissed them as too 'out there' for my business clients. But Andrew ran a session where the group explored a single issue (getting unstuck) and then in small groups we had to create a fairytale that illustrated elements of that issue. Ours was 'awareness and options' and we had no problem coming up with a dragon-killing knight and his inability to see what was really happening around him. The fairytale structure is a ready made collection of metaphors that any group can use to explore organisational issues.

My presentation was on our leadership development program where we use stories from the organisation to illustrate good and bad management behaviours. I also used the opportunity with a room full of story practitioners to explore some of the challenges we face in our work. The two I shared were the general inability for many people to identify a story because we interpret many things as stories and so find it difficult to differentiate a story from opinions; and how using the term 'storytelling' on a corporate setting can make people uncomfortable and how other language can be used.

Well done to Andrew and all the other people involved in organising the event. It was great fun.

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We have found a place we like for drinks. Madam Brussells, level 3, 59 Bourke St Melbourne. Next to Spaghetti Tree. Come on down and join us.

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It seems hard to believe that it was five years ago tomorrow that Anecdote opened doors for business. Time has flown.

On Tuesday 11 August, Shawn and I will be in Melbourne city centre having drinks from 5pm to celebrate. We would love to see you there. We will blog and tweet the venue when we find one we like. So, make a note in your calendars and come along and help us celebrate.

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You can imagine my surprise when on day 1 of the conference I found myself sitting at the same table as Dan Kirsch. I've never met Dan. I've seen some of his posts in ActKM but top-most in my mind was that Dan was the guy who triggered the events that led Yahoogroups to delete the ActKM forum. At first we didn't say too much to each other and then I found myself next to Dan in the line for lunch, so I asked him, "so from your perspective what happened to our YahooGroups forum?" We sat down and he told me the story.

I came away with a different perspective on those events and it reinforced for me the importance of listening to other people's stories to make connections. Stories told and listened were creating new connections throughout the conference. You could feel the energy it was creating among the 150 delegates.

On the first day I started off sitting next to Kerry from CPA. She couldn't believe how small Luna Park was because as a 12 year old she used to think it was an enormous theme park where you could get lost for hours. Context is so important on how we view things. We were blessed with sunny Sydney days and being right on the harbour we looked out over the harbour bridge and the opera house. Spectacular venue.

Rather than give you a blow by blow description of the conference I thought it might be more fun (especially for me) to just recount those things that grabbed my attention.

I enjoyed Frank Connolly's presentation the most. Frank is the co-ordinator for the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network. It was like watching a stand up comedian. Not in the sense of delivering funny lines but in just how relaxed he looked and how well he connected with us. I really admired how Frank phrased his ideas, which were focussed on creativity and how we talk to each other. He told us when he was uncertain of what he knew, he spoke directly and plainly, and showed real empathy for the discipline and his place in it. He was creating a space that encouraged conversation. Frank also left us with this enduring image: "KM is like pushing a loose stool up a hill with a toothpick."

When Dale Chatwin from the Australian Bureau of Statistics was presenting I felt myself cheering him on. Dale was one of the few presenters who had the courage to admit their efforts to establish communities of practice were less than successful. It was a warts and all expose describing how ABS mandated CoPs based on IT consultants recommendations and from what I could read between the lines it seemed that CoPs were mainly viewed as online discussion forums. Dale and a few others knew better and are working to turn things around.

You might have seen me tweeting about On the Origin of Stories. One of its themes is just how important play is for animals, such as lions, because it creates a safe way to learn how to fight and hunt and by practising these things strength, agility and speed also improves. With humans we engage in cognitive play through storytelling, dance, painting, singing etc. Somehow however we've managed to kill many of the opportunities in organisations for cognitive play, with the exception of mind games. So it was refreshing to experience Patrick Lambe's session using his KM Method and Culture cards. At each table we played a set of games which got us talking and thinking in new ways. Great fun.

Roberto Evaristo from 3M showed us how they are mapping the skills of their employees using network graphs. I've been involved in a number of skill register projects and most have failed because they require a lot of time to compile and are rarely referred to which in turns diminishes the motivation for anyone to keep them up to date. Roberto's approach seemed different because senior folk were using the network graphs on a regular basis to decide who would be on what team, where learning efforts should be focussed and who might succeed another based on capabilities. You can imagine that these types of decisions matter to people and would give you plenty of motivation to update your details.

I have to admit I'm normally a KM conference-goer who leaves the room when the software vendor sponsoring the event stands up to speak. I know this is disrespectful but as a delegate I've found that I normally gain much more from the discussions with colleagues in the networking lounge than hear what is often merely a sales pitch. But on day 2 of the conference I was the conference chair so there was no skipping out of the room for me. As a result I was pleasantly surprised by Cuneyt Uysal's presentation from Open Text. Cuneyt (pronounced Jenai) gave us a good context for what was happening in social software. This quote sticks in my mind, "young people only use email to communicate with old people." It checks out with my 14 and 16 year old but like all definitive statements it's not the whole story. Most importantly it reminded me of what was happening in the software world and I was chuffed to see that ideas that I blogged about years ago are being incorporated into mainstream products such as social ranking of search, idea crowdsourcing (but I didn't call it that) and easily incorporating video.

Dave Snowden spoke a couple of times during the conference starting with the conference keynote. The idea that got me interested was the concept that it's not that useful to think of tacit knowledge as something that's in your head but that it's contained throughout your body. I was sort of expecting Dave to go the next step and say that tacit knowledge extends beyond your self and incorporates tacit knowledge of those people and things you are connected to or surrounded by. It reminds me of the network controller who couldn't remember what he knew in his lounge room or that classic of anthropology, Cognition in the Wild where each navigator alone was unable to explain or dock an aircraft carrier, but together they could.

During the conference I heard a some speakers recount the meme, "we learn best from failure." I'm not sure this is entirely true. Anecdotally I remember distantly when I read about the Ritz Carlton approach to conveying values using stories and I'm now delivering a similar approach to a client on the topic of innovation. Here I've learned from a good practice. As Bob Dickman once told me, "you remember what you feel." I can imagine memory being a key first step to learning. And some research shows it's more complex than just learning from failure. Take this example. The researchers take two groups who have never done ten pin bowling and get them bowling for a couple of hours. Then one group is taken aside and coached on what they were doing wrong and how they could improve. The other group merely watches an edited video of what they were doing right. The second group did better than the first. However there was no difference with experienced groups.

So I'm hoping we will have many more presentations at KM conferences like Frank's and Dale's which open up the possibilities, speak plainly and directly without jargon and doublespeak.

Thanks to the conference organisers, Ark Group, and especially Valerie and Aimee, for being attentive and putting into practice the ideas for improvements year in year out. It was a worthwhile and enjoyable event.

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Terrence Gargiulo and I are conducting two webinars in August where we will talk about some of the important lessons we've learned while helping leaders become better storytellers. It's going to be an interactive format where you'll be able to ask questions. The sessions are 45 minutes. Just click on the session that suits you best to register.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM Australian EST - click here to register

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM US PDT - click here to register

Here is our little marketing blurb about the events.

Are your leaders great storytellers? And, why should you care anyway?

With over forty years of combined experience, two of the world’s leading narrative consultants divulge some of what they have learned. Join Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Terrence Gargiulo of MAKINGSTORIES.net for a 45-minute rousing interactive discussion rich with examples and practical tools.

I wonder…

Will you be as surprised as we were when we discovered the “Triple Threat,” of storytelling for leaders?

Find out the answers to the three questions we get asked the most. Prior to the event we'll share a white paper on leadership and storytelling. Following the webinar we'll send you a job aid that we use in our work. So give us the pleasure of your company and interact with your peers to take a nuanced but deep dive into the art and science of leadership through narrative.

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I just noticed that Fast Company expert blogger Thomas Clifford has listed Shawn as one of 7 interesting storytellers to follow on Twitter. I better start following him :-)

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Newsletter subscriber, Ross Nicholson, rightly points out that Tom Peter's said "Ready, fire, aim" not "Ready, aim, fire," which I incorrectly wrote in the last newsletter. It seems automatic pilot kicked in as I was writing that sentence.

By the way, did you know you can see all our newsletters online? Just go to http://www.anecdote.com.au/newsletters.php We typically published the newsletter online a week after we email it to our subscribers.

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Just a quick note to say it is just over 4 weeks before we get together in London for our two workshops (24 & 25 June). Looks like we have a good turn out but if you are thinking of coming along I need to get all the registrations complete in the next two weeks.

Send me an email if you want a registration form and here is the description of the two narrative based workshops.

And just to get a bit of a flavour for my approach you might like to check out this presentation I did this week.

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Thanks to all my Twitter friends who helped me refine this article. It was a fun process that reinforces for me the strength of social computing approaches for collaboration.

The main purpose of this whitepaper is to introduce senior leaders to the idea of business storytelling and demonstrate its importance, especially in the increasingly complex and unpredictable world we live in. It also provides some approaches to how you find and recount your experiences in a business context.

I encourage you to send a copy to your CEO, or better still your CFO and CIO, and help them realise that people only remember what they feel and despite the painful sounding name, people don't feel bullet points.

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As flagged previously, Anecdote, Innotecture and Sparknow are running Story Week commencing on Monday 4th May. Story week aims to explore how to identify stories that have impact and the consistency (if any) with which people rate the impact of stories.

This is of interest for a range of reasons. Firstly, our Narrative Insight process involves collection of large numbers of stories - too many to be used in workshop settings - and we often need to identify the ones that have most impact. Story week will help us understand more about the selection criteria we use and the extent to which they are useful.

Of more relevance to our readers is the second reason. Anyone who gives presentations and talks, writes articles, reports, blog posts etc, can use stories to help communicate more clearly, persuasively and memorably. The stories can come from your own experience, from history, movies or the experience of others. A key challenge is choosing the right stories; the ones that have most impact and are most relevant. We are hoping that Story Week will inform our work to make the selection of the right stories more robust.

Starting Monday, we will post one story per day, seeking as many people as possible to assess the story against the criteria. It will only take a few moments each day.

Get ready!

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Anecdote, Sparknow and Innotecture have been working together for a little while now to find out a bit more about what stories have influence and impact. We've found quite a difference in views, even among ourselves. So we're inviting our combined readership and their networks (and their networks) to participate in Story Week (starting May 4th) Over 5 days we're going to show you 5 stories from different people in different formats, intended for very different audiences and settings. You're going to tell us how you respond to them. We'll tell you what you collectively told us. We'll all learn something in the process. Oh, and it will be fun, too.

Watch this space...

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I am giving a presentation at the actKM monthly meeting on Tuesday 3rd March. The location is the National Archives of Australia in Barton. Arrive for drinks from about 5.15 pm with the presentation going from about 5.45 pm till 6.45 pm. Details are on the actKM website.

The title of the presentation is 'Collaboration....takes more than wishful thinking'. It will focus on the practicalities of developing effective collaboration cultures and skills with plenty of illustrations from our work with public and private sector organisations, both large and small, local and international.

I will describe the urgent need to build collaborative cultures and skills. Not just for our success internally, but also to ensure success with stakeholders, clients, suppliers and partners. This is particularly true when times are tough and our focus needs to be on making the most of available resources. 2009 will mark the tipping point where organisations will move from emphasising collaboration tools to placing the effort on people, on their behaviours and capabilities. We mustn’t forget: it’s people who collaborate.

If you are in Canberra next Tuesday then you are welcome to come along. No RSVP required.

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Here is my presentation from the Ark KM for the Experienced Practitioner. I have to admit that it probably doesn't make too much sense without the commentary and the note are not the best but happy to answer any questions.

The presentation is a case study illustration of our three journey narrative approach to organisational change.

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Tomorrow is the big launch. Nancy White has been toiling away with Tony Karrer to develop a dynamic website that aggregates community and network blogs. Tony is the technical wiz behind the site and there are plenty of ways to discover new and interesting information about one of the topics I love: communities of practice. Nancy is the ultimate connector and this effort is a natural extension to all the great work she does with online facilitation and communities. So here is the URL. Have fun.

http://cc.fullcirc.com/

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Canberra has an interesting event this month! actKM has invited Patrick Lambe to conduct a workshop on Leveraging and Valuing Expertise. This workshop is part of the open research project "Leveraging and Valuing Expertise" (http://usingexpertise.com). Log in to share your stories!

When: 9:00 am to 3:30 pm on Friday, 13 February
Where: University House Common Room, ANU
Costs: $50, includes morning tea
Registration forms

Workshop outline:
* Introduction: the nature of expertise and experience
* Grounding: Anecdote circles with participants exchanging their stories of how expertise is leveraged and used (or misused) in their organisations
* Sensemaking: we work with the stories to identify patterns and key issues in the participants' situations
* Planning: we work with an expertise transfer framework and the Straits Knowledge KM Method Cards to build outline plans for some of the participants' situations
* Close: closing discussion looking at general patterns and sharing any relevant case examples

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Just to let you know that my paper on tacit knowledge and communities of practice has been featured on insightory.com.

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For years software vendors and consulting firms have been developing SAP software components for NSW government agencies and on-selling the same software to numerous other NSW government agencies. These practices are only possible in an environment where the government agencies do not collaborate. In 2008 these agencies got together to share how they were using SAP and worked on ways to collaborate on new government-wide developments. In the first few days of collaborating a tiny piece of code to change how invoices were handled was shared across multiple agencies—each of the receiving agencies saved $5,000 by sharing rather than reinventing. And some of the developments cost millions to develop. The potential benefits are staggering.

When times are tough it’s important to make the most of available resources. Organisations of all shapes and sizes have spent millions of dollars on ‘collaboration’ software yet the level of sophistication in the way we collaborate hasn’t improved dramatically. It’s time to be more systematic and effective collaborators and this starts with understanding what it really means and not fretting over the functionality of communication software, regardless of how alluring the latest web 2.x version looks. We need to build collaborative cultures and skills.

This presentation describes why collaboration matters now more than ever. It paints the picture of what we are up against but shines a light on what’s possible. And by understanding the different ways of working together and the different types of collaboration we can create a new mental model as our collaboration foundation.

Most of the presentation, however, will focus on the practicalities of developing effective collaboration cultures and skills with plenty of illustrations from our work with organisations like NSW Government, Rio Tinto, BAE Systems, and a sprinkling of examples from around the world.

The foundations are there. The software is available. The need is clearly here. 2009 will mark the tipping point where organisations will move from emphasising collaboration tools to placing the effort on people, on their behaviours and capabilities. We mustn’t forget: it’s people who collaborate.

When: Monday March 2, 12:00 - 2:00pm

Where: Treasury Theatre, Lower Plaza, 1 Macarthur St. East Melbourne

Light Refreshments provided

To RSVP click here

You might like to read our paper on collaboration as pre-reading.

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