Marginalia

A wonderful article from Saturday's times, by Ben Macintyre where he proselytises for the reintroduction of writing (in pencil only) in the margins of books. Henry VIII did it, Thomas Hardy once annotated a whole book on billairds, Mark Twain did it, Nelson Mandela did in the margins of his copy of Julius Caesar on Robben Island, Coleridge did it (and invented the term). In fact, Coleridge's scribbles were so in demand that friends and rivals would send him their works and ask him to write on them.

Edgar Allen Poe wrote and essay on it, which the link will take you to if you are so inclined.

'In the early manuscripts, space was left for the reader to add scholarly glosses or rubrics. Later editions might even be printed with these additions, with sapce left for more, the literature evolving with each edition.'

And so in the middle fo the eighteenth and nineteenth century it was very a la mode.

'Marginalia blurred distinctions between writer, reader and critic. Passed from one reader to another the margins and flypapers of some books became a sort of message board for this unique form of intellectual grafffiti, with brief accolades, argumentative asides, addenda and insults.'

This seems to me a very fertile ground for investigation in spark's growing body of research and experiment into making documents and reports in project into interfaces.

links to http://eserver.org/books/poe/marginalia.html

Truth or lies

I’m sure that I’m not alone in being increasingly irritated by the ever-growing volume of junk email. I’m feeling particularly swamped right now because all the loose Sparknow emails are being scooped up and dumped in my Outlook inbox, which means that I have to filter out (electronically or manually) countless invitations to enhance my anatomy, buy fake Rolex watches or performance enhancing drugs, or become outrageously rich by assisting someone in the Nigerian oil ministry.

What really got my goat is when I received a well-intentioned email from one of my mates warning me that they may have unwittingly sent me a worm (a type of virus), and that I should check my computer for a particular file, Sulfnbk.exe, and delete it before it causes any damage. Detailed instructions then followed on how to find and delete this file.

We live in a postmodern world and things are often not what they seem. There’s an enormous amount of information, growing exponentially, available to an increasing number of connected people. This information is being accessed more and more by searching rather than by relying on taxonomy. A Google search on “Weapons of mass destruction” reveals over three million sources of information. Provenance is often unclear, but we are used to accepting as fact information that appears rational and coherent. Which is red rag to the mischievous bull – the internet and email mean that the propagation of the untrue is terribly easy and almost instant. This can be unwitting or malicious, but how are we to know? Organisations have sprung up in reaction to this, from Snopes, a website dedicated to debunking urban myths, to the various databases seeking to warn people about many of the hoax virus, warning and virus emails in circulation. It brings to mind some work we did recently for a professional national electronic library, where it was revealed that one of their major difficulties was in getting papers peer reviewed in order to allow users to judge the potential value of what they were reading.

So, I checked that the email I'd received was, as I'd suspected, a hoax, and I emailed and warned my mate that he'd just innocently asked everyone in his address book to delete a file that Windows uses to restore long file names.

Consequently, it was with interest that I read the other day of Choctaw, a native American language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is known to be true, the other for passing on material taken from someone else without checking. And a little Googling reveals another language, Tariana, now spoken by about one hundred people in north-west Brazil. In Tariana it is grammatically incorrect to make a statement without saying how you know it is true. But of course, I've no way of telling if this is true.

Incense and bongo drums

We went to the final meeting at a government client we have been working with for 8 months yesterday (change management to improve the quality and quantity of records management around an EDRM project).

Claudine and I decided to do a bit of lessons learned in an informal way as part of the meeting, cheered by a bit of fizz we had taken along to mark the occasion.

The 3 questions we asked were:

1. What differences have you noticed as a result of the Scale Up project?

2. Tell us a personal high moment and a personal low moment

3. What would advice would you give yourselves if you were starting out now, from what you have learned?

We were going to ask a fourth memory box kind of question but didn't in the end.

We collected some nice impressions which we will write up. The funniest though, was from the client sponsor, whose personal high was realising it was going to work. He took quite a risk chosing spark against more serious and manly competition, and felt quite nervous that we might fill the halls of this hallowed institution with African story, bongo drums and incense. So he was relieved (and I recall from other conversations a bit disappointed at first) when we turned out to be rather staider and more strait-laced in our cunning plans and clever tricks than he had thought at the outset, or at least our sheeps clothing was working quite well.

All the same, it dawned on him slowly that it was actually going to work, and that other people thought so too.

My personal high was in fact that very meeting. I had taken the wrong shoes to work that day and had a choice between my daughter's pink flowery wellies and some gold stilettos to wear to the meeting. Claudine chose the pink wellies for me, and I felt acutely aware of their absurdity as I strode into the client's reception. But the fact was, as I demonstrated by hoisting my booted leg onto the meeting table at the end of the meeting, they were the kind of client which would actually tolerate pink flowery wellies at a meeting. And I can tell you, not every client would, and that its something for them to be proud of.

And I can also tell you that Claudine and I were both immensely moved and touched when the meeting closed with them bursting spontaneously into applause, another first, and a lovely last with them.

roger trains jessica in the practised art of balloon holding

spark event 024: what an event

E024 was definitely the best event we've ever had (although its not the last - we have E025 a small private oral history training going on next week and something really exciting on narrative practice with people over from Washington in March, E026). It was Philippa who started off the numbering, and I've always liked the optimism of it, right from E001.

I am sitting in my house, sparknow's store cupboard for a bit, surrounded by boxes and boxes of things. This even though we have shifted so much stuff to junk, to other places, to recycling. The best thing was taking the boxes of books down to the bookseller in Crouch End. He was quite lukewarm about them and while I was talking to him, a lovely young rastafarian said 'If you are getting rid of those books, give them to me and I'll send them to schools and universities in Africa'. I went to get the car and left him with my trolley of books, and when I came back he said 'Why are you getting rid of so much knowledge?' I imagine universities in Ethiopia poring over Nonaka and Takeuchi while school children learn Corporania as a set text.

Back to the party. Fiona sent mysterious texts to me and Claudine. We had to be at a certain bar at a certain time and ask for Mimi. We were and we did and we got delivered a bottle of champagne. Fiona and Roger joined us and walked us back to the flat, blindfolded us and walked us in.

Nightlights in jars lined the entrance stairs (Clive said later it was like a Mayan execution in a Hammer Horror film), everywhere was dressed in a kind of bridal way with fairy lights and transparent white sari material threaded with gold. James had been cooking since midday and there were coconut meatmalls, chicken satay, chicory leaves stuffed with something or another, the most extraordinary array of food, a band in the corner. People arrived, the hubbub grew and then around 6.30, Clive introduced Carol who told a story, Sue who recited a poem she had written and then Fiona and Steph gave us flowers and a quite red silk book each, bound by the Wyvern bindery.

And on the cover it said "THE SPARKNOW MEMORY BOOK". All the interviews Fiona had done, lists of clients, lists of events, quotes from emails, Carol's story, Sue's poem, pictures (including Aidan butt naked on the beach) and a story by Roger.

It is the most very beautiful thing that I could have been given.

And then we partied, and partied and partied, until about 3 in the morning. The floor still sticks to your feet, although I took a thoroughly laden car of bottles to the bottle bank yesterday.

All the tables have been delegged, the noticeboards taken down, the chairs stacked, the china packed.

And I've had my first piece of sparknow mail to 12hrg - from the VATman.

sparkspace: the final countdown

Well, this is spark's last day with an office. I've been banned until this afternoon. We celebrate for a bit, with various obscure rituals looking back over 7 years, recover from our hangovers on Saturday and clean it all up on Sunday.

Sometime in the next week, our residence should be sold.

And then we are really through the looking glass and into being completely virtual.

Some interesting things have happened since August in that journey.

It turns out, for example, that there are many things we won't miss about having an office. We certainly won't miss the 4 estate cars and counting fillled to the gunnels with things we filed and didn't look at for 7 years. We won't miss the unspoken grumps about tea towel washing and loo cleaning. We won't miss finding out someone has forgotten to turn the ansaphone on and having the phone ringing out. We won't miss sweeping up the cigarette butts in the alley, taking the rubbish out, the little unfiled mounds of personal treasures that no-one else likes to touch which stay there for months, junk phone calls about holidays we have won, or calls from India about moving our electricity and gas suppliers.

So what will we miss?

Well, a bunch of people will certainly miss smoking on the doorstep, the spark smoking room. And we will all miss lunch together, as much the joint preparation of lunch as sitting down to eat it together. And we'll miss having a space where we can eavesdrop on each other, keep an eye on each other's well being and make sure that people have some emotional back up for what has turned out to be surprisingly (for me almost shockingly) emotional and draining work at times.

How are we going to cook together and look after each other virtually?

We don't know yet.

fishermen - kerala, India - picture taken by Fiona

Community Network in partnership with local radio to support carers

Sparknow was introduced to the charity Community Network a few years back. It is a wonderful charity, spun off from BT research project in Northern Ireland which sought to bridge the sectarian divide by using the way telephony can provide anonymity and so a safe space in which to communicate. It provides conference call facilities for all kinds of not for profit endeavours, from agoraphic research projects, to supervision in healthcare. We use Community Network wherever we can when we use conference calling to support our project management.

This is an email which came from them today:

Dear Friend,

links to http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,7843,1239217,00.html

The swan bench outside the Smithsonian, where Victoria and Carol attended the second Golden Fleece conference and showed some of our work on story

Volunteering and community

Last night we had spark event 22. I thought afterwards that we should find a word to describe these events - perhaps something like a spark convivium, a convivial assembly of like minded people, who are fond of feasting and good company. Although that misses out the conversation piece, unless we pretend it is somehow subsumed into the first syllable of the neologism.

In any case, this one was called

Engaging the whole person, building communities

There were around 15 of us, a really nice and eclectic mixture of associates, clients, friends and interested strangers. We used two short conversations between pairs to start a wider group discussion on themes to do with volunteering, community and networks.

We had bread sticks and hummus, chillis, olives, tzatziki, marinaded lamb kebabs, Turkish cherries, all the lucky consequence of a trip to Green Lanes to talk with the project manager for a new primary care building for older people. On our way back, Steph made me do an emergency stop in the buslane, and she and Chris disappeared into a Turkish greengrocer and patisserie for an age, while I sat drumming nervously on the dashboard and waiting for a traffic warden to corner me.

And Emma, Fiona and Chris decided on Pimms on account of the weather. So we can a kind of Anglo-Turkish feast.

First we listened to Marion Nasskau in conversation with Elizabeth Lank. They talked about Marion's dissertation which focused on the development of the BBC Neighbourhood Gardener's Scheme, a new scheme based on the well established model of the American Master Gardeners Scheme. The schemes are for volunteer amateur gardeners who want to increase their horticultural knowledge and then pass their knowledge on to the community. http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/neighbourhood/index.html

The second conversation was between Carol Russell and Aidan Prior and they talked about the Golden Fleece community, a network of people centred in Washington, but which spreads across the US and internationally, working towards the purposeful use of story and narrative to achieve practical outcomes inside organisations. They spoke about what Carol and I found at the second Golden Fleece conference in Washington D.C. in April,commenting on the individuals that constitute the community and what drives them to collaborate in this way. http://www.storyatwork.com/documents/GoldenFleece_3MonthCalendar.pdf

The broader discussions after each talk touched on motivation and reward; who controls groups of volunteers; what size can communities of volunteers grow to before they become unwieldly; what works, and does not work about the structure and design of conferences and events which are pivotal to the community.

We found unxpected connections and resonances between the two, quite different conversations. There were two which struck me in particular. The first how both sets of volunteer communities seem to be most successful where different groups are working together with some common purpose. For the gardneing volunteers, the best pilot schemes were those where the Neighbourhood Gardeners work with other groups - school teachers and parents, the WI etc, and each found ways to establish their identity, role and expertise in relation to the other. For the Golden Fleece, the storytellers can learn about the mysteries of organisation, and the corporate people can learn about the mysteries of story which ways which are mutually fruitful. I wondered if this was to do with the ability to establish a way to be helpful to each other, or be expert on behalf of others which a way which acknowledges you and gives you a role. I also wondered if the relative ignorance each of the other group creates a space in which explanation and conversation must take place, so less stays hidden or tacit and more gets exchanged across the boundaries between groups who are only partly familiar with the expertise each has to offer. In this way, less assumptions are made and more productive encounters fall naturally from the circumstances of trying to figure out together how to get something done which has not been done before.

The second thing which struck me with more force than it ever has done before was the value of physicality, as well as the more obvious glue which passion provides to a group of volunteers. Things work well when you work up a sweat together, whether its digging a trench to sow the seeds in, or demo-ing a template for a jumpstart story.

We did take notes on the whole evening, and we will post these up soon. The wider conversation which ranged round the personal ones was interesting enough in its themes for us to decide to launch a summer enquiry into volunteering and community inside and outside organisations which we will run through until around the end of October.

I thought I might see if I can persuade Dominic Reid, the Pageant Master for the Lord Mayor's Show to come along and tell us about how he runs a show which is 800 years old, involves marshalling 6000 volunteers on the day, synchronised to the second to suit the BBC scheduling needs, and has to find ways to create change within the rigid continuity of a history which reaches back to mediaeval times.

And perhaps try also to entice Julia Rowntree along, to tell us about her new book, which tells the tale of the Business Arts Forum of the London International Festival of Theatre, and her experiment in creating a network without headquarters, where corporate leaders and young artists, writiers and musicians, come together around theatre and performance, and profound questions of life and death.

'The mushroom girl story' as told by Mohammed Ibrahim - we used the template to have a guided conversation during which he told me about one of the successful projects in Bangladesh to create independence for young women. We found that the framework helped us get under the...

In response to Lucy Kellaway's article on storytelling in the FT, 10th May 2004

Dear Lucy,

Someone has emailed me your article in the FT about storytelling.

You are right that Steve Denning is sensible. So are some other people who have tried hard to get under the skin of what it will take to make the 21st century organisation work.

You are wrong about storytelling either being a craze, or just a sensible thing about examples, in my view.

If you really want to explore storytelling in the context of organisations, I think it would be fairer not to bash it first, although I must agree that at the whackier end of the market, or the flimsier more opportunistic end of consulting, it does rather tend to be a chainsaw in the hands of child.

Although it may not be well written enough for your taste, try our first attempt to describe a 2 year partnership with the Swiss Aid Agency, experimenting with different ways of thinking through how they use narrative and story techniques to create connections between the far flung outposts of the organisation, involved in complex local partnerships in an attempt to make a contribution to the alleviation of third world poverty. We may not have got it all right. But we’ve had a good try and I think you would find their view is that we’ve helped. I can put you directly in touch with the client if your interest is serious.

You can find the case study in its current, first version on our website on http://spark.spanner.org/folio/casestudies.html.

It is called ‘sous l’arbre palaver’ and is the 9th document. We still have to write up all the pilots of the last two years in detail.

I’m not proselytising for consulting, or gimmicks, or whacky stuff. I come from a risk management, pretty hard nosed background and I found my career in the City (LIFFE, NatWest) told me a lot about the glories of working for an entrepreneur like Michael Jenkins, as well as a great deal about how corporate life can brutalise the human spirit. I back this kind of approach, because I’ve found from direct experience that most management is deeply flawed, and my experience is that, well considered, this, the storytelling kind, stands a better chance of success if it is pursued with both rigour and passion.

Victoria Ward

Sparknow

PS, I’m not writing to you to get either bashed or published, so there’s no need to bother. I’m writing because I genuinely think there is a better case to be put and that you are a good enough journalist to put it well if you chose to.

links to http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=040510000149&query=storytelling&vsc_appId=totalSearch&state=Form

Larua's time capsule. Objects as mnemonics for memory. When visiting the Women's Library in Brick Lane recently, heard Antonia Byatt describe the time capsule found under the building, which has been preserved in vinegar. Sharp of them

All reports are interfaces

For 7 years now we have been grappling with how to make our reports for clients unfileable. What is the right balance between rigour and mess, formed analysis and opinion and the making visible of an inviting, if challenging, vacuum into which people from the client feel compelled to step to have conversations which lead to actions which shift patterns for the better?

Our best attempts have been where we have been able to design documents as part of the rhythm of a piece of work where the process (interviews, workshops, events, negotiations and conversations around the final object which is co-created) is seen by us and by the client as of as much value as the tangible consequences. So a report needs in some way to be a provocation which recognisably fits into a chain of events, past, present and future. It needs to be in some way a provocation, without being so provoking that they irritate people to the point that they switch off. And it always works best when we are able to honour the richness of the spoken word, rather than blanding everything down,as is the habit of the written objects by which organisations are governed. But we still haven't quite got this idea of the document as a vehicle for transition as we would want it, due as much to our own fumblings as to any client brief or response.

Put into the context of some of our more recent work on story in organisations, a report needs to come off somehow as a kind of 'half story' - a beginning which leaves you poised at the crisis point or dilemma and makes you want to finish the story by imagining the path(s) to its resolution. Its a pointless exercise if all you do is consult, write something, present it (in bulletpoint form, all emotion excised), and then have it ticked off and tidied away. Actually, mostly we used to try and not write reports, but people won't have that somehow. I recall this used to be the stance of the Kings Fund too, and they were right. The point of any engagement is actually the engagement and how it moves things along, not what you write down.

The biggest insight probably came last year when we were working on the framework for a briefing document for various teams who were moving in a big organisation. How could we create a kind of scaffolding which would allow them to consolidate raw materials from various sources (interviews, mood boards, analytical documents, images, workshop outputs) in a way which would convey their story of their wishes and ambitions without a veneer of organisational speak, but with coherence and elegance. In that case we didn't quite pull it off, although the ambition was right. And it was on this occasion that Will, who has designed our website, pointed out that the document itself, as a template was an interface.

This was a useful prod forward in the right direction. Until then we had been looking at unfileability - how can we make this document unfinished enough that we invite people into the vacuum in decision-making we hve made visible, so that they are forced to negotiate with each other in a way which will lead to productive action. Unfinished and messy are good, but interface is better as a metaphor.

Currently we are working on 3 documents as experimental interfaces (or negotiating instruments), each with quite different qualities.

One is the write up from two team building workshops in a client where the emotions, ambitions, undercurrents and history are all quite complex. Somehow we have to make it possible for them to shift their individual and collective dynamic at work. In this case, we've taken the decision to be quite authorially present, rather opinionated, an active observor and shaper of their words and decisions. We have framed the document in a way that we help will nudge them to some kind of manifesto of their own about how they want to work together. By way of illustration from a different piece of work last year, here is a lightly edited extract from our introduction to notes for a client following an international event at which they were seeking to develop a global community of practice.

Dear Friends

I invite you to offer ideas for improving this so that it is a foundation document with real shared meaning which you can use over time. With best regards Victoria Ward victoria@sparknow.net

The second document/interface currently being produced is a post move evaluation report, which needs to pay particular attention to the emotions and consequences of a move to open plan. Has it moved this particular media company strategically forward, or is it a bit so whatish, a move which people have taken a bit too much in their stride and not made the most of? In this case, we have toyed with creating two amalgam personae - Mr Happy and Ms Unhappy - whose dialogue we can script, and perhaps even record, entirely from words said to us in interview. We imagine (but are unlikely to make happen) a board meeting where our presentation is in fact a short 'radio' dialogue. The authoring role here is much subtler and more hidden for the most part: we need to weave together the individual anecdotal threads in a way which creates recognisable whole, if cardboardy, personae who can be spokespeople for views at the different ends of the spectrum, without pouncing on soundbites at the expense of a careful judgement about the range and balance of opinion we have elicited.

The third, and most complete as a template, is a complete redevelopment of the briefing template we attempted for the workspace briefing last year. In this case, we need to help many units in the client articulate their approaches to using a new records management technology, as well as their current records management conventions, in such a way that these profiles lead both to team by team action to improve coherence and quality, and to comparisons, good practices, networks and relationships being deepened or broadened in an emergent as well as in a directed way aross the whole group. For this third one, we have chosen to develop the whole written relationship through a 'workbook' which we hope will create as much off-the-page activity and reflection as on-the-page form filling. The twist here is a kind of double twist: the very act of using the workbook as a vehicle for negotiation at a team by team level is one twist, and then twisted round it is the need in some way to draw attention to the workbook process itself, so that we can come back later and collect people's experiences of using it in a way which allows us to adapt it as an interface for other uses in the client.

Writing this reminded me of an email exchange with a client, who was one of a small group to whom we sent an internal private document which Claudine and I wrote last autumn about what theh future should hold for spark. In it we tried to express some of our key insights from the previous six years as a precursor to thinking through the future:

I thought you may appreciate a comment which came to mind from skimming 'What is Sparknow'.

So the business model that works? It is Spark. But The sustainable business model? Spark + pragmatic action proposals + documented outputs which are explicit (the 2 later needs development). This leaves the lasting legacy that brings the 'post start up KM'er' back to the orignial KM agenda; maintains the vision over the medium term in an organisation and gains support and committment from the Introverted Thinkers (in Myers/Briggs terms) rather than the Extroverted Feelers (as with Liz and I) at an early stage. These ITs are the people that will be there longer term and will sustain a programme.

Does your head in sometimes it does, doing this job. But its fantastic having this blog to vent obscure and impenetrable half-baked thoughts. And a great relief to the others now that I have a 'channel', as Fi calls it, all to myself which does not get in the way of work, clarity, elegance, rigour and all that.

tibetan singing bowl

Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag......

So the dog winds down the back window, and I park and lock up without noticing. The car still full to bursting with pinboards, paper, kit from running an awayday in Oxford.

Later in the day, as I launch myself at the gym, I suddenly notice an odd draft on my neck, twist to see the open window, and then figure out the kitbag is missing (inconveniently the best kitbag we have, a gift from Giga in Barcelona a few years back).

What I want to know is, what is the thief going to do with a shipload of pinboard cards and flipchart pens, masking tape, blutack, and a Tibetan singing bowl with wooden stick (well chewed by the very same dog who allowed the thief to enter without breaking)?

...and smile, smile, smile

links to http://www.westfront.de/packup.htm

Warning on one of the military buildings on Orford Ness

In my end is my beginning

(East Coker, Four Quartets, TS Eliot, with apologies)

Fiona and I were running a session on communities at a conference yesterday (which we will be writing up here in the next couple of weeks). One of the things which came up in the talks before our session was the great difficulty in getting people's attention for After Action Reviews. Time is so compressed, and the next thing so urgent, that although the spirit is always willing (and how could it not be for an idea so sensible), there just isn't the time compared to all the other pressures of work.

I said that we had found two handy tricks for helping with this, at least in part.

The first is to stop thinking of it as an end, or an epilogue and think if it instead as a beginning, or a prologue (I didn't say it so elegantly mind you). People are more inclined to turn up to help each other other out when setting out on a project. I think it's both because they would like to feel the same level of support (and perhaps want to make sure that they help out their mates), and because if you know the lessons are going somewhere in the near future, it feels more productive and purposeful.

I suppose you could argue that by making the place to which the lessons are going so concrete and specific, you could lose out on lessons which would be useful elsewhere at another time (although personally I've always found lessons of the 'this went well because the communications were good' kind the tiniest bit pointless). But I wonder if that matters so much. After all, by getting people in at the beginning of something, you might hook them in to turning up at the end too, because they want to know what happened. So over time, the system gets to be both specific and more general.

The other thing which definitely works well is changing the question. People respond much better to questions about risk than to questions about knowledge. There's an interesting shift of relationship with the question. Knowledge is something people want to do to you, or suck out of you, risk tends to be seen as something which is shared between the individual and the organisation.

One of the best questions (in an audit, a lessons learned, an after action review, a before action review, whatever) is

'What kept/keeps you awake at night?'

The other useful thing to look at is Wybo's work on episode analysis on near misses on the French metro system (which Clive Holtham found when we were looking into risk a while back). This to me harnesses a really good mix of story telling, rigourous structure, backward looking, forward looking, knowledge and risk.

I've looked, to try and find the URL but can no longer find the documents online, but here is the reference:

C. COLARDELLE, WYBO J.L, (2000), "Learning from experience of incidents in public transportation. A new form of experience reflection for organizational learning." TIEMS 2000, International Emergency Management and Engineering Conference, Orlando, USA.

birch tree planted by Madelyn and Gerry Blair when they built their house 27 years ago. Madelyn says 'what joy to see the silent upraised arms of the birch tree. ..we planted it for shade, and yet in the barren branches of winter, there is greater beauty'

The sound of silence

The Golden Fleece is an annual gathering, held in Washington, of those who experiment in putting story to work in organisations. This year's the meeting was convened for the 4th time, two days at the Smithonian, underground in a rather grand conference centre, and one day overground in a rather old fashioned lecture room at George Mason University - the kind with fixed seats and desks, the seats bang back into place, springing away from you in a rather unexpected way which makes you jump.

Of all the things that struck me over the 3 days, it was the session given by Kelly Cresap which gave me most pause for thought.

In his session he asked us to think of a time when we were stuck (and pointed out the nice paradox of maintaining the forward arc of story while telling of stuckness). He allowed us private time in silence to think of this time, then share it in small groups. After the private sharings, he asked us to open our minds to whether our personal story needed telling in the wider group. The stoy would tell us, he said, if it needed to be told. The need to open the space and let the story decide made for quite a different relationship with what had passed and what needed to pass next, and linked back to what Seth Kahan had said on one of the previous days - a retreat with a storyteller who would wait for the story to come and tell him it needed to be told.

At the end of the public retellings, we held short silences in respect and acknowledgement for what had been told. And at the end of all three tellings, we stood in silence with our arms raised.

These are small, but weighty, pieces of punctuation. And since that experience - today for example, at a session at the Institute of Group Analysis - I have become very alert to pauses and silence as important moments of connection, both with yourself and others. And if you interrupt a silence before it has finished, you might as well interrupt someone who is in full flow.

By that kind of serendipitous chance which happens when you are alert, but leaving space, I read an article by Karen Armstrong in the Guardian on Saturday 'Creativity cannot be hurried'. In it she refers to Keats' notion of negative capability, "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".

Then she goes on to talk about her reluctant move from working in television to writing.

"Working alone, day after day, I was no longer engaged in witty banter with my director about the absurdity of a Kabbalistic myth or the hopeless irrationality of a Christian doctrine. There was now no busy cerebral filter between the texts and myself. At first I resented the silence, but I gradually discovered that the enveloping quiet became a positive element, almost a presence, that somehow orchestrated theological notions, revealing an unexpected resonance. I was no longer using the ideas I was encountering as fodder for my next television interview, but learning to live with them for years at a time and to listen to the deeper meaning that lay ineffably beyond them."

links to http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1202245,00.html

At the SDC Dare to Share Fair, we used a scrapbook to hold what we were told by visitors

First edition

Today is Friday 23rd April 2004 - a glorious spring afternoon in London, and the launch day of our new plaything - the Sparknow public blog.

Watch this space for updates on our latest trip to Washington D.C. where we were invited to join the Smithsonian Associates and the Golden Fleece group to investigate how storytelling changes organisations.