Let me put a thought out there - I’m keen to hear if you have thought about it. I’ve noticed that when people share stories in a group the the story threads (if you like) are often moulded and directed by the very first story (or even, comment) that is offered. So, if I were to assign a categorising criteria to a story, lets say, as a story about a painful customer experience. Once that story is told, the group latches onto it and then follows that thread until someone offers another and redirects the story flow.

The way you ask people to filter the material, the way it which it is gathered and the role of the facilitator all influence outcomes. When we did the original development we went to the extreme of facilitating in English while people spoke in their own languages (Danish, Mandarin etc) so that there was no danger of influence. Now we can easily and cheaply gather large volumes of narrative, self interpreted by the originator (not the group with facilitator influence) we can now rely more on the output - both in quantitative and qualitative terms.

You should pick up on some of your post course entitlement to use the stuff - would be interested to see what you made of it

Thanks for checking out the article, and for your reference links.

I’ll be posting a more detailed article on ONM in the future, but for now let me say this about it.

It is a group of techniques and processes we (myself, Keith and Barrie) are developing in response to companies engaging in organisational culture review. I say review, because most people automatically associate the word “change” with organisational culture. Like I have said in the article, this presupposes that a change in culture is required. It is almost as if it is part of our larger narrative as organisations in which we assume our culture is in constant need of change. What we try and do then is map the narrative of the organisation prior to asserting or making any decisions about what needs to happen to the culture … if anything needs to happen. The idea of doing this is informed by our experience and our dissatisfaction of predicated change. Your work on pre-hypothesis testing has also been helpful in us developing a stance on the issue.

If possible, we’d like to begin steering away from using the word “culture” and lump it into our un-Lexicon. Along with others words associated with established disciplines, it carries with it a baggage of it’s own that in most case limits the work we do on organisational narratives.

Instead, we’d like to do work (and this is ONM) that gets to grip with the organisation’s narrative: its identify, corporate memory, soul and being. All of this goes beyond the typical levels of an organisation i.e. what we do, how we do it and how we say we do it.

So, ONM is a process firmly based on two frameworks: narrative - as a means of gathering, capturing, engaging with the organisation and savvy leadership - a means of engaging with the organisation’s leaders in this narrative.

Hoep this gives you some idea of what ONM is about and is becoming.

I’m interested to know more about what you mean by Organisational Narrative Mapping. If it picks up on the material from the Cognitive Edge accreditation course that you attended in South Africa then I would like to blog a reference (along with other work by people in the network)