Narrative Ecology – Blog of Ron Donaldson – fACILITATOR, TRAINER AND COACH

Last week, at the invitation of the Knowledge Management Forum Norway (part of the Norwegian Computing Society) I travelled to Oslo and gave the first of a two day course on complexity with Dave Snowden giving the second day (I am not stupid – never try and follow Dave).

Hosted by Åsmund Mæhle (chairman) and Gunnar Coll (of Computas) I had a great time telling all my favourite stories from the Badger Man to Bat Milk while throwing in all the ecological metaphors for a complex business environment known to mankind.

The two workshop exercises, an anecdote circle and future backwards were a first for me as I gave instruction in English but all the stories and hexxies were done in Norwegian. This made it surprisingly easy for me to remain context free of the subject matter (Knowledge Management) and the ambiguous instructions were made much easier by the fact that everyone in the room spoke better English than me.

This was also the first time I have taken my son, Toby, along as my ‘official photographer’ and he did a great job as can be seen in his professional Flickr account here.

 

With lunch at 11:30 and coffee and a bun at 2pm the day seemed to accelerate and be over in a flash but I think I went down well with lots of laughter, storytelling and very well thought out questions.