Topics

• 2012-10-01

  What goes around

  Here is a little pestering idea you might want to be pestered by. I started this blog to pass on pestering ideas, so there you go, little idea, move along. When Google first got exciting, it was because it was more accurate than anything else out there. It was more accurate because it relied on… Read more

• 2012-07-23

  What makes a good story listener?

  This blog post has been moved to (and revised for) The Working with Stories Miscellany. You can find it as the section called “Finding good story listeners” in Chapter 2, “More on Story Collection.” Read more

• 2012-04-13

  Lonely for …

  So yesterday I get in the mail the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, and it’s a double dose of loneliness in one day. The Atlantic has an article called “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” while in the New Yorker it’s “The Disconnect.” I read these with interest, partly because I’ve been writing similar things… Read more

• 2012-04-06

  How wisdom happens

  Lately my thoughts keep returning to the topic of wisdom. Why? Because it’s my own particular friend, in a way I will now explain. One spring day when I was about ten years old, my Aunt Honey came to visit. She came into the kitchen carrying a woody shrub covered with tiny yellow flowers and… Read more

• 2012-02-22

  Too hard

  This blog post has been moved to (and revised for) The Working with Stories Miscellany. You can find it in Chapter 13, “Why PNI Is Hard.” Read more

• 2011-12-23

  Peaceful

  It’s a little thing, really. But I can’t stop thinking about it. Lately my son and I have been totally caught up in a new computer experience called Minecraft. Minecraft is a curious concoction. At its core it is a virtual world where an avatar that represents you walks around in a landscape of voxel… Read more

• 2011-11-10

  What we see and what we build

  So my son and I are reading this excellent book called Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, and so far I have found two elements that just beg to be connected to narrative sensemaking. They are both in the chapter by Denis Cosgrove on world maps. First, Cosgrove talks about how we think of… Read more

• 2011-05-25

  Evaluations of story work

  Most of this blog post has been moved to (and revised for) The Working with Stories Miscellany. You can find it in Chapter 10, “PNI Perceptions.” I didn’t use the last part of the post in the book, so I’ve left it here. Means of evaluation, forms of evidence Now, as I was writing up… Read more

• 2011-05-03

  What are you building?

  Here is a small insight, just a tiny one, that you might find useful. One of our every-spring projects is our gradual cabin. Last spring we learned how to set up and stabilize a foundation, so last year it was just a tent platform with a big tarp over it. This spring we are learning… Read more

• 2011-04-20

  Practical ethics in story gathering

  This blog post has been moved to (and revised for) The Working with Stories Miscellany. You can find it in Chapter 12, “Practical Ethics in PNI.” Read more

• 2011-04-02

  Form, function, and phenomenon

  I have sorta-kinda written about story as form, function, and phenomenon so many times now that I wonder if people wonder why I keep glancing at it and never hitting it head on. The answer to that question is (of course) a story. The quiet question The Knowledge Socialization group at IBM Research, of which… Read more

• 2011-03-31

  Stories of definition

  A few weeks ago I realized a mistake I had been making and corrected it. You may be interested to hear about both the mistake and the correction. If you have followed Kathy Hansen‘s wonderful series of interviews with people who work in the story area, you will have noticed the wildly varying answers to… Read more

• 2011-03-24

  Context as trap and tool

  So I’m looking at an old copy of National Geographic a few weeks ago and I see an advertisement that makes me ponder. And ponder. And write. Two guys holding things The advertisement strongly featured two photographs. Here is the first. Being a visual person, my eyes immediately went to the photographs, and right away… Read more

• 2011-03-05

  Narrative inquiry without the participation

  A colleague recently told me about a DARPA-sponsored workshop that was to take place in Washington, D.C. on the 28th of February (a date that has come and gone) to explore new directions for work on story for national defense. The description of the project sounded similar to the DARPA project I worked on from… Read more

• 2011-03-02

  From garment to fiber in story work (part two)

  This is the second part in a two-part blog post reflecting on stories and story work through the lens of a journey through the world of textile crafts. You probably need to read the first part first to understand what follows. DIY story world What is the narrative equivalent of sewing your own clothes, weaving… Read more

• 2011-03-02

  From garment to fiber in story work (part one)

  Here as usual is a perambulatory rumination on matters obliquely yet genuinely connected with organisational and community narrative. As always I beg your patience in seeing how it all fits together. An ever deeper journey I have been studying historical architecture for the past few months together with my seven-year-old son, and as part of… Read more

• 2011-02-08

  E-books and the reading marriage

  Those who read the recent posts (one, two) about my attempts to recall novels I’d read on an e-book reader will be interested in some little recursive reading I’ve been doing lately on the neurology of reading. Pretty much what I said Recently Jonah Lehrer at Wired has written a variety of short pieces around… Read more

• 2011-01-12

  Towards a more fully cooked blog

  So I’ve been thinking a lot in the past few weeks about this blog. I started it a little over a year ago, and I have tried hard to keep to my original rule of posting about once a week, following what seemed like blogging etiquette at the time. In addition to providing hopefully helpful… Read more

• 2010-12-17

  Story games

  This post is about story games, in three ways. First, it is an announcement to my readership that, due to the lamentable fact that I am apparently incapable of making any utterance less than five pages long, I will be switching to biweekly posts for the foreseeable future. I just can’t keep up this level… Read more

• 2010-12-10

  The healing cleaver

  Yesterday I posted about the issue of context in story listening, and how I try to preserve context and worry that I fail. Today I listened to two doctors tell stories about how listening to their patients tell their stories helps them work together to find solutions to problems. (This was on a teleconference from… Read more