Harnessing Narrative Sensemaking at KMWorld 2023
Humans have always been storytelling animals. From sci-fi to fairytales and anecdotes shared around watercoolers, stories provide opportunities to learn, share, and act on our hopes, dreams, and fears for the future.
Narrative provides a collaborative and meaningful way for KM practitioners to explore the intractable issues of our time, a critical edge in embedding social and human capital into the world of work.
At KMWorld 2023, Ellie Snowden, senior research consultant, The Cynefin Company (Cognitive Edge) and Beth Smith, senior research consultant, The Cynefin Company, held a workshop discussing “Future Backwards,” an alternative to scenario planning and a side-casting technique designed by Dave Snowden.
The F-B method brings groups together through storytelling to increase the number of perspectives that an organization can take both on understanding its past and a range of possible futures.
According to Smith and Snowden, it is a fun, connecting method used for lessons learned, historical analysis, and context setting among other purposes.
“This is not future forecasting,” Smith said. “We’re trying to understand the present better by looking at the potential of our future.”
Snowden and Smith explained that the strategy connects everyone within an organization to find a common ground.
This interactive and engaging workshop gave a practical approach to engaging employees in storytelling to explore the future of organizations, a means of conditions for novel discovery, cross-pollination of ideas and transformation, and lessons learning in workshops and beyond.
Starting with an exercise that polled how people used and experienced AI and machine learning in their daily lives, the activity maximized for group think, garnered feedback for change programs, and aimed to find that golden thread based on experiences a general statement.
“You must go backward and pivot to see what enabled the current state,” Snowden said.
After participating in this activity, there are several interventions that can be utilized to help people within the organization make positive changes, they explained.
“You don’t have to solve the problem but think about things right now that we can do to move your organization more toward a utopia,” Smith said.
KMWorld returned to the J.W. Marriott in Washington D.C. on November 6-9, with pre-conference workshops held on November 6.
KMWorld 2023 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Enterprise AI World, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum.