Its quite a list. The only issue is the lack of correlation between good trailers and good movies - which makes one think that the trailer is an art form in itself, distinct from that which it is created to promote!

I find that a little unnerving. These are people who hand out food and drinks to other people, all of whom are usually exhausted, heading somewhere where there is no possibility of rest, and crammed inside an unhealthy metal cylinder with poor air for hours on end. Isn't that an irresponsible recipe for spreading disease – just to save on HR costs?

One is a Scandinavian bank measuring employee satisfaction (in comparison to the traditional climate survey), and the other is measuring citizen satisfaction with a new service initiative being provided by a European government revenue agency.

Great projects and if you think they have resonance with what you are doing, I'd be happy to put you in touch with the relevant Network practitioners.

We did this for a couple reasons - we want potential customers to be able to find local practitioners easily, without going through CE itself. We also wanted to encourage practitioners to list their experience with SenseMaker™ on the site, so customers can consider which practitioner may have the most relevant experience for their problem.

So far, so good. If you can see anyway to improve this, please let us know!

Part of this effort is the Impact Assessment Study, initiated with us in 2007. In their words:

The primary objective is to experiment with narrative inquiry methods to develop a measure to assess schools' achievements in delivering holistic education for students. The study seeks to develop measures that can complement existing assessment and validation models used by schools so as to provide a more nuanced picture of the effectiveness of various school programs.

We had a great meeting today to review some of the initial outcomes from the first full round of narrative capture; we then held a workshop all afternoon with the leaders of the ten schools participating so that they can all use the data for self-assessment, as part of the annual strategic planning exercise.

A good day all round and much more to come on this very interesting project.

The four published are employee sat, horizon scanning, customer insight and culture mapping - additional ones are in rough drafts and we'll be getting them up as soon as possible.

All feedback on these (and contributions to strengthen them) would be welcome!

Accredited members of the CE Network can participate in our online community, set up through Ning, to share experiences, ask questions and make new connections in the Network. It was set up originally by Matt Moore, and we've been working with Matt to maintain the momentum behind the group.

One of the recent efforts in that direction was the Cognitive Edge Film Festival, where practitioners could post short videos of past project experiences. First prize (as determined by popular vote in the Ning community) was a place on an upcoming CE accreditation course. Ron Donaldson took out top prize and the Network got five good videos from experienced practitioners. Hopefully more videos will get contributed over time as this sort of effort delivers classic network benefits ..

We'll keep working on ways to deliver more value through Ning to practitioners - all suggestions on how to do that are welcome, but the Ning forum would be the best place to make them!

So I'm looking forward to going back. We've just posted details of our upcoming course, in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry. The two-day accreditation course will be held in Delhi in December of this year. You can register your interest now, and we'll be posting the online course registration when it is available in early October.

See you there!

You can see the new page here - any feedback or thoughts you may have on making it more useful would be gratefully received.

If you have a project that you think should be included here, feel free to send it onto us. Over time, we'll develop a set of guidelines on what can be published here - again, any ideas on this are welcome!

Keeping me company while we finish some new white papers ... soon to be published ...

On Saturday 13 September we celebrated the first birthday of our little girls, Tessa and Georgia – what a difference a year can make. The girls are strong, healthy, happy little kids and we couldn't ask for anything more ...

" ... entire cliques do this sort of thing, creating, in effect, their own tribal medium and narrative.  Ms Ito [an anthropologist, researching the subject] has noticed a new genre of photography on the rise as young people use their phones to snap photos of everyday situations – the view from the escalator on the way to school, say – which mean a lot to their friends and nothing to anybody else.  They especially love photos that capture "dumb things that their friends do", such as getting drunk and falling into puddles, which collectively amount to "everyday, casual documentaries" for a circle of friends."

I am not sure how "new" this particular genre of photography is – people have been taking cherished photos of seemingly mind-numbingly innocuous scenes for generations.  You can come and sit through my last set of family holiday snaps to get that point.

It is hard to predict with certainty how this will affect our daily interactions.  Currently most of us wonder when we'd ever use the poor quality cameras in our phones.  But given their inevitable improvements in quality, it is a good bet that Ms Ito is onto something here.  Teenagers in Japan famously have a freakish ability to pick trends.  No doubt in time we will all increasingly use the capabilities of these phones to capture and convey meaning in unforeseen ways.

It is old ground to talk about the social etiquette of this.  Laws have been passed to prevent unwanted photography around children for example.  Society will develop norms of acceptability just as we do with every technological advance.

But in our line of work, there are implications.  Some members of our Network are focused on 'stories' purely in their written or spoken form.  Increasingly though we'll need to consider still and moving images as fertile ground for sensemaking.  Clusters of employees around the watercoolers will laugh at photos of colleagues and customers; in return,customers will indignantly share photos of crappy service through guerilla Facebook groups.  These are potent inputs for our projects ...

You can reach Rachael using her email address:  rachael.hyde@cognitive-edge.com

CE has had a consulting business ever since its inception.  In our previous life as Cynefin inside IBM, we were expected to use our methods in engagements with clients.  Nothing has changed!

Occasionally clients will approach us directly for work and make it clear that they want designated CE personnel on these engagements.  This business helps us test out new ideas and gives us much needed revenue for more investments.  Typically we only accept strategic or research-based engagements, and if the work is tendered publicly then we don't bid.

More significantly though, we are getting an increasing load from practitioners around the world who need to access experienced practitioners.  We want to improve the service to these people by increasing the bandwidth of CE to assist them directly.

So we'll continue to be on the look-out for good people - keep watching for more additions soon.

For some reason he then gave the example of Britain and how graciousness had emerged there over centuries  ... why he chose the UK is beyond me, surely Australia would have been a better example?  ;-)

However since I moved out to what counts as 'surburbia' in Singapore, I've seen another side.  I live very close to a major road which is famous for bak kut teh (or pork rib soup) and so is lively 24 hours a day.  As a result, we get a lot of visitors to our street.  These visitors have absolutely no concern dumping whatever rubbish in their car onto the roadside, despite the presence of bins in front of each house.  The worse offenders (confirmed by the Straits Times today) are young men who smoke, who spend their time polluting the air and similarly seem to have no compunction polluting the streets with their butts.

The Straits Times advocates the usual solutions - more government inspectors and higher fines for litterers.  This is often the knee jerk reaction by governments and media everywhere to any problem of public disobedience.  Indeed Singapore has had some (numerical) success with such approaches - according to the numbers, fines dispensed for littering went from 3800 in 2005 to 21200 last year.  However, the littering remains as prevalent.  Some of the proposed solutions went even further - like blacklisting litterers from government jobs and big brother style omnipresent CCTV to catch litterbugs!

I think policymakers need to think a little differently about this.  I believe the problem is that people subject to a high degree of control will rebel as soon as they sense an opportunity where they won't be caught.  Singapore can't rely on the government to solve this problem - the citizens themselves need to solve it - and here is where MM's gracious society comes in.  Singapore hasn't developed a culture of graciousness because often the government hasn't given society the space it needs to set its own self-managing boundaries and norms of behaviours.

Admittedly, I can't be 100% sure what MM meant in his mind by the term "gracious society":  the term could refer to a nation which is not belligerent and plays a responsible role in the world; or, it could mean a country in which the people are considerate and in a hundred little ways each day interact in ways which show respect to one another.  I've taken the latter rather than the former for this post.  I don't think this means a gracious society is all about eliminating littering but I'll say its a small part of it.

It can't be socially acceptable to litter.  Citizens need to admonish one another for not respecting the environment.  In other countries, I've seen irate drivers honk horns and harass smokers who dump butts, but never here.  Girlfriends should not stand for litterbug boyfriends.  Mothers need to set the example for children.  A big part of the issue is that many Singaporeans lead "maid-assisted lives" - most grow up in households with domestic help from neighbouring countries and so aren't taught from a young age to clean up after themselves.  Armies of cleaners scour the areas in the city to keep them spotless for tourists.

Time for some safe-fail interventions into society to seed new habits - less reliance please on a control-based approach of government programmes, fines and inspectors.  Singapore needs to accelerate its emergence of graciousness, as it has so successfully accelerated its economic development!

I think its too early to say that he should be elected - I'm looking for to seeing how he performs in a presidential campaign, should he get the chance - but I have to say that Barack Obama is possibly the most gifted public speaker I have seen in politics in my time.

I first saw him speak at the Democratic Convention in 2004, after reading an article on him in the Economist earlier in the year (unfortunately only viewable with a subscription!).  I was sitting in a hotel room in India preparing for the day and was lucky enough to catch it - listening to that speech made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

His Iowa speech is in a similar, rarified class.  Impressive ...