Sonja completed the Cognitive Edge training in South Africa - Johannesburg Jan 2004. Sonja has experience in ...And the Butterfly Stamped; Model Creation by Social Construction; The future backwards; Nodal networks and new forms of organisation; JIT KM; Necessary bias; Managing complexity by experiment; Archetype Creation; Story Construction; Ritual Dissent; Anecdote Circles; Naive interviews; Getting ready for SMI database; and Information / DP mapping. Industry Specialisation
Financial industry, Public Sector, Research organisations, Industrial, Telecomms, Mining industry Professional Background
I started by career as a meteorologist with the South African Weather service. From there I moved into IT and internet development. Finally developing expertise in Enterprise Content Management in the employ of PWC Consulting. I was introduced to Dave and the CE method while employed as a business consultant for IBM BCS in South Africa. While in IBM, I was involved in several CE projects. I recently left IBM to start my own company, Dialogue, and now The Narrative Lab, and to focus on building CE capability in South Africa. The Narrative Lab is the approved Cognitive Edge Accreditation provider in South Africa. Projects Undertaken
- Large financial sercives organisation - I participated in and led several projects in this organisation. Applications included: Narrative enquiry to understand and enhance Customer Experience in branches; Narrative enquiry to assist with the re-definition of the Customer Value Proposition across 7 new customer segments; Using story to map the organisation's oral history (heroes, villains & mavericks); Narrative enquiry to investigate Agility in the IT division; Several applications as part of establishing a KM Centre of Excellence in the Organisation - these included SNA, Cognitive Bias mapping through categorisation, Knowledge Mapping, Narrative Enquiry.
- CSIR - para-statal Research organisation - Mentored practitioners internal to the organisation through a narrative enquiry and sensemaking project aimed at understanding innovation from a cultural perspective.
- Northern Australian Dept of Employment & Education (co-facilitator at final sense making workshop)
- Government agency - led a pilot project in this government agency as a proof of concept for wider application of the methodology. This pilot looked specifically at leveraging expertise and experiential knowledge within a specific department. We conducted 8 anecdote circles and gathered approximately 550 stories, many of which contained very specific Knowledge Disclosure Points and heuristics. A sample of participants then participated in a 2 day sense making event (with Dave Snowden as lead facilitator) where multiple activities were run simultaneously - these included Archetype Extraction, KDP extraction and ASHEN, Decision/Information flow mapping, Story Construction and SNS design. Specific actions were also generated by the group. The outputs from this workshop fed into a QQE workshop with key decision makers where the outputs were mapped to project objectives. The actions that came from the sense making workshop was mapped to the QQE patterns to assist with prioritising.
- Participated in a Leadership Action Learning initiative with a large industrial organisation - the scope of the workshop was to consolidate learnings and make sense of complex problems. Components used: Future Backwards, Cynefin framework.
- PWC Consulting - facilitated several strategic planning and/or transformation project kick-off workshops. These were all part of larger transformation projects for various local government agencies. Workshops consisted of Future Backwards, clustering of Future Backwards items and working with the cartoonist to co-create heaven.
- Large telecomms company in Johannesburg - design of a narrative based culture audit
- Gold mining company in Johannesburg - design and implementation of a narrative based culture change initiative within the supply chain. The organisation is on the verge of a large change in operations and wanted to assess change readiness as well as surface patterns of behavior that could be leveraged during the change process. The standard pre-hypothesis research method was adapted to cater for different levels of literacy as well as English proficiency. This was done by including a cartoonist in the anecdote circles - the stories was drawn as input to the 2-stage emergence in stead of using words on hexies. Methods used: Anecdote Circles, Archetype extraction (2-stage emergence), Future Backwards.
Additional Information
Training: Co-facilitation of two South African Accreditation training courses (TNL is the approved SA Cognitive Edge accreditation training provider) as well as the October 2007 London accreditation training course. Presented a KM focussed CE accreditation course for IBM's Global Knowledge & Learning community in June 2006 Public speaking engagements on Complexity and Narrative |
