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Topic: Conversations
“StoryForm”: A work in progress
StoryForm is a new project Throughline is gestating. The aim is to create a tool for driving, inspiring and shaping BUYING (business and consumer purchasing) and BUY-IN (commercial decisions, especially around innovative concepts). As such, it relates to and also goes beyond our work in KILN around catalysing innovation. Continue reading
Back in late February, I heard Alexander Osterwalder speak at the Front End of Innovation EMEA conference hosted by the Institute of International Research. The keynote was about the Business Model Canvas. Indy had received Alex's book Business Model Generation (co-authored with Yves ...MORE >
Announcing NEXOS
We’re really pleased to be working with Dan Simmons at Beyond Eureka on a response to the onslaught of digital information, messages, conversations. We’re all of an age where we remember life before mobile phones, email, RSS feeds, FaceBook. We wouldn’t dream of turning back the clock. But we do feel people need better tools and protocols, not simply more devices, more content, more conversations. > Continue reading
NEXOS stands for Next Operating System. I was talking to a TEDx organiser about NEXOS in these terms:
Albert Einstein once famously said: “It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity. I hope that someday, our humanity might yet surpass our ...MORE >
A 3-min movie on Rachel Botsman’s Collaborative Consumption
I produced this short movie in January 2012 as part of the RSA/Nominet Trust Film Competition. The film was immediately featured by Rachel Botsman’s website and went on to attract over 1000 plays in the first four weeks. Continue reading
Although our movie was not selected by the judges, it was chosen for a TEDx in Leeds on the Future of Money in February that was picked up in the Guardian online, and continues to circulate in the Peer-to-Peer global community of which ...MORE >
Stories: how and why
A tweet last week from Dave Snowden alerted me to Anecdote’s Story-Spotting Test. The thing that bothered me about Anecdote’s definition of a story is what it left out. The markers they’ve identified cover the who, where, when and what. They don’t mention the how or the why. Hmmm…. Continue reading
I mulled this over. And began realising that Throughline's practice is deeply interested in the "how" and "why". Maybe it's because our bread-and-butter is finding and crafting stories on B2B topics where "how" and "why" are quite genuinely the most interesting questions to ...MORE >
Driving technology adoption
Cultural readiness is a big part of adopting new technology. There’s only so much influence that thought leaders and vendors themselves can exercise. As this piece shows, direct mentors are often most effective in bringing “newbies” onboard. Continue reading
Collaborating to create value: who is the client?
Now in our fourth year, we’re thinking a lot about how we collaborate to create value for our clients. One of things we’ve discovered is that: network-delivery models create hidden “clients” who can crowd out the needs of the actual, ultimate client. Here’s a story about hidden clients in a networked business situation:
Continue reading
Robert just told me about his work with Jane. Jane is internal communications manager for a company involved in a merger. Her annual budget trebled for the merger period. She had a choice: enlarge her circle of advisors or ask an incumbent agency ...MORE >
Putting metaphor in the frame
University of Leeds Professor Joep Cornelissen’s talk “It’s all in the game: How to successfully frame a strategic change or opportunity” used real-world and television drama examples to the show the interplay between how leaders framed future action and what people understood through the frames. Continue reading
It’s so refreshing to hear someone flag up the importance of metaphor and analogy in business communications. They aren’t simply “literary tools”: metaphor and analogy are tools fundamental to humans’ sense-making.
Joep’s talk and the discussion it sparked reminded me how powerful metaphors and ...MORE >
If you think like hammer, does everything start to look like a nail?
Tool bound thinking is the topic for a group discussion about internal communications that I’ve been part of over at the Commscrum blog. Continue reading
Commscrum is a group blog founded to bring interdisciplinary thinking to business communications. Founders Dan Gray, Kevin Keohane, Mike Klein and Lindsay Uittenbogaard kindly invited me to join the second wave of posters - so here is my first post in collaboration with ...MORE >