summ( )n

Cognitive Edge just put on the website an excellent research paper, Strategic Conversation: How to Engage 3600 Staff in Scanning and Scenario Building. It is both a case study, of how to involve employees into a discussion about possible futures of their organization, and a primer showing the use of tools developed by Cognitive Edge.

The chart above illustrates a very complex and multi-component process of gathering and processing information, which will be later used in developing scenarios and facilitating a change toward the future. I would only suggest to use a more network-looking image, otherwise it doesn’t pay a merit to the real process, as described in the paper.

The volume of the exercise is also very impressive, with over 1,600 ‘scenario fragments’ produced during the process, which had been aggregated into almost 1,200 scenarios, later analyzed in terms of their frequency and relevance (impact).

But the rich and sheer volumes of data (content) was not the only output of the project (and may be even not the most important). Great thing is that it triggered a transformation process in the organization in question (Canadian Ministry of Forests and Range in this case):

“Backed by the experience and knowledge gained from the Strategic Conversation initiative, the ministry later launched a mass staff collaboration project to help solve a specific problem in the present – how to fundamentally transform the business in light of new internal and external operating realities.”

So, the paper is really a good news, as a way to learn about and better understand the way CE works, but also as a lever in changing the attitudes of managers to such initiatives.

There is unfortunately a bad news too: as I just learned, CE has cancelled planned accreditation workshop in Brussels (which was sliding from February to May then to June and finally disappeared from their schedule). Need to figure out now how to add these CE tools to the Summ()n tool box.