Narrative -Exploring the world

For the coming retreat we’ve managed (again as last year went well) and excellent faculty. Yiannis Gabriel is one of the big three in organisational narrative work and one of the most approachable and thoughtful academics I have had the pleasure to spend time with. Mo Costandi has brought cognitive neuroscience to the lay public through his Guardian blog. I had lunch with him last week by way of preparation and we talked widely, including coming up with a plan to debunk Neuroleadership so keep an eye out for that. Mary Condren and I were colleagues back in the 70s when she edited Movement and her subsequent work on the decline of matriarchal power in WesternCivilisation. She studied theology, sociology and social anthropology and was a research associate in Women’s Studies at Harvard University. Her doctoral thesis addressed the role of sacrifice and she is now looking at the question or mercy. All in all we have a fascinating and diverse faculty and we will be using a modified form of the Triopticon (a cross between conference, seminar and un-conference) that we evolved over the three retreats held last year. The method means everyone is engaged at various levels prior to synthesis. As in the previous retreats we will also use the physical environment in which we are located as a part of the events – including the evenings where the local pubs will provide an option to hear native Irish spoken as a first language.

As to what we will get out of it? The essence of a retreat is that it is an exploration from the perspective of multiple academic disciplines interacting with practice. So some of this depends on what people bring to the event. But we want to explore the nature of narrative as a constraint in organisations and society from the humanities and the sciences. A goal is to examine ways in which change can be stimulated; entrained patterns of needless difference reduced in their ability to dehumanise human interaction. How do people gain agency in their own forward narratives while respecting their past? At a very pragmatic level participants should come away with some new methods (and variations of old methods) that they can use in practice, at another level new ways of thinking about old and current problems. We’ll look (critically I suspect) at the role of AI in decision making and decision constraining. Lots and lots of possibilities.