Stealing souls

January 30, 2008

There used to be (and probably still is) an issue in some societies of taking photographs without permission. In some cases it was held to be capturing or stealing souls. Now over the last few years I have come across two examples of consultants claiming ownership over stories that they elicited in organisations. In one case the stories were gathered electronically, but then indexed by the so called expert, which was held to allow them to make an IP claim on the material and its representation. In the second case the so called story tellers, took away raw material from the organisation and enhanced it into more vivid (or some such other word) form and then claimed ownership over the result.

Aside from the fact that enhancing other people’s stories comes into the realm of platitudinous charlatanism, and indexing other people’s stories represents the height of paternalistic arrogance; it must be wrong to claim any ownership over narrative material so gained? How can anyone hold their heads up after making such a claim?

Anyone know of any similar examples? I am hoping the above two cases are isolated, but in these days of the popularisation of organisational story telling into the worst form of management fad, you never know.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
ABOUT USSUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.

© COPYRIGHT 2024

< Prev

English Identity (A rugby blog)

The Six Nations is upon us (how could Gatland leave out Jenkins and Shanklin?) and ...

More posts

Next >

Famine

Famine follows war. Of course it does. The normal infrastructure of production breaks down or ...

More posts

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram