LIKE 4 - Storytelling

The fourth meeting of the London Information and Knowledge Exchange (LIKE) took place at the end of May in the upstairs room of The Perseverance in Lamb Conduit Street, Holborn.

This repeated the format of the previous meeting where a facilitator introduced a topic that was then discussed in small groups, these groups change around once to mix the conversations and then come together for a whole team wrap-up.

Also repeated from the last time was the much appreciated buffet that helped to fuel the discussions, as did the Wainwrights beer.

Storytelling has been a big topic in Knowledge Management for some years so it is no surprise that this proved to be a popular topic for a LIKE meeting.

Marja Kingma selected the topic and introduced it by relating a story from the British Library where their sound archives had been used to support the claim for the reintroduction of pool frogs.

The point of that story was to show that there is more to the BL than books and journals and we were asked to take this as an example of how story telling can be used in business and to build on that in our discussions.

As always we discussed far more than I can hope to summarize here but there were some points that struck home.

Stories in business often follow rigid rules, e.g. CVs and case studies and, while these rules are easy to understand, crafting a compelling story is still a difficult task that requires skills that not everybody has.

Stories can be told in many ways apart from written prose, e.g. video, pictures, drama, poetry, humour, cartoons, audio, etc. and different techniques are more appropriate to different kinds of stories and to different situations. This is a topic that we may want to explore further at a future meeting. However, business seems scared to try anything other than formal prose.

It was a great topic for discussion but the best thing about LIKE meetings is that they attract interesting and friendly people. It's rather like a very good dinner party.

Emirates Airline London Sevens

A friend bought a number of tickets for the recent Emirates Airline London Sevens at Twickenham so I went to the first day to see what the fuss was all about.

We were in row 24 on the lower level on the west side which gave us a good view of the games, as this photo taken without any zoom shows. Only the lower level was open so I guess that there were around 15,000 people there, most of whom seemed to be wearing either the country's club colours or bizarre fancy dress. For some reason Kenya seemed to have attracted the most supporters, it certainly had the most enthusiastic ones.

The tournament started with a group stage with some unusual countries (from a rugby perspective) making up the numbers, I never expected to see Germany play for instance. This, combined with the open play that makes sevens attractive, led to some of the games being rather pointless and scores of 40 - 0 or worse were not uncommon.

That said, the rugby proved to be entertaining enough and we were all duly occupied for some eight hours. We arrived later than some and left earlier than a few but we were there longer than most. It seems that the opening day was something that most people were happy to sample just a bit of, particularly if they had children with them.


While the day was billed as a rugby tournament a serious amount of effort was put into trying to entertain us between the games. This included cheer leaders (here getting ready to welcome the England team on to the pitch) and various competitions that involved the cameras picking somebody out in the crowd who was acting madly when instructed to do so. You will not be surprised to hear that I did not join in any of these, nor did I join in with any of the Mexican waves or singing Macarena. For me all the entertainment was a distraction from what I thought was the main event, the rugby.

The other attraction for us gents was the bar. The beer was OK but came in plastic and cost an unreasonable £3.70 thanks to the bar's monopoly. The food was little better and somehow even managed to make chips look unappetising. I was surprised, and very pleased, to find a decent veggie burger at one of the stalls that ringed the outer boundary of the stadium.


From the outside, Twickenham Stadium does nothing to hide its concrete and steel construction and it looked reassuringly strong with the afternoon sunlight full on the west stand. Unfortunately it looked almost as industrial inside too with the concrete terraces only slightly softened by rows of hard plastic seats. But the worst bit is the no-man's-land between the inside and the outside where absolutely nothing has been done to soften the concrete underpasses. Some paint would do.

All told it was an entertaining day out but not quite entertaining enough for me to rush to do it again.

Exploring St. Pancras

Wherever I work I like to get out at lunchtime and go for a little explore. This has many benefits, it breaks the work-through-lunch habit, provides a little light exercise and uncovers some nice surprises.

The new Logica office for London is just North of Kings Cross which is a part of London that I have not worked in before so there is much for me to explore. The office is right next to the Regent's Canal and that was an obvious place to start the exploration.


Heading West along the canal one sharp turn leads you to a different world where industrialisation is suddenly masked by countryside idyll in which sits St. Pancras Lock. Just behind the lock is the main line from St. Pancras Station but so too is a small wharf where around fifty canal boats are moored.

This stretch of the canal attracts many lunchtime explorers some of whom chose to jog through the landscape, some sit on one of the many benches and some, like me, try to look as though we are used to walking through rural scenes in business suits.


Just the other side of the railway line is St. Pancras Hospital site. It does not look much like a hospital and I guess that is has been superseded by the nearby University College London Hospital but it still appears to be owned by the National Health Service.

This magnificent Victorian industrial architecture sits on the North side of a small park and it is hard to think of a more impressive boundary or a more attractive backdrop for the trees and bushed.


The park is a mess in a delightful way with a criss-cross of paths and some graves and other monuments related to St Pancras Old Church on the South side. The park's main feature is this decorative monument that is guarded by four impassive lions.

All of these sites are no more than ten minutes from my office and were completely unknown to me until a few days ago. This is precisely why I go exploring!

School admissions is a broken process

I have repeated experience of trying to get children into the school of their choice as a parent, a governor, a local government officer and, occasionally, as somebody who sits on Admissions Appeals Panels. These panels give parents who are unhappy with the school that they have been allocated to appeal against this allocation to an independent body whose decision is binding on the Local Authority.

Most of the appeals have little chance of success as the main grounds on which an appeal can be supported are that the school has failed to follow their published admissions policy or that this policy is unfair, and any competent admissions authority is not going to make these basic mistakes.

But the whole admissions process is quite complicated with parents specifying their preferred schools in priority order in October and then getting a letter in March that simply states which school they have been allocated, it does not say how this allocation was arrived at. Disappointed parents are told that they have the right to appeal and will often chose the appeal route simply because they are unhappy with the result of an opaque and complex process when a better understanding of the process could reassure them that they have been dealt with fairly, even if they do not like the end result.

What makes the situation even more difficult for parents is that many schools have now adopted some form of semi-independent status (Foundation, Voluntary Aided, etc.) which means that the school sets and manages its own admissions policy independently from its Local Authority. Most schools in this position have adopted their Local Authority's admissions policy as their own with some minor modifications but some have made quite significant changes.

It is these modifications that make the situation unnecessarily complex for parents as they have to try and understand the subtlety of the admissions policy for each school that they are interested in and it is easy to miss the little differences between them when they all look much the same and are all worded in stilted education jargon.

I do not want to go through the specifics of any of the cases that I have heard at an Admissions Appeals Panel recently (and I am sure that legally I am not allowed to either) but there were a couple of points that came up in general discussion when we were comparing the admissions policies of various schools in Kingston that I do want to highlight.

Firstly, some schools' admissions policies are confusing because they are very badly worded. Even as an expert in admissions I found that I had to read some of them several times to work out what they meant.

Secondly, some of the policies had clauses that unnecessarily (and possibly illegally) discriminated against some applicants, particularly those that could not apply by the October deadline. This is a serious issue for people that move within or into this country after October as they then have no realistic chance of getting their child into a popular school that has this clause in their admissions policy.

The Government has done much in recent years to try and improve the fairness of school admissions and while a lot of progress has been made there is still a lot more to do. In particular, schools need to check that their policies are simple, clear and do not discriminate. Until they do, there will be plenty more work for the Admissions Appeals Panels.

The News Quiz 21 May 2009

The Friday evening comedy slot on Radio 4 alternates between The Now Show and The News Quiz and while I have been to see recordings of The Now Show several times I had never been to see the The News Quiz until this week.

The News Quiz is also recorded on Thursday evenings at the BBC Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House so much of evening followed the usual ritual.

Part of this was a pizza at the Pizza Express all but next door but this may be for the last time. Comments made on previous visits and provided a £10 gift token but not an improvement in service - the dough balls ordered for a starter failed to arrive but were included in the bill. Not impressed.

Decided not to rush for the show and was happy to join the queue in position 100, instead of the usual 50. This was still good enough to get into the first waiting room (despite the usual incident with security which then made it easy to get a seat in the middle of the second row.

The stage was set up quite simply in the traditional game show way with Sandi Toksvig, the chair, sitting in the middle with the news reader, Francis Wheen and Robert Ince on her right and Steve Punt and Fred MacAulay on her left.

Steve Punt, as one of The Now Show creators is not meant to also appear on The News Quiz, and I guess that he was there as a late replacement for Jeremy Hardy who is a regular on the show and who was in that episode according to the BBC website.

The format is quite simple, each contestant in turn gets asked a question on a topical question which they find a correct but amusing way to answer and then the other panellists chip in with other relevant am musing comments. When the rambling runs out of steam Sandi brings the question to a close and moves to the next one. This goes on for three rounds.

The show is clearly partially scripted and the panellists have prepared some bon mots on topics that they know are likely to come up, like MPs' expenses.

The overall effect is rather like a conversation at a dinner party where everybody lets everybody else say their piece and emotions are kept well in check.

As a result it is consistently amusing but rarely very funny. The broadcast version is funnier because they edit it down from around one hour to half.

Some of this editing is pretty simple and brutal, of the twelve questions recorded only nine were broadcast. The rest of the editing pares the rambling down so that only the bonnest mots that pass UK legislation are broadcast.

I was glad I went as being there to see a show being made is always interesting but, unlike The Now Show, the live version of The News Quiz is not that much funnier that the broadcast one so I am unlikely to go again.