Gosh, I'm learning a lot this week about running workshops with people who are not comfortable with English as a primary medium of communication. I am being shown up for the games I play and facades I can hide behind in language. Adding to this learning curve is that these folk are not highly educated (and I'm trying desperately not to be condascending in saying so). I'm helping Sonja with workshops in a fairly well-known mining company in South Africa. To a large extent, the process requires a well-honed set of cognitive abilities - a set that seem fairly removed and foreign to these people who lead relatively simple lives.

My crutch though has been that we're using stories as a primary mechanism for gathering information. No matter what the language, there is magic in every story told and a wealth of relevant information regarding the company and the lives of these people.

I also feel like I'm standing on a threshold of sorts. I have a sense that very few people are exploring how narrative is valuable in a different setting - one that is removed from the English-saturated corporate hallways of the economic hubs our country depends on. It is a threshold of a potentially very valuable narrative technique that transcends language and education paradigms.

I'm not entirely sure where this will go (and whether you even understand what I'm talking about). But it's a reflection worth posting.

When I consider the state of culture and language in South Africa, it's almost as if someone has swung a pendulum in the language sphere of South African culture, and his name is Bok van Blerk. We are one of those nations where culture equates to language, and vice versa. From the bloody years in which Afrikaans was a forced language of education for all South Africans in the 1970s, and even before, South Africans have found solitude in the culture their language reinforces. Since 1994 however, there has been one language that has suffered at the swing of the pendulum - Afrikaans. Democracy has heralded the freedom of language and culture in our country and the Afrikaners have been struggling to find a cultural foundation on which to stand that honours their culture. (At least this is what I have perceived in the way Afrikaners are fighting for their Story - I'm English speaking).

And so, Bok van Blerk came on to the scene with a song, Delarey, that tells the story of a general in the Anglo-Boer war who courageously lead the Boere in the fight against the British many a year back. The songs chorus of “De la Rey, De la Rey, sal jy die boere kom lei? [De la Rey, will you come to lead the Boers?]”, and how well the song has done (SA's best ever debut album) is a salient narrative indicator of where the Afrikaaner culture finds itself - in dire need of expression and solidarity.  read more »

As I work more with groups I'm seeing how they revert and perform according to their lowest common denominator (LCD), if you will. I bounced this idea off of the guys who meet at GIG. I saw it working especially in this group. Of the 12 or so members, there are only two 1st-language English speakers who particpate (me being one of them). Without fail, the group would start off in Afrikaans and then revert to English as soon as

a) someone noticed that I spoke English, or
b) I made a point in English.

So, in this context the group decided, unconsciously, that the LCD was English, and without consciously knowing it, reverted to speaking in English. When I reflected this back to the group, they were surprised. My own defesniveness around English being inferior aside, have any of you noticed how this happens?

Well, Dana Snyman, has written a great article in Die Beeld who taken another view on why this happens. Read it here.

If Pete Laburn has ever cornered you into a coffee shop, he has no doubt told you about Orchestras & Jazz Bands. It is a metaphorical analogy that compares companies (and how they have adapted to our age of discontinuous change) to the difference between orchestras and jazz bands. But let me not steal Pete's thunder. For now, my point is that there is a definitive way in which musical organisations mirror and relfect what happens in companies. The modus operandi is different, but the structural, systemic processes are similar. In doing some reading on organisational culture I stumbled upon the Symphony Orchestra Institute. The SOI was founded by Paul R. Judy who "was motivated by a lifelong passion for classical music and a keen interest in how organizations functioned, coupled with a serious concern about the longer term effectiveness and sustainability of the existing American symphony organization model." The SOI is a great example of an organisation that understands the dynamics of culture and how they play out in organisations. I recommend reading their series on Organisational Culture.