Capturing tacit knowledge within organisations: Our digital storytelling method involves distilling one's knowledge and experience through reflective practice and repackaging these insigths using new and powerful communication tools to share them with others.

The impact of this method lays with basic communication principles that enhance traditional face to face storytelling. Firstly, recording a story eliminates the real time pressures associated with public speaking, leaving the communicator ample time to refine and articulate a message. Secondly its digital outputs (film & audio) can travel further and faster over the internet. A leadership awareness project with women leaders in the NZ dairy sector produced eight inspirational stories (online on the DairyNZ website) and spurred a national demand for leadership movement see screenshot below from (http://dwnregionalworkshops.blogspot.com).

We are interested in capturing and analysing the data that can point to impact on participants and audience: how have people applied what they learnt? How have they used this new knowledge to change? What evidence can be shown of people either taking their next step in their own leadership development or encouraging/mentoring others in their aspiration or career development?  We are currently developing models for elearning based on the collection, analysis and distribution of tacit knowledge. 

A study New Zealand Trade and Entreprise research and evaluation project. The project assessed the performance of E4E (Education for Enterprise) practices in primary and secondary schools as they impacted on early leadership development, risk taking and innovation. The visual research report for this project was also recognised as a examplary resource in the education domain. Please contact us to receive a DVD relating the main aspects of the research.

An e-learning prototype to disseminate tacit knowledge about successs in innovation and commercialisation (screenshot below).

A Royal Society of New Zealand and New Zealand Trade and Entreprise venture to collect, analyse and disseminate leadership knowledge in the commercialisation of science and innovation: http://leadership.rsnz.org

A web platform to enable virtual communication for innovation. This online community was created in 2001 and is the only virtual communication platform for innovators. It presently hosts a project to facilitate the integration of migrants to New Zealand by offering them a vehicle to widen their social network. This project attracted funding from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise ECSA funding for Enterprise Culture Skills and Activities amongst other. 

A leadership archive project to enable companies to collect and analyse their leadership stories for online dissemination. E-learning modules create the conditions for participants to experience 'triple loop' learning (Argyris) and in the process create new organisation leadership knowledge.

A leadership legacy project to enable the retention of leadership knowledge in a firm with multiple geographic locations (in progress). This model examines the knowledge transfer mechanisms between founders and their successors and operates on three levels:

• META LEVEL (firm): Leaders draw from how they were inspired to, in turn, inspire others, their values and ethics.  
• INTERPERSONAL LEVEL (micro interactions): Leaders who operate authentically magnify their impact. 
• INDIVIDUAL LEVEL (self awareness): Leaders level of awareness about self as sine qua non to their development.
  

A leadership tacit knowledge paradigm integrating findings from our work is unfolding. The developmental matrix (organisation/leader) schematically describes the different stages and what learning happens at each stage.

A multimedia E-Leadership Learning Object for Microsoft New Zealand, Partners in Learning Project to help teachers and principals build leadership for the education sector. 

The Ecosynergy Group Ltd (egl) has been supporting Partners in Learning New Zealand, through an extensive research programme aimed at deepening the understanding of the role technology can play in Education. The research is applied so that we document how technology can help teachers develop their teaching practice and students learn better. Over the years, Ecosynergy has carried out this research in a wide variety of settings, studying innovative teachers, students and schools while delineating the role of educational leadership into the 21^st century. Our research is carried out in the context of the New Zealand Ministry of Education curriculum outlining the five key competencies (Managing Self, Thinking, Relating to Others, Using language, technology and symbols and Participating and Contributing). We have developed and tested methodologies aimed at capturing, analysing and distributing the tacit knowledge of educational experts through video via different electronic means. The distribution of targeted knowledge is gaining in importance since we learn from all our life experiences. The results are published both in peer-reviewed publications and in journals aimed at educators; we also share our experiences and publications via our blog which you can access at: www.egl-microsoft.spaces.live.com (image below)

Research Education Ecology