Biographical summary
I started my career as a biologist specialising in the evolution of social behavior. I got my B.S. in biology in 1986, carried out two internships at zoos, and spent five years pursuing a Ph.D. in ethology before leaving in 1990 with a M.A. degree, partly due to an injury that scuttled a field project and partly due to the fact that applying complexity theory to the evolution of social behavior was not yet fashionable. (^_^)
On leaving graduate school, I swore off pure science and switched to writing educational software, undertaking a several-year apprenticeship with a master programmer (my husband). Together we wrote and published (in 1998) two internationally distributed and widely referenced simulators on plant growth, soil science and evolutionary design for informal science education. That work is still available at our web site kurtz-fernhout.com. Alas, the bottom fell out of the educational software market (just about the time we ran out of money :) so we open-sourced the software and moved on.
After a stint doing technical writing on Wall Street, I answered an ad for a technical writer for a group at IBM Research working on narrative in organisations. I quickly realised I had a strong interest in the topic (it is not that far removed from ethology), and my manager (John C. Thomas) was enlightened enough to allow me to switch from technical writing to research (which, really, I do best). I spent the next two years developing concepts, software and methods related to the use of narrative in organisational settings. At the second IBM-wide "story meeting" (of people from around the world working on narrative in any form) I met Dave Snowden, who was doing similar work in the field, and we had a lot to talk about.
In 2001 I started working as a research consultant for the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, where Dave Snowden was a director. There I brought complexity science back into my work, married it to narrative, and started exploring all the possibilities therein. While working for the IKM I wrote the first narrative database software and supported a growing network of IBM consultants working on narrative projects. Still working as an independent consultant, I helped Dave found the Cynefin Centre in IBM and the later independent company that grew into Cognitive Edge.
From 2001 to 2007 I was the main researcher on two multi-year government projects which sought to use narrative and complexity approaches to help analysts better discover weak signals and consider diverse perspectives in complex situations in the social, environmental, economic and security spheres.