Social psychologist, Dan Gilbert, says people will not get excited and worried about global warming in the same way people have about global terrorism because of the way our minds have evolved over millions of years. In his essay for The Times, Gilbert suggests 4 reasons for this disparity:

• Global warming does not represent people attacking us and we have evolved to be incredibility interested in people.
• Global warming doesn’t violate our moral sensibilities in the same way transgressing social taboos will. As Gilbert says: “And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto.”
• Global warming is a long term threat and we have evolved to detect clear and present dangers.
• Rate of climate change is too slow for people to really notice and therefore care.

You might be wondering why in a business blog I’m talking about climate change and terrorism. Well, these same factors, which render people apathetic to global warming, also affect people in organisations with issues like knowledge loss resulting from a retiring, aging workforce, how outsourcing and automation will require 1st world nations to focus on right brain capabilities, and how increasing connectivity among people will require a new worldview encompassing complexity principles.

About two weeks ago my wife entered and won a Toastmasters humorous speech competition. Her winning speech was “searching for a soulmate”. It was about looking for a dog (thankfully not a new husband).

 I’ve noticed how much people warm to dogs. Okay I might be a dog person, rather than a cat person, but if you have a dog and go for a walk in a neighbourhood I’ll guarantee you will have a lot more opportunities to meet people than if you just walk alone. People who take cats for walks are just weird. But like I said, I’m a dog person. Anyway it’s got me thinking about a previous post Are organisations losing their humanity? And maybe there is something we can learn from dogs. Something that might help. Here’s a list I came across, author unknown.

• 1. Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joy ride.
• 2. Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.
• 3. When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.
• 4. When it’s in your best interest, practice obedience.
• 5. Let others know when they’ve invaded your territory.
• 6. Take naps and stretch before rising.
• 7. Run, romp, and play daily.
• 8. Eat with gusto and enthusiasm.
• 9. Be loyal.
• 10. If what you want lies burried, dig until you find it.
• 11. When someone is having a bad day, be silent. Sit close by and nuzzle them gently.
• 12. Thrive on attention and let people touch you.
• 13. Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.
• 14. When you’re happy, dance around and wag your entire body.
• 15. No matter how often you’re scolded, don’t buy into the guilt thing and pout…. run right back and make friends
• 16. Delight in the simple joys of a long walk.

Funnily enough, about 3 weeks ago I joined a library which still has in its constitution the acceptance of dogs in the library! I wonder how organisations might be different if we could take our pets to work? Hmmm. Maybe my shaggy bunny tendencies are starting to shine through a little toooo much now.

Denham Grey has suggested a list of top KM principles. I’ve only included the headings here and encourage you to head over to Denham’s site for his full explanations. The principles include:

• Choose engagement over a repository
• Respect and appreciate the key role of trust & context
• Collect stories, use metaphor, ethnography and analogy to build inquiry
• Cultivate executive support

There is a lot of wisdom in Denham’s post. In addition to the principles Denham describes what he believes is the essence of KM:

• increasing awareness
• fostering learning
• supporting sense-making

I particularly like this statement:

Decisions, solutions, agility, competitive advantage and other benefits follow from sustaining a questioning environment, encouraging creative abrasion & experimentation, promoting deep dialog and allowing space for learning from mistakes.

The principles I would add to Denham’s list are:

• Focus on practice and process before employing technology
• Demonstrate value early and often—from the outset, collect success stories that demonstrate how the KM initiatives are enhancing responsiveness, increasing innovation, building capability and improving effectiveness.
• Get people talking about KM which goes beyond sharing and searching documents.

On this last point, Jack Vinson has posted about how the US Government has come up with a definition of knowledge management, which reads:

Defines the set of capabilities that support the identification, gathering and transformation of documents, reports and other sources into meaningful information.

Wow, this is so limited and unhelpful I was gobsmacked when I read it. Any organisation following this definition of knowledge management will end up with a plethora of IT systems and databases with documents no one looks at. It only talks about how information can be translated to information (a point well made by Tom Short today on the SKMLeaders forum) and forgets about people.

Here is our attempt of how we think people can usefully talk about knowledge management. And here is a way to develop a knowledge strategy.

It’s good to reflect. Take some time. Sit back... Reflect. Here’s some links to our thoughts on storytelling:

Story telling versus story writing
Ignite your story telling
Telling stories for a living
Using storytelling in sales
Story spines for sensemaking
Using story to communicate who we are
Storytelling is more about creating connections than knowledge transfer
Instructional video on storytelling
Storytelling survival guide
Storytelling versus storysensemaking

If you’d like to learn more about storytelling and really get your hands dirty we have 2 great workshops coming up in September and November!

Change your story Change your world and From story disaster to story master (or journeyman)

A handful of community of practice practitioners are meeting in Florence this October to reflect on the field’s theory and practice. Here is the blog Beverly Trayner has established to support our efforts.

If you want to understand Communities of Practice you couldn’t do better than join John Smith, Etienne Wenger and Bronwyn Stuckey on their online exploration of CoPs (see announcement below). You might also like to know that CPSquare members, a community of practice for community of practice practitioners, have an RSS feed which aggregates all our blogs.

The next “Foundations of Communities of Practice” workshop starts SOON -- on Monday September 11th!  It's an extraordinary experience for many people (including the organisers: Etienne Wenger, Bronwyn Stuckey and I -- and a wonderful bunch of guest speakers and mentors who generously contribute their time and expertise :-).

One participant in the Spring Workshop said something like, "This is the most brilliant e-learning design I've ever seen."  At the moment I can't put my hands on it and I haven't for his permission, but it really did make me feel good and, although it's a pretty big commitment to participate in this workshop, it is an investment you won't regret!

More details about the workshop and the registration form are here:

 http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/foundations/index.htm

I’m reading Gerald Zaltman’s How Customers Think. I started from the back because I was attracted to the chapters on story, metaphor and memory. But this morning I starting reading about Zaltman’s metaphor-elicitation technique (MET). It reminded me of Repertory Grid in that it’s an interview technique which uses one idea, or trigger, to probe for related ideas. Here is a cut down version of how Zaltman describes the process (p. 102–103).

The process can start with an image (or it could be a movie clip, a story, a product) that has some level of ambiguity or can be read in multiple ways (which probably means just about any image you like). I use this one in our anecdote circle training because when I ask ‘What’s happening in this picture?’ the answers are always in the form of a story.

Using the MET, the interviewer would ask questions Zaltman calls an Image Description Probe, such as:

Can you describe this image for me? What do you see here?

I see two girls looking at a hat. One is really interested in the contents while the other has her hands behind her back. The girl in the light green dress is bending over with her hands together. The hat seems to have some critters in it—perhaps rats.

Once the interviewee has described the picture and immersed themselves in the image the interviewer asks the introductory probe:

And how does this image relate to your thoughts and feelings about being a consultant within this corporation?

The hat and its contents reminds me of the constant need to produce results and the light green girl is acting like the many senior managers in the organisation who look disdainfully at the output of all our hard work. You can see that the dark green girl is not happy about the situation and might be willing light green girl to put her hands into the hat full of rats in the hope she will be bitten.

Could you tell me more about the hat?

As consultants we are instructed to generate the best hats possible and we are definitely proud of our work yet we tend to be given ridiculous timelines and never enough resources to do the job properly. Mind you when a hat is created all our peers gather and congratulate the hat makers on their work. It’s invariably a team effort.

More open questions follow probing various aspects of the metaphor that has been created by the interviewee in relation to the picture you have shown.

Zaltman encourages the interviewer to probe rather than prompt. Probes “enable participants to respond in multiple, often unexpected, ways, while [prompting] prohibits discovery by focusing the participant’s attention on the interviewer’s assumptions and hypotheses.” (p. 108)

We take a similar line when helping people craft anecdote-eliciting questions and when running anecdote circles. The facilitators role is to probe with open questions and then let the participants help one another remember stories through association. The difference with anecdote circles is that it is done in a group and it’s designed to collect stories.

Zaltman, G. (2003). How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into the Mind of the Market. Boston, Harvard Business School Press.

Karen Armstrong has written a piece in the Guardian today encouraging us to consider and accept multiple perspectives regarding the complex strife in the Middle East. She builds her point of view by comparing the multiple and contradictory stories told in religions and the similarly conflicted narratives told by the protagonists in the current struggle. Her ideas equally apply to business on a smaller scale. We are all are trying to make sense of what’s happening and what might happen and to dogmatically adopt a single truth will ensure the clash continues. As Armstrong says:

Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures; we crave narratives that have a beginning and an end - something that we rarely encounter in everyday life. Stories give coherence to the confusion of our experience.

And the screenwriter Robert McKee remind us that with stories, “What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.” (p. 25)

Karen Armstrong concludes her piece with a plea that businesses should also heed.

We must, therefore, make a concerted attempt to listen critically to all the stories out there in order to gain a more panoptic vision. This includes our own cultural narrative. Our modernity has liberated many of us, but it has disenfranchised others. Counter-narratives that question the myth of western freedom must also be heard, because they represent a crucial element in the conflicted, tragic whole.

McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York, ReganBooks.

[via Robert Kall and Working Stories]

I met with Rick Davies this week. He’s in Melbourne visiting his family and doing some work for Oxfam. We talked about the Zahmoo project and he made some very helpful suggestions. Rick asked me to make a link from the Zahmoo home page to the MSC guidebook that he and Jess Dart put together, which is now there. If you want to know how to do MSC this is the resource.

Rick made an interesting observation. He asked why we make so many of our ideas available noting that this behaviour was very unlike most consultants. Before I could answer he said, “would you like to be remembered for one idea or would you like to known as someone who can create and implement many ideas? It seems your website demonstrates the latter.”

I was writing a paper today describing our story-based approach to change and remembered Paul Kelly’s song, From Little Things Big Things Grow. I’d never read the lyrics before and found they sent a shiver up my spine. Paul tells the story of Lord Vestey (owner of a large cattle station) and Vincent Lingiarri (aboriginal leader) and the 8 year strike by Gurindji people for better conditions and for the return of their land.

There are some lines in the song particularly relevant to change management

Vestey man said I'll double your wages
Seven quid a week you'll have in your hand
Vincent said uhuh we're not talking about wages
We're sitting right here till we get our land

and this one

How power and privilege can not move a people

One of the my favourite blogs at the moment is Bob Sutton’s Work Matters. He’s an academic at Stanford who has a practical view of organisational issues and the author of the no asshole rule. A phrase that jumped out at me while reading Bob’s post this morning is the advice to have strong opinions, weakly held. Strong opinions encourage you to develop strong arguments for your point of view while holding these opinions weakly enables you to see and hear other people’s ideas and change your opinion as you learn more about the world.

Sensemaking is described as how we make sense of the world so we can act meaningfully in it. One of the ways we make sense is to apply simple rules of thumb (heuristics) to common situations. I was re-reading The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame) and noticed a description of a particularly unconventional heurisitic applied by the main character, Dirk Gently, when he got lost while driving:

“There is a school of thought which says that you should consult a map on these occasions, but to such people I say, ‘Ha! What if you have no map to consult? What if you have a map but it’s of the Dordogne?’ My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which looks as if it knows where it’s going and follow it. I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but I often end up somewhere that I needed to be.”1

 This heuristic certainly worked for our hero Dirk in the book, but I am not sure I will be rushing out to try it the next (inevitable) time I get lost in Sydney…

1. Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Pan Books, London, 1989, p121.

One way we help businesses learn and change is to help them find and collect their stories. These business stories are not fancy, crafted stories you might expect an archetypal storyteller to deliver. Rather they are often simple utterances in response to questions like, “So, what happened?” or “What’s going on around here?” These simple stories are told in organisations and help people make sense of what’s happening in the workplace. When collected and used in a systematic way they can provide incredible insights.

So far at Anecdote we’ve collected stories by recording and transcribing what people say. Our technique of choice is the anecdote circle but we have been using a range of approaches lately including getting people to record their own stories. As story techniques become popular there is a growing interest for people to write down and submit their stories either by email or by directly typing them into an online form. There are obvious advantages in story writing. It’s scalable (lots of people can submit stories) and can be done anywhere there’s a computer and an internet connection. As narrative practitioners we need to understand what we are trading for scalability and apparent simplicity.

Much has been written on the difference between written and oral stories. Interestingly, most commentators on this dichotomy focus on how people interpret a told versus a written story. While the interpretation perspective is relevant (and important), the focus of this post is on the differences involved in creating the story. Does the way we create a story affect its nature? Or put another way, How does story telling differ from story writing when creating a story?

Before I make my comparison it’s important for me to reiterate what I mean by storytelling. To tell a story in a business context is to simply recount an experience. In most cases stories are used to explain what has happened or how things work around here. The story teller simply provides an example.

Story telling is spontaneous and is often in response to what’s said by others in a conversation. It’s highly social and each story told reminds people of experiences they can recount. Once the story is told it can’t be undone; it’s out there.

Story writing is deliberate and measured and is typically done alone. During the writing the author is conscious of the potential audiences. They author can edit, draft after draft, to obtain a desired effect.

Story telling relies on a range of human faculties: gestures, tone, volume, pace, facial expressions. Add to this list all those things we leave out when telling a story. As Mark Twain says: 

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length -- no more and no less -- or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended -- and then you can't surprise them, of course.

While much of this richness is lost in a transcription, gathering a group of people together to retell their experiences benefits from all these features and the stories told are a reflection of the environment.

Story writing, on the other hand, relies on just words, fonts and punctuation to convey the full emotional impact and context of the story. And I think we all appreciate how hard it is be a good writer.

Lastly, Dave Snowden is renowned for saying, “We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down.” Relying on the written word to capture stories is bound to result in a loss of context and content.

More and more narrative practitioners will rely on story writing to capture stories because it’s a cheaper and scalable approach. But in using this approach we must be mindful of what we are losing in the process and be aware of how the stories might change when they are written down. More importantly, will some types of stories never be written at all?

IBM seems to be taking its WorldJam technology to the streets and letting everyone take a look. Since IBM’s first Jam in 2001 (I was one of the 50,000 or so participants) they have regularly held these 72 hours collaborations on their intranet to tackle a range of issues. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that everyone (outside IBM) can see what’s going on. It’s starts on September 12 and it will be worth taking a look.

[Thanks to Nancy White for finding this one]

Here are three signs that you could benefit from our storytelling workshop:

• Ever felt limited by a ‘dot-point’ type mentality?
• You find yourself in meetings where there is alot of conflict and people can’t or don’t seem to really listen to you or each other.
• You are searching for a more humane and meaningful way of communicating

If this sounds like you, be sure to catch our early bird, closing on the 20th August!

Also, read some more here.

Stephen Colbert, the comedian who brought us the devastating roast of George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, has outlined how you can be an expert in anything. Good advice for people wishing to fine tune their bullshit detectors. Here are Stephen’s 6 headings. Check out his article in Wired for the detail instructions.

• Pick a field that can't be verified.
• Choose a subject that’s actually secret.
• Get your own entry in an encyclopedia.
• Use the word zeitgeist as often as possible.
• Be sure to use lots of abbreviations and acronyms.
• Speak from the balls, not from the diaphragm.

[thanks to Les Posen for the link]

Bob Sutton has noticed that the Wall Street Journal is reporting research suggesting that individual brainstorming (some have called it brain-writing) is more effective that group brainstorming. I’ve also noticed this viewpoint in the Medici Effect. According to Bob this lopsided view is nonsense and he sets about listing the weaknesses contained in the academic literature. The conclusion: it’s good to do both.

We’ve witness a similar phenomena in collecting stories. People love the group story collection groups because they get to hear their colleagues’ stories which helps them remember their own stories. I often see people scribbling down ideas (come prepared to dump your ideas) that are sparked during the anecdote circle. There’s also a time for collecting stories from individuals. Asking people to recount their experiences around a theme before they attend an anecdote circle has the advantage of giving someone time to record their stories without competing for time in a group. It also primes the person with a range of stories they might tell in the circle. Lastly, an anecdote circle is an excellent stimulus for remembering stories but the remembrance might occur after you’ve left the room. Providing an ability for people to record the stories after the AC is important.

Most Significant Change is a monitoring technique based on the collection and selection of stories. The technique involves collecting stories, gathering people together to talk about them and then selecting the stories they believe are the most significant. This selection process creates new conversations in an organisation while systematically developing an intuitive understanding among staff of a program’s impact. Here is a short history of the technique.

Today we are announcing that we will soon launch a new web 2.0 innovation that will help you run your most significant change projects. The project is called Zahmoo and if you want to get an early look at the application, sign up as a beta user here.

This might be a bold statement, but I think the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network (VPSCIN) blog might be the first Australian government (federal or state) blog outside the firewall. Let me know if you are aware of an earlier examples.

What happens when you cross a well known Improv guru with a company passionate about story? You get a new workshop, of course!

With Izzy Gesell coming all the way from the USA to Australia in November we have worked together to design a new workshop called “Change your story Change your world”. How story telling and Improv Theatre skills can help you honour your past, understand your present and shape your future. We’ll be running this workshop in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Check here for dates. Don’t miss out!

Check out this link from Marshall Clemens, a talented complexity graphics designer. Probably one of the most comprehensive diagrams I’ve ever seen regarding complex systems thinking.

I was re-reading the Most Significant Change Guide developed by Rick Davies and Jess Dart today (their manual is an excellent resource available freely on the web here) and I noticed this list of why organisations have found the technique useful.

• It is a good means of identifying unexpected changes.
• It is a good way to clearly identify values that prevail in an organisation and to have a practical discussion about which of those values are most important.
• It is a participatory form of monitoring that requires no special professional skills. Compared to other monitoring approaches, it is easy to communicate across cultures. There is no need to explain what an indicator is. Everyone can tell stories about events they think were important.
• It encourages analysis as well as data collection because people have to explain why they believe one change is more important than another.
• It can build staff capacity in analysing and conceptualising impact.
• It can deliver a rich picture of what is happening, rather than an overly simplified picture where organisational, social and economic developments are reduced to a single number.
• It can be used to monitor and evaluate bottom-up initiatives that do not have predefined outcomes against which to evaluate.

The last point is one of the main reasons we use MSC to monitor complexity based interventions because from the outset we can never know exactly how the intervention will unfold.

I’ve just discovered a new word which I love: taskonomy. Donald Norman uses it to describe how we arrange things around us to get our work done. Rather than organise our materials alphabetically or thematically (that’s the taxonomy approach) we assemble things we might use together. Don’s example comes from some anthropological work investigating blacksmiths. At the end of the day a blacksmith doesn’t put all his hammers in one pile and tongs in another. No, he places the hammer next to the tongs and pops them both on the anvil ready for work the next day.

Typesetters of old, as you would imagine, had a similar system. Typesetting cases were arranged so that the popular letters where together and easily accessible. Capital letters were less commonly used so they tended to be stored in the Upper Case, out of the way. This is where we got the terms upper and lowercase letters.

These examples illustrate physical arrangements of tools which represent a craftsman's knowledge. Do we use taskonomies to arrange our concepts? To me one obvious example are stories, which arrange ideas using a plot. Like a blacksmith arranging his tools ready for use, a story gathers ideas into a meaningful assemblage ready to be told. Social networks are another example of a taskonomy in the sense that the people we know and trust are clumped together into groups like communities, friends, colleagues.

Patrick Lambe’s post put me on to Donald Norman’s idea of taskonomy. Patrick says:

Taxonomists cannot remain in the back storeroom keeping the shelves tidy. They also need to venture into the storefront and see how customers need their information organised for use.

I suggest taxonomists go a step further and get out into the workplaces of their customers, listen to their stories, find out how work really gets done and start incorporating taskonomy thinking in how they deliver their services. I agree with Patrick when he says:

It’s not that taskonomies are any better than taxonomies – in fact, you’ll need both taxonomies and metadata to support your taskonomies behind the scenes.

The problem we face is that organisations are obsessed with order, taxonomies, and wanting their workplace to work like a well-oiled machine. It’s time we shifted the focus to taskonomy and re-balance our approach to organisational issues by including more right brain thinking (design, story, empathy, meaning. symphony, play).

[thanks to Tom Graves for the typesetter example]

Jess Dart, an Anecdote Associate, is running her excellent Most Significant Change training in October. If you are interested in learning how to assess the impact of difficult to measure projects then this is an important technique to learn. Jess is one of the co-developers of the technique so you will be getting the very best information and I know she loves lots of participation and interaction. Here is the link to the course details.

Many thanks to yesterday’s workshop participants for their tremendous participation and openness in sharing their many insights. It was a really good day and everybody had lots of fun. And people may have even learned something :-)

One of the concepts of Appreciative Inquiry is to identify the positive deviants in a system and to find out what it is they are doing that works. The Positive Deviance Initiative has put this approach to the test in development projects since 2002. The concept is to identify the things/people that are successful in a system (the positive deviants), find out why they are successful and apply this learning broadly. The case study of ‘anti-girl trafficking’ in Indonesia provides a powerful example of how his approach can have stunning results.

When it comes to being an effective fire fighter, fire science has come up with the fire triangle. The fire triangle is a simple model which says that fire requires Fuel, Heat and Oxygen to burn. These three elements form the sides of the fire triangle. Take any one of these sides away and the fire is unable to burn.

In the same way, Doug Lipman has presented what I think is a great (and useful) model for how to be an effective story teller. He calls it his Story triangle. Like with the fire triangle, take any side away from the story triangle and you will have an ineffective story. The sides of the story triangle are:

• Clarity on “The most important thing” to you about the story
• Clarity on your intention towards your audience
• Using your imagination in all forms. eg: Auditory, Visual and Kineasthetic

As we will explore in our From story disaster to story master workshop (September 20th Melbourne, and 21st in Sydney) becoming a better story teller hinges on prospecting (being able to find stories), patterns (understanding some of the common forms story takes) and performance. I think Doug’s story triangle is a great way to become more mindful and effective in the delivery and performance of story.

Oscar Wilde once remarked, “there was no fog in London before Whistler painted it.” Wilde was referring to Whistler’s, Chelsea Wharf, and making the point that we can easily fail to see what’s staring us in the face until something or some experience brings it into sharp focus. This happened to me just the other week. I was reading Steve Denning’s The Leaders Guide to Storytelling in preparation for the teleconference call John Smith had organised with Steve and CPSquare members. I was reading the section on introducing yourself using a story when I got side-tracked (see my post on Yak shaving to see what being side-tracked is really like) and began to look for a reference to dead metaphors. I remembered that George Orwell had written on this topic and thought it was in his essay, Why I Write. So I re-read the essay, which I’d read a few times before, and noticed that his first few paragraphs were a series of anecdotes aimed at introducing himself just like Steve suggested in his book. Wow, never seen it before. Just shows you the power of context in influencing what people are able to see and take in.

Karl Weick says that seeing and noticing are the pre-requisites to sensemaking. Brenda Dervin has a similar perspective. So our challenge in business is to create situations where new patterns are discernible. We’ve talked about how stories help us see new patterns but what else can we do? Here is my list of perspective lenses I think we can apply:

• New eyes—introduce people with different background and way of seeing the world and new patterns become evident. For example, the Victorian Department of Primary Industries has introduced an agent provocateur program as part of their innovation initiatives.
• New frameworks—a powerful new framework will help you see the world differently. I remember the first time I saw they Cynefin framework and from that day on I could see ‘complex’ phenomena.
• New experiences—people can talk about how something works but until you experience it the effects are typically limited.
• New combinations—Darwin famously envisaged a model of evolution via natural selection by combining Malthusian economics and countless observation made on the Beagle.

After reading Alain de Botton’s short essay On the Pleasures of Sadness I was reminded that New Surroundings provides another excellent lens. de Botton has a fondness for train travel when he’s in search for new ideas because,

“Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought: the views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or plane, they move fast enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects.”

So when we want our business leaders to see new patterns let’s get them away from the familiar day-to-day environment and run our workshops and meetings in new and surprising locations. This doesn’t have to be extravagant, just different.

For some time now we have wondered whether organisations may be starting to lose their humanity. Maybe its a good question whether they ever had it, but the “Time is money” metaphor predominant in business today seems to have a lot to answer for. Tick Tock. To busy to spend time in dialogue. To busy to explore, we need to know the outcome. “How are you today” – “Busy”. To busy. Time is money.

And then, what about the “no asshole” rule suggested recently by Harvard professor, Bob Sutton.

Don’t hire assholes regardless of their earning potential and if someone has developed into one, help them see the light or get rid of them.

Its interesting and ironic that things have gotten so bad that we need to become more mindful of assholes and asshole behaviour in organisations.

And all this is not without cost. Organisations should care. As Leon Gettler a senior business journalist and blogger at The Age has found:

Workplace bullying is estimated to cost Australian business in excess of $3 billion a year and employers could be liable under a stack of laws, including Occupational Health and Safety, discrimination and workers' compensation. 

So, I wonder, are organisations losing their humanity? What do you think?

I spent the afternoon with one our clients, a large multi-national, talking about the Most Significant Change pilot we’ve recently worked on together (perhaps one of the first MSCs in a corporate environment). The client has worked on a range of projects with us over the years, including business narrative to address morale issues, knowledge sharing and we learnt today that they are about to conduct a new business narrative project on trust. It’s great to see them being self-sufficient, which is a major objective of all our work. I was particularly pleased to hear the following statement: “Other parts of the business are now visiting us because they’ve heard that we are using some really innovative and useful techniques.” 

John Smith tells an amusing anecdote about our conference call last week and makes some comments about conference calls and communities of practice.

We’ve learnt that for SNA to be effective in group situations there is real value in preparing people for what they may see within typical social network maps. The “hubs and bridges expectations warm-up” is one of our sensemaking processes useful for such preparation. This warm up activity aims to prepare groups for sensemaking in a productive and non-confrontational way.

This activity uses as its basis the broader Delphi process of brainstorming, narrowing down and ranking.  Unlike the traditional Delphi approach which usually occurs anonymously and asynchronously, this method is usually done in a group setting and resembles Bob Dick's description of Delphi Face-to-Face. This process does not require the same rigour which the typical Delphi process employs as the purpose of this activity is to provide a sensemaking activity complimentary to the more formal activities associated with a typical social network analysis.

The Hubs and Bridges expectations warm-up

This process can work for 3-50 people. It is assumed that people are at tables with 5-7 people per table at Step 2. Materials required: Post-its, A4 template, Butchers Paper, Red dots = 6 per participant. Total time: 20-30 mins

Step 1: Introduce the group to the Hubs and Bridges concept
Time: 5-7 mins

Introduce people to what a 'hub' is and what a 'bridge' is in social network analysis. Experientially, this can be done using sociometry "networks in action" warmup exercises.

Step 2: Brainstorm and narrow down the list of Hubs and Bridges at table level
Time: 5-7 mins

First invite participants to privately spend 2-3 minutes brainstorm a list of people who they think would be key Hubs and Bridges in a given context. The context may be about information flow, problem solving, knowledge hoarding etc. Tables then are to work together to compile a list containing all the brainstormed Hubs and Bridges. From the compiled list, each table is to come to a consensus of their 5 most important Hubs and Bridges. No ranking required here, simply the 5 most important Hubs and Bridges. This can be decided through vote, discussion or any other means which the table decides.

Step 3: Feedback and group voting of narrowed down lists
Time: 10-15 mins

Invite each table to provide its list of 5 most important Hubs and Bridges. Compile this onto 2 large sheets of butchers paper (one for Hubs one for Bridges) with two columns: Name and Vote. Once compiled, invite the group to vote for the Hubs and Bridges they think would be the most important in the given context. Tally the votes. The groups expectation of who the Hubs and Bridges is now available for broader conversation and discussion.

Note: The 5 most important, could also be the 5 most … valued, key, influential,…

You might also be interested in my squidoo lens on Social Network Analysis and Sensemaking.

David Maister has inspired me to copy one of his blog practices; thanking everyone who contributes to the online conversation occurring on the blog. So to everyone who has made a contribution at Anecdote, thank you. Here are the contributors for July. I’ll post a similar message every month.

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Harold Jarche, Matt Moore, Michael Vanderdonk, Les Posen, Nerida Hart, Dennis D. McDonald, Gary Bourgeault, annette, Luke, christianhauck

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David Maister, Luis Suarez, Frank Connelly, Jason The Content Librarian, Robert Hruzek, Jack Vinson, Dave Snowden, Donald Clark, John Smith, Library Clips, annette clancy, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, Psybertron Asks, Darren Woolley,  Emanuele Quintarelli, The Corner, Dennis Kennedy, Geoffroi Garon, Laurent Haug, Lilia Efimova, CPH127, Dances with Books, Beth Shankle, Joitske Hulsebosch, Beverly Trayner, Christina's LIS Rant,

A tiny thought but potentially quite practical. Organisations have a mission, right? They have values. Dull, boring, lifeless. No one cares about the organisation’s stated mission or values; they probably don’t even know they exist.

What if an organisation was on a mission?

What if we valued things, actions, attitudes?

Sounds more exciting. Sounds like something you want to be a part of. You betcha.