What is the link between storytelling and complexity?

This was the theme that found me travelling over 28 hours from Melbourne, Australia to Las Cruces, New Mexico to join with 38 other participants in the story circle. It was a fantastic conference. One of the highlights for me was the socratic circle process which opened up on the 2nd day of the conference. This I will definitely be sharing more about, after I’ve gotten over my jetlag. But for now, I thought I’d just share some elements which emerged for me during the conference.

During the socratic circle process, participants were asked to consider “what is complexity”. Some of the metaphors that appeared were:

Complexity is incompressible
Complexity is a methodology
Complexity is a language
Complexity is a theology

When asked in the socratic circle to define “what is story”, I really loved one participants response. She said “I have heard people say there is no story only storytelling, but I don’t agree with that. If I had a definition of story I’d be wrong”.

So, what is the link between storytelling and complexity?

I think one of the best answers came in the form of a question proposed by Theodore Taptiklis. He asked “Like storytelling, does complexity help us understand that “paradox” doesn’t need to be resolved?”.

Salvatore Parise, Rob Cross and Tom Davenport have teamed up to write an article for Sloan Management Review titled: Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis. It’s a description of how Organisational Network Analysis can be used to identify people who would be sorely missed if they left the organisation. They focus on three social network roles: central connectors, brokers and peripheral players. Here’s a summary, from the paper, describing the knowledge-loss risks and possible actions for each of the three network roles.

Central Connector

Knowledge-Loss Risks

• Technical expertise and organizational memory as well as a set of relationships that help many others get information or other resources to do their work.
• Experiential knowledge and reputation that enable rapid onboarding of new employees

Actions

• Use personal network profiles in career development and onboarding practices to create network redundancies systematically where departures might dramatically fragment a network.
• Reallocate information access and decision rights to ensure that one point does not become too vulnerable in the network.
• Have central connectors lead communities of practice as a means of creating connections around them.
• Require central connectors to help newcomers get acclimated through strategic introductions, “shadowing,” mentoring and joint projects.

Broker

Knowledge-Loss Risks

• Broad knowledge of how the organization operates and ability to reconize opportunities that require integration or disparate expertise.
• Ability to mobilize and coordinate efforts of disparate groups to pursue those opportunities.

Actions

• Identify and develop brokers through staffing and rotation across division, geographic and expertise groups.
• Assign brokers strategically where information gaps exist or where ideas can move from concept to action.
• Give brokers preauthorized decision limits to tap into network resources. Allow them to experiment to obtain real-time information.

Peripheral Player

Knowledge-Loss Risks

• Niche (and often marginalized) expertise or early-adopter ideas that have the potential to reshape offerings or operations.
• Set of external relationships built on trust and familiarity.

Actions

• Ensure relevant peripheral people agree visible and engaged, for example, by encouraging their hosting of “lunch-and-learns” and webcasts.
• Invite external partners to conduct workshops and attend meetings to broaden the network.
• Reward employees for bringing external ideas and connections into the organization.

Parise, Salvatore, Rob Cross, and Thomas H. Davenport. 2006. Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis. MIT Sloan Management Review 47 (4):31-38.

Last week I faciliated a workshop of 90 futurist gathered together for The Australian Foresight Conference. The organisers were keen to harness the energy created by the conference to explore new ways the group might collaborate into the future. With 90 people in a large atrium I was keen for the group to learn about themselves as a whole and go beyond an intellectual understanding. With Andrew’s help we designed a 90 minute session which included sociometry and getting people to vote with their feet. Here is what we did and a few things we learned from the process

We divided the session into two parts: understanding where the group was now; and exploring possible future collaboration opportunities. This session tool place about 2/3rds of the way though a three day conference. To kick things off I got everyone to stand and ask them to arrange themselves along an imaginery 20m line. One end of the line represented those people who thought this was one of the best conferences they had ever attended; a transformational event. The other end was for those people that thought the conference really sucked. With lots of laughter and chatting the group arranged itself pretty evenly along the line. I asked everyone to have a good look around at the result.

Using the same approach I then asked people to indicate the level of foresight experience they have with one end representing over 30 years (2 people) and the other end for those people just starting out. This time there were more people in the middle and the ‘just starting out’ end of the spectrum. Based on the movement from the previous question, it seemed like the people ‘just starting out’ were enjoying the conference more that the highly experienced practitioners.

The previous two questions where aimed at getting people used to moving around and learning about the whole group. My last question was directed squarely at the objective of the session: please indicate your level of comfort and preference for using technology to collaborate. One end represented those people who loved using technology and the other consisting of people who would rather avoid it eschewing even the telephone. Again, an even spread.

We then moved to creating a human social network diagram and I asked everyone to think about the time before the conference and recall those people they regularly collaborated with. Then stand next to a collaborator and place your hand on their shoulder. Within a few minutes a complex network of bodies emerged with clear clusters evident. I asked people to look around and then invited people from each cluster to describe their bunch.

The next step was to explore the potential for new collaborations, so I asked the group to think about the people they’ve met at the conference and who they would like to collaborate with in the future. Again I invited everyone to place their hand on the shoulder of potential future collaborators. The network changed considerably suggesting a substantial potential for new connections and collaborations.

At this point I asked everyone to grab a seat. The tables were arranged in groups of eight. To get people to consider what collaboration meant to them I ask each group to have a conversation and explore the question “why do you collaborate?” This discussion went for 15 minutes and was simply designed to get people to think about collaboration generally.

We wanted to move from this understanding of the reasons for collaboration to different forms it might take, so I invited the whole group to construct a final spectrum but this time with one person on the spectrum line representing a form of collaboration. The group made suggestions. At one end of the spectrum was formal approaches to collaboration while the other end represented informal approaches. The suggested structures, from formal to informal, were: association, community of practice, salon, virtual collaborators, partnerships, mentoring, adhoc collaborations. A addtional group formed calling themselves ‘the walkers’ and they paced up and down the entire spectrum highlighting that all the structures were relevant and useful.

Now that we had some structures identified I asked people to join a group that appealed to them most and for each group to develop a description of why their structure would be best suited for everyone to adopt. Each group then had a representative spruke the benefits of their approach. As the final move of the session I ask people to make a decision as to which group they would like to move to after hearing each benefits statement. This final group then develop a mini action plan on what they would do next to make progress after the conference finished.

The session seemed to be enjoyed by the group and the organisers were pleased with the outcomes. Lots of good actions and a commirement by people to take the next steps. One of the interesting things for me was how quickly strong groups formed and how strongly people identified with their chosen group. For example, in summarising the session I forgot to mention the Salon group and an indignant Salon member quickly pointed out that they had a very productive session and didn’t feel compelled to join any other group.

This job for a senior business analyst in Dallas was advertised on Monster today.

Analyze business functions and document high quality functional requirements. The documentation of functional requirements includes business narrative requirements, use cases, and process flows.

The demand for practical narrative skills is increasing!

I enjoyed reading this article this morning on some of the neuroscience behind change and some of the practical approaches you might adopt armed with this knowledge. Here are the sections of the article with one or two sentences highlighting key ideas.

• A Universal Truth – brain science is giving us new insights into how and why people change (or resist it).
• Why Change is Painful – there is physical and psychological discomfort when we are faced with change. We get overwhelmed as the prefontal cortext is overworked—short term memory and where we perform our mental gymnastics. We fall back on our basal ganglia, which is our intellectual work horse. The patterns here are more fixed and resilient to change.

• Carrot and Stick: The Flaw – this approach is like training animals. Doesn’t have a long-term effect on the individual. It can have a system-wide effect, for example getting all entire sales force to increase the number of customers in South America.
• Not Your Change; Their Change – People hate being told what to do. It is better to show people examples and have them have their own epiphanies. This means painting a broad picture of the future and resist filling in all the gaps so there is room for people to envisage how the future might unfold.
• How Questions Provide Answers: A Case Studied – The article highlighted questions as a good way for people to engage in a idea. I was also say stories help enormously. Here’s a guide to collecting stories you might like.
• The Joy of Repetition – The insight or epiphany is merely the trigger. People need repetition of the idea for the new connections to be made.
• Not Your Motivation, Theirs – Learning is a big part of change. Learning programs need to be at the core of the change programme.
• The Hard Edge of the Soft Stuff – Be patient. Change takes time.

 [via Stephanie West Allen]

I was thinking this morning about what I believe about learning. Some of the things that sprang to mind include:

• people don’t think they’ve learned anything until they’ve reflected on what happened. When I conduct lessons learning sessions I get the same response. “So, what did you learn from the project” I’d ask. “Hmmm, let me think … no, nup, there was nothing new for me,” is a typical reply. We then start recounting the stories from the project and I then hear things like, “Hey, remember how we got our funding. What a mess. Remind me to just say no if it looks like that again.” The learning comes at this point of reflecting not in the act of work in many cases.

• learning is social—it benefits from conversations. While I believe learning can learn on your own, most learning comes through interacting with people. Learning richness increases as multiple perspectives are described, discussed, challenged and explored.
• learning is social, intellectual and emotional. There is a tremendous focus on intellectual learning in organisation yet we know decisions are made on more than the facts. Whether we are aware of it we learn through the emotions we experience. It’s no coincidence that we are better able to recall stories (our experiences) when they are attached to strong emotions.
• we learn through experience, and experience is shared through stories. I remember my honours year at uni spending 2 months researching the geomorphology of macro-tidal rivers, ‘learning about’ interference ripples, point bars and sedimentary structures. From the 3rd month I spent six weeks in the Ord River in Western Australia only to learn that it is never as clear as the diagrams in the text books make it out.
• we learn best when there is a reason to learn—I think this is an important aspect of sensemaking. We are awash with experience and information and we only notice things we care about. One of the reasons we care is when we know we must apply what we are noticing and making sense of.
• we get better at what we learn through practice. Focussed experience helps us develop a portfolio of patterns we can then use for future decision making. It’s said that it takes about 10 years the be proficient, perhaps expert, in a practice. But action without reflection through conversation doesn’t build proficiency.
• we all have different learning preferences and ways of interacting. On Saturday I facilitated a workshop attended by ninety futurists. They were exploring, as a group, how they might improve collaboration among their members. I invited everyone to arrange themselves along an imaginary line. At one end were those people who would prefer to avoid technology, even the phone was something they didn’t love using. At the other end were the techno-maniacs who love using blogs, wikis, and a raft of other web 2.0 gizmos. There was a completely even distribution along the line. And this is just one type of learning style preference. Audio, kinaesthetic, visual is another set of preferences to keep in mind.

For some time now I’ve been advocating what I call ‘action-oriented communities of practice.’ The model is described here and it’s in use by a range of communities of practice. The starting point is to convene short, intense discussions around topics of interest to the community. This can be done online or face to face but should be limited to about 12 people per discussion table so everyone who attends is present. But what do you talk about?

One option is to organise a Wikipedia raid where a group of people work on a single entry in the Wikipedia encyclopedia. The community just picks a single entry related to its domain and as many people from the community that can be mustered work to improve the entry over a short period of, say, 24 hours. At the same time the community might conduct an online discussion to talk about ideas for future community actions this activity prompts. At the end of the raid the community will have improved an artefact directly relevant to its interests, worked together as a community (a bit of a barn raising activity) and developed new ideas for the future.

Here’s an example of an invitation to a Wikipedia raid.

Like they say, life is about timing.

Coinciding with the launch of our recent ebook The ultimate guide to Anecdote Circles, Chris Corrigan has released an 81 page ebook called the Tao of holding space. Definitely worth a read for all those interested in Open Space.

I had coffee with my friend Trevor Moore yesterday and we got talking about a system implementation he’s involved in. It’s a large project affecting more than 500 people in the organisation. Trevor shared with me a sketch he uses to illustrate what is likely to happen to staff performance as the system is developed, tested and made available.

From October people are taken away from their jobs to be involved in testing and training. Performance gradually declines. The system is implemented in December at which point performance drops off dramatically as everyone comes to grips with the new ways of working. If things go well performance will steadily increase and exceed the levels prior to the system implementation. If things go badly … we don’t even want to think about that

As Trevor was describing this scenario it occurred to me that the level of connectivity among the staff affected by the system might be a major factor in their ability to cope with the new system. If the staff are sufficiently connected in useful ways they will have relationships to turn to when things go wrong, when they need to untangle a mess, ask a favour and therefore by able to more rapidly enhance their practice of using the new system. Connectivity and conversations will provide resilience.

So for our example, now’s the time for the system implementers to understand how well the protagonists are connected. Social network analysis is a useful tool. The next step is to stimulate new connections and this can be done by moving away from a training mindset and moving to a learning mindset. What often happens on large IT systems implementations is that everyone who will use the system is trained, which usually involves getting people into a classroom and teaching them how to use the system. And that’s it! You are now trained to use the system. A learning approach, on the other hand, start with some teaching, then provides some practical experiences followed by an opportunity for groups of people to reflect and learn from their experience and the experiences of their colleagues. How you group people for these reflections would be a good way to create new social networks. This learning approach would unfold over a longer time and provide a more sustainable approach to learning and using the system while reducing the risk of the system falling over in the first months of operation.

We are very pleased to announce the release of a little eBook we have been working on called The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles. Our aim for this book is to bring together the combined practical experiences of Anecdote in running anecdotes circles and presenting the information in a fun, easy to use format. You can download a copy from:

http://www.anecdote.com.au/AnecdoteCircles

Feel free to pass it on to anyone you think might find it useful and we look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Steven Pinker says:

“Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.”

Thanks to Les Posen for point me to this one.

I have a confession. I love stationery. Dave Snowden calls it the stationery gene and I’m sure it’s firmly embedded in my DNA. So I’ve been enjoying peaking into Notebookism which seems to be all things stationery and I marvelled at a recent post on the world’s thinnest pen, the Uniball Signo Bit 0.18 mm gel pen. Great for writing on rice I believe. There must be a way to use one in my next project .

Nancy and I facilitated a workshop this week for the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network (VPSCIN) where we explored the relationship between communities of practice and technology. Frank Connelly describes the event here and Luke Naismith summarised the workshop here.

We’ve been helping a few organisations with knowledge strategies lately and discovered the power of knowledge strategy tag lines. This idea first came to us while we were working on trust in one of the large Australian banks. They’d done a traditional mission, vision, values exercise (which are normally ineffective) but one of the values kept popping up in the meetings: “tell it like it is, no spin.” Whenever someone was pussy-footing around a topic someone would invariably blurt out this line and more often than not the pussy-footer would become forthright. We never heard the other values mentioned and when asked, people only seemed to remember this one. Colloquial language seem to be an important part of its effectiveness.

The relationship to knowledge strategies was drawn for me by Mark Bennett over at Rio Tinto. Mark was saying that he liked the tag line “Making collaboration ridiculously easy” and on hearing this I knew it had the same appeal as “tell like it is, no spin.” Whenever someone is faced with a difficult collaboration situation I can imagine people saying, “Come on, we need to make collaboration ridiculously easy not the bloody mess it is now!” (this is how an Aussie would say it and a little profanity ups the intensity).

Here are a couple of other knowledge-related tag lines I’ve heard which can be used but lack the punch of the previous examples:

• connect people to people, people to communities, people to information, and people to good practices (APQC?)
• find it and use it, find it and adapt it, build it yourself (Learning to Fly?)
• hire smart people and let them talk (Larry Prusak)
• notice, understand and act (based on Karl Weick)

Are you aware of other good knowledge strategy tag lines or would like to share your own creations? Love to hear them.

Since completing our Australia wide survey on the attitudes and awareness of story and narrative approaches within organisations, I have been working my way through sharing the results. So far, the analysis has surfaced interesting results around:

• Australian managers intuit story most useful for culture change
• The 7 story forms valued within organisations
• The 5 ways storytelling has been discouraged in organisations
• What are you more aware of - positive or negative stories?
• Anecdote from a survey participant - on being a storylistener

This blog post shares the results from asking nearly 400 participants to identify, “as far as you are aware, which of the following story-based techniques does your organisation use”.

The big surprise for us was how popular Most Significant Change is!

(Which reminds me, have you heard of Zahmoo?)

I'm on route home from Florence (at Heathrow) and I just wanted to get down some thoughts about the Prato Dialogue I've just attended. Eight CPSquare members met for 3 days and we engaged in sustained conversation supported by the bare essentials: a couple of flips charts, chocolate, good food and wine and plenty of humour. It was a real joy. Think about those times when you've attended a conference and you had great conversations in the corridors or at morning and afternoon tea. Well Prato was that without all the boring powerpoint presentations that keep you away from the conversations. Actually, we talked a lot about conversations. I proposed that conversations were waning in organisations and we pondered why and what might be done to turn the tide. We recorded and documented every session so expect to see the details over at the Prato Dialogue blog. Our major theme, understandably since it was a CPSquare event, communities of practice.

I think we were blessed with an excellent group of people. All were great listeners, with an array of practical experiences and theoretical knowledge. There was also diversity with each one of us coming from a different country, some were old mates while others, like me, were new to the group. And despite being a new comer I didn't feel like an outsider. Some of the guys are now heading off to the communities informatics conference in Prato to run a workshop based on the ideas that were covered during our conversations. I believe they will be running a Most Significant Change session to show how this technique can be used to evaluate a community of practice.

It is the most ubiquitous platitude of corporate life: “People are our most important asset.” The undeniable reality, of course, is that the human side of enterprise remains the ultimate backwater. Be honest: How many companies do you know that are as creative, as disciplined, as businesslike about the people factor in business as they are about finance, engineering, marketing?

I came across this statement (and question) in the Maverick’s Manifesto circulated in the latest ChangeThis newsletter (which never fails to provide valuable insights). One of Anecdote’s motivations is to bring humanity back into our organisations and thus our methods are designed to help create the conditions to achieve this. There are many people we speak to about what we do who’s eyes glaze over when we mention topics like sensemaking, business narrative, storytelling, open space, communities of practice etc. There are also many, the early adopters, who’s eyes light up. They realise that they need to be able to answer the question ‘why would great people want to join the organisation’ and they understand that you don’t get happy customers from having unhappy, unfulfilled staff.

While I am often surprised at the number of managers I meet who just don’t get that ‘the people are the organisation’, we are fortunate that our work brings us into contact with organisations that are serious about the people factor. This reinforces our optimism that having fulfilling and humane organisations will eventually ‘go mainstream’. 

Today the VPS Continuous Improvement Network experienced something unique. With Larry Peterson (a well known Canadian Open Space Practictioner) touring Australia, we had a great opportunity to try a new format for exploring and engaging conversation around “Leading complex change and opening space”.

The format? A fishbowl. With Larry inside!

Although not Open Space Technology the 4 four principles and one law of Open Space certainly applied and contributed to the way the fishbowl ran.

• Whoever comes is the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• When it starts is the right time and When it’s over, it’s over.

The one law of Open Space invites people to take responsibility for where they are, and if they find that they aren’t learning or contributing, move to a place where they can. In this case, out of the fishbowl and allow for another particpant to join the conversation.

During the fishbowl Larry mentioned that Open Space was one of the most powerful technologies for change that he had worked with. I’d have to agree with him. The mathematician in me particularly enjoyed Larry’s description of how momentum = mass x velocity. And how for successful change it is important to have both elements in the equation. The whitepaper I wrote regarding the evaluation of an Open Space event I ran with a large scientific organisation seems to me to confirm how mass and velocity can result from the enhanced communication patterns and social networks created in Open Space Technology.

From the feedback it looks like people found it a very thought provoking session. I enjoyed it heaps! It was great working with Larry.

When asked in our recent Australian wide survey on the attitudes and awareness of story and narrative in organisations “How much have you heard or read about narrative and story methods for business?” the response from the 390 participating HR Managers, GMs, Directors and others was on the whole some or not much. (See figure below).

Even though the majority of our participants had read little around the approaches of story and narrative methods in business, when asked which areas they felt might have the greatest application and use for story approaches the area of organisational culture change was the clear leader.

The top 4 areas which emerged being considered useful for story were:

• 37.1 % Organisational culture change initiatives
• 32.6 % Enhancing leaders ability to motivate
• 32.2 % Enhancing leaders ability to communicate vision, goals and direction
• 31.4 % Organisational learning initiatives

It may come as no surprise to some that story has utility with working with culture. The work of Jung and Campbell, although controversial, was all grounded in story to explore cultures. It is also through story where we can learn the most about organisational culture. Think about those first few days in a new job, or in a new organisation. Think about the water cooler conversations you might have overheard. The tea-room stories shared. All of these stories provide a powerful way to learn about a companies culture. Yep, it makes sense to me that our participants might have intuited that story is useful for organisational culture change initiatives.

actKM is running its 7th annual conference on 25 and 26 October. This is the best KM conference in Australia because it consists of practitioners talking about how it is done – no vendor presentations. It’s a two day program with an excellent conference dinner—not to be missed. The conference theme is “Realising the Knowledge Management Vision” with a focus on balancing and integrating the cultural and technical elements of knowledge management theory and practice to deliver tangible organisational benefits.

I will be there along with Robyn Ciuro. Let me know if you are going because I would love to catch up.

The conference program is here.

And you can register here. 

In a previous post Izzy Gesell and I asked the question How can one improvise in a virtual world?

Why do you care?

Maybe you don’t but with our upcoming virtual workshop on October 10th being a taster for our “Change your story Change your world” program running with Izzy across the Australian eastern seaboard in November, we certainly do!

This morning Izzy, myself, Carla and one other brave participant experienced how improv games feeeeel in a teleconference kind of environment.

For Izzy, the 3 foundational skills of improv are Presence (showing up and being present, focus), Acceptance (remaining in the present) and Trust. In our teleconference today we ran with a few improv games which help to illustrate these foundational skills. The three games we played were “the one word story”, “the counting game” and “Yes…and”. Even with four of us, we had a lot of fun.

Three learnings I came to were:

• 1. Be prepared to provide more support for people in this ‘virtual’ environment – Unlike an event in real time and space, in a virtual environment one needs to be mindful of participants frustrations and how to lessen the burden 
• 2. Lag on teleconferences may provide a “gift” to consider for how rhythm is created within these kinds of group interactions
• 3. Even Improv has structure – As Izzy keeps telling us “If creativity fails, go back to technique”

If you’d like to learn more about how Improv and Storytelling can help you in life and work, come along to the virtual workshop on October 10th 10am. There are still some places left, AND it’s free!

Back in July we decided that the Anecdote team needed to grow and we ‘advertised’ via the blog and using word of mouth. We received many applications and met a whole bunch of fabulous and interesting people during the interview process that we will be keeping in touch with. To everyone who applied –  thanks.

Most importantly, we are pleased to announce that Robyn Ciuro will be joining us in mid-October. Robyn was a real stand-out candidate. Her diverse career includes teaching, system testing and senior HR roles for several companies.  Academic achievements include a Masters of Education and a Masters of KM. Most importantly of course, we love her and her attitude to life and work! We look forward to introducing her to you. Robyn faces a bit of an uphill battle in bringing some gender balance to Anecdote though :-)

Are you a blogger? Maybe you blog professionally. Maybe your blog supports your business in some way. Maybe you blog inside an organisation. Maybe you have a personal blog.

Whichever it may be, we’d like to invite you to join in Zahmoo’s exploration of the Most Significant Change across the blogosphere and share your story around what has been the most significant change since you’ve been blogging. This is the first phase of our exploration. We will be providing information regarding the next steps in due course.

In the meanwhile, we would like to invite you to use the comments section of this blogpost to provide your answers to the following two questions:

• Describe a story that epitomises the most significant change that has resulted from your blogging .
• Why was this story significant for you?

In your comment, please be sure to provide your story and the reason why it’s significant for you.

Click here to join in and share your story.