Andrew and I met about two years ago at a meme and complexity workshop organised by the CSIRO. I was immediately struck by Andrew’s intelligence and curiosity and thought, “maybe we could work on a project together.” In the following six months we hit it off and Andrew joined Mark and I at Anecdote.

Over the last 18 months we’ve learned a lot from each other. Andrew’s love of facilitation, trying out the very latest and ground breaking ideas helped us stretch our minds. We pushed and prodded each other and worked out how to collaborate with one another. I was the tight string that loosened, Andrew started loose then tightened.

Mark remembers first meeting Andrew and thinking ‘Man, his hair is curlier even than mine!’ We soon learned that beneath that mop of curls was a highly ethical, first-rate brain that was always able to provide a perspective that opened new opportunities and ways of approaching issues. His love of Yum Cha is legendary and we look forward to our continuing education in this discipline. 

So you will probably be surprised to learn that Andrew will be leaving Anecdote today and heading out to pursue his interests in facilitation. We wish him all the very best and thank him for his efforts at Anecdote. Andrew will remain a kindred spirit in the field of business narrative and I’m sure there are still many coffees (or herbal teas) to be had.

“If it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people” said Finnerty, “always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s paradise.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952:59)

[thanks Bob Sutton]

Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. Knowledge strategies are no different but most organisations develop a knowledge strategy in the following way:

1. the company engages consultants to analyse their needs
2. the leaders are asked, "what result would you like to see at the end of the project?" The consultants capture this information as the project's vision.
3. the consultants interview staff, conduct focus groups and compile an inventory of important knowledge assets
4. gaps are identified between what currently occurs and what needs to happen to achieve the vision
5. a report is written and there's considerable debate over the structure, format and wording of this document
6. the knowledge strategy and associated implementation plan is presented to the executive group for their approval
7. everyone is exhausted but pleased with the document
8. there is little energy left for the actions needed to make the required changes

Don't get me wrong, a process like this is what’s mostly needed to undertake an effective knowledge strategy. It suffers, however, from a problem of balance. The weight of effort is on developing the document—the strategy or plan. Little energy or process is left for people to take actions that will change how things are actually done. The further the organisation gets away from the initial strategy development exercise, the greater the apathy to implement the original plan. The ideal situation is one where the top down focus on defining what to do is balanced with a process that enables people to do things that will make the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves.

So what if we put less effort into the knowledge strategy design and more into implementing strategic actions?

There are three reasons why we should shift the balance from viewing the strategy as a thing to redressing the balance towards the process for implementing the strategy.

1. businesses are less predictable and long-term, linear plans rarely achieve their stated goals
2. embedding actions in the day-to-day activities of the organisation allows new ways to tackle problems to emerge
3. the process moves the responsibility for making a difference to how knowledge is created, shared and used to everyone in the organisation rather than a typically under-resourced knowledge management unit

So how might this look? The best solution is one developed by people in the organisation, one that develops the process for embedding the strategic actions into the day-to-day activities. To give you an idea of what it might look like here are some ideas adapted from David Maister's suggested approach for conducting a strategy.

The initial knowledge strategy design should result in some objectives, which might include things like:

• improve knowledge sharing
• enhance innovation
• reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
• build skills and know-how
• improve everyone's ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
• improve how we learn from experience

Ideally, there should only be two or three objectives. Six is too many.
The process starts by giving each group within the organisation one sheet of paper for each objective. Each sheet has four columns. The group lists, for each objective, the actions they are going to take over the next three months to help achieve the objectives. A senior member of staff works with the group acting as a friendly sceptic or mentor. This mentor's role is to ask question, helping the group to stretch their plans or to reign in over enthusiasm. At the end of the session, the mentor sets a date to meet with the group again in three months where they will review how they went, what they learned and establish a new set of actions for the following three months.

The four columns to fill in for each objective are:

• the action to be done
• who is responsible for ensuring the action is completed
• the date the action will be completed
• a description of how the group will know the action has been completed

It’s important that the group focuses on actions and not goals. For example, if the objective is “improve knowledge sharing” then rather than provide a goal such as, “build better relationships with the policy division,” describe a tangible action like “organise 3 brown bag seminars with the policy division.”

By repeating this activity every three months the organisation begins to embed knowledge-related activities into their day to day business. It becomes second nature. The three-month time frame also feels achievable and tangible. It gives the groups something in the foreseeable future to aim for. One last benefit of a shorter time frame for action is that it enables the organisation to sense and respond to the changing business environment making it more nimble and resilient.

You might be thinking, “Yeh, but what about those initiatives that take longer than three months to accomplish?” Of course this will be the case. Sometimes the organisation will be able to identify longer-term initiatives, such as the adoption of communities of practice or an intranet implementation, in the initial knowledge strategy design which can be implemented organisation-wide. Here I am arguing for a balance between the more traditional approach to developing a knowledge strategy with a greater emphasis on embedding the knowledge actions.

Maister, D. H. “Ready, Set, Go: Fast-track Strategy.” Strategy in Professional Business  Retrieved 27 February, 2007, from http://davidmaister.com/podcasts/4/45/.

Last week I returned from my morning walk to find my 11–year-old daughter filling the blender with ice cream to make a banana smoothie. My first reaction was to say, “What are you doing eating ice cream for breakfast? That’s a bad habit to get into. It’s unhealthy. You should stop having ice cream for breakfast” The response was a dismissive grunt in my general direction. Hmmm, that didn’t go well.

After we sat down to eat breakfast I started to tell my daughter a story. “When I was in high school my parents really had no idea about healthy eating and we used to drink soft drinks all the time, ate lots of bread and hardly touched fruit.” Then the phone rang and I answered. When I returned to the table my daughter said, “go on, you were talking about when you were in high school.” I continued the story which conveyed the message that the habits you form now will be with you for the rest of your life. I made no mention of the smoothie.

A week has gone by and ice cream hasn’t featured on our breakfast table.

There seems to be a renewed interest in developing knowledge strategies. We have been involved in three in the last six months and our narrative techniques have been well received. We now need to move people from seeing a knowledge strategy as a thing to a seeing it as a process. We also need to see a shift from developing knowledge strategies to engaging people in knowledge-focussed business strategies.

People have heard that storytelling is great for dealing with tacit knowledge. They say things like, “If we could only capture our stories we could then capture our organisation’s tacit knowledge.”

This is the big mistake! Stories only have meaning in the context of their telling. That is, you need to tell and listen to stories to transfer (not capture) tacitly held knowledge. It’s a social process. You need to be part of the conversation.

In practice, this means creating spaces for stories to be told and listened to. We do it in a bunch of different ways depending on the needs and objectives of our clients.

For example, if we are helping tackle complex issues such as trust, leadership, culture change, we would create the space in sensemaking workshops.

If we need to evaluate the impact of difficult to measure initiatives we create the space using Most Significant Change and the selection workshops.

NASA creates this space for staff to listen to and tell stories in their monthly project management seminars where PMs discuss the stories collected in the their monthly newsletter, ASK.

Everyone is busy and no one will give up their valuable time to listen and tell stories. But they will allocate time to evaluate a project, tackle a complex problem or learn lessons from their colleagues.

The stories don’t contain magical solutions that we can capture, dissect and unleash. Rather they provide a language of engagement, of learning and a way to transfer what is impossible to write down and store in any database.

A simple tip last night from the actKM discussion list contributed by Ivan Webb who provides a ‘strategic job description’…

…that will change the culture of most organisations and leads naturally to knowledge management being embedded in the organisation’s activity. It is everyone’s job to:

• know what is happening
• work with others to improve what is happening
• make it easier for the next person to do their work well

I like the simplicity of these statements and the guidance for behaviour they provide. In some situations they might contribute to improved knowledge sharing behavours. They are also interesting because we know that little things can make a big difference.

Here’s an interesting new service described in the Springwise newsletter.

With Life Trackers, turning life experiences into a published book is as simple as sending an email. While self-publishing is nothing new, Life Trackers makes it easy to pull together travel journals, memory books and other keepsakes from just about anywhere a user has internet access. Best of all, there's no cost to join, and customers can get a printable PDF of their book for free.  

Could have application for story collection. Imagine if every employee had an account, or project team members, and they sent in their work experiences. What a resource!

Related post: Story telling versus story writing

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that every knowledge strategy has the same objectives, which are:

• improve knowledge sharing
• enhance innovation
• reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
• build skills and know-how
• improve everyone’s ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
• improve how we learn from experience

If this is the case, couldn’t a knowledge strategy activity move quickly to engaging as many people as possible in the organisation to work out what actions are needed to make progress on the objectives?

Have a look at this funny take on the recent election slogan adopted by the NSW Labor Party: “More to do, but we're heading in the right direction”

(hat tip to Victor Perton)

Over the last few months we’ve talked about the importance of having a short phrase or mantra to help everyone in an organisation implement the company’s strategy (here and here). At Anecdote we’ve had a few catch phrases over our relatively short life and we’ve never been totally happy with any of them. Here’s the chronology:

• complexity – narrative – knowledge
• narrative – narrative – narrative
• insight and empowerment
• learning and change

After reading Made to Stick we realised the problem. Each attempt was abstract and passive and the phrases didn’t really give us any indication about how to act nor tell our clients what we were all about. So here is our new tag line: Putting stories to work

Let us know what you think. 

Just a reminder that the early bird rate for these workshops closes in 1 week. Here is a description of the workshop. The full description and registration details can be found here.

• What's really going on in your organisation?
• What are the touch points where small changes can transform behaviour and morale?
• How can you access and transfer the wisdom of your workforce to future employees?

Surveys and metrics can uncover trouble in an organisation, but they usually don't help you identify the reasons for dysfunctions, let alone point the way toward remedies for the problems. Instead, learn to use stories as listening posts. From time immemorial, stories have contained collective lessons in condensed form. When gathered and examined, stories that are told in your organisation reveal important themes and patterns that in turn indicate effective solutions.

This one-day workshop, led by Australia's leading expert in story listening, teaches you to gather and analyse stories so as to see revealing patterns and use them to gain traction on solving messy organisational problems or reaching complicated goals.

After a full day of instruction, practice and feedback, you will have the confidence and knowledge to apply these powerful techniques within your organisation.

I should have mentioned this earlier but this Friday (23rd February) I will be presenting a workshop in Sydney on how to use stories to retain and keep alive retiring employees’ knowledge. It will be a practical session where the participants will have fun crafting questions to elicit stories, conduct interviews, facilitate anecdote circles and then use a couple techniques to help make sense of the stories. Communities of practice will feature.

The two key messages I’m hoping to convey in the workshop are:

• communities keep stories alive
• lessons from a few stories collected once are fun and interesting; lessons from many stories reviewed widely and regularly nurtures wisdom

This workshop is a post-conference event for Extracting and Sharing Knowledge from an Ageing Workforce conference. To receive a full copy of the brochure for this event please email Louise at louise.badcock@keyforums.com.au or call on +61 2 9436 4255.

This newsletter was sent to our subscribers a week ago. If you would like to receive this information with all the other of our newsletter subscribers, just go here. I’ve also created a new category ‘newsletter’ so you will be able to view all the newsletters we send out in the future.

Good morning,

I have just discovered an excellent exercise you can try with your colleagues, clients and loved ones. I’ve used it a couple of times this week and people get it. It’s called ‘tappers and listeners’ and is one of the many engaging stories in Dan and Chip Heath’s new book, Made to Stick. Here’s how it works. Ask your audience to participate with you in a little game. You will tap out a song with your fingers or a pencil and you ask the audience to guess the song. Pick two songs everyone knows well—I was using Happy Birthday to Me and Advance Australia Fair. Most people are unable to guess correctly, though Happy Birthday is a lot easier than Advanced Australia Fair. In fact, Elizabeth Newton, a PhD researcher from Stanford, found that, on average, only 2.5% of the listeners she tested could guess the song. But here is the rub. When she asked her tappers how likely it was for the listeners to guess correctly, they expected the listeners to get is right 50% of the time. The tapper has the song in their head and can hear it as clear as a bell. They are cursed with their own knowledge and expect everyone else to hear it as easily as they do. Every communication suffers from the same dynamic and this newsletter is no exception. I’ll do my best to fill in the taps with a few melodic whistles.

With that said, welcome to our first newsletter for 2007. We hope you have had a good holiday break and are have broken all your new year’s resolutions :-). It has been a fast start for us being busy getting ready for our workshops in the USA, helping a community of chocolate experts see their social networks, coaching a Paris-based CFO on storytelling, using stories in a leadership development program, and leading a change management initiative in support of an IT implementation. All this activity might make us tired if we didn’t love our work so much.

We were going to have a theme for this newsletter like ‘Doing knowledge strategies’ or ‘Getting a community of practice started’ but some other tidbits of interesting information appeared that we thought you might like (as an aside, Shawn has written a 3-pager on how to start a community of practice and if you would like a copy, just sent him an email-shawn@anecdote.com.au). Why don’t we start with a mystery story?

Why should we care about mystery stories?

Robert Cialdini discovered a secret to learning in 2005. As a world-leading psychologist he was surprised he didn’t already know this secret but now swears by it. He was researching a new psychology book we wanted to write for a general audience and wanted to know the characteristics of effective science writing for an informed public readership. Most of his review confirmed what he already knew: must have a clear and focussed point, well written, concrete examples. The big surprise for Robert was that the best examples where written in the format of a mystery story.

Robert’s laboratory is his classroom so he tried out the approach there. A typical lecture, before using the mystery story format, would end with his students starting to pack up five minutes before the lecture’s scheduled finishing time. When he presented the same information as a mystery story, and he was yet to reveal the who’d dunnit, the students remained totally engaged and didn’t move, even after the lecture was supposed to have finished. It was like magic.

So here is the structure Cialdini discovered in his review and then wrote up in volume 24 of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

• Pose the mystery
• Deepen the mystery
• Home in on the proper explanation by considering (and offering evidence against) alternative explanations
• Provide a clue to the proper explanation
• Resolve the mystery
• Draw the implications for the phenomenon under study

To test this out I wrote a blog post using the mystery format called ‘What is happening to Melbourne's trains?’ I would be grateful to receive your feedback. Just leave comments on the blog post.

Cialdini, R. B. (2005). “What’s The Best Secret Device for Engaging Student Interest? The Answer Is In The Title.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24(1): 22-29.

How to find great stories to retell

Telling a story is an effective way to spark action, convey values and communicate ideas. Facts alone are insufficient. So how do you find great stories to tell? How much detail do you include? What do you leave out? What is the best way to present your story?

Our storytelling process is a simple set of activities to help you find relevant and powerful stories, help you decide how to construct your stories, and suggests a set of tips for the best possible storytelling.

The best stories to tell are your own stories. You know them. They're real. And hopefully they'll sound real. Authenticity and plausibility are hallmarks of successful business storytelling. The starting point is to become aware of just how effective stories are in communicating ideas and sparking action. Before you have this awareness interesting things will happen and you will barely notice them as great material. You need to become mindful and take note of your experiences. A good way to do this is to search through your personal history for remarkable events. This search is harder than it sounds because we need prompting to remember our past. Therefore, a good way to make progress is to enlist the help of a provocateur, an interviewer.

In eliciting stories from an individual, the role of the interviewer is to help you remember what you know.

What Does The Interviewer Need To Do?

The interviewer's job is to create a relaxed, conversational environment that helps you remember your past in a way that encourages a candid response. They need to put you at ease, listen to what you say and really care about the conversation. If you sense the interviewer does not care or is distracted you are less likely to reveal your experiences.

The reason why you would want to reveal your experiences is that it will help you remember other experiences. The more stories you retell to the interviewer, the more aware you become of your own stories and the number of potential stories for retelling increases.

The following approach is for conducting one-on-one interviews. If you have a group of people who you would like to share their experiences, we suggest you read the Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles

One-on-one interviews can be quite arduous for the interviewer. The interviewer is under pressure to keep the conversation going while trying to remain focussed on what the interviewee is saying, keenly observing possibilities for unearthing new and interesting stories. Consequently, they need to do their homework and be prepared.

What Does Doing The Homework Involve?

The interviewer needs to know the interviewee's important life/business events. What jobs has she held? What projects has she been on? What roles has she performed? Whom has she worked with? How long has she been with the organisation? The interviewer needs to collect as much information as they can in order to pinpoint important events and relationships that might form the basis of questions.

How Do You Work Out Which Themes To Explore?

It’s impossible to garner every story from a person’s life so a substantial amount of selection is required before you start. Selecting a few themes to explore is a good approach. Three themes are usually enough for a 90-minute interview. I suggest you choose the themes based on the ideas you wish to convey in the stories. The themes will influence the questions that we will create to elicit the stories.

Simply brainstorming the themes is an effective approach.

How Do You Create Story-Eliciting Questions?

We have outlined a process for creating story-eliciting questions in the Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles. In addition to this resource, here are some further suggestions:

Start with the simplest and least confronting questions. The following format can be a useful way to get started:

"You started in the HR department in 1995. What was it like when you started?"

This type of question gets people in the right mindset to reminisce. Another way to phrase this context-setting question is to ask:

"What was the HR department like when you worked there?"

After you get your subject talking you can then get into asking your meatier questions. Don't forget: one question at a time, relish silence and listen carefully.

Colton et. al. (2006) provide some excellent example question templates. 

• “Tell me about a time when ...” “Tell me about a moment when ...”
• “you or your project faced a dilemma in a project
• “you or your team experienced a significant turning point
• “you dealt with a real crisis on a project. What happened before, during and after it?
• “you felt really proud to be part of something
• “you took a real risk and it paid off or didn't pay off
• “you were really inspired by what was going on around you
• “you encountered an obstacle and overcome it
• “you saw (one of your organisation's values) really brought to life/being acted out
• “your partnerships were working really well
• “you saw positive changes happen as a result of your work

Throughout the interview, you will need to adapt and respond to the stories being told. Colton et. al. (2006) provide some common situations and possible responses.

Setting the scene: “I’d like to hear you tell your story in your own words, to get under the skin of it.” “Are your ready to start?” “Take a moment to think back …”

Beginning: “So tell me about how you first got involved with/ met/ starting doing X?” “How did it begin?”

When things are too general: “What were some of the memorable moments?” or “for instance?” or “can you give me an example, so I can picture it?”

Qualifying the difference: “Can you pinpoint a time when you really saw you were making a difference?” “What did that feel like?”

Engaging emotions, finding turning points: “Can you remember a particularly magic or moving moment? One that really sticks in your mind?” plus follow-up comments like “what did that feel like?” or “you must have been proud to be part of it”.

Audiences and messages: “Who should hear this story?” “If you were telling this story to X what key messages would you want them to take away?”

Catchy title: “Hearing you tell your story I listened for nice turns of phrases. But if this story were a book, what would its title be" Can I suggest X?” Note: this is a really important part of the process. Titles should contain the essence of the story and make it really memorable. People also appreciate you playing back their words--it makes them feel both heard and creative.

Digging deeper: The best results were when we reflected back saying things like "so it sounds like you really had your work cut out ..." etc.

Direct and indirect: Direct questions can sound quite intimidating and block people: “Were you frightened?” Whereas indirect questions can prompt deeper recall and develop empathy” “It sounds like that might have been quite frightening for you?”

Interrupting: Interrupting, to check facts or to express surprise can send people off in a different direction to the story they wanted to tell. Containing your surprise is important to prevent diversion from the original direction.

Silence: Holding long pauses feels unnatural but allows the story to unfold.

What Other Ways Can An Interviewer Help A Subject Reminisce?

On our blog, we reported on a project that aims to help the elderly reminisce as a form of therapy. This reminisicience work has many good ideas for memory triggers to help people recall their stories.

Related Blog Posts & Whitepapers From Anecdote

• Some more words to elicit stories
• The difference between a sound argument and a good story
• Which story-based techniques are most used?
• Story telling versus story writing
• Telling stories for a living
• Building trust and rapport in Anecdote circles

For our readers in North America – Narrative Techniques for Business workshops in Seattle and Boston (end of March)

There are only a couple of weeks left to register and receive the early bird discount for our Narrative Techniques for Business workshops. If you are interested in getting hands-on experience with our techniques simply check our the workshop description and send me an email requesting a registration form.

Social network analysis workshop in Melbourne

On the 22nd and 23rd March Andrew will be running a 2 day workshops titled “Practical Social Network Analysis: Skills and techniques for facilitating organisational change.”

This workshop is for those looking to:

• Build their confidence and expertise in applying the theory and practice of social network analysis for facilitating change
• Gain an understanding of the key concepts and models which inform the practice of social network analysis and sensemaking for change in organisations
• Gain enhanced understanding and capability to use and apply the specific software tools for conducting social network investigations within your organisation

As a special offer, the first 5 participants to register for this course will receive a free copy of Rob Cross’ book “The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations.” Regarded as one of the most practical and comprehensive guides written to the application of social network analysis within organisations.

To find out more about this course including how to register simply down load the registration brochure here: http://www.anecdote.com.au/files/Social_network_analysis.pdf

I just read with interest an article in the NASA ASK Magazine about training new teams to operate the two Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. The process takes over 12 months ‘apprenticeship’ and requires learning many of the systems associated with the rovers to ensure they have the context require to successfully operate the vehicles.

The NASA ASK Magazine is an interesting knowledge sharing initiative that communicates success stories intended to share good practices and lessons learned with fellow practitioners across the Agency. ASK stands for ‘Academy Sharing Knowledge’. The underpinning philosophy is that

I just had coffee with Greg Shepherd. He coordinates the Dining and Activity Network in Melbourne. What a delightful fellow. I was asking him about which activities his social club members seem to love the most and surprisingly he said walking was best for building community. As Greg explained, walking enables a group of people to clump into small groups and talk without being forced in an intense face to face meeting. When you tire of one conversation you can easily slow or quicken your pace to join a new clump. This probably explains why the blog walks are popular.

Have you ever been asked to find success stories and been unsure where to start? Done well success stories slide effortlessly from one teller to the next conveying company values, strategic directions and the good reasons why your company should invest in initiatives like communities of practice. Done badly the stories remain captive and moribund in content management jails.

What is a success story?

We have all heard the term ‘success story’ but what are we really talking about? First let’s take a look at a few examples.

In their Change This manifesto, Talking Strategy, Chip and Dan Heath retell this story from FedEx, the company that promises to deliver your package “absolutely, positively” overnight.

In St. Vincent, a tractor trailer accident blocked the main road going into the airport. Together a driver and ramp agent tried every possible alternate route to the airport but were stymied by traffic jams. They eventually struck out on foot, shuttling every package the last mile to the airport for an on-time departure. 

Here is one from SCORE—the counsellor's to America’s small business.

Judith Moore, a lifetime baker, was on a quest to find the “perfect” chocolate chip cookie recipe. Her son-in-law thought she should start her own business.

“I started investigating what it would take to start a cookie company,” she says.  Charlie Elberson, who owns an advertising agency, offered to develop a brand identity for her. In return, Judith would supply him with free cookies for a year.

Judith next contacted Coast SCORE in North Charleston, S.C., for advice on her business plan. SCORE Counselor Greg Kopatch helped her focus her vision. Greg also recommended that she create a spreadsheet and produce cash flow projections for three years of business.

His encouragement and enthusiasm helped to keep Judith going forward. “I could not have accomplished this much without SCORE’s help,” she says. Greg’s guidance was crucial to the completion of Judith’s business plan, as well as the necessary financial data to support it.

Greg continues to advise Judith on her ongoing business and its structure, business management and growth. And, it’s been a recipe for success. Judith recently entered into a new partnership with Dean & Deluca, a retail and catalogue gourmet food company based in New York City.

“It’s been a pleasure working with Greg, and a thrill to have all that information available to a small business, like we are, at no cost,” Judith says. “Having the expertise of SCORE counsellors is invaluable!”

And finally here is an example of a success story from Sun Microsystems.

SIM University (UniSIM) has to operate in a different manner than other educational institutions — the curricula, modules, programs, and even classes have to be flexible to enable students to strike a balance between work and study. The university recognised that it has to invest in its IT infrastructure to efficiently manage and operate an online e-learning solution to give its students a flexible learning environment. “Since we have decided to implement the e-learning infrastructure, it is increasingly critical that the system that supports this remains highly available and that the archives are easily managed,” says Gary Teo, Senior Manager of Educational Technology and Production for UniSIM. “We have to have systems that are always available so that our students can log in anytime, anywhere. We need something that is robust, stable and scalable. Most importantly, it must be cost-effective and highly reliable, which is why we turned to Sun.”

With almost everything online, learning becomes more flexible and interactive as students can now submit their assignments online, chat with their tutors and peers, download course materials online and even watch lectures online — from the comfort of their homes or wherever they happen to be. “We knew we made the right choice to go with Sun when the company took these seemingly irreconcilable requirements, customized them, and set up our infrastructure within a very short time,” adds Teo. “We are all very impressed.”

In order to run the Blackboard Academic Suite, the school put together an array of high-performance Sun products, including a storage area network (SAN) to house its mammoth database of lecture materials and administrative documents. To minimize the need for staff to manage the system, UniSIM acquired high-performance Sun Fire T2000 servers for high availability and automated recovery, and a Sun Fire X4100 server to support video streaming applications. To manage its database, UniSIM chose the Sun Fire V890 server. UniSIM’s critical storage and archive systems runs on a Sun StorageTek 6130 Storage Array and Sun StorageTek C2 Autoloader. As a result, UniSIM is now set for future archive expansion with additional arrays that can easily be added seamlessly.

Success stories come in all shapes and sizes but they share the trait of wishing to communicate, “look at us, look how clever, persistent, innovative [insert positive characteristic] we are.”  But that’s where the similarities end. The FedEx story can be told and retold—it’s an oral story. The cookie story is more like a journalist’s version of a ‘story’. Sun Microsystem’s is more like a case study. These three examples are a microcosm of the possibilities.

Most organisation have had experience writing case studies and commissioning journalists to write pieces for their corporate newsletters. As such, I would like to focus on the characteristics of oral stories and how to find them.

The first thing to notice about an oral story is their length. They’re short; an anecdote. While there are examples of storytellers retelling epics like Homer’s Iliad, mere mortals like us find it difficult to remember really long stories. A good oral success story is memorable. Its short length helps but there are more important features that make a story memorable.

People remember concrete details that create a picture of what’s happening in our mind’s eye. What did you see when you read the FedEx story? Did you see anything while reading the cookies or Sun stories? If the story recounts events we’ve seen before—airports, delivery truck, traffic jams—we can picture the story and it’s memorable. We simply replay the pictures to remember the story. If the scene is unfamiliar other devices are needed such as analogies, similes and metaphors. But, beware of the dead metaphor.

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language)

Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald noted: “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogue.” The Great Gatsby.

But this is not an essay on writing. We just want to be in a position to identify good success stories when and where we hear them. Some of the other characteristics to look out for include:

• a hero overcoming adversity
• detailed and concrete rather than vague and abstract
• simple and clear
• and most importantly, authentic and plausible

BHP Billiton, one of the world’s largest resources companies, justified its significant investments in communities of practice through the collection and retelling of success stories. They purposely created two versions of the same story: an oral retelling and a case study replete with detailed graphs showing savings, increased quality and reduced downtimes. Their most successful story is the rope shovel story. Here is how it was told to me.

In Ok Tedi there was a rope shovel, the largest moving machine on the planet, that was up and running 63% of the time. The very same type of rope shovel in a mine in Santiago had very little downtime by comparison and the Global Maintenance Network (the internal CoP for maintenance) wondered why. So they sent a team from Ok Tedi to Santiago to find out. After a few weeks with their colleagues in Santiago, they worked out that lubricant cleanliness made the difference. After changing their practices at Ok Tedi their rope shovel gradually improved its availability over a five year period saving BHP Billiton more than a million US dollars every year. And that was just one thing the Global Maintenance Network has done.

The details might be wrong but the message remains intact. The Global Maintenance Network is helping members improve their practices and saving the company significant money.

We could improve this success story by finding out the names of people who were involved and then tell it from their perspective. Some dates would make the story more concrete and verifiable. An analogy might help those of us who haven’t seen a rope shovel. I know its big, but how big? How about, a rope shovel would barely fit into the MCG and could be seen poking out above the stadium and be mistaken for an additional lighting tower. I guess this only works for Australians, but football stadium comparisons are always effective.

One last story before we look at how we find these examples.

Ruby S. presented with lower abdominal pain. She was tender in the right iliac fossa, and was therefore operated on as acute appendicitis. On opening the peritoneum there was a smear of turbid fluid, but the appendix was normal. Loop after loop of small bowel was pulled out, much to the irritation of the registrar, and there, in the upper jejunum, was a toothpick sticking through the wall. (Cox, 2001)

This story illustrates the effectiveness of an unexpected ending, the power of specific and visual language (loop after loop), and the need to use the language of the intended reader.

How do you find success stories?

The first step is to know what you’re after. Who are you trying to impress? What do they value? What is your purpose? Kathy Sierra recently posted a request for success stories which shows a woman who knows what she’s after.

The overall point is to find success stories about people whose lives have been affected by the web or software apps. I'm particularly interested in places where there is an intersection between live (face-to-face) interaction and online interaction (like people who've met online then forge off-line relationships). But even purely online experiences are important to me as well.

So here’s the first strategy. Ask for success strategies. This approach works when you have a large group of people listening. Kathy Sierra certainly has a large audience being one of the most popular bloggers in the world. You might have a similarly popular communication channel like a well-used intranet, email lists, or newsletters. But in large organisations this if often not an option. Broadcast communication channels are carefully guarded.

A good plan ‘B’ is to go to your social networks. Who are the connectors and mavens who know what is going on in the organisation? If you don’t have a well established network, I suggest you seek out roles that tend to be performed by natural connectors.

• Personal assistants
• Professional association leaders
• Community of practice leaders
Union reps
Successful business developers (connectors outside the organisation)
• Good (internal) head-hunters
• People who travel around the organisation

Social network experts say that we’re most effective in finding the people we are seeking by first exploring likely physical locations. “We need stories that illustrate good safety behaviours. Where are some of our most dangerous operations? Don’t we have operations the Ukrainian Donbas?”  The next place we should look is in the organisational structure. “Our mine operations people will have some good stories. The coal division would be a good place to start. Who heads up that division?” In combination with getting to know the company’s connectors you should be able to pin point a plethora of possibilities.

A way to use oral stories to target case studies

Many companies are obsessed with writing customer case studies. The Sun Microsystem example above gives you a feeling for what these case studies look like. When I worked at IBM we had an extensive case study database. These systems cost a fortune to maintain. And I have to tell you, I’ve never really found them that useful. I suspect because each case study requires so much effort to compile they are never done well. Here is an approach inspired by what I learned when I ran a photographic library.

Our photo library had over 100,000 photos. All the images were transparencies ranging from 35mm to large formats. It was impossible for us to catalogue the entire collection with the resources at our disposal. So we developed a general understanding of where groups of slides were physically located (which slide box) and when we sold a picture we catalogued it.

Oral success stories could represent an organisation’s first attempt at recording a success story. It’s essential that the oral story can be easily retold, just like the FedEx van driver story above. Some stories will be what Dan and Chip Heath call ‘sticky’, that is, they will be told and retold and eventually there will be a queue of people wanting the full case study. This is the signal to investigate and report the full story enabling a wisdom of crowds prioritisation of which case studies get written up and when.

You might be wondering what is happening with Zahmoo? The main reason for the delay is our busy lives at Anecdote. Zahmoo is a labour of love and while we have made great progress and actually have an alpha version of the software working, I’m holding things up with a list of things I need to do that seems to be constantly trumped by other priorities. Please be patient and thanks for you all your help and interest so far.

The Master gave his teaching in parables and stories which his disciples listened to with pleasure – and occasional frustration, for they longed for something deeper.

The Master was unmoved. To all their objections he would say, ‘You have yet to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story’.

Anthony De Mello, One Minute Wisdom

Now this opens up a whole can of worms because if you take Bruner’s concept of a narrative mode of thinking, then the objective is not truth but verisimilitude.

I spent the past few days facilitating an event at the Mountain Heritage Resort at Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. It is a great place to run open space events with lots of comfortable nooks and crannies (both indoors and out) for groups to work on issues and a main room big enough for a circle of about 100 people. The rooms are very good, some with magnificant views, and the food is first rate. The photo shows me on the balcony with the Jamison Valley (home to The Three Sisters) in the background. Open spacers just need to hope that they don’t experience a photocopier meltdown like we had…

Last night I went along to a talk by Guy St. Clair held by the KMLF and VPSCIN. I found Guy’s topic of knowledge services quite interesting. Guy comes from a libraries background but now takes a wider view of how to integrate information management, KM and strategic learning.

One idea that stuck was the reason Guy called his work ‘knowledge services’ and not ‘knowledge management’. As we know, knowledge management is not easily understood by executives. It seems too nebulous. But executives have had plenty experience in obtaining services: legal services, accounting services, catering services. So why not ‘knowledge services’?

Do you like my old library catalogue card? I created it with the Card Catalog Creator. Thanks for the link Patti.

Everyone in knowledge management acknowledges the vital role trust plays. “Trust is the bandwidth of communication” says Karl-Erik Sveiby. When talking about trust I mostly hear people say “we need to build trust”. But I rarely hear people discuss the issue of what to do when trust is broken and needs to be rebuilt. See below for a process for rebuilding trust. At the core is an apology.

I was reminded of this issue by a post by Seth Godin where he lists 10 apologies from the weakest to the strongest.

• “You can always take your business elsewhere.” (1): Thank you, I will, and so will all of my friends.
• “It’s not our fault.” (2): This is a non-apology, where you are not seeking to redress the issue, nor evincing any sort of sympathy for the injured.
• “We’re sorry that you feel that way.” (3): This is also a non-apology, which roughly translates into “It pisses us off that you feel that way. If you didn't feel that way, we would be happy.” It also doesn't take any responsibility for the problem, and places all of it onto the injured party. Be careful of any apology that starts “I’m sorry that you...”
• “We’re sorry if we did something wrong.” (6): This is getting there, but doesn’t really accept responsibility either. You are not acknowledging that you did anything wrong; you're still hoping that you haven’t. You are offering an apology for appearances sake.
• “We're sorry that this occurred.” (7): You are sorry, but as a matter of principle you’re still trying to insist that it wasn’t really your fault.
• “We’re sorry that we caused this problem.” or “We’re sorry that we have let this happen.” (9): This is a full apology, and is what the customer needs to hear. Frankly, it doesn’t matter that it was really the post office’s fault, and not yours; the customer doesn't care. Most people hearing this cannot help but respond with some sort of graciousness, such as “Well, all right then, these things happen. What are you going to do to fix it?” This is the target level that you want to hit for your customer service. But for the record, there is still one level to go. The complete apology is:
• “We’re so sorry that we caused this problem; we are really distressed over this. Please know that we take this very seriously. This is a huge oversight on our part. I will immediately notify my supervisor, and we will review our procedures to ensure that this cannot happen again. In the meantime, that is no consolation to you for our lack of service! What can we do to regain your trust? We will be sending you a little surprise as a token of our appreciation of having you as a customer.” (10) In truth, this little speech goes on until the customer interrupts. And it is followed by a few more apologies as the conversation closes, as well.

In my search for ways to help organisations rebuild trust in groups, I discovered this interesting paper and process which came from work in reconciliation in South Africa. The author suggests a five step process in rebuilding trust. The process requires actions on both sides of the relationship: from the violator of the trust and the victim (this is language from the source material).

Actions of the Violator

• They must engage in a series of steps that identify, acknowledge, and assume some ‘ownership’ for the trust destroying events that occurred.
• recognise and acknowledge that a violation has occurred
• determine the nature of the violation—that is, what ‘caused’ it—and admit that one has caused the event
• admit that the act was destructive
• accept responsibility for the effect of one’s actions

This very much looks likes apology 10 above.

Actions of the Victim

• The victim to request (or the violator to offer) some form of forgiveness, atonement, or action designed to undo the violation and rebuild the trust

Lindskold, S. (1978). “Trust development, the GRIT proposal, and the affects of conciliatory acts on conflict and cooperation.” Psychological Bulletin 85: 772-793.

There is something peculiar going on with Melbourne’s trains. A couple of years ago we received a new fleet of brand new Siemens trains and everything worked fine. This year the same trains have a mysterious and serious problem: they don’t stop when and where the driver wants them to. The brakes seem to have a problem and no one can pinpoint the difficulty. According to The Age, there is a glimmer of hope but the resolution is dragging out. Experts have been flown in and the best people are working on the issue, so why is it taking so long to resolve?

What increases my befuddlement is the apparent nuts and bolts characteristic of the problem (at least that is how it appears). A train is a system (admittedly complicated) you can pull apart, analyse each component, make a diagnosis and put back together and you still have a train. So the solution, therefore, can’t be just a simple malfunction of equipment there must be something more complex occurring.

Could it be that they just don’t have the right people working on the problem, that the true experts on maintaining Siemens trains are yet to be engaged? I think this is unlikely given the concern and inconvenience the absence of these trains is causing Melbourne commuters, Connex and the Victorian Government. Could it be that this type of problem hasn’t been encountered anywhere else in the world and the engineers are simply not equipped to handle the problem? That’s hard to believe given the number of these trains working diligently on so many tracks around the world. While the problem might not be identical, if it were a purely mechanical issue the mechanics would be able to spot it and fix it.

But any issue involving people is never purely mechanical. When people are involved in problem solving we need to consider how knowledge is flowing from one person to another; from one group to another; from one organisation to another. Here are some possibilities that might be hindering the resolution of the unstoppable train problem.

The people responsible for the day to day maintenance of the trains in Melbourne (I’ll call them the mechanics) don’t know the experts that well from Siemens (I’ll call them the engineers). Knowledge will only flow between these groups after a relationship has developed and trust formed. If the first time they have ever met is in the heat of resolving a high profile issue, then tempers are likely to be frayed, finger-pointing occurs and communications stop. In the future, prepare for emergencies by ensuring the experts know the people on the ground.

Mechanics tend to be practical, concrete thinkers. Experts like to work with abstractions. Engineers like to work with drawings and designs. When there is a problem, go back to the drawings to figure out what is going on. Mechanics like to try things out. Get another part, replace an old one, see what happens. The two groups speak different languages. One solution is help both groups become bi-lingual and show more empathy for the others’ approach. And mechanics and engineers wont be the only groups involved who speak a different professional language. The policy folks from the department, the politicians and the rail safety regulator will have a way of talking that will be different again.

While the absence of pre-existing relationships and the lack of a common language among experts will slow the flow of knowledge, there are a myriad of other possibilities and it’s impossible to predict which one will help resolve the problem. The key point is that a complex problem like this requires the team to try things, make educated guesses and see what happens, while ensuring the public is kept safe and services are maintained as best as they can.

The unstoppable train problem is unlikely to be a mere mechanical fault. It sounds like a knowledge problem: an inability to find and access the right knowledge when it is needed. But don’t be fooled in thinking this knowledge resides in a database somewhere. More than likely it is contained in the experiences and stories of groups of people around the world who don’t even realise they have the answer or that anyone is looking for it.

If you are in New Zealand in early March (1st-2nd) you might like to attend this workshop that will be run by Ross Dawson and Verna Allee.

Trends in the Living Networks: Value Networks Masterclass in New Zealand with Verna Allee.

by Tim Laseter and Rob Cross

Charlottesville, Va., January 31, 2007 -- A growing number of companies, including Chevron, Halliburton, and Whirlpool, are seeking new methods to stimulate innovation and streamline global practices. By mapping the relationships between key thought leaders within a company, executives can bolster innovation by building connections between critical employees -- those who offer specific expertise or deep knowledge about the company and industry. By creating a database of these employees and their respective specialties, leaders can draw on the experience of these individuals to help solve problems, increase productivity, and share domain knowledge with others in the firm.

To read the full analysis:
www.strategy-business.com/enewsarticle/enews013107

From the time of the first bound books, right up until the 17th century, books were shelved with their spines facing inwards and the pages facing out. There was a practical reason for this seemingly perverse practice. Books were typically bound in leather and the technology for decorating a book was primitive. Bookmakers applied embellishments to the front and back cover but avoided the spine because it had to bend and flex and created problems when you affixed adornments.

So how do you know which book is which on your bookshelf when you can’t see the spine? Well, you decorate the fore-edge (the paper) of the book—much like you did with your school books. And if you’re a renaissance book collector you engage an artist to decorate your outward facing pages. This is what Odorico Pilone did when he employed Cesare Vecellio to decorate 172 of his books. Here is an example of this beautiful work.

So how does all this relate to Kathy Sierra’s excellent post on how to use your Moleskine notebook to keep your life in order? I’ve been a Moleskine users for a few years now and have a small collection of completed notebooks. I found it difficult to label the spine on a Moleskine so I simply reverted to the pre-seventeenth century practice of shelving the notebooks with the fore-edge facing out and decorating my fore-edges with the dates I started and finished each notebook adding a simple label for reference. Here they are on the left.

Petroski, H. (2000). The book on the book shelf. New York, Vintage Books.

Last month I listed 10 questions you might use to help people recall their experiences (stories). I was chatting to Paul Atkins (executive coach and leadership expert based in Canberra) the other day and he mentioned that the subject-object interview developed by Harvard professor, Robert Kegan, also featured emotional words designed to elicit stories. Here are some of the words Paul uses when doing a subject-object interview.

• angry
• proud
• torn
• change
• delight
• success
• conviction
• strong stand