Things are continuing to grow here at Anecdote and we are again looking for someone to join our little crew.

We would love to work with

• someone passionate about people; you love working with people, you’re interested in how people work in organisations; and you share our desire to restore humanity to the forefront of organising and organisations.
• a person with 5 or more years working experience; it would be good if you had a degree in a people-related discipline (for example, organisational psychology, anthropology, KM, HR);
• someone who has sound consulting experience and can work with clients to understand their needs and deliver against them;
• someone who will enthusiastically embrace the Anecdote operating principles of: do good things; look after each other; and have a go.
• a person with a great attitude to work, to life: this is far more important than skills.

What we will do for you

• We will train you in all our techniques such as narrative collection, sensemaking, intervention design, storytelling, social network analysis, communities of practice development, and fostering knowledge transfer.
• Provide a diversity of project types and activities that will stretch you and help you learn at a cracking pace.
• Good coffee, great conversations and meeting and working with interesting people.

What you will be doing at Anecdote

• Helping to develop and refine our sensemaking approaches based on our work in organisations, big and small, public and private sector.
• Project activities including interviewing, focus group facilitation, research, presentations, and logistics.
• Meeting and working with outstanding people who form part of the Anecdote global network of collaborators.

Is this you? Are you interested?

Then …

Send a 3 page pdf that conveys your outstanding attributes and why you should be part of the Anecdote team to jobs@anecdote.com.au

We will close the call for submissions on 27 April 2007.

You will need to live in either Canberra, Melbourne or Sydney for this job.

As you would expect, Anecdote provides a collegiate working environment. We’re a small, close-knit team that collaborates without ego or arrogance. Have a browse through our website and get a feel for the company you will be joining. Our perspectives, priorities and thoughts are published here and we think they provide insight into Anecdote’s philosophy.

Bob Sutton is on a campaign against workplace arseholes. In yesterday’s post he describes Rob Cross’ work on social network analysis. In particular he looks at how to identify people who energise and de-energise.

Bob’s interesting in ways to measure the impact of arseholes.

I am trying to figure out some ways and places to measure this stuff, and am hoping to recruit Rob to help as has some really cool software that he uses with the companies that he works with and that are partners in his network.

One technique he might consider is Most Significant Change. While this technique wont create a measure of arseholeness, it will give people in the organisation a very good understanding of what’s happening and provides a forum to address some of the issues. Very soon he will be able to use the Zahmoo software to support the technique.

I just entered my presentation on How work really gets done into the World’s Best Presentation Contest. It would be great if you popped on over to the contest site and registered a big thumbs up for this preso. Send me an email if you would like to see the presentation handout that goes with it.

In 2001 Shell collected a bunch of stories and put them together in a booklet now know as the Blue Book, but with the official title of Stories from the Edge: Managing Knowledge through New Ways of Working within Shell's Exploration and Production Business. It’s a landmark publication because it shows that a company in a hard-nosed industry like oil exploration and production recognises the value of storytelling and are getting benefits from its application.

The booklet (87 pages) is in four parts:

• Global Networks
• Global Consultancy
• Centres of Excellence
• Distributed Teams

Many of the stories tell how the organisation has saved money  by sharing knowledge. Others are about how new tools and techniques have been used. In each case the stories are in the language of the Shell employees. Here’s an example:

Pecten Cameroon's research revealed that other operators had achieved production gains by injecting demulsifier downhole in gas lifted wells, reducing viscosity in the production string and thereby increasing production. After a trial evaluation of their own, the company obtained a gain of 500 barrels per day or $5 million per annum. The approach is being extended to 17 other wells with prospective gains of $9 million per year.

What I find most interesting about the Blue Book is how the authors recognised that collecting and sharing stories of success is a powerful way to garner resources for things like communities of practice, which are notoriously difficult to develop a business case for. In fact, any learning initiative is difficult to justify in a strictly analytical way (to see why have a look at this post I wrote a while back-Learning initiatives need stories not measurement).

BHP Billiton has taken a similar approach with their communities of practice (also called Networks). Check out their Ok Tedi story.

Throughout the Blue Book are quotes from Dave Snowden’s early papers on narrative techniques for knowledge management. I hadn’t heard about any work Dave had done with Shell so it was a welcomed surprise.

This description of sensemaking makes the most sense to me.

Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. (Weick et. al 2005)

I’ll tell you why.

When I run lessons learning sessions I’ll often start the session by asking, “So, what did you learn from this project?” The typical response is, “Hmmmm, let me think … Nup, didn’t learn anything really.” Then we timeline the project, identify key events, retell stories of what happened and then this happens: “Remember how we got the funding? It was a shocker. We had to get the Commissioner to move money to the large projects vote and as a result we never really had a project sponsor. I would never do it that way again.” It’s this point of putting the idea into words, usually as a story, that the lessons are identified (not sure they’ve been learned yet).

The same think happened to me last week. We (I’m working with Patti Anklam and Bruce Hoppe on this one) are running a social network analysis for a global community of practice of chocolate experts. When we presented the first SNA charts the immediate response from the client was, “Nothing new here really.” After a number of discussions the response was, “Wow! Heaps of insights.”

Weick, K. E., K. M. Sutcliffe, et al. (2005). “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking.” Organization Science 16(4): 409-421.

Check out the original Bob Dylan version.

I’m just in the process of building up some reflections for my workshop in Boston (you’re most welcome to register and attend) in a couple of weeks and thought I would share some snippets as I progress. You will notice some of the following text is directly from previous blog posts and some is new.

Annette Simmons says that explaining storytelling is like explaining kittens.

“We all know about kittens. We have wonderful memories of kittens—children holding kittens, watching kittens play, petting a kitten. Our memories are a meaningful whole. Trying to break them down into pieces is like cutting a kitten in half in order to understand it. Half a kitten isn’t really half a kitten. Breaking storytelling down into pieces, parts, and priorities destroys it.” (xviii)

If you go searching for explanations of stories, narrative, business narrative and storytelling, you will discover mountains of information that dissects the kitten into a million pieces. From our experience, there is one practical thing you need to know to be effective in business narrative; you must know how to identify a story.

A story is a set of events linked together in a way that explains what happened or what could happen. It differs from a clinic example because a story includes emotions and sensory detail.

“The King died and the Queen cried,” is a statement of fact.
“The King died and the Queen cried of a broken heart,” is a story.

Here’s a story from FedEx. They collect them to demonstrate employees exhibiting the company’s values.

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.

A story is detailed and specific and through these details people generalise and work out what’s happening and how to behave. When you become attuned to identifying stories, you will realised you’re surrounded by them.

Their ubiquity is due to our tendency to use stories to explain most things that happen around us. The boss comes down from the 26th floor to speak to Mary. “Jim must be down to talk to Mary about next week’s round of performance reviews.” It’s how we make sense of what’s happening.

Some people think a story must have a plot, character development, a protagonist, a turning point and a resolution. This might be true of a film script, a play, a novel etc. but in organisations, stories tend to be much smaller and inconspicuous. Stories can range from well-rehearsed retellings of a foundational moment in the organisation (the creation myths) to the smallest of utterances that immediately help people recall a story: “What happened, Fiona?” he asked. “Exactly what happened to Pedro 3 years ago,” Fiona replied. The Pedro story is replayed in everyone’s mind without anyone hearing it.

Most of the time business stories are short anecdotes recounting an event. Often these anecdotes are ephemeral, lost almost immediately after being told. Other times the anecdotes are enduring, a successful meme that is told and retold throughout the organisation. The enduring anecdotes shape the character of an organisation and are the most important stories to find.

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/02/finding_success.html

Simmons, A. (2006). The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling. New York, Basic Books.

Boje, D.M., D.B. Fedor, and K.M. Rowland. 1982. "Myth Making: A Qualitative Step in OD Interventions." The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science 18(1):17-28.

Whenever someone asks me this question I tell them this story.

One of our first narrative projects was to help a government department assess their occupational health and safety practices to see whether their policy and procedures were being following and to determine their training needs. We formed two teams to collect our data, one used structured interview techniques and the other collected stories. At the end of the first day of data collection both teams got together to compare notes. “Well, looks like they pretty much have things together,” said the interview team. “They seem to follow the procedures and policies quite well.” The narrative team members looked at each other in amazement. “So you didn’t hear about the guys showering in their own urine because their recycling system is faulty or how in one workshop everyone wears protective shoes because a guy chopped the top of his foot off a while back but no one wears protective eye wear?”

I saw the slide pack from a Gartner briefing today. It listed the ‘Top 10 Technologies for 2007’. Included in the list was ‘communiites and collective intelligence’. This ‘technology’ involves linking people within and beyond your organisation and helps organisations to ‘move beyond “enablement” and tap the value of internal communities’ and to ‘exploit the power of scale to solve problems in new ways’.

Interestingly, communities were shown at the very start of the ‘Gartner Hype Curve’ – at the technology trigger point. This is much early in the cycle than I would have expected and it is long before the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ or the ‘trough of disillusionment’. 

The slide pack is advertised as being available from here, but I couldn’t find it.

I have just returned from the UK and from co-delivering a training program for new CoP coordinators in a global company. It was a great experience and I learned much about communities of practice. In the week before, I spent some time in Brisbane looking at some of the company’s CoP success stories. A number stood out, including this one:

In early 2005 a CoP was established around the data and process standards used to manage physical assets across a multi-site division. The company knew that a new module of SAP will be introduced in late 2008 and that achieving agreement on data and process standards was a key to successful implementation. In early 2007, the CoP members took on the challenge of establishing the standard and, using a wiki, they did it inside 6 weeks.

Aside from the importance of this achievement, what stood out for me was management’s insight in establishing the community long before it was needed to tackle this key business issue. Using hindsight its obvious that the group needed to work on their social capital before they could be ‘tasked’. Building a capability in this manner is a great example of thinking strategically about communities of practice.

The following four conditions are cited as factors that communities of practice might consider in deciding whether something should be made explicit:

• it is relatively stable
• it has longer lasting value for a larger community
• it is expected to be retreived relatively frequently
• it will be maintained and kept up to date

1. A van Unnik, Shell EP LLD, Benefits of Developing Knowledge Sharing Communities, Abu Dhabi International Conference and Exhibition, 10-13 October, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Society of Petroleum Engineers, 2004

Some people think a story must have a plot, character development, a protagonist, a turning point and a resolution. This might be true of a film script, a play, a novel etc. but in organisations stories tend to be much smaller and inconspicuous. Stories can range from well rehearsed retellings of a foundational moment in the organisation (the creation myths) to the smallest of utterances that immediately help people recall a story: “What happened, Fiona?” he asked. “Exactly what happened to Pedro 3 years ago,” Fiona replied. The story is replayed without anyone hearing it.

Most of the time business stories are short anecdotes recounting an event. Often these anecdotes are ephemeral, lost almost immediately after being told. Other times the anecdotes are enduring, a successful meme that is told and retold throughout the organisation. The enduring anecdotes shape the character of an organisation and are the most important stories to find.

Margie Borschke interviewed me a while back and wrote this article on decision making.

A simple way to help people develop stories of how their organisation might operate in the future is to ask them to consider specific triggering events then explain what happened. It’s important the triggering event is specific yet representative.

For example, a triggering event might be Ron Wilson suddenly resigning from the investments section to join a competitor. The group might decide to tell the story of what happened from the point of resignation or sometime before that.

Another approach is to find examples of how you would like your organisation to operate from within your organisation or in other similar organisations. As William Gibson says, “The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.”

So why are we interested in future stories? They help an organisation paint a memorable vision of what they would like to achieve and rooting it in specific examples that everyone can understand, recollect and retell. The provide a strategic intent for the organisation without being prescriptive.

There are two examples on the web you should check out. 50 Lessons is a subscription video library of senior executives recounting their experiences. It’s called 50 Lessons because the original set of 50 companies they interviewed were ones that in the early ‘70s helped propel the stock market into a long bull run.

These clips are professionally produced and look great. The videos are categorised into business issues (such as change, innovation, managing people) so you can find stories that convey particular lessons. A good way to use these stories is to get a group of people together to discuss the ideas they trigger (sensemaking) and how the lesson is relevant to the circumstances of the discussion group.

There’s one shortcoming of 50 Lessons. There is no online ability to create a discussion around a particular video clip. Online discussion helps keep the content alive in an organisation. For that reason I love what they’ve done at Channel 9.

Channel 9 is a site for Microsoft technologists. It consists of video clips (which you can stream or download) taken of Microsoft engineers explaining what they are working on. It’s done with a hand held video, it’s roughly shot and edited. What’s great about this site is that anyone can view the video and make comments. You can also see how many people have viewed each clip.

Both sites provide organisations with examples of what can be done with video to share experiences. Both sites have recognised that capturing experiences as stories makes the content more engaging, and ultimately determines whether the content is ever watched again.

If you are interested in developing this capability within your organisation, give me a call.

Towards the end of this month I will be in Seattle, Boston and Las Vegas. If you are in or near any of these cities and would like to meet, send me an email and hopefully we can organise a time to catch up.

• Seattle: 26th March
• Boston: 28th or 30th March
• Las Vegas: 2nd April

 In case you hadn’t seen the news, but I will running some narrative technique workshops while I’m there.

Ira Glass in a public radio producer and host of This American Life. In this video Ira describes the anecdote as one of the two basic building blocks of a story. He also demonstrates how compelling an anecdote is to listen to regardless of the information being conveyed. It’s one of the reasons why we like to listen to stories.

The second building block is time for reflection. While Ira is commenting on crafting a story, we use a similar construct in our work when we conduct sensemaking workshops which give leaders an opportunity to see patterns in a number of anecdotes and reflect of their meaning. This proceeds the act of designing interventions.

I’m truly blessed in knowing lots of interesting people. I don’t mean to boast but this morning it really dawned on me. I’m very lucky. The other thing I’ve come to understand about myself is that I’ve reached an age, or perhaps a stage in my career, when I’m happy to admit that I don’t know the answer. More than that, I’m comfortable in contacting my many friends and colleagues (usually on Skype) and say things like, “I’m giving a presentation next week and I’m not sure I really know that much about one of the aspects they want me to talk about.”

I said something like that to John Smith this morning on the topic of revitalising communities of practice. He said that I should start by thinking about the Etienne Wenger’s CPD model (community, practice and domain).

Thinking about this model will prompt you to ask a series of questions, he said.

• maybe the community needs new domain areas or domains that were once on the periphery need to be brought into the centre
• perhaps the community needs to explore new tools and practices to expand its repertoire
• perhaps there are members who have left the group in the past who might now like to re-enter and invigorate the community

Now here’s the interesting thing. After only five minutes listening to John’s suggestions a whole bunch of things sprung to mind for me. For example, I’ve seen communities flagging because the members didn’t really have a strong, shared identity with the community’s domain. One example is a community I’m part of that discusses complexity science in organisational settings. It continues to struggle because none of us really identify as complexity-dudes. It fails my “I am a …” test. 

Contrast this with the communities of practice we’re working with in mining companies. Many of the community members have been with the company for 15 or more years and have only done one type of job. They might be underground safety guys or iron ore process guys or pit optimisation guys. They define who they are by the work they are doing and in many cases a job well done will save lives. When this is the case the community of practice seems to thrive if you also have good community coordinators and it’s developed a good rhythm of activity.

John left me with this thought, “If your community of practice is flagging then get the group focussed back on practice.” One way to do that is to implement my action-oriented CoP process.

A couple of years ago Etienne Wenger stayed with me and my family for four days. The poor man. I kept bugging him with CoP questions and my strongest memory from this time was Etienne’s most common answer to my questions of how to do this and how to design that He simply asked, “So what do the members think?” Get the members to design the community activities, the domain, the practices. So when your community is flagging, go the the members for help.

Having people you can contact quickly to have short, meaningful conversations is priceless. Knowing someone’s name, their contact details and their expertise is not enough. You need to have a relationship with someone, a common language and an ability to absorb what you are hearing. John and I are in a community (of CoP practitioners) which helps this conversation happen. At the same time John exercises choice in what he tells me, how deep or wide he goes, how much time he spends and how much effort he puts in during the interaction. This is his gift.

Several weeks ago, while preparing a presentation on the use of story in organisations. I came up with quite a long list of ways story is used, but it needed a framework. The following came to me in shower (where good ideas occasionally occur and where bad singing is commonplace). The three main dimensions of story in organisations I came up with were:

• We tell stories to make ourselves understood. Stories are powerful persuaders. Good teachers will always try to illustrate a learning point with an example or a story. We communicate strategy using story; stories help place facts in context and give them emotional impact.
• We listen to stories to understand others and to learn. Stories are an important way we remember and learn things and they often are the vehicle by which our various identities and memberships are illustrated. Much of an organisation's knowledge is contained in its stories. Story, in the form of anecdotes, are an essential part of finding out what is really going on.
• Our behavior creates and changes stories. This one came to me as an afterthought, but the more I think about it the more it seems appropraite at this level. As an example, the CEO can read out the organisation's (lengthy, important and well-written) sustainability strategy statement without any noticeable effect other than eyes glazing over. But a story gets created when he puts his hand on his heart and says "I don't want to be part of an organization that doesn't act sustainably, and I don't think you do either”. People will tell the story of the behaviour long after the words of the sustainability statement are forgotten.

There are many ways we could cut such a framework and I found this one useful for the presentation I gave. There are many other ways of looking at it and I would love to hear other views

I just noticed that we have reached the milestone of over 1,000 downloads of our guide on how to run anecdote circles. Just click on this graphic to download your free copy.

If you would like to receive training in how to run anecdote circles, check out our half day course.