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We are lucky to have many terrific clients that we love working with. Here's an example.

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I'm hoping everyone who reads our blog is reading it by subscribing to our RSS feed. Now if that sentence made no sense to you, check out this Common Craft explaination of RSS and how to use it.

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The Democratic party in the US has had a pretty rough trot in terms of the number of Democratic Presidents that managed to secure a second term. In recent history Roosevelt and Clinton are it. Professor Drew Westen puts this down to the Democrats being too smart for their own good. They have a tendency to provides the facts, dazzle the electorate with ideas and craft intellectual arguments to garner support. But one thing is missing. Engaging voters' emotions.

Here is a good example from the Bush Snr and Dukaikis campaign from one of the debates.

BERNARD SHAW (MODERATOR): Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

DUKAKIS: No, I don't, Bernard. And I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.

And the audience thought, “What a heartless bastard. He didn't even mention how devastated he would be if his wife was raped and murdered.” Instead Dukakis gave the rational, intellectual response and according to Westen lost the debate at this point—in the first minute.

It turns out that 80+% of our decisions on who we vote for are based on our emotions not rational analysis.

You can fall into the same trap with your knowledge strategy. Your strategy report, which should be the result of extensive participation but often isn't, can easily be a rational account of what needs to be done having the emotional content of a wet tea towel.

Stories help. You can illustrate why your organisation needs to take action now and why a systematic approach to managing knowledge is important. You can use stories in at least two ways: including anecdotes throughout the report like this one:

“If we tried to find stuff on landholders beforehand you may have had to have made 15 phone calls, 14 emails, you know, try to track all that info down.”

And you can preface the report with a short history (3 paragraphs) on what brought the organisation to this point. This helps people understand why the strategy is being done and puts the activity in context. And if the story is strong people will recount it when explaining why the knowledge strategy is being done. Now there is some emotional content to what you are saying

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One of the new practices that will be essential at a time when information volumes are exploding is social bookmarking. That's because with social bookmarking you are getting help from your colleagues, community members and practically any one else who's doing it. Problem is, it's not the easiest thing to explain. So we are lucky to have Common Craft's 3 minute video that anyone can understand.

As readers of this blog you are probably already in the know about things like social bookmarking, weblogs and wikis. So your job is to let your colleagues know about this practice so we can all benefit from people using this tool. Just forward this post to them so they can see this cool video.

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Last week I was lucky enough to go along to the Intranets '07 forum in Sydney and had the opportunity to see what a number of organisations in Australia are doing in this space.

One thing that really struck me is that most organisations seem to view wiki's and blogs (and all things 2.0), to be a natural extension to their Intranet projects. The pressures to adopt the latest trends are certainly there, and doing something inside the firewalls seems to be on people's agendas, so it makes perfect sense to use the teams and infrastructure that are already in place.

However, I'm not sure that they know what they're getting themselves into. Adopting these new collaborative and social tools will require a paradigm shift from the current thinking. Let me explain ...

In my notes, I wrote that there seemed to be a real dichotomy in the language being used. On the one hand speakers when describing their Intranets were talking about standards, compliance, custodians, approval, reviews, structured, efficiency, control, and 'single source of truth'. Yet on the other hand, they mused that intranets were about 'people, people, people' and that they were trying to improve collaboration, increase knowledge sharing and foster networks.

I put this down to what appears to be a lack of or poor understanding about the differences between information and knowledge. It seems that many organisations still have a mindset that knowledge management is about trying to codify explicit knowledge - finding it and sticking it in a database, which will in-turn improve sharing and collaboration. However, in doing so, they are ignoring tacit knowledge and the social aspects of learning. Organisations face big challenges to bridge this nexus, and to do so they will need to also consider the 'human' aspects of social software - that it is enabling, empowering, emergent, organic, action-oriented and open. I'll end with a quote, which I think sums it up pretty well ...

" ... viewing knowledge as a duality means that both perspectives are needed and both must be taken into account in any attempt to manage knowledge." 1

References
1. Hildreth, P.J. & Kimble, C. (2002). "The duality of knowledge"Information Research, 8(1), paper no. 142 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html]

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Friends of Anecdote are invited to join our colleagues in the Knowledge Management Leadership Forum and the KM Round Table to an evening seminar with visiting guest speaker Patrick Lambe.

Patrick is President of the Information and Knowledge Management Society based in Singapore, and Founding Partner of Straits Knowledge, a research and consulting firm specialising in information and knowledge management.

One of Asia’s most respected knowledge management practitioners, originally trained in Library Science. Patrick arrived in KM via a second career in training and development, and has been based in Singapore for 16 years.

On the evening of October 25, Patrick will run an interactive forum on “the Vices and Virtues of Knowledge Management” which will be followed by an informal networking session with the who’s who in the field of knowledge management.

When: Thursday Oct 25, 6:00 – 8:00pm

Where: Treasury Theatre, Lower Plaza, 1 Macarthur St East Melbourne

Refreshments provided

RSVP to melbournekmlf@gmail.com by Friday Oct 12.

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David Maister has an excellent podcast series. Some time ago I listened to his podcast on earning trust and the useful way he provides to talk about trust and its importance to business. The first point is that earning trust must be earned and deserved; it requires you to be 'truly trustworthy'. His construct was useful in a recent workshop where a client was exploring their vision statement to "be a trusted supplier of ..." as it helped them think specifically what it meant to be 'a trusted supplier'.

Maister identifies four dimensions to trust. The first three can cause trust to increase (if you get them right):

• Credibility - about words - I can trust what he says. This is about tangible, professional expertise.
• Reliability - about actions - I can trust her to do something. Are you dependable and behave in certain ways?
• Intimacy - about emotions - I feel comfortable discussing this with that person. This is about the ability to relate to people one to one. It is the dimension that people fail on most often - it has high consequences if we get it wrong. Many people think (wrongly) that being 'detached' is something to aspire to.

The fourth component, self orientation, reduces trust:

Self-Orientation - about motives - the extent to which we can trust that someone cares about certain things. This relates to the extent to which we can focus on the other person in the relationship rather than ourselves. Selfishness, self-consciousness, need to appear on top of things or to appear intelligent, a long to-do list that distracts us from focussing in the moment etc are all things that keep us focussed on ourselves rather than the other person.

Earning trust requires us to be good at all four dimensions. And, of course, it doesn't just relate to business.

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Why does Google work? Because on the internet people link between sites. Popular sites are popular probably because they are relevant and more people link to these sites. As a result Google ranks them higher than others and hey presto when you Google the most highly ranked sites are at the top.

What happens on an intranet? Pages and pages of material is published and by comparison to the internet there is no linking. And as a result it's hard to work out what is useful and what's not. How many of you have searched for the “car booking” procedure for your department to find a myriad of other gumf totally unrelated to what you need? I have. And it's a pain.

That's why social search is going to be important. I've been playing around with social search for a while using Eurekster's Swickis. Here's one I've created for people interested in business narrative.

Grab this swicki from eurekster.com

The idea is that whenever you do a business narrative related search and you find a hit that is a good one, you vote for it. Over time its ability to server the business narrative community improves. I've added it to the bottom of our blog and you can easily add it to yours as well.

Imagine using this type of tool on your intranet where over time you good efforts make the search engine work for you rather than something you have to battle with. In fact we will be relying more and more on our colleagues and community members to keep abreast of the tsunami of information coming our way. This is one was to do it.

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Who is prescient enough to be able to consistently predict the future? These researchers think they can.

Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing

via Tom Davenport

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I came across the idea of the power law when I read Duncan Watt's Six Degrees. It's the one that best describes city population distributions, the size of hubs in networks, the popularity of blog sites, word frequencies and the Pareto principle, to name just a few. In power law systems there's one standout (the biggest city, the most frequently used word, the most popular blog) then the rest trail off into a very long trail. Imagine one of those fun drop slides where you hang from a bar, let go and enjoy a terrific slide to the end. The shape of a drop slide is the same as a power law if you graph these distributions. Quite a different shape to the normal, bell-curve distribution we were all told at university best represented the world we live in. Power laws tell us to notice the extremes. Bell curves tell us to remove the outliers and look at the majority.

Do you know the difference between character and characterisation when you are crafting a story? In Story, Robert McKee tells us that characterisation is what you can see, the observable qualities: a person's age, gender, occupation, how they dress. Whereas character is revealed by their action when there are tough choices to be made. In the final season of the West Wing, Bruno (the Republican campaign advisor) finds Senator Santos' (the Democratic presidential candidate) briefcase and Bruno brings it to his boss, Senator Vinnick who's running against Santos. Vinnick is presented with a dilemma: leak the contents of briefcase and gain an advantage in the campaign or return the briefcase to Santos. His actions in tough situations when there is much at stake reveal his character. Vinnick returns the briefcase.

Stories are told at the edge and from the edge. We recount remarkable events which in turn communicate those events that reveal our colleague's character. This is why stories are at the heart of organisational culture but they don't magically appear without a trigger. They come from remarkable things that are happening.

Sometimes people say to me, “does that story really represent the majority of what people think?” My first response is to say we are less interested in a single story than the patterns many stories reveal. But the question does reveal bell-curve thinking where the outliers don't matter, they're an aberration to be ignored. But think of every major breakthrough in how things are done. Each one came from the edges. The trap we make for ourselves comes from the wonderful minds we have and their ability to make sense and explain things after the event. “Of course Google had to happen, 911 was a foreseeable tragedy waiting to happen, the ability to show videos on the net would result in a multi-billion dollar purchase”—bollocks! In hindsight it all makes sense to us and we believe we can predict what is coming next by analysing past events. Those days are well behind us now. From now on we need to design for serendipity, furiously take action, make mistakes, but most importantly create situations where ideas can bubble up and and be tried out.

Stories are a double edge sword. On the one hand they deliver the messages from the edge. On the other hand they are the carriers of sensemaking, explanation and encapsulate the causes that brought us here today. Stories help us simplify what happened. We need to be both wary of and embrace stories. Get used to paradoxes. Charles Handy said it was the age of unreason and I think he is right.

While I haven't finished the book yet I'm finding The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb an inspiration that's generating so many thoughts. Last week I had the good fortune to have a hour long chat with Tom Peters at the AIM Convention. It turns out we both share many intellectual interests such as Karl Weick's work on sensemaking, a love of storytelling and a desire to challenge the status quo. In that conversation Tom said I was crazy if I didn't read The Black Swan. I'm glad I took his advice.

Technorati Tags: black swan, karl weick, nassim nicholas taleb, tom peters

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The Anecdote website is all about storytelling in organisations. You can get an idea of how we use business narrative by checking out how we help organisations use business narrative. But to get you started with some ideas, here are a few links to posts other people have found useful (based in del.icio.us).

• Questions to elicit stories
• Finding success stories
• 10 reflections on storytelling
• The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles
• How I used a story spine
• Hierarchy of explaination or why narrative is becoming more important
• Squidoo Lens on Business Narrative

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In 2002 I wrote a paper called Crafting a Knowledge Strategy. Its basic premise was that a knowledge strategy should be designed for emergence: it should both encourage and cope with unpredictable things happening.

Part of the framework included something I called the knowledge environment, a container of sorts that enabled knowledge to be created, shared, lost and used. Every organisation has a knowledge environment and the role of the knowledge strategy is to work with what's there while incrementally improving it.

So what should you (ideally people within the organisation with some guidance from people like me) examine in a knowledge environment in order to make improvements? Mnemonics helps you remember lists so this is what we came up with.

Space—physical space has a significant impact on how knowledge flows
Technology—what's there to support knowledge work?
Organisation and People—organisational structures, roles, HR processes, rewards and recognition
Routines and Rituals—important business processes, rituals people talk about
Information—can you find the good stuff?
External—external factors affecting knowledge, job markets, industry trends, competitors, clients
Support—is KM supported by the executive? what are the tangible support structures

What have we missed?

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Here is a great quote from Ursula K. LeGuin that succinctly describes complexity. It was posted by Kathleen Osta to the Open Space List earlier today.

The only thing that makes life possible
is permanent, intolerable uncertainty;
not knowing what comes next

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“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

When Einstein uttered these words little did he know that he was stating the case for techniques like Most Significant Change (MSC).

MSC is a simple process for helping senior decision-makers develop a gut feel for what an initiative has achieved. It’s not a replacement for gathering and analysing the numbers. Rather is a supplemental evaluation that helps to systematically develop decision-makers' intuitive knowledge. And research shows that many of the decisions we make are based on our judgements and intuitive, so it’s a part of our knowledge we mustn’t ignore.1 2

Here's how MSC works. It can be done in 4 steps.

STEP 1 - COLLECT STORIES OF SIGNIFICANT CHANGE

The process starts by asking two simple questions of the people affected by the initiative of interest.

1. What is the most significant change that happened since the initiative started?
2. Why is this change significant for you?

STEP 2 – IDENTIFY AND ASSEMBLE THE DECISION-MAKERS WHO NEED TO KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AS A RESULT OF THE INITIATIVE.

This step is crucial to the success of the evaluation and consists of the evaluation designers asking the question, “Who needs to know, in their gut, the impact this initiative is having?”. These decision-makers could be at any level in the organisation, in any location. The evaluation designer then arranges the decision-makers into groups of 6-8 people and arranges for these groups to meet for 90 minutes or so to consider the significant change stories collected in Step 1.

STEP 3 – SELECTING THE MOST SIGNIFICANT CHANGE STORY

When you have your decision-makers in a room the facilitator guides the group in a discussion about 4 to 6 of the stories that where selected. In fact, we encourage the group to read each story then argue why they think a story is most significant. This discussion helps embed the stories in the minds of the participants while raising issues of strategies and implementation. The participants experience a lively debate and get to know one another and the issues affecting people in the field. Most importantly they develop an intuitive understanding of the impact the initiative is having. At the end of the session the group agrees on a most significant story and describes why they selected it. They also identify actions they will take to reinforce the good things that are happening and disrupt the undesirable outcomes.

The result is communicated to the original storytellers. The most significant change story from each group is then made available to the next level in the organisation, such as an executive group, who repeats the process with the subset of stories.

STEP 4 – MAKING THE STORIES AND WHAT WAS SELECTED AVAILABLE

The evaluation concludes by collating all the stories and creating a document that includes which stories were selected and why.
Invariably lessons are learned during the process and these ideas can be then fed into a continuous improvement process.
The selection process is frequently scheduled to occur on a regular cycle. Organisations that use MSC often select a period of between selections of 3-6 months to evaluate ongoing change.

Additional resources

How to conduct an MSC selection workshop

Dart, J. and R. Davies (2003). “A Dialogical, Story-Based Evaluation Tool: The Most Significant Change Technique.” The American Journal of Evaluation 24(2): 137.

A short history of MSC

Zahmoo - software for supporting MSC projects

References

1. Klein, G. (2003). Intuition at Work. New York, Currency Doubleday.

2. Westen, D. (2007). The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York, PublicAffairs.

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How do they get away with such appalling behaviour? I've seen some dreadful displays by managers who seem to revel in the power and forgetting their role is to serve their staff so everyone can deliver value to their clients/stakeholders. Bob Sutton calls these people assholes and has written a neat book about them (The No Asshole Rule) and how to survive their despicable behaviour (here's a list of survival tips).

So if 'Who Killed Channel 9' by Gerald Stone is true, there is a new pantheon of arseholes to be considered in Australia. In a stinging confrontation with channel nine executives, Kerry Packer hurled one accusation and expletive after another. Rory Callaghan, head of light entertainment, had the following interchange with Packer:

'So where are the figures I asked you to get for the last ten years of Sale of the Century?'

Callaghan was left absolutely stunned. 'You never asked me for those figures,' he replied.

'I f...ing well did,' he snarled.

'No you didn't,' Callaghan bravely persisted.

'Right,' Packer retorted, 'let's fix this once and for all.' With that he picked up the phone to his personal assistant back at Park Street, Di Stone, and barked into the mouthpiece. 'Di, who's the f...ing idiot I spoke to about getting all those statistics for Sale of the Century - you know, so we can discuss the seven o'clock slot?' He listened for a moment, then Callaghan could almost sniff the brimstone on the dragon's breath, 'Rory Callaghan! That's exactly what I f...ing thought!'

In the next couple of pages of the book we discover the call with Di Stone was a charade and there was no one at the other end of the telephone.

Technorati Tags: assholes, bob sutton, kerry packer

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Welcome to the September Anecdote newsletter. It's been a busy but exciting past month. During August we celebrated Anecdote's third birthday and to mark the occasion, Shawn put together a number of short presentations exploring our history. This short history of Anecdote can be found on our blog:

In this edition of the newsletter we have:

* Book review: Understanding Comics
* Technique: Decision Games
* What we're up to
* Productivity Tip: TinyURL
* Breaking News

We hope you enjoy reading it. Feel free to send any comments, insights or feedback you might have.

Regards -- the Anecdote team

Books we're reading...

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

A couple of years ago now, I read Dan Pink's "A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age". This book had such a big impact on me, inspiring both a number of personal changes and a more recent career change! So when I read Dan's recommendation of Scott McClouds; "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" as "... one of the best books I've ever read.", I though WOW! that's some sort of recommendation, I've got to see this for myself.

While this book might have been Pink best book, for me that mantel is still held by J.R.R Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings'. Nevertheless, 'Understanding Comics' certainly is an extremely interesting look at the strange, and yet somehow familiar world of comics.

The first thing that strikes you is that the book is written as a book-length comic. A brave and innovative approach. Yet it's appealing, and 'walks the walk' in terms of applying his own craft as a means of demonstrating what he's talking about. An amazing experiential form of writing. It's easy to digest, whilst at the same time thought provoking and interesting.

Not only does it explain how comics work but covers off a range of other comic related topics: looking historically at the use of comics as a medium; exploring the different styles and uses of transitions; time and motion and other techniques. McCloud also touches briefly on some weighty philosophical subjects, including the relationship between art and understanding. His look at the pictorial representation used in comics to explain the way that they represent the world and the reader is at first a little mind-boggling, but on further inspection is fascinating.

McCloud's use of a 'map' or triangular model of visual iconography to show the range of iconic abstraction to photographic representation (horizontal axis) and the range of ‘pure’ abstraction to representation (vertical axis) used in comics is useful. The plotting of different types of comics against this map was enlightening as it allows an insight into why artists may have chosen a certain style, and what they are trying to communicate through the art.

McCloud states that his goal in writing the book is to "encourage the reader to consider exploring, or continuing to explore comics on their own." Judged against this criteria, I have no choice but to say that he achieved what he set out to do. He has piqued my curiosity in the comic art form, and rekindled a dormant passion that I had for visual and graphic arts as forms of communication. I'm off to the library to dig out some comic books.

Techniques we're using ...

Decision Games: Developing intuition and problem solving skills through systematic and smart practice.

Meaningful experience improves your intuition by helping you to build patterns and mental models. Real life is experience is hard to beat but sometimes you don’t get the opportunity. And it may be that we can’t afford to learn from our mistakes. Anecdote recently worked on a project for a government department where we used decision games to help new starters get this practice. It is a technique described by Gary Klein in his book “Intuition at Work.”

Decision games help you:

1. Identify and understand the decision requirements of your job
2. Practice the difficult decisions in context; and
3. Review your decision making experience.

Decision games have a name, some background, a narrative description of the scenario itself and usually some sort of visual representation. They are stories that build to a climax and a dilemma. The actual decision is less important than the thinking that goes into it. It’s merely a device to trigger the decision making process and allow the group to talk about it and transfer their knowledge.

A decision game should use a personal experience that focuses on a type of judgement where people are repeatedly struggling. Stories collected from within the organistion are a good basis to build a game upon.

You can play decision games on your own but you lose much of the value gained from group learning. Small groups of six to eight people are ideal. The people in the organisation are the best people to develop the games and Anecdote can help facilitate the game development based on stories collected. Good learning can also come out of the process of constructing the games. You can even run a decision game online in a discussion forum.

You aren't just restricted to asking what decision they would make. You can also ask them what information they would gather, or what questions they would have, or how they would assess the situation. Ask them what problems the might anticipate, or what they would expect to happen in the future or what guidance they would offer. These are all ways people use their intuition.

They can also think about the external and internal forces that might be at work. What are the emotions and perceptions that might have influenced your decision and that might have influenced the behaviour of other scenario protagonists? Then consider what external factors might have influenced your decision and the behaviour of others in the scenario.

Here is an example of a decision game we used on our recent project.

-Giving someone a lift-

You have recently joined a government agency. The department was keen to employ you in this regional role because you will be able to work closely with the locals and form an effective link with the department. You have taken on a role as a project officer and will be helping, among other things, to organise job fairs in regional Victoria.

Two weeks ago your supervisor called you into her office and told you that you will be attending two job fairs, one in Bairnsdale and the other in Lakes Entrance. Your supervisor says you will need to take a government vehicle and there is one important rule that must be followed: only government employees can travel in the car because of insurance requirements.

Your supervisor has been terrific in getting you up to speed in the department. She really seems to care about your feelings and progress but at the same time it’s clear she is tough but fair.

On the day of the job fair you drive down early to Bairnsdale and the morning is a fabulous event for the department. All of the community is there and you catch up with plenty of people you have known forever and meet many more. You know there are some respected community leaders in town that you must catch up with so you drop in and pay your respects.

At lunchtime you realise you’d better get going to Lakes Entrance and as you start travelling out of town you notice a group of people next to the road. They are hitching tyo Lakes Entrance. They flag you down and ask for lift.

You remember the instructions you were given back by your supervisor.

Take three minutes and determine how you think you should proceed and consider the reasons for your suggestions.

We had heard this story told in the early stage of the project and there were some interesting solutions presented by staff and managers. But when it was presented as a decision game with a mixed group of new starters and experienced staff we were amazed at the variety and number of great new options that were suggested by the group. Experience teaches the biggest lessons and makes the biggest impressions.

What we're up to ...
Consulting Engagements and Projects:

• Aboriginal Staff Induction project for Large Government Department
• Knowledge Strategy program and regional deployment for Government authority
• Evaluation of a systems implementation for a large construction company
• Leadership program for a multinational Pharmaceuticals company
• Business strategy and leadership development for Defence organisation

Upcoming Events that we're running or attending:

• 04-Sep - Anecdote: Narrative Techniques for Knowledge Retention breakfast. Sydney, AU.
• 05-Sep - Anecdote: Narrative Techniques for Knowledge Retention breakfast. Canberra, AU.
• 06-Sep - Anecdote: Narrative Techniques for Knowledge Retention breakfast. Melbourne, AU.
• 19-Sep - Attending Intranet '07 Conference. Sydney, AU.
• 16-19 Sep - Attending AIM Conference, Sydney, AU.

Productivity tips ...
Partly because we're busy, but also as part of our quest for continuous learning and improvement, here at Anecdote, we're always looking for ways to improve our own personal productivity. We thought that we'd share a few tips and tricks ...

tinyURL:

Have you ever experienced the frustration of sending a web link (URL) in an email only to realise that it has 'broken' when sent, causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? I have: that was until a friend pointed me towards a simple solution ... tinyUrls.

What is it? Simply, it's a website http://tinyurl.com that enables you to turn a URL that looks like this:

http://yellowpages.com.ausearchpostCategory
Search.doheadingCode=22276&sortBy
Alphabetical=false&businessType=comic+books
&sortByClosestMatch=false&sortByDistance
=false&sortByDetail=true&locationClue=All
+States&stateId=9&safeLocationClue=All
+States&currentLetter=

into this tinyURL:

http://tinyurl.com/3yus53

To do this, all that you need to do is copy and paste the long URL from your browser into a box on the tinyURL website and hit a button.

You can then copy and paste the tinyURL into your email. This URL will not break and never expires, meaning that the URL can be accessed at any time in the future, or can be re-used.

A simple solution that works well.

Breaking News ...
Last week we delivered our Narrative Techniques for Knowledge Retention seminars to audiences in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. We had some great conversations, shared our ideas and also learnt a lot.

Knowledge retention is certainly a big issue that many organisations face, not only in the coming years with the 'baby boomers' leaving the workforce, but also in the more immediately future. With today's employees constantly on the move and a high churn rate in the labor market new types of employee-employer relationships are created. Business is now complex, interconnected, messy and unpredictable.

New approaches and different ways of working together will be required to deal with this. That's why narrative techniques - stories and intuition - should play an important role in organisations knowledge retention strategy, particularly in the key area of transfering knowledge. Why? Because narrative techniques are a great way to get a handle on this messiness. Listening and working with the stories people are telling in your organisation delivers facts in context with emotion, and carry with them some of the messiness inherent in the business environment. We've shared a couple of videos on our blog of our client, Arthur Shelley from Cadbury Schweppes, talking about how knowledge has been lost, shared and recovered in his organisation, which illustrate the power of narrative.

If you'd like to know more about our approach to knowledge retention or if you're interested in attending a seminar on this topic in the near future, send an email to: info@anecdote.com.au.

++++++++++++++++++++++

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Jennifer Jones mentions that she has been working with Intel on the social media activities and how storytelling plays an important role in Intel's success in this area.

Jennifer makes the following observation:

However, I am struck when I watch vblogs and listen to podcasts how many people today are not storytelling with social media. They don't have a beginning, middle and end to their pieces, but instead often just list facts and thoughts, and don't connect the information so that the viewer/listener etc. gets the point of the podcast, video blog, etc

Me too. I'm surprised at how many people talk about stories but don't know what one looks or sounds like. A story is a recounting of what happened or what might happen. It's not an opinion, or what someone thinks, or a description of how things work, or don't. To get the most from storytelling we will need to know what a story looks like.

A while back I suggested the following approach to identifying a story.

For every power however there is an associated curse. When you are aware of stories you see them everywhere and sometimes you will be sitting there admiring the speaker's use of stories instead of being immersed in their telling.

And if you want to see more examples of anecdote just check out our 'anecdotes' category.

Thanks to Nancy White for pointing Jennifer's post out to me.

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I'm giving a presentation to the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers (AIPIO) conference in October so I'm keeping my eye out for relevant news items. Here's one passed on to me by Nerida Hart. Any other pointers would be appreciated. The topic is narrative approaches to knowledge retention.

Young feds bring intell changes: A workforce bought up to use collaboration tools is making the CIA Web 2.0-savvy

“How do you transform analysis?” asked Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). “One word: attitude. For people to collaborate and bring new and vital skills to the intelligence community, we need to change our attitude.”

Technorati Tags: intelligence

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On a recent flight to Sydney, I was flicking through the Virgin Blue in-flight magazine 'Voyeur' and came across an interesting article about the ABC-TV series South Side Story, a documentary on the turnaround of the South Sydney Rabbitohs - an organisation that has seen its fair share of turmoil in recent years. Here's a quote that particularly stood out ...

"The major challenge was how do we get people to think only about what they can achieve in the future, as opposed to what they have witnessed in the past? ... That's why we've been getting players to share their stories and to build an ethos between them."

This is an interesting real-world example of how an organisation is using narrative to transform their flagging team into a high-performance organisation. It'll be interesting to watch their progress and see if it translates into both on-field and off-field success.

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Story techniques are becoming popular but I do worry that people will become overly focussed on capturing stories with the hope that someone will search the story database in search of how to get things done. The other, and complimentary, approach is to create workplaces where it's natural to tell (and listen to) stories and therefore create spaces for constant knowledge flow.

Here are some ideas on how you might make your workplace more storyable.

• Do remarkable things. Stories are told when there is something worth telling a story about. And if there is very little to remark on that helps guide the organisation, then people will delve into the minutiae, the trivial, the professional pulp fiction
• Know how to ask story eliciting questions. Don't just ask for the facts. Ask “What happened?” “Tell me about a time when ...” “When was the last time ...”
• Eat together. We seem so busy these days. In many workplaces people don't even stop for lunch. Big mistake. The best stories, the most important stories are told over a meal.
• Tell stories. Someone has to start modelling the behaviour so why not start the trend yourself. But don't make it a big thing by saying things like, “I've got this great story to tell you ...” Just slide into examples and recount your experiences.

How storyable is your workplace?

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