I’ll remember Strategy and the Fat Smoker (SATFS) by David Maister for two things: helping me realise that creating a resolve in a group to take action is more important than merely creating insights into what should be done; and putting me on to the weight-loss analogy as a way of talking about facilitating change in a business context.

I’ve put both ideas into practice. First, I’ve recognised that our storytelling work is an important way to create resolve in a change initiative, such as developing a knowledge strategy. Second, we have incorporated the weight-loss analogy in our workshops and seminars to help people to think more deeply about what’s required for people to change.

I have to admit, when I received my copy of SATFS I was in two minds about the book. I admire David’s work and I’ve read most of his papers, listened to the podcasts and watched the online videos (is this a little too obsessive?). So when I heard that SATFS was a compilation of articles written from 2005, I thought, “Oh well, I guess it will be nice to have all the articles in one place.”

So I was pleasantly surprised by just how fresh the articles felt and how many good ideas I rediscovered. David creates an appealing flow of topics reinforcing the main theme of getting people to take action. This action-oriented approach makes tremendous sense because, as the business environment becomes even more complex and the issues we try to solve don’t have clear answers (even defining the problems will become more illusive), a good way to proceed is to take action and see what emerges. Then nurture the good and disrupt the bad.

There are two specific writing habits David employs that I really enjoy: first he gives the nitty-gritty details and even provides examples of what you might say in a given situation. For example, when talking about being a trusted advisor and helping clients find a professional service they need when you are not best placed to provide it, David suggests saying something like, “We are not your best choice for that new need. We can do it if you insist, but you may be better served to go to a specialist who can focus on providing the particular client benefit you seek.” And then take the next step to help your client find that needed specialist.

I also like the way David peppers each chapter with questions that prompt us to think differently about strategy. Here are a couple of examples:
“If so many people have offered such practical wisdom, and their work has been so well disseminated, publicized and understood, why do so many managers fail to actually apply all this practical wisdom?”

“The essential questions of strategy are these: ‘Which of our habits are we really prepared to change, permanently and forever? Which lifestyle changes are we really prepared to make? What issues are we really ready to tackle?’”

Because each chapter was originally written as a standalone article, it’s easy to dip into the book at any point. I found myself reading from the beginning to about the middle of the book and then I jumped around following my current interests.

My only suggestion for improvement would be to add end notes so we can follow up references more easily.

David’s passion and field of focus is the professional service firm but this book has a much wider appeal and relevance. Personally, I was able to immediately translate many of the ideas in what we are doing in the field of knowledge management and the application of business narrative techniques. Strategy and the Fat Smoker has the main characteristics that I look for in a book: a good read, new ideas, practical, thought provoking, and most importantly, helping to create new conversations. I thoroughly recommend you to pick up a copy.

The conduit metaphor is a common way for people to imagine how information is passed from one person to another. This metaphor paints a picture of information passing as a message to a receiver and the receiver picks it up and pops it in their mind. I have even seen a keynote speech recently where the speaker made the additional point that the receiver needs to be pointing their antenna in the right direction to pick up the signal.

I have been aware for sometime that this metaphor is unreliable at best and I was recently reminded of this fact reading Steven Pinker's latest book, The Stuff of Thought.

Another misleading conceptual formula is the conduit metaphor, in which to know is to have something and to communicate is to send it in a package. Again, it has a kernel of truth; if information were never transmitted with some fidelity from mind to mind, knowledge could never accumulate in a society, and language itself would be useless. But cognitive science has repeatedly shown ways in which the metaphor falls short. ... language understanding is more than just extracting literal meaning, as George Costanza learned too late when he realized that coffee doesn't necessarily mean coffee [his girlfriend asks him up for coffee and he says no because it keeps him up at night]. And once a meaning is extracted and stored in memory, it does not sit there like a knickknack on a shelf; memory research confirms Twain's observation that people tend to remember things whether they happened or not. Traditional education was dominated by a version of the conduit metaphor sometimes called the savings-and-loans model: the teacher dispenses nuggets of information to the pupils, who try to retain them in their mind long enough to give them back on an exam.

But now I'm stumped. Is there a better metaphor or analogy for illustrating how we transfer our knowledge? Until we have one, the conduit metaphor will reign supreme and organisations will continue to waste money training staff by employing the expert to lecture students.

Some of the references Pinker makes include:

Blakemore, S. J., and U. Frith. The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005.

Schacter, D. L. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

There are a whole bunch of useful concepts used by organisations to focus their community of practice and knowledge management programs. Some of the more useful and memorable ones are listed below:

• Learn Before, Learn During, Learn After - the concept used by BP and described by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell in 'Learning to Fly', which remains an excellent practical reference on communities of practice and KM in genel
• Connections, Conversations, Content - the core concept of the US Army CompanyCommand Professional Forum as described in the book 'CompanyCommand' by Nancy Dixon et al. This concept is described as "a network of company commanders who connect in conversation about relevant content to advance the practice of company command" (page 3).
• Discover and Adopt, Discover and Adapt, Develop and Share - the CoP mantra developed and used by the communities of practice within ExxonMobil
• Ask, Learn, Share - used by Shell International to provide the focus for their community of practice program. The 'Shell Blue Book' remains a fantastic example of collecting and presenting CoP success stories and we previously blogged about it here.

We have been working during the year with Mark Bennett, who is the steward of Rio Tinto's extensive communities of practice program. Mark has been looking for an appropriate concept to use within Rio Tinto and while liking the concept of ask-learn-share, its linear nature didn't sit right. So Mark has designed this concept and is testing its utility in simply describing the focus of their CoP initiatives.

Rio Tinto's coal division here in Australia recently published a booklet called 'Stories from the Coal Face' and, inspired by the Shell Blue Book, it describes how CoP have contributed to the business. Mark Quinn (yes, another Mark) is the driving force behind this booklet and behind the CoP activities within the Rio Tinto coal business. It is an internal publication so you might have difficulty getting your hands on a copy, but well worth it if you can.

We had a great day on Monday running our Narrative Techniques for Business workshop in Canberra. The venue overlooked Lake Burley Griffin and we had a fun group of people attend from within Canberra and interstate.

I started at Anecdote in mid-October and one of the things I have been working on is our 2008 workshop schedule. We’ve decided to focus on three of our most popular workshops: Storytelling for Business Leaders, Starting and Sustaining Communities of Practice, and Narrative Techniques for Business. We’ve just released our schedule for 2008, which can be found on the workshops page of our website. We also have a printable version of this calendar. For more information, or to register for a workshop, please follow the links, or e-mail us on info@anecdote.com.au for more information. We hope to see you at one of our workshops next year.

I just read a great article over at the thestar.com about Nobel laureate Carl Wieman who wants professors to rethink how they teach.

His message? In a nutshell: reduce the load; stimulate the brain.

A lot of what he recommends is not just applicable to teaching science, it's also relevant to anyone who presents information to others or works with groups (meetings, presentations, workshops, training etc).

Basically, we need to up the interaction quotient folks!.

A strange recurring pattern involving pigeons seems to have emerged in my life recently.

A pigeon walked into my house the other day after I had left the back door open. It caused a bit of a ruckus when my dog realised what was going on and started chasing it all around the house, bouncing off the furniture and trying to climb the walls to catch it. Relating this incident to a friend a few days later triggered childhood memories of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Anyway, I digress.

Yesterday morning while having coffee with a colleague, we talked about the often inappropriate use of the 'target' metaphor so often used in business, and ended up having an interesting discussion about how pigeons find their way home. I'm no expert on pigeons, so intrigued, I decided to do a little research. Here's what I found:

When reared in a particular loft, a young pigeon can be transported hundreds of miles away and successfully find its way home from the release site. Because it requires the pigeon to pinpoint a specific location, this behavior necessitates more than the compass orientation system of migratory birds. Instead, the pigeon must be able to determine its position relative to the location of the home loft in order to orient itself in the proper direction. In doing so, pigeons use a variety of external cues such as the sun, visual landmarks, olfactory cues, and the earth's magnetic field. Depending on the weather conditions, where the pigeon was raised, and the nature of the release site, pigeons use a combination of these cues to determine their flight path. [1]

After exploring this in more detail, it seems like this might be a useful alternative metaphor for exploring strategy and objective setting, particularly in the complex and rapidly changing environments in which organisations operate today where linear thinking is mostly inappropriate and ineffective.

1. from a copy of articles published by Cornell University: http://albertaclassic.com/suncomp.php