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| 29/02/08 | | 4 Stories themes that can help engage staff |
The January '08 cover of CIO magazine provokes an interesting thought about managing people: There's so much to be done to bring and retain people in an organization.
Hidden within these 23 points is a learning curve that the employee is expected to leap across. So what is the best way to 'hang on to them'?
To make the work experience interesting and engaging for staff, managers could dig out stories from their workplace.
These stories are simply examples of things that worked well. Here's four examples to seek out:
1. How a training opportunity made a difference
2. When a manager was a good listener
3. How a bunch of helpful colleagues made life easier
4. When good work was recognized
These stories are a great resource for staff induction. What other stories themes can you think of?
PS: If you're keen to find such stories in your workplace, come along for our Narrative Techniques for Business Workshop to learn how to elicit stories.
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| 28/02/08 | | An anecdote's point of view |
Ford Harding has just posted two versions of the same anecdote. The first paints the consultant as the hero while the second focusses on the effort of the client. Ford wants us to consider which version would we tell and why.
Version #1
Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning. Not long ago, a major power company was sued for breach of a twenty-year power contract. The plaintiffs were asking for damages in excess of one billion dollars, the value of the damages hinging on the discount rate used in their calculation.
Multiple experts offered the defendant ways to calculate the rate. We spent many hours educating the general counsel on the credibility of the alternative ways to calculate a discount rate and persuaded him of the intellectual superiority of our approach. When the arbitrators compared our estimation of the discount rate with the one provided by the plaintiff’s expert, they found ours more credible. The power company ended up paying the plaintiff only $115 million, far less than they would have had to pay if the plaintiffs had won or one of the other experts’ calculations of the discount rate had been presented.Version #2
Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning. Not long ago, a major power company was sued for breach of a twenty-year power contract. The plaintiffs were asking for damages in excess of one billion dollars, the value of the damages hinging on the discount rate used in their calculation.
The attorney representing the company asked several experts to calculate the rate. He spent many hours with the power company’s general counsel evaluating the credibility of the alternative ways to calculate a rate, and selected our experts’ approach. When he took the case before arbitrators, they found his arguments both intellectually superior and more compellingly presented than those provided by the plaintiff’s attorney. The power company ended up paying the plaintiff only $115 million, far less than they would have had to pay if the plaintiffs had won or one of the other experts’ calculations of the discount rate had been presented.
There are a couple of other interesting features these stories display that are worth talking about. Each one is prefaced by a statement summarising the moral of the story. It's an effective approach which I've noted in the work of Victor Frankl. It's conversational and creates a mystery of sorts because we want to understand what is meant by the statement.
Both stories are without real people's names. It's the sort of story written up in case studies that gently washes an element of truth from what's been said. It's harder to check these stories out. Did it really happen? People love details and the best stories have the names of the characters. I understand what this type of business story lacks names in its written form: people are uncomfortable talking about what happens inside organisations. But when told orally names are important.
| 28/02/08 | | Meeting to talk about storytelling, narrative and complexity |
I run a meetup group in Melbourne call Emergence and we get together for drinks and dinner each month. Our next meeting is on the 13th March at 6pm. For full details and to RSVP go to here. It very informal and just a good way to catch up with new people and talk about things that interest us. Everyone is welcome.
| 27/02/08 | | Anecdote's will be checked and re-checked |
Expect any anecdote you tell to be tested and retested, especially if you are a politician. Barrack Obama is a storyteller par excellence and so when he recounts a story you can bet there is an army of doubters checking out its validity. Here is the anecdote in question reported in the New Republic.
"You know, I've heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon--supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn't have enough ammunition, they didn't have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief."
The same is true for organisational leaders. Don't get lazy. Don't think you can slip one past without employees noticing that you are garnishing the facts. Good stories are retold and good stories are checked out. Authenticity is the key.
| 24/02/08 | | What is thought? |
I'm listening to Will Durant's book, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, and I noticed this passage which help us understand why we get in such a pickle when we try and define knowledge.
“What is thought? It baffles description because it includes everything through which it might be defined. It is the most immediate fact that we know, and the last mystery of our being. All other things come to us as it forms, and all human achievements find in it their source and their goal. Its appearance is the great turning point in the drama of evolution.”
| 24/02/08 | | Knowledge management lessons |
As the co-ordinator of the SIKMLeaders community of practice, Stan Garfield asked the community members this question:
"If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"
Here's my answer.
All KM is change managementView every knowledge management initiative as a change initiative, which means helping the leadership group to imagine what it will be like when it's done and after imagining it, they want it. It also means getting the employees engaged in working out how it's going to work and then getting people to volunteer to work on it. It will also involve a recognition that most KM initiatives are affected by culture (actually, what isn't) and culture is never completed, done, ticked off the list of things to do. Consequently, a continuous improvement approach is needed.
Link to what matters
Make sure that the the most powerful people in the organisation understand and believe the answer to, "so what?" Always link the KM initiative to what people care about. Mostly that's the business strategy but there have been times when I've worked with organisations without a clear business strategy, so a linkage there wasn't going to help. Find out what matters and if the KM initiatives doesn't make a difference, dump it rather than try and make it fit. A poor fitting KM initiative will eventually unravel anyway so it's better to dump it early than to forced to dump it when heaps of resources have been spent and it's barely limping along.
Collect stories early and often
It's often hard to quantify the value of KM initiatives. So whenever you hear a real live experience, no matter how small, take a note of what happened and tell others. We're helping an engineering firm start a community of practice for its draftspeople. At the first teleconference a woman in Newcastle recounted how she was creating a library of screws for a particular type of aircraft. A fellow in Adelaide piped up saying they already have a library of screws and it also includes auto-placement. You could hear the excitement in the woman's voice on hearing this work had already been done, "and it even has auto-placement." The couple joined forces and updated the library and made it available to the whole community.
This is a small story but one senior leadership heard from the very beginning of the community's development and they could retell to other leaders in the company while finishing their anecdote with, "and this is just one thing the community is doing." While the business benefits must be articulated, the stories gave the community time to establish themselves.
| 22/02/08 | | Everyone has a story... |
...is the byline of Smith, an online storytelling community that provides a space to read, write, and share stories. Just over twelve months ago they posed a challenge to the community that was based on the famous $10 bet that Ernest Hemingway rose to conquer - that he could not write a short story in six words. His pithy and evocative response: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never Worn." shows that a story does not have to be long and complicated to deliver a punch to the emotions. Over 15,000 people took up the challenge, delivering funny, eloquent and addictive results. Smith have just released 852 of the best of them in this book Not quite what I was planning.
It says a great deal about our willingness to tell our stories, no matter how small. I also seem to find writing to a specific set of directions is always a lot of fun and obviously I am not alone in this. Smith describes the book as "the most literary toilet reading you'll ever find".
And my mini-memoir? It's late. Make up your mind.
| 22/02/08 | | Running a knowledge market on a teleconference |
Inspired by a conversation with Chris Young at Thiess, Robyn and I ran a knowledge market activity with our client and their spatial modeller community of practice.
We had three objectives:
- Help participants appreciate the nature of what members are keen to share with the community and what members are seeking to learn
- Create new connections among community members
- Identify knowledge gaps
This is how we did it.
The invite
Before the teleconference we invited all members to email us one thing they were keen to share with the group and one thing they would like to learn from the group. It's important to emphasise in the invitation that their offering and request should be as specific as possible. Rather than offer "35 years of experience in aeronautical parts design" suggest something like, "I have developed a tool for estimating the ..." Look for tools, techniques, stories of success and failure, data, templates. Things community members would value.
Facilitating the session
We compiled the offerings and requests in a spreadsheet and recorded the members name who was offering or requesting.
On the teleconference we gave a quick introduction and described the objectives.
Then we started with the offers. We said something like, "John Smith has a technique he's developed for modelling motherboards that reduce the likelihood of manufacturing faults. Anyone interested?" People would pipe up and we recorded their names. Sometime the offerer would provide some additional explanation of what was on offer.
After the offers we did a similar thing for the requests.
It generated lots of conversations and you can tell members were sorting out issues and decided to catch up later for a more in depth conversation.
Results
We ran a short survey after the meeting. All 14 attendees responded to the survey. On a scale of great, good, neither good or bad, bad, awful, 2 people rated the meeting as great and 12 rated it as good.
Lessons
Getting people to be as specific as possible is an important factor in successfully running this session.
Let me know if you give it a try. Love to know how it goes for your community.
| 19/02/08 | | Making a difference |
I know we keep harping on about this, but little things can make a big difference! Here's an inspiring Indian public announcement showing a great example:
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| 18/02/08 | | Looking for the single, correct answer can be dumb |
Thanks to ken (one of our favourite Anecdote blog commentors) for this link of Malcolm Gladwell doing what he does best: telling a story which helps us understand something new—this time it's spaghetti sauce. The story is about Howard Moskowitz and how he transformed our views of retail choice and explains why we have so many varieties of mustard, soft drinks and practically anything else you can buy from the supermarket. But more importantly we learn that looking for the single correct answer might not be the best solution.
I won't spoil the story but watch out for how Gladwell introduces his character and how story comes before reason or interpretation. And see how he creates mystery from the outset and gradually reveals the culprit.
Gladwell's essay covering the same topic is here.
| 18/02/08 | | Last days to register for our narrative courses in Canberra and Melbourne |
Join organisations like IBM, AstraZeneca, National Australia Bank, BHP Billiton, The Treasury and Thiess and register for our Narrative Techniques for Business workshop in Melbourne next Wednesday 27th. To find out more and register click here.
And next week (26th) in Canberra we will be running a workshop on how to tell better stories in a business context to improve communication. Check out Storytelling for Leaders to register.
Both workshops cost $495.
| 12/02/08 | | Questions |
I've created a new blog category today called "questions." I'm planning to use it to capture some of the excellent story eliciting questions I come across in our work and reading. So to kick things off here is a question from Christina Baldwin:
"Can you keep a confidence? Describe a story about confidentiality. What is important to you about confidentiality?"
We would love to hear your story. Just post it in the comments.
Baldwin, Christina. Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story. Novato, California: New World Library, 2005.
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| 12/02/08 | | Good intentions and the ability to apologise go hand-in-hand |
I caught up with Julie Perrin yesterday. Julie is a storyteller and performer and we got talking about the dangers of spin in teaching people storytelling. Julie made the important point that any storytelling effort must start with good intentions and be told with authenticity.
Then it dawned on me: in a complex world many outcomes are largely unpredictable and so while our intentions might have been sound at the outset, the result might unexpectedly cause pain to someone. Consequently the ability and willingness of people to apologise is a fundamental business skill. I wrote this post a year ago on ways to say sorry to rebuild trust.
This thought was prompted by radio discussion yesterday morning about the impending apology the Australia government will give to Aboriginal people for the past practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families and putting them into foster homes. Tomorrow will be a historic day.
One radio listener sent a message into John Faine (the radio announcer) and said something like: "Saying sorry is the first step when a mistake is made in order to maintain a relationship regardless of the intention" (she said it much better than that. Please let me know the actual wording if you heard it). The many relationships at work are important because they have such an impact on how we feel and our ability to do a good job.
The ability to say sorry sincerely is also important in the growing number of collaborations we are now seeing in business.
How to say sorry1
- 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
- offer some form of forgiveness, atonement, or action designed to undo the violation and rebuild the trust
1. Lindskold, S. (1978). “Trust development, the GRIT proposal, and the affects of conciliatory acts on conflict and cooperation.” Psychological Bulletin 85: 772-793.
| 9/02/08 | | The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson is now free |
The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson is all about innovation, particularly that type of innovation which occurs when two or more different disciplines, mindsets, ways of doing things, collide and new idea emerges. It seems that Frans learned that "best-selling author Paolo Coelho boosted sales in Russia by uploading a pirate copy of his book, The Alchemist," and decided this was something he would try out but in this case with the permission of his publisher. Get the free version from the Medici Effect website.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Medici Effect and it's full of engaging stories and practical ideas. As an entrepreneur I was anxious to have confirmed that nearly every new business fails a number of time before it gets it business strategy right. Frans goes on to quote Clayton Christensen from his best-selling book The Innovator's Dilemma:
Research has shown, in fact, that the vast majority of successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when they began implementing their initial plans and learned what would and would not work in the market. The dominant difference between successful ventures and failed ones, generally, is not the astuteness of their original strategy. Guessing the right strategy at the outset is not nearly as important to success as conserving enough resources (or having relationships with trusted backers or investors) so that new business initiatives get a second or third stab at getting it right. Those that run our of resources or credibility before they can iterate towards a new strategy are the ones that will fail.
| 8/02/08 | | Marshall Goldsmith on balancing technology and other skills |
I heard Marshall Goldsmith say this on my ipod this morning:
"So many people have spent a lifetime for preparing themselves for technological skills yet have spent no time training themselves on how to influence people so the technical skills make a difference."
The same is true for collaboration. So many people have spent countless hours preparing themselves for collaboration technology skills yet have spent no time learning how to collaborate so the technical skills make a difference.
| 7/02/08 | | The link between complexity and narrative? |
Steve Hardy has written an article - What Specifically Do Generalists Do? To quote:
All the elements that make up experiences are very complex when viewed objectively ... but since experience is subjective, it is wonderfully refreshing and most useful to look at that kind of complexity through a human subjective lens and ask simply "what does the experience feel like from this perspective?". Literally seeking to understand the experience, the journey through time and space, for someone else. That perspective automatically integrates all the contributing elements into a whole and helps you appreciate the interdependencies in a way that doing only objective analysis wouldn't.
This is the most succinct--and perhaps the best--description of complexity I've come across. It captures the essence of what we are trying to do in our narrative projects.
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| 6/02/08 | | Business storytelling training in Australia |
Regular readers of our blog are well aware of the many storytelling, business narrative and community of practice workshop we run throughout the year. But if you have just found our site you can download our latest schedule of courses or visit our workshop page to see all the topics and dates.
This month we are offering two workshops:
Narrative Techniques for Business, Melbourne, 27th February
Storytelling for Business Leaders, Canberra, 26th February
Next month we will be visiting Perth to run the Narrative Techniques for Business workshop.
And if you are a fellow blogger we are offering a blogging bonus. If someone mentions your blog when they register, we’ll pay you $50. One blog per registration, of course, but no limit on bonuses per blog, naturally.
| 6/02/08 | | Developing a Collaboration Capability Requires more than Wishful Thinking |
The ability to collaborate is becoming an essential capability for innovative organisations (actually, for any organisation). Imagine getting any big project done without collaborating. Here’s what scientist and Australian of the Year, Fiona Wood, said on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope TV show about collaboration:
“I haven't got the intellectual capacity or the time or energy to actually manufacture all these pieces of jigsaw, but I know where I can find them. I go and I see amazing science being done, I think, ‘Whoa, can we work together? Because that is one of the pieces of the jigsaw, I can see that it will fit and I can see I can help you with maybe a little bit of yours but you can help me with mine.’”
The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It’s something we learn on the job in a fairly hit-and-miss fashion. Some people are naturals but many of us are clueless. It’s no wonder then that developing a collaboration capability is often the number one priority in the work we do to help organisations develop their knowledge strategies.
Establishing a collaboration capability requires someone to foster its development. People would think you are crazy if you suggested a company establish a sales capability without sales people or a human resources capability without a HR team. Yet, we have seen organisations wishing for a collaboration capability without identifying or resourcing people responsible for developing it. Wishful thinking is not enough.
The role of the collaboration co-ordinator (evangelist, manager, specialist; the title doesn’t really matter) would include:
- ferreting out good collaboration practices and tools and keeping up-to-date with the field
- finding situations in the organisation where better collaboration would make a difference to the quality of products and services, the speed of delivering these products and services to clients, and the ability to use a diversity of ideas and approaches to innovate
- helping people learn and adopt collaboration practices and tools
- collecting stories of how collaboration really works for the times you need to justify the role
- connecting people and ideas so new collaborations might flourish
Those organisations that move beyond wishful thinking and commit resources to establishing a collaboration coordination role can often face the frustrating dilemma of wanting the job done but are unable to free someone to do it. We’ve seen this situation a number of times now and have offered an Anecdoter (one of our consultants) to do the job while a suitable permanent staff member is found. Whether the role is filled in house or my a services organisation is immaterial. The important point is that the organisation is signalling to everyone that collaboration is important and that they are serious about enhancing their collaboration capability.
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| 4/02/08 | | Why is presentation important? |
There are probably a 100 reasons why presentation is important. But a laundry list of reasons won't get the point across as effectively as a story can. Here's an interesting anecdote I read recently:
Gary Bush’s passion for his craft [makes him my most memorable teacher]. I took a course called Presentation Fundamentals from him (really, a 3-day Trainer's Training class that, by far, surpassed [another] 5-day class I also took) back in the early 1990's. I still remember it vividly to this day, plus still often use the training materials from that class. I then had the pleasure of developing an entire corporate training curriculum with him and credit him for my learning of the teaching/training craft.My favorite memory of Gary is from the He came into the classroom after a break - no introduction, no explanation, no talking - looking rather disheveled. He started serving pieces of cake by scooping them out with his bare hand and onto brown bathroom-type paper towels. He didn't get very many takers for pieces of cake.
He then left the room and reappeared a few minutes later dressed like a waiter from a fine dining establishment. He had the cake on a fancy rolling serving cart, along with silver, china, and cloth napkins. He served up the cake again, spoke politely to each prospective cake-eater, and obviously got quite a different response the second time round. He then debriefed the whole event with the gist of the message received by the students (without a second of "lecture") being, "it's all in the presentation." The cake was still the same cake, but the audience members' reactions sure were different.
I read this anecdote in an ebook called My Most Memorable Teacher (or Trainer). It’s an amazing compilation of stories put together by Elliot Maise.
To understand and share what makes great teachers, he invited people to send stories about their best teachers. The book contains around 750 testimonials and anecdotes about teachers who made a difference, and the stories give a great insight into what makes the teaching experience memorable. Storytelling, of course, is a key factor.
What an excellent approach to cultivating the right behaviors in people!
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| 3/02/08 | | Lao Tsu on communities of practice development |
Here is a poem by Lao Tsu, a Chinese philosopher circa 700 BC. It's well quoted on the web but it was difficult to find exactly which writing it was included in (any ideas?). Anyway, it speaks to how we should be helping our communities of practice develop.
Go to the People
Live with them
Learn from them,
Love them.Start with what they know,
. . . But with the best leaders
Build with what they have.
When the work is done
the task is accomplished
The people will say,
‘We have done this ourselves.’
| 3/02/08 | | Control Of Anecdote Wrested From Boyfriend |
A news item just in from the US.
NASHVILLE—In what onlookers described as an epic war for conversational dominance, girlfriend Amy Soisson, 28, clawed, battled, and interrupted her way to complete control of an anecdote started Wednesday by her boyfriend, Greg Harvey, 29. According to sources, Harvey was in strong command of the tale's settings and plot points until a brief hiccup in detail gave Soisson an opening to pry custody of the anecdote from Harvey's still gaping mouth. After several futile attempts to recapture the story at its climax, a weary and broken Harvey fell again and again to his girlfriend's ruthless strategy of speaking over him in increasingly louder tones. The long and arduous contest of wills reportedly concluded with Soisson ascending to the rank of sole storyteller, forcing Harvey to retreat to the kitchen and share the anecdote with friends there.