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We're running our last workshops for 2008 this month.

If you're interested in coming along to our Building a Collaborative Workplace workshop, the dates are:

Perth: November 5
Sydney: November 26

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The size of the endeavor doesn't matter as much as how meaningful it becomes to you.

credit: www.gapingvoid.com

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Doctors can easily get into the pattern of treating their patients like a slab of meat to be fixed. Anyone who's spent some time in hospitals have seen doctors waltz into the room, grab the chart from the end of the bed, mumble a few things to themselves, say a word or two to the patient and disappear as quickly as they arrived.

So it was heartening to see that there is a movement building called narrative medicine where doctors read and discuss stories about patients, literary stories and poems. This New York Times article is well worth the two-page read to see what some doctors are doing to engage the emotions of their interns and ensure humanity is returned to the doctor-patient relationship. By reading stories such as Empty Pockets and discussing what it means to the doctors they are creating a space for valuable conversation. This is similar to the Ritz Carlton example. And when asked about the time commitment:

And the time commitment? “It does get pretty busy,” Dr. Kaplan conceded. “But if you want to make time for it, you can. Spending a half hour a day to remember that we are all human, not just doctors or pharmacists or nurses or patients, is important enough that I think you should do it.

via Stephanie West Allen on Working Stories

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Today we've set the date for our Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop to be held in London. I'm looking forward to this trip and catching up with all the good folk in that part of the world who have kept up an interest in our work here in Australia. Please drop me a note if you would like to meet up while I'm there. And we would greatly appreciate your help passing on this message about my visit.

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From talking with people who are trying to improve their collaboration capability, I'm detecting a scepticism with the practice of getting your team or community together to decide, up front, how they will behave and treat each other. The feeling seems to be, "we can spend time talking about our agreed behaviours but then something else emerges that our agreement didn't really cover, so it's a bit of a waste of time."

So, how about this? Teams and communities only agree one behaviour that becomes the catalyst for nudging all the rest in the right direction. The behaviour is simply an open invitation by all members to,

Call Me on It (respectfully and with good intent)

Whenever a person does something other members believe strays from the group's values, members will talk about it and in doing so enables the group's values in action to emerge and become visible.

For this to work everyone will need to develop the skill to receive, which in some cases will be sensitive, feedback. Most importantly, the person receiving the feedback must listen and not let their emotions send them into a typical flight or fight tailspin. This will be a crucial conversation.

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I was amazed when I watched this presentation about the history of banking. I had no idea that banks could conjure money from nowhere and loan it to you. Thanks to Euan Semple for the link.

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Correction: In a blog post on the 19 July 2008 I incorrectly identified Lorenz Grollo for Daniel Grollo, Equiset for Grocon and Franco for Lorenzo. My apologies to those concerned.

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Collaboration is often hard and it takes time—time to build the relationships, time to clear up misunderstandings, time to listen and time to get things done. We do it because collaboration enables us to do bigger and better things.

So in selecting a partner to collaborate with (this could be an individual or an organisation) you will want to make sure there is sufficient energy and persistence to invest the time needed for the collaboration to work. One way is to understand your collaborator's business strategy, starting with whether they even have one, and ensuring your collaborative effort helps them achieve their objectives while achieving your own.

In the euphoria of a new collaboration, however, everyone will tell you what you want to hear, so seek out evidence of their business strategy rather than merely rely on what you are being told. And be totally open and honest about these things at the outset because getting your objectives aligned will provide a solid foundation for all the great work you will be doing together.

And if you really want to inject some reality into the partnership from the outset, try running a pre-mortem.

Thanks to Frank Wyatt for sparking these thoughts in our conversation this morning.

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Most organisations have a set of values statements. Many of these do not reflect reality as displayed in the behaviours of people within the organisation. For example...'we value working collaboratively' is displayed on the wall but people are told "do it my way or else" by managers; deriding other areas of the business is effectively endorsed when people are not 'called' on the behaviour.

We had a fun day on Thursday running our 'Storytelling for Business Leaders' workshop in Sydney. The group chose 'values in action' as one of the story patterns they wanted to examine in detail. We came up with four questions you can ask to help identify the values at work in organisations:

• Think about a time when a manager made a tough decision, and did 'the right thing rather than the easy thing'. What happened?
• When have you seen someone 'cross the line' and they were 'called' on it. Alternatively, have you seen people 'cross the line' without being called.
• When have you felt uncomfortable about something your boss has done?
• When have you felt proud to work for this company?

Can you think of other questions that could help explore an organisation's values?

I also related an example of a values in action story from our workshop in Brisbane in August.

A company introduced a new health and safety policy for mobile phone use while driving. The policy was "engine on, phone off". Some time after the policy was introduced the company did a random call-around of about 50 employees. A senior manager answered his phone while driving. The response was "turn around, return your vehicle, give the keys to reception and clear your desk. Your employment with this company is over". The rationale was that the manager could not help enforce a policy that he was abusing himself.

For me this story says very clearly 'we value health and safety'. However, the story didn't seem to be well received by the workshop participants, possibly because firing the manager seemed a little draconian. What do you think?

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Examples, especially in the form of stories, help us make sense of what someone is saying. This is partly because when we listen to an example we are using our natural pattern matching abilities (something our brain has evolved to excel in) to link the example with our own experience. We then adjust our understanding based on the new input.

So it makes sense that examples also increase our ability to remember the main idea they illustrate.

Researchers at the University of Nebraska put this idea to the test. They asked 22 students to read an essay about a fictitious African country. The essay consisted of 32 paragraphs, each paragraph with a single, main idea sentence followed by none to three one-sentence examples. Here is an example paragraph from the essay.

Virtually all social reforms of the early 20th Century were the personal responsibility of King Manual. A state run medical service was established by King Manual in 1900. A system of primary education was created under Manual's direction in 1920. The forceable recruitment of native workers was stopped by Manual in 1915.

When they were done the researchers asked the students to recall the main ideas.

The result: the more examples (at least up to three), the better the recall of the main idea. The researchers suggest that the laws of diminishing returns must set in at some point. The likelihood of nine examples being more effective than eight is slight.

So why don't we see many examples in the things we read, especially in business writing?

I suspect it takes more time to find an example and it's much easier to espouse an opinion.

For example, I'm writing a client report at the moment and I've asked my client to send me a couple of examples illustratinh how their information system has been used to have a bottom-line and positive impact on the business. I also asked for examples of when the system had been misused or failed the organisation. My client could immediately think of examples of the latter and is still looking for our positive examples.

So maybe it's harder to find the positive stories and business report writers have a tendency to want to show strength and a positive outlook, and this is more easily done, especially with time pressures, with opinions. The problem is, we are creating a false intellectual economy because without the examples your readers don't know what you really mean and instantly forget the main ideas.

Palmere, M., S. L. Benton, et al. (1983). "Elaboration and Recall of Main Ideas in Prose." Journal of Educational Psychology 75(6): 898-907.

I discovered this research reading John Medina's Brain Rules.

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MLA stands for Museums and Libraries Association and my friend Victoria Ward has recently finished a tremendous project using narrative techniques to help MLA London understand and enhance the way in which Museums and Libraries are used in London. The bonanza for narrative and knowledge practitioners is that the MLA and Sparknow (Victoria's company) have shared their findings, method and initial pilot descriptions for everyone to download.

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Here is my test for whether a skill is manipulative: “Would it lose its power if people knew exactly what you were doing and why?” If the answer is yes, if the technique loses its power in the light of day, then it’s manipulative and I don’t want any part of it. - David Maxfield

This definition works for me.

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Last week Mark and I agreed to each develop a plan detailing how we were going to meet our targets. I opened up Excel and created a spreadsheet showing the number of days I was working with each of my clients. Mark opened Word and eloquently wrote how he was going to achieve his objectives. We both knew what a plan looked like. We just had two different visions of what plan looks like. We lacked common ground.

Patrick Lambe's recent blog post set me off on this train of thought about how effective teams share common ground. Team members must have a good understanding of what their colleagues mean and a good idea of what they will do. Both comes from working with our colleagues, asking questions and requesting examples that illustrate what is meant. In fact this propensity to second guess our colleagues and infer their motives (sometimes called Theory of Mind) is a signature characteristic of humans that is likely to have resulted in our species collaborating in the first place and through this collaboration outsmarting our stronger, faster and more deadly predators.

But concrete understanding of concepts like 'common ground' or 'planning' is unlikely to emerge from an abstract explanation of the terms. It comes from first hand experience, and when you can't get that, from stories, examples that illustrate in detail what's meant.

Patrick points out that common ground must be cultivated or maintained, much like my grandfather's obsession with keeping his carrot patch weed free. Periodically teams must work to repair or re-establish common ground because people change, views change, and what's happening around us shift and warp.

Did you know that US fighter pilots decide whether to follow the instructions of their weapons director based on how competent the weapons director sounds as they barking commands on the communication channel? Common ground can be a life and death proposition. Bringing this idea back to business, have you ever thought how you come across in a teleconference? How competent do you sound? This concept of common ground has been well thought through by Gary Klein, the famed psycholgist and decision making specialist and in this video Patrick interveiws Gary (I was impressed by the two camera production and editing). They not only explore the concept of common ground but I suspect they are also creating it for themselves (this video is 20 minutes).

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People respond so differently to new ideas. While some people jump with excitement at the thought of new possibilities and irrational ideas, unfamiliarity can others uncomfortable, give up, or find it safe to be a skeptic. This is so well illustrated in this conversation between Alice and the queen in Through the Looking Glass.

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

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