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| 30/04/09 | | Apologies |
Last year I wrote about how the skill to apologize will become even more valuable as the world get even more complex and speedy. Things will go wrong.
Well it looks like some books are being published on the topic. Here's what Tom Peters has discovered.
In What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, Marshall Goldsmith proclaims: "I regard apologizing as the most magical, healing, restorative gesture human beings can make. It is the centerpiece of my work with executives who want to get better."
All I can add is:
Amen!
I believe that skill at Apologizing is nothing short of a "strategic competence"!
"Strategic competence"? Absolutely! Customers lost for want of a timely and sincere "I'm sorry. My fault" number in the billions, from restaurant diners to aircraft engine purchasers.
And now there's an entire book on the topic arriving May 1, Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust, by John Kador.
Read a whole book on the topic?
Yes!
Damn it!
Stra-te-gic-com-pe-tence!
In addition to being an excellent "how to" guide, the book also captures hard evidence. For example, with a new policy on apologies, Toro, the lawn mower folks, reduced the average cost of a claim from $115,000 in 1991 to $35,000 in 2008—and the company hasn't been to trial since 1994. The VA hospital in Lexington, Massachusetts, developed an astonishing approach to apologizing for errors (forthcoming—even when no patient request or claim was made). In 2000, the overall mean VA system malpractice settlement was $413,000. The Lexington VA hospital settlement # was $36,000—and there were far fewer per patient claims to begin with.
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| 29/04/09 | | Story week starts on Monday |
As flagged previously, Anecdote, Innotecture and Sparknow are running Story Week commencing on Monday 4th May. Story week aims to explore how to identify stories that have impact and the consistency (if any) with which people rate the impact of stories.
This is of interest for a range of reasons. Firstly, our Narrative Insight process involves collection of large numbers of stories - too many to be used in workshop settings - and we often need to identify the ones that have most impact. Story week will help us understand more about the selection criteria we use and the extent to which they are useful.
Of more relevance to our readers is the second reason. Anyone who gives presentations and talks, writes articles, reports, blog posts etc, can use stories to help communicate more clearly, persuasively and memorably. The stories can come from your own experience, from history, movies or the experience of others. A key challenge is choosing the right stories; the ones that have most impact and are most relevant. We are hoping that Story Week will inform our work to make the selection of the right stories more robust.
Starting Monday, we will post one story per day, seeking as many people as possible to assess the story against the criteria. It will only take a few moments each day.
Get ready!
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| 24/04/09 | | Taming Twitter and Email |
Technology can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The two technologies I've managed to turn back into friendly allies are email and Twitter. Until recently I had my email and Twitter open all day. As a result I was being interrupted (and quite frankly would interrupt myself) checking email and Twitter and posting messages. My productivity was going down the toilet.
I think it's useful to have an analogy to explain how to use a technology. I think of Twitter as like my virtual tea room or cafe. It's the place I go to hear the chatter about what's happening. I will tend to sit down with some friends (using Tweetdeck) while also looking forward to meeting someone new. I'll share some ideas and resources and ask people for their help, experiences and opinions.
The problem was that I was in cafe (socializing) mode all day long when I should have enjoyed this social space like I use to when I worked in an organisation, at 10.30am and 3.30pm.
So my new regime has been to only participate in Twitter at 10.30 and 3.30 (for about 30 minutes at a time) and in times when I've decided I'm going to just have some fun (evenings, weekends). This doesn't mean that I'm going full pelt at Twitter in each session. It just means I have a read and participate during these times.
And the same rule applies to email with one variation. I'll send emails and read emails throughout the day as part of getting things done, but I wont retrieve new emails except at 10.30 and 3.30.
As a result of this new approach to productivity I spend more time in my task manager (OmniFocus) picking off the next task and knocking it off.
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| 24/04/09 | | Vital behaviours for knowledge sharing |
My colleague Hugh Bathurst is currently working for an engineering firm helping one of the divisions develop a knowledge sharing culture. Hugh has been collecting stories, eliciting how things get done and encouraging peope to contribute to developing of a range of knowledge resources.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting the manager who's sponsoring this initiative. His division is leading the firm financially and he puts their success largely down to the knowledge sharing initiatives, especially their ability to transform their culture over the last 18 months. So I asked him, "what behaviours do you see now that weren't there when you started?"
I find this question really gets people thinking because in many cases managers don't think about culture in terms of behaviours. "Hmmm, I think people spend more time moving about the floor and having conversations," he said first. "But now I think of it, there are two things that have made the biggest difference. We call one of them Active Introductions. It's where I accompany Hugh when we first introduce a new person to our knowledge sharing initiatives. I sit next to Hugh as he explains the program to show that knowledge sharing is important. After about 5 minutes, when I see they are getting it, I say I'll leave you guys to work through the details and I head off."
"The second thing we do is to identify what we call Beacons. These are the people who really get into knowledge sharing. They are like a bright light. We make sure the beacons are spread across the floor so they shine on as many people as possible and we keep their energy up by heaping praise on their good work."
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| 18/04/09 | | Ginninderra High School Reunion—Class of 1980 |
I went to school in Canberra at Ginninderra High School. Amazingly I still keep in contact with so many of my classmates from back then and this year I'm part of the organising committee for our 30 year reunion to be held on the 6th March 2010.
One of the incredible things that have happened in preparation for this shindig has been the creation of a Ning website where we now have over 70 classmates swapping stories, pictures, and making or renewing connections.
If you are one of my classmates from year 10, 1980, Ginninderra High School, please send me an email (shawn@anecdote.com.au) and I can invite you to join us at the reunion website.
And if you know anyone who graduated from Ginninderra in 1980, please pass on this note so we can reconnect.
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| 17/04/09 | | Story week is coming |
Anecdote, Sparknow and Innotecture have been working together for a little while now to find out a bit more about what stories have influence and impact. We've found quite a difference in views, even among ourselves. So we're inviting our combined readership and their networks (and their networks) to participate in Story Week (starting May 4th) Over 5 days we're going to show you 5 stories from different people in different formats, intended for very different audiences and settings. You're going to tell us how you respond to them. We'll tell you what you collectively told us. We'll all learn something in the process. Oh, and it will be fun, too.
Watch this space...
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| 17/04/09 | | Three story plots we humans dearly love |
The authors of Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath, point out that there are three story plots we humans dearly love:
- the creativity plot where the protagonist solves one or more puzzles through shear ingenuity, persistence and always with a dash of dumb luck. The DaVinci Code is an example.
- the connection plot where people come together from different walks of life: different race, class, affluence, nationality, power. This week Sheen and I re-watched the movie Notting Hill which is definitely an example of a connection plot: famous celebrity connects with impoverished book store owner.
- the challenge plot where the protagonist faces a daunting challenge, everyone is sceptical whether is can be done, and especially by our hero, but in the end she triumphs. You might not have heard of Susan Boyle but this video is a classic example of a challenge plot told in 7 minutes.
Now you might be thinking, "how does all this relate to stories in a business context?"
Successful leaders are people who are able to change the minds, feelings and ultimately the actions of people who follow their lead. And stories play a fundamental role in helping people change their minds. Don't just take my word for it. Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist and author of Changing Minds wrote: "The principle vehicle of leadership is the story: The leader affects individual behavior, thought, and feelings through the stories that he and she tells."
So to succeed as a leader it's important to build your repertoire of stories but you don't want to recount just any story. You want to be mindful of the things that happen in your life that others will find interesting, inspiring and meaningful and by knowing these three plot types you can be on the lookout for these experiences. Let me finish with another quote from Gardner: "One of the most powerful weapons in the possession of leader-storytellers is the lives that they lead. To the extent that leaders embody the stories that they tell, the leaders' examples will increase in power."
Gardner, H. (1999). "The vehicle and the vehicles of leadership." American Behavioral Scientist 42(6): 1009-1023.
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| 11/04/09 | | As a business person, why care about storytelling? |
In 1993, as the co-founder of photographic library startup, I travelled to Los Angeles to check out one of America’s largest commercial photographic collections. Remarkably they were well underway converting their film stock to Kodak PhotoCD, a proprietary digital format launched the year before. We were impressed with Eastman Kodak because it looked like they were taking digital photography seriously. The shift to digital was really happening. It was an exciting time. So we began to furiously scan our 100,000 images. At the time it seemed that Kodak was riding the digital wave. They were a digital camera pioneer building the first digital camera in 1975. This 110 year old manufacturing giant, however, missed the digital boat. Their share price today is less that what it was for them in the 1950s. So why did Eastman Kodak falter? Why did it take them so long to really adopt a digital approach to their products and services? What held them back?
Ted Turner (founder of CNN) joined his father’s billboard advertising business full-time in his early 20s. His father, Ed Turner, was a child of the depression and his parents almost lost everything during that dark time. This only strengthened Ed’s resolve to succeed and he promised his parents to work hard and one day be a millionaire and own a plantation and a yacht. By the time Ted joined the billboard company his father had all those things and Ted remembers clearly his father taking him aside and saying, “Son, you be sure to set your goals so high that you can’t accomplish them in one lifetime. That way you’ll always have something ahead of you. I made the mistake of setting my goals too low and now I’m having a hard time coming up with new ones.”
Perhaps Kodak reached their goals in the early ‘90s and was struggling to set new ones. Kodak was the predominant force in the photographic industry. It had succeeded through its many advances in chemical processing and manufacturing streamlining. At the same time it was more than aware of the new digital technologies yet profits were coming from its established business lines. In the minds of their leaders they knew how to succeed. They had done it for so long. So don’t fix what’s not broken.
We see this ‘I know what’s right’ mentality in our leadership programs. Just last week Mark was running a leadership program in Sydney and the most senior person in the room approached Mark and said, “I really just wanted to come to see what the troops were learning and keep an eye on things.” He had been with the company for 20 years and believed he’d seen everything and didn’t need to learn anything new. He told himself a story along the following lines: “I’ve been in the business for 20 years now and I have seen it at its best and its worst and I have survived and thrived. So I pretty much know what I’m doing and that it works.”
Our stories, collectively and individually, have a profound affect on what we believe is possible. Therefore the challenge for leaders is to both understand the stories affecting individuals and groups and then know how to define and tell (ideally through wide participation) new stories that set the direction for the company. But that’s not all. The greatest challenge is to help people hear, remember and believe where the company is headed and then inspire people to act in line with that belief.
Whether the leadership team at Kodak had seen the need to redirect towards a digital future in time is hard to say. But even if there was a resolve to go digital, were the leaders equipped with the skills to create the new stories and have them stick in a meaningful way?
Aligning everyone’s actions to the company’s strategy is equivalent of finding the corporate Shangri-la. It can be done. Take IBM’s turnaround for example. Lou Gerstner arrived as the new CEO in 1993 at a time when IBM was on the endangered species list. Gerster had been CEO at Nabisco and American Express and before that he was a director of McKinsey Consulting. He’d seen hundreds of strategies and knew that most are the same—it’s extremely difficult to have an unique strategy. What makes the difference, however, is executing the strategy. Gerstner set about turning around IBM by telling new stories about their direction such as the new emphasis on services and the growth that will come from software. And of course this wasn’t done by Lou alone. He worked hard to develop a good team who understood the stories and could act in a way that created new stories that reinforced the strategy. I joined IBM in 1999 and experienced the last years of the turnaround. It was an inspiring place to work.
This post is the beginning of a series I have planned that looks at why storytelling is a vital leadership skill. Some of the topics I will cover include how stories are memorable, how they show commitment, how they inspire people to take action, how they reduce anxiety, how they share lessons, how they convey values and how they change minds.
References
Gerstner, L. V. (2002). Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround. New York, Harper Collins.
Turner, T. (2008). Call Me Ted: The Autobiograhy of the Extraordinary Business Leader and Founder of CNN. London, Sphere.
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| 6/04/09 | | Difficult conversations |
At a recent leadership program we were talking about values and a participant related a recent experience: "Another manager gave one of her staff a real serve in front of the whole office. I was appalled, it set such a bad example. And one of our values is respect for the individual". When I asked what happened when he 'called' her on the behaviour, the reply was a blank look and "er, well, I didn't say anything".
According to Human Synergistics data, the number two style for Australian and New Zealand mangers is 'Avoidance' (number one is Oppositional - oppose ideas and be critical of others). So, imagine 10 million managers and workers in Australia avoiding having difficult conversations.
Avoiding difficult conversations like the example above has a huge downside when it comes to organisational values. If behaviour that contravenes your values is not 'called' then you are effectively condoning it. So, having difficult conversations is critical in bringing your values to life. A value is only a value if you do something when it is contravened.
When we work with organisations to improve their ability to have these difficult conversations we find a few gems, like "One of my fellow managers, who is also a friend, is very loud. She is a good person, and a good manager, but she just talked too loud. I wanted to talk to her about it but I knew she wouldn't take it well. But I had to do it. And you know, she took it really well, was grateful for the feedback. It really surprised me".
A key behaviour we encourage groups to adopt to make these conversations possible is 'Call me on it...respectfully and with good intent'. Would your organisation be a better place if these difficult conversations were the norm rather than the exception?
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| 6/04/09 | | Knowledge strategies for natural resource management |
In the second half of 2007, Anecdote worked with the Knowledge for Regional Natural Resource Management (K4RNRM) project in Land & Water Australia (LWA) to develop a methodology for the 56 NRM bodies in Australia to develop knowledge and information strategies. The output is documented in the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit (RKRK), a wiki that is now being used and maintained by practitioners from the regional NRM bodies. Much of the methodology is licensed from Anecdote based on our experience in developing knowledge strategies.
The idea behind the RKRK is that regional NRM bodies can use it to develop their own knowledge strategies. Some initial training is provided to the staff that help facilitate the process in each region, otherwise it is pretty self explanatory.
The RKRK has proven extremely successful, with many of the regional bodies having completed their knowledge strategies. The most recent news is that funding has been provided by the South Australian government for the eight regional bodies in South Australia to develop strategies using the RKRK process.
We think this is a pretty good example of public and private sector collaboration and are proud to have been part of this great initiative. We are in the process of updating the RKRK to ensure it reflects current practice. For any RKRK users from the NRM regions, we would love to get any feedback on RKRK usability and ideas for improvement (mark@anecdote.com.au).
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| 3/04/09 | | A simple explanation of the Cynefin Framework |
A while back I created a sketchcast of how I explain the Cynefin Framework and it became a popular sketch. Unfortunately Sketchcast went out of business and I lost my sketch so last night I recreated it and popped it up on YouTube.