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The co-evolution of technology and organising
The technology we use changes the way we organise and the way we organise effects the technologies we use. This hand-in-glove interaction is called co-evolution. Take the example of the invention of the spinning frame during the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The spinning frame made possible large scale cloth production and created the need for factories, which in turn affected how water and steam were used to drive machinery in those factories.1
Are we seeing a similar co-evolution between information dissemination technology and how knowledge programs are organised? The two killer apps for the PC have been the word processor and the spreadsheet. With these two tools we were able to create documents. Consequently many knowledge sharing initiatives focus on creating and sharing documents. This limited us to sharing what we could write down.
YouTube started in 2005 (here is the first video uploaded to the site). It’s a site for sharing videos. Now that it's easy to share videos more companies are building this form of information dissemination into its knowledge sharing programs. The interesting thing is that the tool changes the type of knowledge shared. It seems to me that videos encourage us to share practices and tell a story of what happened or how to do something. This type of knowledge helps us share values, principles and lessons in a more compact and digestible way. Sure, documents can be used to do that too but that wasn’t the default use and it took so much effort.
As we witness the rise of the video we'll need to develop other skills to make the most of it. Most importantly, you guessed it, video creators will need to be adept at finding and telling stories. Just as we learned the language of documents (structure, headings, font sizes, margins, footnotes etc.) we will need to learn the language of video. And that language will partly involve characters, events, action, time and place.
1. Beinhocker, E. D. (2006). The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Boston, Harvard Business School Press.
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London public workshops in June
Just a quick note to say it is just over 4 weeks before we get together in London for our two workshops (24 & 25 June). Looks like we have a good turn out but if you are thinking of coming along I need to get all the registrations complete in the next two weeks.
Send me an email if you want a registration form and here is the description of the two narrative based workshops.
And just to get a bit of a flavour for my approach you might like to check out this presentation I did this week.
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How to be memorable and inspire action at work by telling stories
Thanks to all my Twitter friends who helped me refine this article. It was a fun process that reinforces for me the strength of social computing approaches for collaboration.
The main purpose of this whitepaper is to introduce senior leaders to the idea of business storytelling and demonstrate its importance, especially in the increasingly complex and unpredictable world we live in. It also provides some approaches to how you find and recount your experiences in a business context.
I encourage you to send a copy to your CEO, or better still your CFO and CIO, and help them realise that people only remember what they feel and despite the painful sounding name, people don't feel bullet points.
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Stories and video how-to guides—screencasting Salesforce.com
A couple of week ago a 28 year old naval engineer delivered his baby son based on watching some DIY YouTube videos. When I heard this news I realised that the DIY video's time had come and it wouldn't be too long before we see its wide adoption in organisations.
I've been a long-time user of screencasting technology such as ScreenFlow as a way of recording how to do things on your computer. As an example here is a 3 minute guide on how to establish a cash flow schedule in Salesforce.com.
How to establish a schedule in Salesforce from Shawn Callahan on Vimeo.
Notice how I've preceded the instructions with a story that conveys why it's important to go through these steps.
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The TED presentation commandments
- Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
- Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
- Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
- Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
- Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
- Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
- Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
- Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
- Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
- Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.
If you don't know what TED is, you don't know what you are missing. You can see some of my favourite TED videos here.
This list is from Presentation Zen.
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Creating stories
My friend Terrence Gargiulo and I were chatting last week about the role storytelling plays for leaders and we agreed that the leadership-storytelling triple-threat was the ability to elicit stories, tell stories and trigger stories. When we say trigger stories we mean that a leader does something that's remarkable so people tell the story of what happened. So on this theme I was tickled pink to receive this video from Victoria Ward. A terrific example of a leader triggering stories.
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Day 5 of Story Week
So it's Friday and here we are at the end of Story Week. Many thanks to all of you who contributed and here is our final story - something serious...
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Day 4 of Story Week
Our fourth story for Story Week is from the UK - please tell us what you think.
No red signal when minister plays with train set by Adam Sherwin (From Times UK Online)
All aboard the Adonis Express. Frustrated commuters will get direct access to the Transport Minister next week when Lord Adonis embarks upon a railway voyage to criss-cross Britain in six days.
The Minister will board the Paddington to Truro sleeper service on Easter Monday, just one man, his laptop and a £375 standard class Rail Rover ticket. On Saturday he will arrive in York after a 1,500-mile Michael Palin-style trip, involving 45 trains and extensive knowledge of the timetable. He will speed (hopefully) through Cornwall, East Anglia, the West Midlands and up to Aberdeen, before arriving in North Yorkshire to a hero’s welcome. Any signs of cabin fever will be logged on a Times Online blog.
A spokesman said: “Andrew is travelling solo and is happy for commuters to chat to him.”
Lord Adonis tells us: “My plan is to get to railway lines I have rarely or never used. Nothing beats first-hand experience when you are responsible for a major public service.”
Network Rail is advised to clear the line of engineering works.
A prize for the best picture of Lord Adonis captured on the rattlers.
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Day 3 of Story Week
Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to Story Week so far. Continuing with our theme of "leadership", today we are featuring a story from Dr Fiona Wood, who was recognised as "Australian of the Year" for her work after the Bali Bombings. And we'd still like to hear your ideas for Friday's story.
When I saw the burns patients and I saw that we needed something radical to actually cover these large areas, that had to be more... They had to be smarter than traditional split-thickness skin grafting. We had to be able to do this better. And that was, I guess, the gauntlet that I threw down to myself. On the Sunday morning after the Bali bombing I got a call from the registrar, who is a very close friend of my senior registrar, who actually on Saturday had left for his holiday to Bali. Our first patients arrived in the early hours of the morning and they were the most severe patients, the most severely injured. And my overwhelming memory of that is the relief on their faces as they arrived at Royal Perth and spoke to us just before they were incubated for ventilation and for the treatment to commence, that relief on their faces. We were full at the time, so we started putting our disaster plan into action. And as the Sunday developed it became apparent that there was going to be a significant need, not just for the Perth Burns Unit but for the Australian Burns community as a whole. When the Bali bombing situation arose we did in fact deal with 15% of our annual workload in a day, but it's the sort of situation that we've been training for a long period of time and when you're involved in it and actually active in doing things it's a very motivating situation because you are able to influence those lives, not always to a positive outcome but we did our best.
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/talkingheads/txt/s1711934.htm
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Day 2 of Story Week
Day 2 of Story Week is here. Yesterday we had a video with a big Story. Today we have a snippet, a small story of a day-to-day interaction in a workplace. Our theme for the week is leadership, so look at the story in this light. Think how you would feel in the same circumstances. And of course, please pass this on to your networks and encourage them to join the fun. The more, the merrier. N.B. We have yet to finalise a story for Friday - is there a video of a story on the theme of leadership (preferably involving a woman) that you'd like to suggest?
... we organised a workshop, it was really high pressure and done at very short notice. It ended up being a success, but the CEO was there, and I thought it was one of those things where the team had all sort of pulled together, and it could of fallen over, but it didn't. At the end of the workshop, it had all gone well, there was a perfect window there for the CEO to come up to the team and say "Good job". I don't know the CEO at all, but it was a perfect opportunity for him to go and get some easy PR, or even at least say good stuff, and pass it on. But he just left. I mean, he may have had a thousand other things to do, but it was one of those things.
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Story week is here
The Story Week is here! Over the next 5 days, we'll be offering you 5 stories - some momentous, some more low-key - and we're inviting you to tell us what you think of them. After you have viewed, read or heard the story, we'd like you to fill out the form below and maybe tell us a story of your own. We will be publishing (under a creative commons license) the aggregate results from this little experiment and also some of the stories that you tell us. So without further ado...
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