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I recently read a fascinating account of how story collection made a real difference in America winning the Second World War (or at least their part in it). Rob Yeung tells the story about the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the psychologist John C. Flanagan in his recent book The Extra One Per Cent.
In June, 1941the USAAF was created as part of the USA's preparations for being involved in the Second World War. Less than six months later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the USAAF was immediately ordered to ramp up its number of pilots, not by hundreds, or thousands, but by tens of thousands.
However, more men were being shot down than were being trained. Thousands of cadets were killed during training accidents every year, while thousands more were dropped for not being good enough. You can imagine that the decision to drop a trainee from flight school wasn't taken lightly. It was incredibly expensive to recruit and train new recruits only to kick them out, and the Air Force desperately needed every pilot they could create.
The USAAF began to look at why pilots were being rejected and the reasons given on documentation produced by the expert tutors were things like, "poor judgement", "insufficient progress" or even lack of "inherent flying ability." But what did such phrases mean? No one knew exactly, and certainly these explanations were not good enough to avoid recruiting the wrong kind of candidates.
To address this issue the USAAF hired civilian psychologist John C. Flanagan. He quickly realised that most people, whether the trainee pilots themselves or the highly experienced instructors, were almost useless at explaining what contributed to even phenomenal success or dreadful failure. He wrote: "Too often, statements regarding job requirements are merely lists of all the desirable traits of human beings. These are practically no help in selecting, classifying or training individuals for specific jobs." (1)
So Flanagan started to focus on getting people to talk about specific episodes of either triumph or failure, in forensic detail, with a particular focus on what they did, what they said, and what they were thinking at the time. Rather than asking for general opinions as to why people think they succeed or fail, Flanagan (and his army of over 150 psychologists and 1,000 assistants) solicited descriptions of what they did in the past. Rather than asking; "What do you do?" or "What do you think you do?", the emphasis became "What did you do?"
Flanagan's work make a tangible contribution to the war effort by allowing the USAAF to make better recruitment decisions, turning away more candidates who were unlikely to make it through pilot training or perhaps even more likely to kill themselves in the process. For his effort he was awarded the Legion of Merit for the outstanding contribution that he and his team made towards winning the war.
This story for me underpins a lot about what initially attracted me to Anecdote. Having an approach built around really understanding and making sense of what is going on through collecting real life, specific examples before rushing straight to solutions is one that just seems to make sense for me. It also reminds me of the power of making things concrete, and how abstractions, opinions and beliefs can 'get in the way' of understanding and clarity.
This USAAF/Flanagan story is certainly one I will be telling in the future to help make the point about the power story collection can have.
(1) Flanagan, J. C. (Ed.). (1947). The aviation psychology program in the Army Air Force (Research Report 1). Washington, DC: US Army Air Forces Aviation Psychology Program
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Brain Blast
Filed in News.
Our friends at Quick Think are running one of their creativity and thinking workshops, the Brain Blast, on the 3rd December in Melbourne. You can get all the details here and sign up for the session here. A great way to get the juices flowing to cap off the year.
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Last week I was in Yeppoon in Queensland delivering a keynote and workshop on collaboration at an innovation in government forum. In the workshop I used an activity mentioned by Bob Sutton in his new book 'Good Boss, Bad Boss'. Bob is also the author of 'The No Asshole Rule' that we have blogged about a few times.
The activity used an age-old prioritisation game called Survival on the Moon (you can find the instructions here). Groups are asked to prioritise fifteen items to survive after a crash-landing on the moon. Everyone does it individually, then they do it as groups (hopefully getting a better result). The interesting twist in Sutton's book is organising the groups with a hierarchical spread (executives through to junior staff) and then giving the most junior person the answers in advance. They are asked to argue strongly for what they know to be the right answers without revealing they have the correct answers. The scoring system is based on the variance of group priorities from the NASA-provided ones.
In my workshop there were nine tables with about six people at each one. Five tables had one of the junior people with the correct answers. The results were very interesting.
- Groups with answers at their table scored an average of 31 (NASA rates this score as 'good')
- Groups without answers scored an average of 36 (NASA rates this as 'average')
- The best score was 21 which NASA rates as excellent. This group observed that the reason they did so well was because there were no men in their group
- Two groups scored 26 - one group had the answers and one of them didn't
- Two of the groups with the answers scored relatively badly. In both groups, the person with the answers observed that "no-one listened to me" or "I couldn't get a word in".
- Several groups commented that people who were more senior, and people with higher educational qualifications, tended to dominate. This is consistent with Sutton's observation on page 131 of Good Boss, Bad Boss' that some bosses 'wield excessive influence...even when they spew out nonsense...and insisting they are right even when they are dead wrong'.
So, none of the tables that had the answers got anywhere a perfect score, though they scored, on average, better than groups without the answers.
One thing this highlights for me is the need to do some more reading on the effect of gender on collaboration. I will definitely do this exercise again. Next time I will record the individuals scores as well as the group ones.
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My daughter and I recently watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show and our DVD has the option to play the audience participation sound track while you watch the movie. It brought back fond memories from the early eighties going to screenings where we would take our rice, water pistols, confetti and newspapers and for every line in the movie we would call out an irreverent line or two. Great fun.
On re-watching the movie you can't help noticing just how flimsy it is: weak plot, poor acting, clumsy directing. When it was first released it was roundly panned by the audiences and critics alike. But then something happened. People started having fun with it and audience participation emerged and next thing you know you have a cult classic.
I'm willing to bet that one of the reasons why audience participation emerged is that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is an imperfect story and therefore leaves space for the audience to add in their own content. Compare this with a beautifully crafted movie such as Million Dollar Baby. Can you imagine audience participation happening? OK, that's not a fair comparison so think about some musicals: Chicago, Westside Story, Hairspray. Again the only participation here is singing along to the songs.
Crafting perfect stories is unlikely to get the participation you were hoping for in your business. I'm finding comms departments particular obsessed with the perfect story approach. Comms folk have been in the business of crafting and disseminating company messages and in most cases they are in broadcast mode. So when they encounter storytelling they are often preoccupied with learning how to tell the best story. What are the features of a great story? How do we help our leader tell a compelling story? How will we hook our audience and engage them emotionally? All good questions but it's only applying one approach to story work and I can guarantee if you spend too much effort crafting the perfect story your audience wont participate in the conversation you are hoping they might have. You will have created a Million Dollar Baby that no one wants to mess with.
Contrast the perfect story approach with what happened in one of our leadership programs. We collect 100 stories from staff of good and bad leadership. Verbatim stories: just the way they spoke them. The workshop participants have to decide which story is most significant in terms of staff engagement. Two stories bubble to the surface. Both stories are anaemic in story terms. The one they chose is about a woman who whenever she goes to her manager's office he's working on his computer, very focussed on his computer screen. But when he sees her he stops what he is doing, comes over to the table in the middle of the room, sits down and engages her like that's the only thing on his mind. She finishes the story by saying that she reeeally appreciates it and no other managers do it in the company. That story generates heaps of discussion but more importantly we see the conversation triggering new behaviours in the organisation. The story is not pretty. It's not perfect. But it has a lasting impact.
So in business story work let's not get so obsessed with the perfect story. Let's leave that to the Aaron Sorkins and Clint Eastwoods of this world. In business story work we need to trigger conversations that reveal new stories and really engage our people in storytelling.
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